What's the longest (fiction/literature) book you've ever read?

[Canai]

The Dark Tower Series. I consider it one giant book.

 

[dyn2nvu]

A book on tape for 6 hours.

 

[Slammy1]

Dr. Zhivago seemed long because of all the names, it was hard to keep track esp at the beginning. The version I read had a listing of characters and short bios in the beginning which helped immensely. War and Peace in paperback was HUGE, Russian literature is so verbose but so amazing at times. I remember people freaking out when they saw it. Count of Monte Cristo didn't seem that long, but I think for all its girth it went quickly because I really enjoyed it. I also read the unabridged version of The Stand, I found the first 800 pages awesome and hard to put down but the last 480 tedious (I enjoyed reading about the end of the world, but the spiritual side was just weird). I read the Hobbit followed by LOTR in 7th/8th grade. I still think of them as 4 books. Couldn't make it through the Silmarillion (talk about too many names in the first few chapters). I also wondered about The Covenant, which I remember as a very long book. The one that probably took the longest to read was A Tale of Two Cities, which despite not being of the same size really confused me to the point I had to put it down for a while (I was 14). The movie helped get me through that one. I read so little fiction anymore, mainly just textbooks it seems (a lot of the ones I've read were for my own knowledge over class requirement). I've read every Dune book, including the prequel, taken as a whole there are a lot of them (same as the Foundation, which if you want to include his earlier stuff like Caves of Steel is a pretty massive body of work). Still, that's like what, 8-9 books?

 

[waggy]

Originally posted by: Horus

Originally posted by: Atheus
Probably The Stand if it really was 1200 pages as someone said, I swear Dr Zhivago seemed bigger though.

Or it could be one of the Wheel of Time books. Has anyone else read those?

Dingding...winnar. The Stand-unabridged and uncut version. It never fails to stun me how FVCKING GOOD that book is.

starts off alittle slow. then gets really really good.

 

[DaTT]

a Choose Your Own Adventure book

 

[Leros]

Battlefield Earth
1200 pages

Unlike the movie, the book was pretty good

 

[SLCentral]

Jean Christophe

 

[DanTMWTMP]

Shogun. Approx 1000 pages. Loved it.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: Slammy1
Dr. Zhivago seemed long because of all the names, it was hard to keep track esp at the beginning. The version I read had a listing of characters and short bios in the beginning which helped immensely.

I want to read that one...

 

[Miramonti]

Harry Potter. One book is 850 pages or something like that. It couldn't have been too long tho, those books are fun.

 

[RaistlinZ]

"The Neverending Story"

I started reading it back in '85. I'm halfway through Ch. 1,384 right now.

 

[flxnimprtmscl]

Originally posted by: Toastedlightly
Im reading "Atlas Shrugged." A good 1200 pages of fiction!

I've read this several times. Great book and well worth the time spent reading it.

 

[Shadowknight]

Originally posted by: Atheus
Or it could be one of the Wheel of Time books. Has anyone else read those?

Eh, they don't really count. They sucked after book 5, and while the page counts are about the same, the font size has gotten bigger and the spacing between lines has gotten bigger, so it has less content than you might assume.

 

[jonessoda]

Atlas Shrugged, but I cheated; I skimmed over John Galt's speech, but I read the rest.

 

[SZLiao214]

I read some fantasy book in third grade called the Lackey's remorse or something like that. The book was around 1k pages and it took me like a month. Sad my desire and endurance has been killed off by school

I can't seem to remember the name of the book and would like to read the other 2 books in the series. Does anyone happen to know the series i am talking about? I think the author was actually mercedes lackey. The book was about a sword thane coming back from duty on the frontier.

 

[SilthDraeth]

I've read Battle Field Earth, Giants in the Earth, several CJ Cherryh books. A lot of the books where Trilogies all thrown into one big book. Cyteen is an epic novel. I still haven't broke into Stephen King's works. Though I have read a couple of Dean Koontz books, and he isn't as good as all the "reviews" say he is. At least not imho.

 

[shuttleboi]

I'm glad to see that there are a lot of people here who like to read "non-canon" books for leisure outside of school. I thought most people would say something like Grapes of Wrath or something similarly high-schoolish (nothing wrong with GoF of course; it's one of my favourite books).

 

[Wag]

I don't count pages. I want good books to last longer.

 

[Perknose]

Dickens, Michener and the Russians come to mind, but my all-time fav big-ass loooong book is Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It is the gonzo masterpiece of a truly brilliant mind. The "hero" amongst the more than 400 characters is named Tyrone Slothrop.

At so many points in it's 760 small type pages, the prose tightens up and sings like the very best poetry for paragraphs on end. I love this book

The novel is regarded by some as the greatest postmodern work of 20th century literature, while others have declared it unreadable.

The three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction unanimously supported Gravity's Rainbow for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the fourteen-member Pulitzer board overturned this decision, calling the book "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and "obscene", with at least one member confessing to having gotten only a third of the way through the book. :laugh:

The book, however, was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and won the National Book Award for 1974.

The novel inspired the 1984 song "Gravity's Angel" by Laurie Anderson. In her 2004 autobiographical performance The End of the Moon, Anderson said she once contacted Pynchon asking permission to adapt Gravity's Rainbow as an opera. Pynchon replied that he would allow her to do so with one condition: the opera had to be written for a single instrument: the banjo. Anderson said she took that as a polite "no."

The novel also was the inspiration for the title of Pat Benatar's 1993 album Gravity's Rainbow [1].

Reportedly, a scene in the film Trainspotting (1996) is an homage to a passage where Tyrone Slothrop dives into a toilet [2]. The novel also features in the animated television series The Simpsons; in the 13th-season episode "Little Girl in the Big Ten", Lisa Simpson spies a college girl's recreational reading material. Awestruck, she asks, "You're reading Gravity's Rainbow?" To which the college student replies, "Well, re-reading." This exchange may have motivated Pynchon to guest-star in two later episodes, both of which preserve (and satirize) his anonymity by animating him with a paper bag over his head. The Japanese anime series Boogiepop Phantom also makes Rainbow allusions. (Such as the title of 11th episode, Under the Gravity's Rainbow)

A German film, Prüfstand VII (Test Stand 7, 2002) is based upon Gravity's Rainbow. Starring Inga Busch as Bianca and Jeff Caster as Pointsman, it was nominated for the 2003 Adolf Grimme Award in the area of "outstanding individual achievement" (recognizing its writer/director Robert Bramkamp).

New York artist Zak Smith created a series of 760 drawings entitled, "One Picture for Every Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow" (also known by the title "Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow") [3]. Occupying eleven rows and over eleven meters of wall space, the drawings attempt to illustrate, as literally as possible, every page of the book. The piece includes palm trees, shoes, stuffed toys, a lemon meringue pie, Richard Nixon, Sigmund Freud, an iron toad wired to an electric battery, a dominatrix, and other exotic images from the novel. The series had a successful reception at New York's 2004 Whitney Biennial event, and it gained a reputation "as a tour de force of sketching and concept" (Abbe 2004).

David Lowery has stated that the Camper Van Beethoven song All Her Favorite Fruit is based on a subplot of Gravity's Rainbow.

The Nirvana song "Territorial Pissings" is rumored to derive the lyric, "Just because you're paranoid/don't mean they're not after you" from Gravity's Rainbow. The pop group Army of Lovers derive their name from a graffito reference ("an army of lovers can be beaten") in Gravity's Rainbow. (This is itself a reference to Plato in the Symposium, albeit with the meaning reversed). British indie band Klaxons have a song called Gravity's Rainbow.

Derek Gregory named his last chapter in the influential The Colonial Present 'Gravity's Rainbows' (sic) after the book. Gregory's book, which has had a large impact in modern political geography, is a highly critical account of actions by Israel, the United Kingdom and the USA in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

.

 

[Rayden]

Storm of Swords - 1216 paperback

This is the longest of the four released with seven total planned.

 

[ZetaEpyon]

The Count of Monte Cristo, ~1400pp unabridged

Like others have mentioned, it's so engaging that it doesn't feel like a very long read. I read the entire thing in less than a week while on vacation, in fact.

 

[Kyteland]

Originally posted by: Armitage
Probably Cryptinomicon - Amazon puts it at 1168 pages

Try reading the Baroque Cycle all at once. 2700 pages.

 

[Turfzilla]

The Stand - Stephen King

 

[MikeyIs4Dcats]

The Stand
Atlas Shrugged
IT

 

[Turin39789]

The internets