Longest book you've ever read.

I suppose if Jane Austen, The Complete Works don't count, then Charlotte and Emily Bronte, The Complete Works doesn't count either? Those are probably the longest books that I've read in book form. LOL... I lugged both of them in to reread my favorite parts after state testing and my teacher gave me the weirdest look. Besides those, it's probably Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheniox, sad, I know. But, if you count books that I read online through etexts (which is most of the books I read), I think Camilla by Frances Burney tops the list for me.

Among the longest books I´ve read are:
Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Foundation trilogy, Isaac Asimov (actually they are 3 books, but one story... if you count all books of the Foundation series, it´s a huge reading... and I´ve read them :nod: )
QB VII, Leon Uris
Complete Works of Machado de Assis (2 volumes of very thin paper and small letters, very good stories)
The Thorn Birds, Colleen Mc Cullough
Operação Cavalo de Tróia, J J Benitez (all 6 books, haven´t read the 7th yet, I think it´s "Trojan Horse Operation" in english, again, it´s one story in several books, very good books)

If I remember some more I´ll post later

Cris

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Originally Posted by Schokokeks

aye, me! :nod:
but I admit that I did not read it completely. I once worked on a project relating elements of the history of medicine, especially focussing on different forms of madness. My epoch was the Ancient World, and as in traditions of texts from this age, melancholy was defined as a form of madness, I read some excerpts from Burton's book that seemed helpful. I'd love to read the whole book one day, as I'm very curious about an historical approach to medicine..My admiration that you made it through! :nod: Did you like it so far?

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Yes I did like it very much. It is truly a man's entire life work - an obsession. I thought it to be a true masterpiece though, and well worth my many many many hours spend reading it.

All together, meaning Burton's strange introduction to the book and all the partitions, it accumulates to be 1224 pages long. Though thats only my copy of the text, which features very tiny text

Either "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Martin Chuzzlewit"--they were both 700-800. Longest non-fiction was Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."

Victor Huog Les Miserables I think...but don't quote me on it.

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!