What is the thickest book you ever read in your life?
What is the name of the book? What kind of book? How many pages? And How long did you take to finish that book?
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
56 Answers
Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. I went through it pretty quick in about a week or so. I was kinda disappointed in the very end.
The Science of Survival was pretty long and wordy, is that longer than the Big Book, thought I was a drunk till I read that.
@py_sue How many pages?(if you remember,if you don’t it doesn’t matter).
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. It is, without doubt, the most difficult thing I have ever read. Normally I read a book a day, and have done so for some 25 years. I’m not a philosophy neophyte, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but Kant essentially redefines every single term he uses, and completely rewrites the very basis of cognition. It took me something on the order of two months to struggle my way through both books of the CoPR, and I’ve never experienced anything else like it before or since. The only thing that even came close was some of Husserl’s work, where I’d read a two-page sentence entirely devoid of verbs and then encounter a tangled briar patch wall of verbs all piled up in front of the final period.
Off the top of my head, maybe The Stand, which clocks in around 520,000 words. The first time I read it, it took me four days. Now I’ve read it so much that I can do it in half that.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read it after Fountain head, so was easy.
Steven Kings the Stand was pretty darn thick. I know i have read compilation books that needed a fork lift to read and really can’t remember the others as there have been many.
I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. That was over 1000 pages. I also read Churchill’s Memoirs of the Second World War. That was also over 1000 pages. They were both interesting and I read them during a summer break. So it didn’t take too long. I also read Churchill’s The Second World War, which is a six volume set. I believe each volume was about 800 pages. I read each volume separately, so it took a while.
I started War and Peace. And then I put it down. The thickest single book (not counting anthologies) I’ve actually read all the way through is a biography of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis.
The Stand, the Harry Potter books, and the Bible.
A tech manual for a weapons system. About 1700 pages.Portions of it had to be memorized.
I have “The Stand” but haven’t read it yet, it has 1,141 pages for those of you who have read it! What I have read is “Legacy of the Drow” by R.A. Salvatore it has has 1,077 pages and “The Icewind Dale Trilogy” also by R.A. Salvatore, it has 1,040 pages. It took me less than a week for each one. I have also read “To Green Angel Tower” parts 1 & 2, by Tad Williams each have 815 pages. They are part 3 of the series “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” All of these books are fantasy/sci-fi!
The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson – ~3000 pages.
@AustieZ Reading the dictionary isn’t sad because I do it too lol.
I’ve read The Stand and The Talisman both of which are around 900 pages (hardcover). I actually just finished reading The Talisman out loud to my kids.
Diana Gabaldon has also put out several books that range from 900 to 1000 pages and I’ve read them all.
George R. R. Martin’s book, “A Storm of Swords” was about 1000 pages in hardcover (1200 pages for the paperback).
And I’ve read the Bible….twice.
The Stand and It by Stephen King
@stranger_in_a_strange_land Jesus, 1700 pages of memorization? :O
Well Lord of the Rings probbaly doesn’t count since it’s six books, but mine is all of them combined into one big book. So, The Stand I guess. It’s pretty big.
@tranquilsea: It’s been so long since I’ve read either. It was a library book, and I believe The Stand might have been too, or it’s packed away. So I have no idea how big either of them were. I just know they were honkers. lol
@poofandmook Yes, they were.
A book that is better than The Stand IMHO is Swan Song by Robert McCammon. It’s a 1000 page book.
Like many others, The Stand is one of the longest books I’ve ever read. I also read Under the Dome by King, which was roughly the same length (and very good).
@jeffgoldblumsprivatefacilities: See the problem is, and this is going to sound stupid… I have little hands. Holding hard-cover books that big is awkward and annoying so I have to wait until they’re paperback. That one is still hardcover though, right?
@tranquilsea: No, but I’ve been Stevie’s girl since I was too young to be reading his stuff lol
@poofandmook Haha, I’ve never heard that one before! :) Yep, it’s still hardcover as far as I know. But, it’ll be well worth the wait if you read it when it comes out in paperback.
I just started reading the first book of the HP series, but I don’t think if I will continue reading the series, but then maybe the second book is the thickest, since it’s thicker than the first one:)
@Thesexier: I think book 5 is the thickest in the series.
Bulfinch’s Mythology. It has about 900 pages
@poofandmook you should read Swan Song. I promise you you won’t be disappointed. I’m a big Stephen King fan myself. So no heresy here
Wow, that’s a hard one.
You can’t really go by pages, because different publishings might have different page counts.
I know “The Mists of Avalon” is up there, over 700 pages in the 1st edition hardcover. I’ve read Bulfinch’s Mythology, also. There the “Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe”, if that counts. I’ve probably read every page of “The Joy of Cooking” at one time or another. That’s over a thousand, and two columns at that. Don Quixote is two columns, too. That’s a long story.
I’m with @tuxuday . “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. It’s ~1200 pages long
I also read “It” by Stephen Kind which is… somewhere up there in the pages (I mean like 1000 when I say that). mine was paperback. I felt terrible for the spine
@Thesexier and @poofandmook Yup, #5 (Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix) is the longest.
The thickest ones I’ve read are probably “It” by Stephen King and “Gone with The Wind” by Margaret Mitchell. (There’s a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” in possession, and my S/O and I both plan to read it.)
I’ve been tempted to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, but don’t think I’ll ever get around to it. It would take a lot of patience and a big bottle of aspirin.
The Bible, Harry Potter, and Sophie’s World
Probably Don Quixote by Cervantes, Our Mutual Friend or Nicholas Nickleby by Dickens or War and Peace. I don’t really look at pagination, but each was probably around 700–900 pages.
@Symbeline Not the whole 1700 pages, about 50 had to be memorized perfectly. Certain tasks had to be performed perfectly or you could vaporize yourself and everything else in a half-mile radius. This is the little toy the tech manual was for.
The thickest stinking textbook on Contract Law in College was easily 4 inches thick and very heavy in the bookbag. 25 years later I am still mad about buying it for over $100 and selling it back for $15.
I suppose this is cheating, but I read an entire Encyclopedia. When I was a child, my dad subscribed to the Book of Knowledge children’s encyclopedia, and I read every one that come in, month after month, from cover to cover, plus each of the yearly updates that continued to come after we received the whole set.
The first book that comes to mind is Les Miserables. I just checked, and my copy goes for 1260 pages. That took me about a year, though I finished a couple of other books in that time as well.
I am certain there have been longer, but these days I’m more likely to download massive volumes because I am running out of bookshelf space.
Either The Bible or The Stand. I didn’t count the pages. But both took me about 6 months to each get through.
I’d have to say half of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone lol
Either Pillars of the Earth or Atlas Shrugged. I’m pretty sure Pillars is longer – they’re about the same width on my shelf, but the text in Pillars is tinier…
@sdeutsch Pillars is about 402,000 words. Atlas Shrugged is about 645,000.
@sdeutsch I’ve read Pillars of the Earth too. That is a fantastic book!
Oh, I never thought of The Bible! KJV? I’ve read that several times.
Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett) and Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) are the two longest works of fiction I’ve read. Isn’t that what you want for a good story—plenty of detail and development? I’m not a fast reader—1000 pages might take me weeks.
I’ve got various textbooks that are something like six inches thick that I’ve “read” in various parts—are we counting that? I’ve got the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics that used to be a staple of every techie shelf—tables of numbers, formulas, etc. It might be the thickest book in my library—and it’s been collecting dust for over 40 years.
@sdeutsch Where do you find figures for a book’s word count?
I read many books (mostly non-fiction) but the King James Bible was the longest (took me a year) because I read it off and on.
I read 1984 in half a day, that wasn’t the thickest but it was intense. I was in jail, and it was the only thing in my cell, Eric Blair’s masterpiece. Ever since I read that I can’t shake this thought that I will end up like him.
I’m not going to go count pages, but The Thornbirds and Homeland were both very long books.
@MacBean Wow – Atlas Shrugged is a lot longer, then! My copy must have very very thin pages…
@gasman I don’t know where to find word counts, but I bet @MacBean knows! :)
@gasman I look here first, and if what I’m looking for isn’t there, I just google ”[title] word count” and check out a few of the results and pick out the count that has the most trustworthy source(s) behind it.
@MacBean Thanks—interesting list. I suppose one could count the words on a page & multiply by pages, but seems like too much work. I recall a discussion somewhere (in the context of Kindle e-reader) about how page numbering is rather arbitrary & variable from edition to edition.
Looks like I have to change my answer—I read Les Miserables (English translation of course) in 8th grade—the assignment was to read a classic novel & that’s what we had lying around. Thought it took freakin’ forever to finish—but I hadn’t yet learned the joy of good fiction.
Probably The Stand by Stephen King.
Answer this question 
