I'm reading a partial memoir, and it's 4,000 pages as it is. Willem Oltmans memoirs (spanning about 70 years). I don't know if I can finish it, since I pause to look up certain names, or watch a documentary mentioned on YouTube, etc..
shareNot sure, probably nothing over 2,000 pages.
shareI’ve read A Song Of Ice And Fire, It and The Lord Of The Rings a few times.
I don’t mind reading good books several times (Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, the Conan short stories, the Lord Of The Rings, Stephen King stuff. Etc.) but it really pisses me off when the author dies or fucks off to do other things!
OK, I accept that R.E. Howard was mentally ill and what we might call a ‘damaged man’ and he committed suicide with a pistol but WTF is GRR Martin’s problem finishing his books?!?
These fucking guys from Jersey, I wouldn’t bet a buck on any of them.
Coincidentally I have read LotR three times that I can recall, also both original Thomas Covenant trilogies at least that. Orwell, Bradbury and Vonnegut got reread a lot and oddly were all eerily prescient.
OTOH, I noped out after book four of ASoIaF the first go 'round after the first season of GoT. Ripped through the first three, but the fourth was a freaking slog for me. Then I heard book five was even sloggier; that, coupled with GRRM's writing schedule and health were factors in my bailing out "early."
Why mentally ill? The fact that he couldn’t get over his mother's death and killed himself must not overshadow his great talent.
shareI have been a life long fan of Howard, his economy of words, his ability to paint a huge scene in a single paragraph, I am a great admirer and might compare him to Hemingway in terms of verse.
But SUICIDE!?!
That is just really sad and foolish.
I think it was probably David McCullough's Truman biography. That ran about 1100 pages if i remember correctly. It's been a long time, but I remember it being one of the best books of that type i've ever read.
I can't remember the author's name, but about 15 years ago I read a two volume biography of Nixon that probably ran at least that length if you count the two books as one read.
Plebian though it may be, the longest I can recall is The Stand at just over a thousand pages. Think I read it at least three times.
Tangentially, I was a voracious reader until going back to school in my late twenties, when textbooks replaced pleasure, and since then, reading has been sporadic at best. My "to read" collection is slowly obscuring the modest collection of books I've kept.
Les Miserables by Hugo.
War and Peace probably. It was an easy read compared to Anna Karenina though, which I found dull. I've read some volumes of In Search of Lost Time, but I couldn't tell you how many!
shareMine is probably the Bible, though to be fair I don't think I've read the whole thing in sequence at all in my life. My folks used to put me to sleep by reading it as a kid, and I attended Sunday school where the teachers would tell us the well-known accounts like the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, the Exodus, Samson & Delilah, the reign of King David, Jesus' ministry, etc.
It was only many years later that I started attempting to go through it myself, and I realized how much of the Old Testament is filled with stuff that in all honesty drives me nuts. I love both God and Jesus like crazy, but I have a very tough time caring about things like the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant, the traditions of the Levite priests, the details of the genealogies, and trying to decipher the various illustrations in Revelation. I'm just glad that God doesn't need perfect people on His side, though...just humble ones willing to listen and obey Him.