After watching Baz Luhrmann's movie The Great Gatsby Saturday night (Paul's review), a local 12-year-old who had insisted even before the film began that it was too long decided to test whether she could read the book in a shorter time than it took her to watch the movie.

The movie lasted 142 minutes. She clocked in at 156. She declared the book better, with the added implication that she should not have been dragged to the movie. Yes, but then she wouldn't have spent her Sunday reading the book. She had to admit this was logical.

A few years ago at On the Boards, a New York theater company performed the entire book while reading it line by line onstage in a production called Gatz, and that took more than six hours. And people loved it.

Paul's written before about folks making time-to-entertainment equations for themselves to determine how much they think things should cost: That, say, a book offers more hours of entertainment than a movie or a play, so it should cost more. I've honestly never thought about it this way, and it seems batty. But everybody's busy, time is at a premium, etc etc (I don't even have time to flesh out this concept in this sentence, for instance), so... do you think time should be money when it comes to movies and books and theater? And if you do, is longer better, or is shorter and more "efficient" better?