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Dumas has always been one of my favorite writers so I decided to read The Count of Monte Cristo for a class a few years ago. I had never read it before so, naturally, I put it off until a week or two before the test. When I found out that it was around 1100 pages I was less than thrilled but I finished it in about six days.
Peter the Great - some author I cannot remember.
Perhaps that or the Bible. There may have been another I cannot think of, but those seem to me to be the longest that I remember.
Lord of the Rings.
Never again. :p
I'm taking a class in Russian next year. I haven't really touched any Russian literature so far because I'd love to one day be able to speak Russian fluently and read what many call some of the greatest books ever written in their original language. Maybe when I'm just out of university and have nothing to lose I'll go live in Russia for a few months. If I ever feel confident enough in Russian, I'm making a bee-line for Dostoevsky, promptly followed by Tolstoy.
Since I can already speak French and Spanish, The Count of Monte Cristo, Les Miserables, and Don Quixote are definitely on my list. When I have time I'll read them for sure.
Harry Potter books have a lot of pages, sure, but the print is fairly big and the language is very easy to read. Now, when you get LotR or The Bible, which contain the kind of language that makes you zone out and re-read a paragraph 5 times over and has more than 1,000 pages in extremely small print, that's a different story.
the mars trilogy by kim stanley robinson weighs in at around 2100 densely packed pages, although technically these are three different books.
biggest single book is either war and peace or stephen king - the stand, both 1400 pages.
the mahabharata edition i read was around 1300 pages i believe
The longest book I have read recently were both Sir Winston Churchills biography by Randolph Churchill, about four hundred pages, and simultanously Secret of the Samurai, a whopping six hundred pages. I read them over a five month span and managed about six novels in the meantime.
The longest book I've read so far was the fifth edition of Harry Potter. Though I have been thinking of reading War and Peace, Tom Jones, and Middlemarch.
Ulysses (Joyce) springs to mind (possibly because i am writing on it at the moment). Apart from its mammoth size, it is so loaded with intertextual references, that there are separate books for footnotes! Joyce once said that he intended to include so many 'hidden' gems in Ulysses that it woud keep literature professors arguing about it and speculating over it for a long time after he was dead. Interesting writer.
Thomas Mann -Joseph and his brothers; it is amazing what Mann could do on several pages of the Bible.
longest book....
i'm not sure. but longest book psychologically was a textbook regarding quadratic equations... (although it was only 200+ pages)
Vanity Fair - Thackerey.
Toooooooooooo longgggg.
Michel Faber's "The scarlet petal and the white". It's about 1050 pages long but you just can't get bored!
The longest books I have read, in no particular order:
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Les Miserables
The Faerie Queene
The Stand - unabridged
Tom Jones
Don Quixote - in Spanish :thumbs_up
hmm, lord of the rings being three books and the bible being(unless you count the Apocrypha) 66, so can you strictly include them by the reasoning some have stated on here?
Lord of the rings
'The Pillars of the Earth' (Ken Follet)
The longest books I have perused include Boswell's "Life of Johnson", which is over 1200 pages, Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" which at 4 volumes tops some 2500 pages, Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholia" which tops some 1400 pages, and my current read... one of the mothers of all monster novels, Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" which stands at 4 volumes and some 2500 pages.
Among the longest books I have completed I might count Tolstoy's "War and Peace" (1400 pgs+), Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" (1200 pgs+), Cervantes "Don Quixote" (900 pgs+), Ariosto's "Ormando Furioso" (2 vols. 1200 pgs+). Of course there are even longer books... the complete Arabian Knights and various works of Indian literature which go on for volumes (John Barth discusses any number of these in his essays).
The Lord of the Rings is one book in three volumes.Quote:
Originally Posted by booksgalore
Me, I once read the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Either the whole LOTR, or np- definitely- the entirety of Bulfinch's Mythology. Charlemgane, Arthur, and Zeus all in on book? Be still my heart...
Miss Caroline
Anna Karenina and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
This is probably the shortest book I've ever read, but one that felt like the longest book I've ever read: The Heart of Darkness!
I've read passages here and there, but I thought it was too pedantic.Quote:
Originally Posted by cuppajoe_9
The longest book I have read recently is Gone with the Wind. I disliked Scarlett O'Hara so much that I could hardly stand finishing the book. I believe it should have ended about half way but the torturous thing kept on going on.
Other long books I can remember having read are the Lord of the Rings books, and Les Misérables.
I don't know..which is longer, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell?
Don Quixote. Still not finished, in fact. Striving to finish book 2.
The Harry Potter books (I forget which are the long ones) and The Three Musketeers
Robin Hobb's The Farseer Trilogy's final volume Assassin's Quest, 975 pages, paperback. I think it's thicker as a hardcover book.
I don't remember how long it was, and I'm not even sure, but when I was a kid I read a book called "Amy's Eyes" and I was so proud of myself for finishing it because it was so huge...
I guess it would be vanity fair by thackeray, lotr or les miserables... I dont know which is the longest.
Definitely Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.Quote:
Originally Posted by malwethien
One of teh longest books i ever read is the one i am reading right now: War and peace. I am in 1345 page and i still have! But i really enjoy it.
Evi
Just finished James Joyce's Ulysses (931 pages) but it felt a lot longer!!!! :eek:
the count of monte cristo by alexandre dumas.
it was a 1000+-page book, but it didn't feel like it though. :D
The length of Ulysses never bothered me, but it didn't become the longest book I had ever read until 2004 when I completed it. I never finished it because I got so lost years ago. Then on the 100th birthday of its publication I decided to finish it and am planning to read it again next year. I fell in love with it. Each year I do walk around a town where I happen to be for most of the day in a tribute to Leonard Bloom.
lord of the rings
Suitable Boy -- Vikram Seth...It was over 1000 pages.
Probably Lord of the Rings or Les Miserables.
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. The unabridged version. An eighteenth-century epistolary novel. It was originally published in serial form, and Richardson deliberately padded each installment because the longer he could drag it out, the more money he'd make out of his endless saga!
As I recall, the saintly heroine had NO LUCK. She trusted the wrong guy, so was kidnapped and taken into a brothel where he raped her! Later, returned to her family, she pined away and more or less died of a broken heart. What I remember most is how neurotic Clarissa became towards the end, having a coffin constructed in her bedroom. The book was great fun, all melodrama and purple prose, but so-o-o-o-o long!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mary Sue
The Lord of the Rings(:thumbs_up )
but have just started Clarissa this week so that would be the longest. I think I read somewhere that Clarissa is the longest book written.
I have to say the longest book I've read is Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix, sorry I know that it doesn't belong on the forum. 870 Pages
The longest book Ive ever read was Animal Farm. :lol: No, W&P probably is the longest.
I'm not sure, but I guess it would have to be Stephen King's The Stand, which was over 1,000 pages long.
Lord of the Rings, and Don Quixote which I never got to finish admittedly...