Longest book you've ever read.

I'm not sure, maybe the Arabian Nights, or the Lord of the Rings, counting all the books (the LotR trilogy, plus the Hobbit and the Silmarillion). Don Quixote could be a contender also.

I do not think the length of the book depends on its complexity or impressiveness, as short books (Critique Of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant, The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway) can seem equally, if not more, complex than longer books.
A few books I have read at great length, anyway: War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1136 pages), The Complete Short Stories Of O. Henry (1692 pages), The Poetry Of Geoffrey Chaucer (1552 pages), and The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (1246 pages).

My record right now is Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy in a hardcover book which is 1420 pages. After I read Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann I am going to read his epic Joseph and Brothers which is 1536 pages. However both of these are novels put into a larger collection. My largest single novel page wise is probably be The Dark Tower by Stephen King

Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was about 1100 pages, from memory.

The longest book I've read is Atlas Shrugged too. It wasn't really worth it though.

Don Quixote, unabridged. Now I ask myself why....http://www.smileyville.net/invision/question.gif

Tom Jones - by Henry Fielding. Truthfully speaking I skipped many pages to reach the end. The story is great & the authors ideas & language, expressions are good.The book is worth ones time. Anyone there who has read this one ?

I think it's the silent don

Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Other very long novels were tolstoy's anna karenina and war and peace,
the brothers karamazov and some more, but I don't remember 'em all.
Just remembered those, because someone at the russian literature topic discussion said that Russians somehow always seem to write veeery long books (but every page is worth it!)

If you count the Lord of the Rings trilogy as one book, that's the longest for me. Crime and Punishment and The Bros. K are up there, too.

The one that seemed the longest, though, in that every moment of my life that went into reading it was utterly wasted, is Moby Dick. I'm sorry, that's just bad writing. Who held the contest for Most Consecutive Sentences Over a Half-Page Long?? There were so many ridiculously off-topic tangents that I felt like I was reading straight-through one of those "choose your own adventure" children's books, where you're supposed to skip ahead depending on what you want to happen, except that Melville forgot to mark the pages. And then the entire chapter dedicated to Why Whales are Fish. . . *ugh* It was like an entire book of "Birdseye View of Paris."

For me it's the Lord of The Rings or the Bible.

Encyclopedia Britannica

What? Why don't you believe us?
We once read an article from there ... almost.

Ok, but we think that it is "Otherland". We haven't got our hands on the first book in it, but still, it is the longest, we think.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AimusSage

For me it's the Lord of The Rings or the Bible.

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Oh, the Bible, of course! I forgot about that thing. :p I've read that, I'm sure that's my longest. There's a whoooole lot of begetting in that one.

The longest fictional book I have read is definitely Tolstoy's War and Peace.My edition is the Penguin Classics one, but I have his Anna Karenina in another edition.For poetry, I would probably say my Seven Centuries of Poetry in English, by Oxford press.Though I have read alot of Shakespeare, but in separate books.Possibly, Shelley's full collected works is also one of the longest in poetry that I have read so far.For one single non-fiction work, I would have to say Encyclopaedia Britannica which is so long, and the text of my CD Encarta, which covers nearly every topic possible.How about your dictionary?I have to add my 1492 page Heinemann dictionary as well.I actually quite enjoy reading the dictionary, but I realize it's not to everyone's taste.;)

This is turning into a serious contest of one-upmanship.

If I read the Adelaide Yellow Pages, does that count? :lol: