theblackdostoyevsky

What’s the longest book you’ve ever read?

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It’s not fair for The Holy Bible to be included in things like this. It clocks between 9 and 12 hundred pages, in any translation, and in nearly all prints doubles the texts columns on every page. 

That said, leave it to me to complicate this further. “Book” is a loaded term. Are we talking longest, solitarily bound book or longest continuous subject or story? Are we counting compilations, like the collected FWP Slave Narratives published in the 1930s? What about textbooks that have been read, cover to cover, over the course of an academic semester or year? The Collected Writings of James Joyce, or Henry James, or Aristotle, or Johnathan Edwards? Those are many-paged books, but what then of even longer stories? All seven Harry Potter books would be quite a long book, if the stories were compiled, even if each installment isn’t so long in itself (except book seven, of course). Should series’ like The Hunger Games, Divergent, Percy Jackson, etc. ought count for this, especially if each book picks up where the last left off. If each is an individual, standalone story, like The Babysitter’s Club series, or the Arthur Conan Doyle mysteries featuring Sherlock Holmes, probably not. I don’t know. Maybe I’m making too much of this. 

I’ve read some long books, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I’ll go with the ones I enjoyed the most, where I would have read a thousand more pages, had they been written, because I didn’t want the story to end. I’m not sure which is longest, but it’s between The Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz and The U.S.A. Trilogy, by John Dos Passos. And those, it could be argued, are compilations.