So, while I was busy complaining about the length of my final Orange Prize read, I was thinking about how many historical novels are unwieldy.
I was thinking about the Margaret George novels, which have started to turn yellow they’ve been sitting on my shelves for so long (you know, the ones about Henry VIII and Mary Queen of Scots?).
And I was thinking about the non-fiction, the seemingly endless works by Antonia Fraser and Alison Weir, and about Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
It was all pretty random, the only consistent theme being my feeling-sorry-for-selfy because the size of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (which is actually a terrifically well-told story) has prohibited its being toted on my commutes and being dragged into bed.
That means that I’m reading an average of 10 pages a day, which means I’ll be finishing Wolf Hall (assuming I don’t miss a day) in approximately 2028. (Although, if it’s a nice weekend and my schedule cooperates, I might finish it on the porch this weekend, where it can sprawl across my lap as needed.)
But as it turns out the 650-ish pages that I’ve been moaning about are really not so many, not in the wider reading scheme of things.
When I sorted my fiction inventory file, these were the longest books to come out.
True, some of them are compilations and contain more than one novel (I’ve *-ed those) but, still, I’ve read three of them (I’ve bolded those).
1004 Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782)
1006 Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1848)
1023 Mervyn Peake’s The Gormenghast Trilogy (1988) *
1024 Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936)
1024 Elizabeth Moon’s The Deed of Paksenarrion (1992) *
1065 Sigrid Unset’s Kristin Lavransdatter (1929) *
1079 David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1079)
1086 James Michener’s Centennial (1974)
1088 James Michener’s The Source (1965)
1111 Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History (1999) *
1130 James Michener’s Hawaii (1957)
1168 Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1955)
1198 Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965)
1222 Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862)
1444 Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869)
1472 Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993)
It’s fun: pulling out a chunk of your inventory, musing at whether it reflects your reading habits.
I’d say this chunk does not-too-badly (some classics, some genre, some commercial, some literary) but because it’s so costly (and, therefore, less profitable) to produce works in translation, I’d say the seeming preponderance of authors from England and the U.S. is somewhat misrepresentative.
Anyhow: herein ends my moaning about the size of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
How about you? What’s the longest book you’ve read? Are you moving v-e-r-y slowly through something yourself these reading days?
Thanks for the hardly-so-looooong comments!
Victoria – So now I’m going to have to re-read the first book of Ash and keep going. *And*, as if you haven’t added enough to my TBR list, now I have to give A Suitable Boy another try too. ::affected sigh::
Laura – Well, I haven’t read many of them either: I agree 500 pages is plenty long when you’ve got so many books ahead of you.
Jackie – I was just petting a copy of The Tale of Genjii the other day; I’ve read an abridged version for a history course but I know that doesn’t count. I’m sure you’ll finish it…eventually…
Eva – I, too, was in my teens when I read GWTW, so I’m not sure how I’d feel about it now either. And with so many other fresh, 1000+ paged books to tempt me, I’m not sure I’ll revisit it either.
Study Window – Riiight: I’d forgotten that. Thanks for the addition to my not-even-published-yet-but-still-TBR list.
Danielle – I was thinking of Les Mis for next year’s insanely long pick, assuming I make it through this year’s War and Peace.
::looks nervous::
Jenny – Oh, that’s good to know: I’ve been eyeing Manning’s work for awhile now. Thanks for the encouragement to more-than-eye it.
Kathleen – For me, Middlemarch was a relatively quick read, after the 2-page preface which, for some reason, slowed me for weeks. ::shakes head at self::
Charlotte – Sadly, my copy of Clarissa is ::whispers:: abridged. In my (weak, nearly meaningless) defense, I read it in the same year that I read Pamela (yes, also abridged) and Tristram Shandy (complete) along with about a dozen other shorter (in comparison) novels of the period. Congrats on the preponderance of chunksters in your reading log!
Sasha – My copy of Bleak House just missed the list; it’s 994 pages long. I can’t imagine handwriting the manuscript either: no wonder they didn’t edit as much!
I was scanning your list, thinking, “Nope, nope, nope.” Meaning, no, haven’t read, and no, too scared too read. 🙂 I remember, I was a kid, asking my mother why that book she was reading was so fat [Bleak House] and she said, “It needs to be long.” Before I could bombard her with more Why-questions, she told me, “Did you know a lot of people wrote books like these longhand? With pens?”
Paradigm shifted that day, haha. It also shut me up.
How did Richardson’s _Clarissa_ miss your list? Not only is it 1500 pages, but the Penguin edition also has pages which are, individually, twice as big as a standard Penguin’s! 🙂
I’ve read far too many huge books – I’ve read six of the ones on your list! I find long books easier and quicker to read than some shorter ones. Usually they are epic, story-driven and easy to lose yourself in. I have spent months upon months mired, instead, in shorter but more meandering (or experimental) works – Dostoevsky’s _The Adolescent_ and Ishiguro’s _The Unconsoled_ spring immediately to mind. I can only slog through a page or two at a time. :/
I had to laugh because I have a Margaret George novel (I think it is Cleopatra) on my shelves turning yellow too! I’m getting ready to read Middlemarch which is over 800 pages.
Hmmm. Probably The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning, in recent years. Having said that, it didn’t take long to read, because it’s incredibly absorbing!
Les Mis has been the longest book for me–in more ways than one, I’m afraid! 🙂 I’ve also read Kristin Lavransdatter, which didn’t feel very long at all, and War & Peace, and a few of those Margaret George novels you mentioned. I sort of like long books (am reading Anna Karenina now), but they do take me a while to get through–if they are too heavy to carry it means I only can read at home and most of my reading is actually done on the bus or walking on the treadmill. I hope to read Wolf Hall this summer, though.
I carried ‘A Suitable Boy’ around with me all one summer and still didn’t finish it. Don’t forget that ‘Wolf Hall’ is only the first part. There is a second instalment still to come.
I think A Suitable Boy is the longest for me! From your list, I’ve also read War and Peace, Les Mis, Kristin Lavransdatter, and Gone w/ the Wind. And I adored all of them! (Although I haven’t read GWTW since I was 13 or 14, so I don’t know if my current self would adore it.) I’m a chunkster girl, though…the fatter a novel is the more excited I get about it. 😀
The longest book I’ve read is probably Gone with the Wind. I’m half way through The Tale of Genji, which is long on top of complicated. I hope I’ll get to the end one day, but it might take me a few years!!
Good luck with Wolf Hall!
I haven’t analyzed my reading by length but I am pretty sure that over the past 3-4 years (the time I’ve been keeping a detailed inventory), I’ve read very few that are over 500 pages. I’m impressed at the sheer number of >1000-page tomes on your list. I’ve not read a single one of those!
A Suitable Boy, without a doubt. It took me three weeks, and I read the final four hundred pages in a long, overnight push. I didn’t believe I could finish it any other way. The problem is I liked it so much I’d like to read it again. Eep. From your list I’ve also read Gone with the Wind (which was pure torture) and Ash (which was a delight). Other long books? I read about a hundred door-stopping fantasy novels as a teenager but I don’t suppose they really count. And I’ve read Don Quixote, which is nowhere near as long as War and Peace, but felt veeeery long to me. Sometimes I think it’s not just about the number of pages, but the density of the book that contributes to my sense of its length.