What's the longest book you've ever read?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been doing a mental inventory.

I’ve read Stephen King’s The Stand, which, IIRC, is nigh unto a thousand pages, and It, which I know is well over a thou.

Lord of the Rings, which was actually originally written as a single book, comes in at 1361 pages.

I’ve also read John Julius Norwich’s three volume set, Byzantium, which I consider to be a single book. It comes in at right around twelve hundred pages.

Oh, yeah, and the Bible- all seventy three books. Even the dry statistical stuff in Numbers. I have the New American Bible here next to me (I’m on my second trip through), and it weighs in at 1390 pages.

I’m sitting here right now eyeing St. Augustine’s City of God, which I bought a few years back but never got around to reading. Hmmm… *** gets it off the shelf*** 1091 pages, not counting the index. Yeah, I think I can handle it.

So, Dopers, what’s your greatest feat of literary consumption?

2

There’s no way I’m going to remember page counts, but going by memory of general heft…

I finished Les Miserables and Gone With The Wind within months of each other.

I started a book on the life of Peter the Great that was quite thick, but didn’t finish that (I was borrowing it and the owner needed it back for a class).

Does Jordan’s The Wheel of Time count as one really, really, REALLY big book? :smiley:

3

Well, there’s It and The Stand, by Stephen King.

Lord of the Rings

War and Peace, by Tolstoy, which was about 1400 pages.

Plus a slew of 500-700 pagers.

4

Hmmm, I’ve read both It and The Stand.

I’m going to say Ulysses, though. Sure, it’s a couple hundred pages shorter than The Stand, (and, by golly, they’re smaller pages, too,) but somehow it seems longer, subjectively.

5

The unedited version of Stephen King’s The Stand is the longest book I’ve read in the shortest period of time. I’ve read the Bible and Les Miz, but not in two sittings.

6

The copy of Atlas Shrugged that I read has around 1100 pages and Lord of the Rings has been mentioned already. I get the feeling I’m forgetting one…oh well.

7

Depends on your definitions of what “one book” is. I’ve read The Stand and Atlas Shrugged , both of which clock in at over 1000 pages. But does LoTR count? How about Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? It is technically one book, spread over 7 volumes, each over 400 pages long. Do textbooks count? I am teaching a class right now that has a text that is over 1400 pages. The record for me is still A Thousand Nights and a Night translated by Sir Richard Burton. I have read the whole thing…all 27 volumes. Including footnotes and appendices. That works out to be about 13,500 pages, more or less, in one work.

8

Probably the most I’ve read from any single author has been Colleen McCollough’s Masters of Rome series.

The First Man In Rome (1104 pages)
The Grass Crown (1104 pages)
Fortune’s Favourites (1028 pages)
Caesar’s Women (943 pages)
Caesar: A Novel (928 pages)
The October Horse (1110 pages)

And I’ve read all but the last book several times.

9

I read A suitable boy by Vikram Seth, which according to Amazon is 1488 pages.

It was a bit daunting at first, but it’s such a good book that when I finished it I missed the characters like they were absent friends, and wished there were another 1488 pages left.

10

I’ve read the King books, but what really got me was Battlefield Earth. Though I can’t recall the exact page count, I know it is well, well over 1,000 and the type is in a tiny font, which means it’s even longer than it looks.

It was sheer agony trying to get through that book.

11

I’ve read The Stand, Atlas Shrugged, The Mists of Avalon (along with The Forest House and The Lady of Avalon), The Bible…

But the longest book I’ve read was Bleak House by Charles Dickens - if it wasn’t the longest, it sure felt like it. So long you begin to cheer for the bad guys, hoping they will kill the blasted Little Nell and the book will end!
Ummm, and I’ve never finished Lord of the Rings. It just has too many names starting with “E”!! I couldn’t keep the characters straight!!

12

Like jjimm, mine is A Suitable Boy. I started it a couple of days before the end of a vacation – it turned out to stretch the vacation feeling on for quite a while, since it took me a couple of weeks to finish it when I was only reading for an hour or so a day.

13

I know how you feel about that one. I thought About a Boy was great. Although the ending was a bit meh, I thought.

I’ve currently got a great book called “Raj” about the rise and fall of the British Empire in India. Its weighing in at about 2000 pages…

14

:smack: :smack: :smack: A Suitable Boy is what I meant. Not About a Boy. I think my brain’s shot to pieces at the moment. I probably need more sleep.

15

I’d have to say LotR, and the complete Don Quixote, both volumes in one edition.

After that probably Silmarillion.

16

I’ve also read Lord of the Rings.

And Battlefield Earth. I’d forgotten all about that. I suspect it’s a defense mechanism…

17

The longest single volume I’ve read was The Unabridged Jack London, which included all his Arctic novels and stories. It was 1143 pages.

I’m currently reading James Clavell’s Shogun, which will take the crown at 1200+ pages.

Of course I’ve read Lord of the Rings, but I don’t consider that a single book. I’m bowing to the publishers’ wisdom on that point.

Has no one here read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? I hear it’s quite a monster.

18

You win.

Does anyone have a page count for Illuminatus? 'Cause I’ve read that, too.

19

Which is longest: Lord of the Rings, War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, Anthony Adverse, Les Miserables, Remembrace of Things Past? I’ve read them all at least once–some multiple times–and a lot of other very thick books (I like baggy Victorian monster-novels), but page numbers differ from edition to edition, so it’s hard to judge size on that basis.

20

I have to say that Ulysses is the longest book I’ve read, because it’s such difficult reading. But I suppose The Stand had more pages, and so did (may God forgive me) Shogun, possibly the biggest waste of my time ever. Les Miserables, The Lord of the Rings, and the subject of my MA thesis, the longest poem in English, The Faerie Queene.