Why to read the longest sentence ever?

[novaera]

Do you know that the longest sentence in english literature consists of 469,375 words or 2,273,551 characters (with spaces) and… it occupies 732 pages!!! Can you imagine that?!?! (the full story could be found at Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20071126/bs_prweb/prweb571610_1)). Can you say at least one reason why I would like to read it?

[NikolaiI]

Well I was originally going to say that although I couldn't create it, it shouldn't be hard to add on to it---sentences are not usually considered intellectual property! But it's a 732 page book. Wow! Sounds cool, they give a pretty good review of it.

[NickAdams]

The phase shifting interest me more than the sentence length.

[Oniw17]

That actually sounds like a pretty cool book from the link. I wonder if they'll have it at the library.

[*Classic*Charm*]

That really couldn't be any more dificult than writing a novel of the same length: Couldn't one simply use semi-colens to seperate phrases instead of periods? Then technically it would be one long sentence, but would read like a regular novel.

[NickAdams]

That really couldn't be any more dificult than writing a novel of the same length: Couldn't one simply use semi-colens to seperate phrases instead of periods? Then technically it would be one long sentence, but would read like a regular novel.

John Gardner defines a true long sentence, as one where the substitution of any other punctuation other than a coma, would change the effect of the sentence.

[bibliophile190]

Eh, I'll see if Half-Price Books or Amazon has it.