2012 reading challenge

Well DarkMuse is reading around the world in 80 books (which is a fab idea, by the way) and Scher is still doing the Pullizer and BBC Big Read and probably the around the world thing (I don't know how she finds the time) and I too am looking for a 2012 reading challenge. My 2011 challenge was to read significantly more books by female writers and I've achieved that, so for 2012 my new challenge is:

wait for it....

don't get too excited...

MAMMOTH NOVELS

So, to explain, I'm trying to slow myself down, get myself deeper and deeper and deeper into a story and to do this I think I need to read some much longer books. Books of 600+ pages. So far I have the following on my list of potential candidates:

The Tale of Genji
War & Peace
Anna Karenina
The Poisonwood Bible
Mickelsson's Ghosts
The Corrections
The Women's Room
The Three Musketeers
Middlemarch
Don Quixote
Gravity's Rainbow
Infinite Jest

and something by Dickens, I haven't decided exactly what yet (I was thinking The Old Curiosity Shop). I'd also still like to keep some kind of gender balance in this too, difficult as that might be.

So:

1) would anyone like to join me on the mammoth read challenge, and
2) any suggestions for great mammoth books to read? I'm up for pretty much anything so long as it's long :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheFifthElement

Books of 600+ words.

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You mean 600+ pages, right?

:D

How about A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth? It is the longest book in English language that's printed in one volume or something along those lines and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I also enjoyed American Gods by Neil Gaiman and Pickwick Papers by Dickens (one of the funniest things he wrote, I think).

I wouldn't mind reading Poisonwood Bible with you, for example, if you start group discussions on them :)

Dur, yes 600+ pages. I've changed that now.

I'll try and remember to start a thread when I read Poisonwood.

I have a list of books that I call "The Monsters"...Books that are either very long or very complicated that I want to read. Originally, I was going to make this year a giant book year, then I decided to go for American lit instead.

But, the monsters are:
Ulysses by James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

And, the biggest monster of them all, clocking in at the smallest page count of the group...
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce

I suggest you read Henryk Sienkiewicz's Trilogy. The English Translation I read had the titles as follows: With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Fire in the Steppe. It totals over 3100 pages and it is, in my opinion, far more exciting, interesting and humorous than War and Peace. Sienkiewicz truly deserved his Nobel Prize.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño. 912 pages, very good.

Surprised to not see Les Miserables on there.

Also, Three Musketeers, which by itself may not be as long as you want, is actually the first book in a trilogy. You can add Twenty Years After or go whole hog and include Ten Years Later as well. Note that the latter is also very long, so publishers generally lop off the first 2/3 to 3/4 and publish the remainder as Man in the Iron Mask. Oxford Worlds Classics has the entire thing in three volumes (five total for the series). Just FYI.

For that matter, Count of Monte Cristo is plenty long itself.

Lord of the Rings was intended to be one novel, but the publisher split it up into a trilogy.

Bleak House, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, Nicholas Nickleby all by Charles Dickens.
He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

......

Anna Karenina
The Brothers Karamozov
The Idiot
Moby Dick

Not sure where it comes in on the page count, but it's a good read. I'm not too big on Kingsolver's prose, but I like her storytelling.

Not sure if you have any interest, but The Bible could be thrown into this group (as well as other religious writings from other religions). I'm trying to tackle it currently myself (in the King James version), and I actually find it very fun. I've read about 550 pages of the Old Testament (it has a little over 1,000 pages) currently. I'm going to finish the OT, move onto something else, then come back and tackle the Apocrypha and New Testament. If you haven't read it yet, I wholeheartedly recommend it! Even if you don't read anything, there are a ton of great books in it (so far, Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, The Books of Samuel and Kings).

Several books on your list are on mine, also, so I'll try to read those with you, although I've noticed I'm not very good at reading on a schedule.

Demons (or in other translations: The Possessed) by Dostoevsky
Also voting for Les Mis
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
East of Eden by Steinbeck (just over 600 pages)

Sitting on my To Be Read shelf, giving me sadly neglected looks, are two whoppers left from my Read-about-New-York-to-Get-the-Most-Out-of-Your-Trip plan: Don DeLillo's Underworld (827pp) and Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale (748pp). The opening pages of both really grabbed me but somehow I've never got around to reading the rest of either. Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections joined them shortly after my return and again, only the first few pages have been read. And Moby Dick and Don Quixote have been there ever since the TBR shelf was just a TBR-When-I-Retire box - perhaps I should join you in your 2012 challenge? :smile5:

There is one that I'm saving for a long, indulgent read - C J Sansom's latest Shardlake book, Heartstone (631pp + Author's Afterword). I need something absorbing for the dark, wet afternoons ahead.

I'll second Brother Karamazov and Moby Dick which are both excellent.

East of Eden is good as well. If you like steinbeck you will like this.

I will give a negative recommendation for American Gods. I feel as though I'm the only person who didn't like this book. I really feel like over the quality of Gaiman's prose is fairly poor, thought the concept of the book is pretty cool as are all of the grifts that occur in it.

Also "The Recognitions". I haven't read it, but the handful of people who have always seem to rave about it.

EDIT sorry didnt see that you already had the corrections on your list.

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone :) I hadn't realised Les Miserables was quite so long which is why it wasn't on my list (I didn't really do much research, just mainly had a look through what was already languishing unread on my shelves :D ) but I think if I was to read one book by Dumas I'd probably rather read The Three Musketeers, can't exactly say why. It is just long enough - my copy is dangerously 666 pages long. Spooky.

I think I'd like to add The Brothers Karamazov to my list of reads and the Sienkiewicz trilogy looks really interesting but is hazardously expensive here so I'm not sure about that, but in my investigation I noticed he wrote Quo Vadis and I think I'd like to add that to a future reading list. Phew. I also thought of The Woman in White which is also a whopper and could be interesting, and discovered I own David Copperfield so that might be my easy choice for a Dickens. Magic Mountain is also on my possible hit list. At this point, the difficult bit might be narrowing the field! All the books suggested sound good and I haven't read any of them.

I'd love to have company on the journey so I might just start a thread each time I begin one of the mammoth ones and if anyone would like to join me for the slog you'd all be more than welcome. I reckon it's easier to keep going when reading with friends :)