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What is the longest book/work you've ever read?

steffee

steffee

Active Member
And finished? The bible can count, if that has been read right through.

Mine would be War and Peace or Anna karenina by Tolstoy or Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, whichever was longest.
 
In my head, Perdido Street Station leaps out at 867 pages. I've tried a few others but never got round to completing them: War & Peace, Don Quixote, The Witching Hour, and the collected essays of Michel de Montaigne.

I intend to read Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy at some point this year and, should I succeed, then I should think it will be the longest single volume that I will ever have read. It's 1504 pages. :eek:
 
Stewart said:
In my head, Perdido Street Station leaps out at 867 pages. I've tried a few others but never got round to completing them: War & Peace, Don Quixote, The Witching Hour, and the collected essays of Michel de Montaigne.

I intend to read Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy at some point this year and, should I succeed, then I should think it will be the longest single volume that I will ever have read. It's 1504 pages. :eek:
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I have Perdido Street Station and King Rat waiting to read one day. I bought A Suitable Boy on ebay a couple of months ago for the grand sum of 21p (plus postage) but gave it away. Yes, it was very very long, with teeny teeny writing... isn't it the longest book written in the English language?
 
My Bible (1063 pages) loses out (in terms of length) to Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard (1066) and Les Miserables (my translation is 1374).
 
The complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Or the complete Brother's Grimm. Other than that, the Great Book of Amber or Atlas Shrugged.
 
Gone With The Wind. My copy had 1, 037 pages. It might have competition with a leatherbound edition of Lord of the Rings when I first read it, but I don't remember how many pages that book had.
 
At the moment, Drums of Autumn, which has 1,185 pages, but that will change once I finish the book that I'm reading at the moment - The Fiery Cross - as this one is 1,412 pages.
 
Does a trilogy count if it's all in the same book? If it does mine would be The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. It got a bit boring, but I stuck with it until the end. I have Anne Rice's The Witching Hour in my TBR pile, which I think is a bit longer though...
 
My biggies are Anna Karenina and Bleak House, both clocking in (in my editions) at about 1,000 pages, give or take.

I too have A Suitable Boy and would like to read it this year if I can. In response to Steffee, it's not the longest work written in the English language (that would be much much longer, maybe Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or indeed the Oxford English Dictionary), but I believe it is the longest single-volume novel published in the English language, which is still pretty good going. The other main contender for that title is Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Both are about 1,500 pages.
 
Shade said:
I too have A Suitable Boy and would like to read it this year if I can. In response to Steffee, it's not the longest work written in the English language (that would be much much longer, maybe Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or indeed the Oxford English Dictionary), but I believe it is the longest single-volume novel published in the English language, which is still pretty good going.
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Yeah that. That's what I meant ;)
 
If volumes are counting as one book, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, must be a pretty good contender too?!
 
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