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.
