Time for another Top Ten Tuesday! Today’s Topic is “Longest Books I’ve Ever Read” but how does one figure that one out? I’ve read some really long books in my life. Since I can’t pinpoint the longest books I’ve read in my lifetime, I guess you’ll have to settle about reading about some of the really long books that I’ve read. They’re all over 800 pages long!
A lot of these are history books because they can be really long.
The Bible might be the longest book that most of us ever read. Maybe. I’m guessing that the majority of people around today have never actually read the Bible from cover to cover. I try to every year, but I’m failing miserably this year. I have different editions that I read (one year I read it in Spanish for a challenge and to improve my Spanish language skills). The American Patriot’s Bible is 1568 pages and contains a lot of interesting facts about the founding of the United States.
A History of Modern Europe – at 1515 pages, this is a really long book! It’s definitely not something that you’re going to read over the weekend. It was really good though. A lot of history that I’ve read over the years either deals with world history or American history. This one focuses solely on Europe, which has had plenty of its own problems!
Atlas Shrugged might very well be the longest fictional book that I read. This edition is 1188 pages! It is not an easy read, either. This particular book took me months to read. I wasn’t blogging about books at the time, but even if I were to reread this book today, I think it would take me a while to get through. The writing is not easy.
I’m sure that there will be a lot of George R.R. Martin books on Top Ten Tuesday posts this week. The edition of A Dance with Dragons that I read was 1125 pages! No wonder they took me so long to read! I read the five books that were published while I was at work last year; I was reading this series on my lunch break for months!
The edition of A Storm of Swords that I read was 973 pages. Even though these books are long, they were a lot easier to read than Atlas Shrugged. They’re still long enough that I don’t plan on reading them again until the last book comes out. Well, maybe if Winds of Winter comes out ten years from now, I might reread the series before that, but if it’s out in another two or three years (LOL) then I’ll probably wait on the reread.
A Patriot’s History of the United States is another very long book, with 960 pages to it. This one focuses on the history of the United States, from its discovery by the Europeans to fairly recently. Although long, it was well-written and easy to read.
The History of the Ancient World is 896 pages. Susan Wise Bauer’s writing is interesting and easy to read. Even though this book took me a little while to get through, it didn’t take me months like some of the more difficult books on this list did.
From Dawn to Decadence is 895 pages (at least the original hardback edition that I read was) and took me a very long time to read. It’s not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination. I had aspartame poisoning the first time I tried reading it, which made it difficult for me to remember details of the book as I read it. Years later, I tried reading it again, and I was able to finish it. I read it right around the time that the author died (he was really old at the time).
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a long book, even in the abridged version, which is what I read a long time ago. This Penguin Classic edition was 848 pages. It took me months to read this. Someday, I hope to read the unabridged version of this book, but that’s 3,674 pages — and it’s not easy reading, either! That will probably be the longest book that I’ll ever read.
The Creators by Daniel J. Boorstin is 832 pages long. I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I did The Discoverers, but this was a good book. For a book this long, it didn’t take too much time for me to finish. Looking this book up on Goodreads, I discovered that there’s yet another book in this series — The Seekers — that I had never heard of before. I had to add that to my TBR, because these books are amazing.
So there you have it: ten über long books that I’ve read. I have some really long books on my TBR, but most of them (with the exception of Kingdom of Ash) are not quite as long as these!
Next week I will probably write about settings in books that I’d like to visit. The topic is on bookstores and libraries I’d like to visit, but since I can only think of three of those, I’ll be switching up the topic a bit.