For me it’s Metro 2033 by Dmitriy Glukhovskiy, which is 500 pages long
ASOIAF, that was a waste of time lol
David Weber Honorverse, something like 30 books averaging around 600 pages each. Main plot is 17 books (i think, at the end main plot and spinoffs converge).
A single tome book would be James Clavell’s Shogun, 1125 pages, small font.
What do you make of Clavell? I like long reads and Asian culture, but I hesitate to buy his books because he is an Englishman and I fear they might eventually converge into the usual White Saviour and Noble Savages bullshit you tend to find in literature from back in the day
Shogun is pretty good, protagonist do have some white saviour moments and quite a lot of orientalism but the book is written good, so the author is invisible, and all that is put on a head of XVI century british sailor (for a XVI century British sailor Blackthorne is actually remarkably tolerant and open minded at least after Yabu and Omi explain to him he’s not in England anymore). The book also make few important points about about christianity in Japan. Definitely low key anticolonialist.
Tai-pan is worse, but i read it long ago and don’t remember much.
It definitely has orientalist parts, but its not the thrust of the book, which is very positive of Japan, and more often than not treats the euros as less civilized. I def recommend it, because its incredibly entertaining, and has some of the best political intrigue / realpolitik ever written. This book is massive, and I still couldn’t put it down.
Every book from the ASOIAF series. They’re all massive, but A Dance with Dragons has over a thousand pages
goddamn wish i could consume theory as good as i consumed ASOIAF, i read all the books in a summer vacation.
Jesus Christ, you devoured those thing. I’ve read them once and listened to them 1-2 times and each run took me like half a year lol
Yea, at that point i was in love with the show. Then it turned into garbage and i couldn’t even bother to watch the last season. And the next book never came lmao
Same here. Probably the fate of most fans since like 2018. And that wretched book is still not out…
In that case, ADWD could be my longest individual book.
As for longest work, either this one or Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, which may be a bit longer overall. Although I only got to the end of the ones he wrote. I never got round to the Sanderson books. I’d like to try again but unfortunately Sanderson is up there with Stephen King with authors who bore the pants off me.
Depend what you read, Sanderson is very uneven writer in terms of technique, but what draws people to him is rather his originality than his workshop. For example, i think his highest acclaimed series, the “Mistborn” is boring (still original but boring), first book have incredibly tedious action scenes and later ones while fixing it to large extent, don’t manage to fit in something good instead so it’s the same words but spreaded. On the other hand, Stormlight Archives, while much more wordy, are for me one of the best series i read lately. I also love his early single books, Elantris and Warbreaker. Also The Rithmatist, his version of scholomance genre, but better than anyhing i read in it. Lately in Poland they been publishing Skyward and its continuations but i think it absolute crap, his worst book.
I also hate Wheel of Time, Jordan was third rate scribbler who can’t make interesting characters and instead is flooding readers with his sexual frustrations.
I am willing to give him another go. Maybe my issue comes from two places:
- I took a break from WoT (can’t blame him for dying, I suppose) and picked up the first Sanderson book a few years later. Maybe it was Jordan’s writing that I disliked as I had matured. I was also pissed off that I would have to wade through two more books of this shit. I don’t think I finished even the first finale book.
- Curious as to whether the problem was Jordan leaving a mess of notes or whether the problem was Sanderson, I picked up Mistborn. I gave it a good go. I have a rule not to dismiss books before 50 pages (sometimes I forget them after fewer, but that’s because I get busy and intend to go back later), but for this one I gave it a hundred pages or so.
Thanks for the recommendation. Tbh, I hear such good things about him that I have wondered what I was missing. So I’ll give a few of his other series/novels a go.
Go for Elantris first. It’s his novel debut and it’s really most in character. Still my favourite book of his.
Also adding to previous post he did wrote pretty decent young adult postapocalyptic superhero trilogy Calamity-Firefight-Steelheart.
That’s where I’ll start, then. Thanks.
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Around the World in Eighty Days.
It was an abridged version, but they still make it all the way around.
The US constitution 😂
My longest and by far best read was the Three-Body trilogy by Liu Cixin, weighing in at a combined 1400 pages. It is hard science-fiction and may require a bit of physical-mathematical background to appreciate how it makes esoteric scientific concepts into driving plot points, but if you have that, it is an absolutely stellar experience from the tons of creative worldbuilding to the inventive storytelling to even the minutest technical details.
One thing of note is that the Dark Forest hypothesis, today one of the most well-known solutions to the Fermi paradox, was invented by the author and had its first-ever appearance in the second book of the series.Correction: Upon further looking into it, the Dark Forest hypothesis apparently predates the book, which then axiomatised and coined the term for it
Read the first two. Some guy once pointed out that the Dark Forest hypothesis rests on the assumption that communication is slower and more expensive than instantaneous destruction, which is false.
I wish i only read the first two, they were great, but third is absolute garbage, guy ran out of ideas for plot and instead presented one of two nead ideas he had left along some really weird shit mixed with wide plethora of apocalyptic scenarios broken by some really tedious nothing parts. There’s also 4th book written by other author and accepted by original one which straightens out the ending dud, but i would still rather not read it at all.
Some people like it for its scale. It’s a matter of taste I guess, since it’s held in great esteem as far as I know in China.
Yeah the scale is huge but again we rapidly move from Sol-Alpha Centauri scale to universe level catalcysm. and god’s eye over entirety of spacetime. About the esteem afaik it’s the first modern Chinese book becoming really worldwide bestseller, of course they will held it in great esteem. Poland had the same phenomenon with Andrzej Sapkowski and his books are even more uneven with good start but by the last 2 the quality is in freefall.
Overall the thing i get from the issue with TBP series is that the “3rd book curse” is universal in every culture.
People may dislike it for the specifics of the story but at least the premise is very interesting. I lost interest 75% through the first book but would love to read a synopsis of the story.
One thing of note is that the Dark Forest hypothesis, today one of the most well-known solutions to the Fermi paradox, was invented by the author and had its first-ever appearance in the second book of the series.
That sentence reminds of Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur
That’s because he already did a video on it (Spoilers for the book, obviously)
I know
War and Peace
I wish I read that, I loved the games. I regret cheating on so many High School reading tests. My class read Crime and Punishment and I just went on Shmoop to find all the answers. At times it was worth it, for example, some days, we were a bit behind schedule and had to read 40+ pages in a single night, while we also had hw for other classes, so I don’t completely regret it, but I wish I read more of it. Unfortunately the longest book i read was probably one of the Harry Potter books when I was like 9 or something. Ik ik but I was really young and I liked the ps2 games and the movies so I read a few books, nearly the whole series I think. Other than that, most of the fiction books I read were all classics like To Kill a Mockingbird or Room with a View or Shakespeare plays. None of those are very long, so by default, I have to say with much shame that the longest fiction book I’ve read is a HP book😔
I wish I read that, I loved the games.
The book is very different from the game
The games were weird to me because I thought it was just like Fallout in USSR but it was way different, there were like spirits and monsters and stuff
Serbian legal code
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, around 1200 pages
I read the penguin English translation and found it to be a real page turner, like almost like a pulpy adventure novel. Would recommend.
I also read the penguin edition and loved it. I read it from start to finish in like 3 days. Once I started I couldn’t put it down.
I love that book so much.
Same. It’s one of my favorites!
Classic, definitely best Dumas novel for me.
Really? No one else read “House of Leaves”? Y’all are missing out on the best psychogical essay novel ever written
I have it on my reading list! I heard it’s horror, is that right?
Psychological horror with a healthy topping of liminal-style fear. It’s been a while since I read it, but I do recommend it - in physical form especially, given that a lot of the unease stems from metahorror regarding the book itself. 👻
House of Leaves is around 700 pages long, am I wrong? Most books mentioned in this post’s comments are longer, so maybe that is why.
I read it Sophomore year. It gave me nightmares for a while. I loved it.
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In a single volume, that was Brothers Karamazov, over 1000 pages. I count Dostoyevsky as imperialist and teocrat, but I read it years ago
It by Stephen King is… roughly 1,138 pages long.
Still the longest piece I’ve read I think, and I read it in high school. In fairness it is a reaaally long book and I got through it in maybe a little under a month. Wish I could force myself to read like that again (I could, I just lack the willpower).
Life is a lot more carefree for many teen-agers, even if it didn’t always feel like it at the time. It’s a lot easier to shut the world out and read for the pleasure of it. Is it only longer books or don’t you really read anything nowadays?
I miss the regimented nature of being a kid sometimes. Every year I had at least one class dedicated solely to reading at least twice a week and I can vividly recall how good learning felt then - I read House of Leaves by Danielewski in Sophomore year/10th grade and I can’t remember feeling that proud that I had finished something considered difficult even for adults.
Nowadays I’ll get halfway through a novel or history book or theory piece and just stop, fall off - my attention is desparately needed elsewhere. I’ve got a lot of half-cocked ideas I know I could solidify if only I could focus. I can read articles like crazy, though.
I’m similar. We just need different strategies as adults. It’s still hard, though.
One way I get through non-fiction is to plan only to read a chapter at a time, starting with whatever looks most interesting, and treating it as the task in itself (as opposed to finishing the book). It tricks my brain into thinking the task is manageable. This way, I’ve not ‘failed’ if I get distracted, and I can pick up the same book to read another chapter later. Sometimes this means reading books in the wrong order, but the alternative is drifting away somewhere in the middle of one of the early chapters. And if I only read the one chapter, at least I properly engaged with it while I had the book open.
Brilliant advice comrade, thank you. Compartmentalizing tasks like that is one of the only reasons I’ve been able to keep working without losing it. The journey is often as tolerable and potentially even as enjoyable as the destination if we allow it to be.
Not a single work, but I’m currently reading the collection of all of HP Lovecraft’s works of fiction which is at least a thousand pages long (idk exactly how long).
