From 1999 to 2024, I have read at least one book over 1,000 pages every year.*
*Except 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2020 (?!).
According to my records, the longest books in those years were:
- 2015 – Gone with the Wind (862 pages)
- 2017 – Roots (899 pages)
- 2018 – The Annotated Malay Archipelago (761 pages)
- 2020 – Don Quixote (768 pages)
Caveats to the caveats: My copy of Gone with the Wind was printed really dense. Other copies (including the first edition) were more than 1,000 pages. Don Quixote is also often if not usually more than 1,000 pages in English. So I think these two still qualify me as having followed my “rule” of reading at least one 1,000-page book every year.
Roots and The Annotated Malay Archipelago really don’t qualify, though… What happened in 2017 and 2018?
What happened was, my local book group leader decided we would read The Dream of the Red Chamber! I read the five-volume Penguin version translated by Hawkes and Minford, titled The Story of the Stone, from October 26, 2017 to January 14, 2018.
Vol. 1 – 540 pages
Vol. 2 – 601 pages
Vol. 3 – 637 pages
Vol. 4 – 398 pages
Vol. 5 – 383 pages
Total 2,559 pages!
That’s more than equivalent to two 1,000-page books, so I’m going to count The Story of the Stone as my long book for both 2017 and 2018.
So, if granted a little flexibility, I can actually rather truthfully say:
From 1999 to 2024, I actually have read at least one book over 1,000 pages every year!
Or we can say that since there are more than 26 doorstoppers on the list, the average is more than one per year anyway. (Whatever! Much books! Very reading! Such wow!)
See below for the list of all the 1,000-page books (by year and by genre) and some comments.
List of 1,000-page Books by Year
- 1999 – Shogun by James Clavell (1,210 pages)
- 2000 – The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough (1,076 pages)
- 2001 – Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1,024 pages)
- 2002 – The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (1,076 pages)
- 2002 – The Grass Crown by Colleen McCullough (1,077 pages)
- 2002 – Fortune’s Favorites by Colleen McCullough (1,028 pages)
- 2003 – The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye (1,189 pages)
- 2003 – The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, anonymous translation (1,095 pages)
- 2004 – The October Horse by Colleen McCullough (1,110 pages)
- 2005 – Hawaii by James Michener (1,036 pages)
- 2006 – Gai-Jin by James Clavell (1,236 pages)
- 2006 – A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (1,474 pages)
- 2006 – A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin (1,009 pages)
- 2007 – A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin (1,128 pages)
- 2007 – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susana Clarke (1,008 pages)
- 2008 – Noble House by James Clavell (1,370 pages)
- 2009 – Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1,074 pages)
- 2010 – Whirlwind by James Clavell (1,270 pages)
- 2011 – The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (1,071 pages)
- 2012 – A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin (1,128 pages)
- 2013 – Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (1,219 pages)
- 2014 – A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (1,168 pages)
- 2015 – Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (862 pages)
- 2016 – A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (1,478 pages)
- 2017 – The Story of the Stone, Volumes 1 to 3, by Cao Xueqin, translated by David Hawkes (1,778 pages)
- 2018 – The Story of the Stone, Volumes 4 and 5, by Cao Xueqin, edited by Gao E, translated by John Minford (781 pages)
- 2019 – The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Robin Buss (1,312 pages)
- 2020 – Don Quixote by Cervantes, translated by P.A. Motteux (768 pages)
- 2021 – Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, translated by Charles E. Wilbour (1,006 pages)
- 2021 – The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Royall Tyler (1,224 pages)
- 2021 – The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker (1,136 pages)
- 2022 – Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1,188 pages)
- 2023 – Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en, translated by W.J.F. Jenner (2,345 pages)
- 2023 – Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2,101 pages)
- 2024 – The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1,627 pages)
Actually, The Complete Sherlock Holmes and Rationality: From AI to Zombies shouldn’t be on a list of long books, because they are collections. Most authors, if you were to read everything they wrote in one go, would qualify as having published “a book over 1,000 pages”! Still, I’m counting these as one work for the purpose of this list. (If you prefer to fudge the math a different way, observe that I read three doorstoppers in 2021, enough to make up for 2023 and 2024.)
List of 1,000-page Books by Genre
Nonfiction
- Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Translated fiction
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, anonymous translation
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Robin Buss
- The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin, edited by Gao E, translated by David Hawkes and John Minford
- Don Quixote by Cervantes, translated by P.A. Motteux
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, translated by Charles E. Wilbour (1,006 pages)
- The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Royall Tyler
- The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker
- Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en, translated by W.J.F. Jenner
Historical fiction
- The First Man in Rome (Masters of Rome series) by Colleen McCullough
- The Grass Crown (Masters of Rome series) by Colleen McCullough
- Fortune’s Favorites (Masters of Rome series) by Colleen McCullough
- The October Horse (Masters of Rome series) by Colleen McCullough
- Shogun (Asian saga) by James Clavell
- Noble House (Asian saga) by James Clavell
- Gai-Jin (Asian saga) by James Clavell
- Whirlwind (Asian saga) by James Clavell
- The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
- The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye
- Hawaii by James Michener
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Detective fiction
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Fantasy fiction
- The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time series) by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
- Towers of Midnight (Wheel of Time series) by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
- A Memory of Light (Wheel of Time series) by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
- A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire series) by George R.R. Martin
- A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire series) by George R.R. Martin
- Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Dystopian fiction
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Which books would I recommend?
I mean… it depends what genres you like, doesn’t it?
The knee-jerk literary recommendation is the obvious crowd-pleaser, The Count of Monte Cristo, the classic revenge adventure novel. Read the relatively recent Robin Buss translation, which restores some details the ubiquitously reprinted anonymous translation omitted.
The off-the-beaten-path recommendation is the rather challenging Tale of Genji, which plunges you into a world that is remote in time (and likely also space) but familiar in terms of human emotion. Read the Seidensticker translation of this thousand-year-old Japanese classic, which IMO makes it easier than the Tyler version to keep track of the characters.
Would I read these books again?
Art is long and time is fleeting… nevertheless:
I’ve been wanting to re-read The Far Pavilions; I remember one very specific scene (a chasm opening up between friends because of religion) and nothing else, except that I enjoyed it.
I’ve been wanting to re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell also. Again, I have one specific image: a grey world between worlds where stepping stones that float in nothingness can take you to other places, if you’re careful. But maybe I should (instead? also?) read her much shorter 2020 novel, Piranesi.
I would not read Pillars of the Earth again. I assume Follet did his homework and wrote well about architecture, but I hated the excess of what struck me as blatant emotional manipulation. Something goes well? Disaster is just around the corner. Someone in abject misery and distress? Behold, rescue is at hand. Such a soap opera. At least that’s how I remember it.
Michener, if I recall correctly, filled the first 50 pages of Hawaii with a description of lava building up on the ocean floor to create the island chain. I mean, I guess he set out to tell the entire story of the place. But I prefer books (whether long or short) to be narrower in time scope so that they focus on the same few core characters, and not generations of different people. Every multigenerational family saga I’ve read just makes me feel like nothing matters because the world moves on and on and on.
Roots falls between two stools: As I understand it, the author originally claimed the book was biographical, and concerned his own ancestors, but it’s also necessarily fictional in at least some aspects (and is now sold as fiction). Moreover, the book is pursued by the lingering odor of possible plagiarism. These issues aside, the book’s structure is lopsided: there are a couple hundred pages describing an African boy who was transported to America by slavers, but then the book follows generations of descendants at a much faster pace. Like I said, I don’t really enjoy family sagas, so… I’m never reading this one again.
I enjoyed Don Quixote a lot more than I expected to. Moreover, there are a ton of translations, and the one I read doesn’t seem to be very well respected, so maybe I’ll read one of the others someday. Still, it’s a bit incoherent; some good notes would help but not make it any less a patchwork.
I would absolutely Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy read again, even though I’ve already read it twice now. Something about the tone.
Are doorstoppers going the way of the dodo?
Rationality and The Complete Sherlock Holmes are collections bundled as ebooks. But apart from those, which I read in 2023 and 2024, I also read 4 of the other thousand-page books listed above on a device instead of paper: in 2016, A Suitable Boy; in 2019, the Robin Buss translation of The Count of Monte Cristo; in 2021, the Royall Tyler translation of The Tale of Genji, and in 2022, Atlas Shrugged. My habits are shifting; I read a lot of other (shorter) ebooks in the same period.
Sometimes I feel like at some point, for various reasons, even when I can buy a really thick book locally, maybe I just… won’t.
On the other hand, I hate shelling out money for ebooks, which I feel are priced arbitrarily high given the lack of paper, printing, binding, warehousing, and transportation cost (not that a publisher’s digital infrastructure is exactly free), especially given that Amazon ebooks technically don’t belong to me. I’m better at finding printed books at attractive bargain prices than I am at finding ebooks at attractive bargain prices. Moreover, printed books are imbued with a kind of armchair-timetravel aura: every old book belongs to a specific era, visible in the way it was designed and manufactured, and bears the marks of its shorter or longer journey to the here and now, to the shelf where I can see it when I walk around in my house.
I don’t think I could stop reading printed books altogether. But the really thick ones? Perhaps.
Postscript
I wanted to title this post “I like big books and I cannot lie.” I decided not to because this joke is based on a 1992 song about butts (not books), so I’m guessing it’s a pretty stale joke at this point, being as it’s older than the internet omg. But if you hadn’t heard that pun: Congrats, you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000! (It’s your Diet Coke & Mentos moment).
