I'm reading Stephen King's IT for a book club, and holy hell this thing is long. I'm digging it so far, but damn it's long.
What's the longest book you've ever read? How long did it take? What are your memories about reading? Not so much about the book itself, but...what's different about reading something super long?
If we're not talking literal length, the longest I can remember reading was Fahrenheit 451. Few years ago now, I remember I could barely will myself to pick it up. Just a meandering snooze fest to me...
I think Bolaño's 2666 is the longest novel I've read. Word count is shy of 300k. (It is reported to be nearly 450k.) 2666 is broken up into five distinct parts, which made the length less noticeable. I sometimes had doubts as to how the author considered the whole thing to be one novel; there were explicit and suggested connections between the interior volumes, but the author's other works display such connections even though they're not claimed to be installments of a single novel. Or maybe he operated as though all his fiction was part of one big work, even if the others weren't labeled as such at publication.
Generally, I like the idea of very long novels more than my real interactions with them would suggest.
Probably Altas Shrugged. 561,996 words.
Probably IT for me too. I was 15 so I had oddles of free time to read so although it was long I don't think it would feel as long as it would if I read it today when I have way less free time. Plus at 15 I hadn't discovered minimalism :)
Stephen King's INSOMNIA. I had insomnia, and I wanted a great big long book to read in the night....It was long and great for about halfway through and then it started to fall apart. I think I quit at about 3/4 through. Made me so mad I didn't read King for quite a while after that.
Atlas shrugged is THAT long?
Yeah
Most of the long ones I've read were around 1,000 pages. I finished Infinite Jest last year, about 1,000-1,100 pages with the footnotes. I read it for a class so we did it in under a semester, 3ish months. War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov are both on my shelf begging me to pick them up again soon.
"It was long and great for about halfway through and then it started to fall apart"
I read that one too. It totally falls apart. I loved it and then the end was very disappointing. I feel like King struggles with endings for his longer works.
Isn't he a discovery writer? Totally makes sense.
I hear Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings is so big that it's approaching the limit of the machines' ability to put into a single book.
Machine single book? Like binding?
I think it had something to do with binding, yeah. It can literally only have so many pages stuck together.
That is such a scum thing to do.
Maybe they just used the cheaper glue
That is such a scum thing to do.
I don't know if it counts because it's technically a trilogy but, Asimov's Foundation series has to be the longest book I've ever read. I did read it as one book.
^
Oh, if that counts, mine might be the Unwind series, which I read like a book, which, including the short story, has... 470k words. FInished in a week flat.
Gone With the Wind. I don't know how many pages it was/is, but at the time (high school), I was going through most books in 2-3 days; Gone With the Wind took me a month and a half. It didn't help that I found reading through all the detail extremely tedious.
I'd say Infinite Jest because I read it twice but the real answer is A Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. All 3,000 or so pages of it.
Imajica by Clive Barker was a doozy.
Single book: Maybe Atlas Shrugged.
Longest Series: Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan/finished by Brandon Sanderson
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami at 944 pages and 244k words. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Gone With The Wind
Sacajawea by Anna L. Waldo (1,427 pages)
Mine would be "Motley Crue - The Dirt" (One of the funniest most entertaining reads ever. Even if you don't like Motley Crue) at 431 pages. But as of tonight, when I finish the months long marathon of reading it to my 7 year old daughter, it will be "The Magic Faraway Tree" trilogy by Enid Blyton, at 676 pages.
I have chosen to go down the path of audio books with larger books such as Stephen King's "The Stand" and "The Dark Tower" series. I'm up for a new challenge though, and have a mint copy of "Sleeping Beauties" by him and his son Owen to move onto text.
A Clash of Kings by GRRM
Under The Dome
"The Complete & Uncut Edition: The Stand" by Stephen King was 1152 pages.
"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace is 1104 pages
"The Company" by Robert Littell was 900 pages
"The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky was 824 pages
"To Green Angel Tower" by Tad Williams was 1083 (and a disappointing end to a great series)
I have "Jerusalem" by Alan Moore to read and that clocks in at 1266 pages. It was far easier to read big tomes when I was single and no kids. ;)
The Stand by stephen King.
Fountainhead. That book was huuuuge.
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo. Unabridged, 655,478 elegant words.
Anna Karenina on a Kindle at many times magnification because I'm old, quadrupling the number of pages, which aren't numbered or whose number I was never quite sure of because … Kindle.
Gardens of the Moon, Stephen Erikson. For me, the experience was like trying to commute in rush hour on the central line in London, the amount of characters in the book was giving me flashbacks to the time I was on the carriage and being rammed so close to someone that you've skipped first and second base and gone straight into marriage.
I listened to Rise and the Fall of the 3rd Reich on 24 hour plane ride to Singapore. Half on the way there, other half on the way back. It was not at all laborious to get through. When it was done, I felt like only two hours had passed. Every new chapter baffled me more and more.
I'm about two thirds of the way through Infinite Jest (1079 pages), but I've read longer. The Stand by Stephen King, at 1325 pages, is probably the longest I've gotten through, but I've read more than a few books that top out at about 900 to 1000.