My favorite book podcasters keep talking about how long Lonesome Dove is. Every time they do, I think, is it really? I want them to read it for their Zero to Well Read podcast. I even wrote in to put in my vote for it. It’s so good. So good. Maybe the best. I mean, I remember it having heft, but it moves. It moves and I wouldn’t have thought of its length being a blocker. My son has a copy of it on his shelf, so I went to check how long it really is, and okay, it’s long. I think his paperback copy is 850+ pages.
If I had to guess, without looking up page counts, I would have guessed Moby Dick was longer. It certainly felt longer. As did Les Miserables, which I never finished (and apparently is longer).
This exercise sent me on a quest to guess the relative lengths of big books I’ve read. This is harder than it sounds because I don’t have most of them on my shelf, and if I did, they’d be in different formats. A hardback will have a different page count from the mass market paperback of the same book. But I tried anyway.
I mostly based my list on remembering the wide spine of the hardback or the thick brick of pages of the paperback. On my list were Moby Dick, Roots, Anna Karenina, The Goldfinch, War and Peace, and Ducks, Newburyport. I added Lonesome Dove because of the podcasters talking about it being long.
The best way I could figure out to compare page counts was to go to Goodreads and look them up in similar formats. This is hard for a book like Moby Dick which has 7375 editions, but it turns out that Moby Dick is a shrimp compared to these others. I was surprised. I manually looked up all the books on my longest book shortlist and then realized I could sort my shelf on Goodreads by number of pages. Several books showed up there that weren’t even on my radar, and I was surprised to see that War and Peace is the longest book I’ve read. It must be because I read it as an ebook so had no sense of its scale in physical form. These are my top ten longest books in whatever format I have them in Goodreads:
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1392pp)
World Without End by Ken Follett (1237pp)
The Witching Hour by Anne Rice (1216pp)
It by Stephen King (1184pp)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1186pp)
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1037pp)
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (1022pp)
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (976pp)
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (960pp)
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (944pp)
The Goldfinch is in the 25th spot at 771 pages, Roots is in 28 at 729 pages, and Moby Dick is in 29 at 720.
Butterfly Mind 
2 responses to “The longest book”
Some of those are on my tbr. I need time to focus on them though.
I’ve read 5 on this list. I loved Lonesome Dove so much I never thought about it being so long. I read Dr. Zivago and Hunchback of Notre Dame when I was in high school and thought they were really long but both are less than 600 pages.