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Recommend A "Long" Book!!

jackbhoy · 2008-02-06 21:21:56

I am going on few long overland trips this year and want to bring 1/2 books with me. I will be spending stints of 3-4 days at a time on trains/boats so need something that I won't finish in a day! I brought Crime and Punishment and LOTR Trilogy last time and they only lasted 1/2 weeks. So anyone got any suggestions? War…

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06-02-2008 10:21pm

#1

jackbhoy

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I am going on few long overland trips this year and want to bring 1/2 books with me. I will be spending stints of 3-4 days at a time on trains/boats so need something that I won't finish in a day!
I brought Crime and Punishment and LOTR Trilogy last time and they only lasted 1/2 weeks.

So anyone got any suggestions? War and Peace and Count of Monte Cristo spring to mind but any others?

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#2 06-02-2008 10:27pm
Mr. Bones

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Don Quixote?

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#3 06-02-2008 10:28pm
pandemonium

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The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
its abit hard to get into but i loved it

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#4 06-02-2008 10:28pm
Mr. Bones

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oh yeah, Proust's En Recherche du Temps Perdu (spelling?).

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#5 07-02-2008 10:16am
biZrb

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Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

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#6 07-02-2008 10:22am
buck65

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A suitable boy - Vikram Seth
War and Peace or Anna Karenina.

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#7 07-02-2008 10:30am
Sheridan

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If you enjoyed Crime & Punishment, Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" should be right up your street. Similar themes and treatment but a whole lot longer...

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#8 07-02-2008 10:30am
jam_mac_jam

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Q by Luther Blissett , excellent novel set during the reformation. Quite long.

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#9 07-02-2008 1:03pm
LoLth

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Focaults Pendulum - tough to get into but well worth perseverence. A chunky book (smaller than LoTR) , well written and a really good story with tons of detail.

Cryptonomicon by neal stephenson: if you're in any way techy or if you like ww2 then you'll like this (math heads will like it too).

you could start on the baroque cycle by stephenson then. each book is about 3/4 the length of the cryptonomicon but is harder (slower) reading.

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#10 07-02-2008 1:04pm
slinky

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Strumpet City - James Plunkett

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#11 07-02-2008 1:07pm
pwd

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malazan book of the fallen series by steven erikson. Each book is about 1000 pages. They're good too. (fantasy)

Dune by Frank Herbert (sci fi/fantasy)

Farseer Trilogy, Liveship Traders trilogy, tawny man trilogy by Robin Hobb. Each book is about 1000 pages again. (fantasy)

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#12 07-02-2008 1:58pm
dream brother

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Count of Monte Cristo is a very good read!!!

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#13 07-02-2008 2:47pm
LoLth

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pwd wrote: »

malazan book of the fallen series by steven erikson. Each book is about 1000 pages. They're good too. (fantasy)

Dune by Frank Herbert (sci fi/fantasy)

Farseer Trilogy, Liveship Traders trilogy, tawny man trilogy by Robin Hobb. Each book is about 1000 pages again. (fantasy)

hmmmm, Dune, fair enough. its a nice long read. malazan, I read these books on the bus during my morning / evening commute , 3 hours per day and the book lasts me 5 days - at an easy pace , so thats 15 hours. Not what I would term a long read. and judging from the OPs comments on C&P and LotR he's either got a lot of time on his hands or is a much faster reader than me.

Same for the farseer/liveship/tawny man books. in fact I find Hobb's writing style very easy to read and on first pass read through the assassain trilogy at a rate of 1 book per day. The latest soldier trilogy were even quicker.

I think the OP is more concerend with having to carry as few books as possible while still having a lot to take in. generally, the more thought provoking a book the longer it takes to read as the reader stops to digest bits before continuing on.

I would like to suggest that you bring all four dan browne books with you. force yourself to read through every single page (deception point being the most challenging for this) and then when you finish each novel, write out every fault you can find with it and any way in which you think the touch of a 3 year old would improve upon the plot/details/character development. the reading will fly past - but will *feel* like years - and the writing will last you several journeys!

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#14 07-02-2008 2:52pm
pwd

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So it's thought provocation rather than sheer wordcount huh? The Glass Bead Game or Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, or any of his later novels really.
A collection of essays by orwell.

Another good long book in the wordcount sense is Papillion by Henri Cherrie

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#15 07-02-2008 2:58pm
Hermy

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biZrb wrote: »

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead by the same author is another good long read.

John Updike's quadrilogy (tetralogy according to wiki) Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels will keep you going for a while.
http://www.amazon.com/Rabbit-Angstrom-Novels-Everymans-Library/dp/0679444599/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202392468&sr=8-1

After that you might like to tackle Beckett's trilogy - Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.
http://www.amazon.com/Molloy-Malone-Unnamable-Everymans-Library/dp/0375400702/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202392672&sr=1-1

Genealogy Forum Mod

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#16 07-02-2008 2:58pm
r3nu4l

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Okay if you're not just looking for old classics you could try "Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrel" by Susanna Clarke. It's written in the style of Dickens and set in the 1800's.

A very enjoyable and different mythological/fantasy read set in the real world. Worth a look, I loved it.

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#17 07-02-2008 5:48pm
SuperGrover

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The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. Now published in a single volume.

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#18 07-02-2008 8:50pm
jackbhoy

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Thanks for all responses so far, some really good suggestions there so keep them coming!

LoLth wrote: »

I think the OP is more concerend with having to carry as few books as possible while still having a lot to take in. generally, the more thought provoking a book the longer it takes to read as the reader stops to digest bits before continuing on.

Exactly! I am travelling overland (and Irish sea of course) from Dublin to Bhutan and from there to NZ etc so going to have a lot of time on my hands. Given that we have to carry backpacks for duration we will bring a maximum of 2/3 books between us. I suppose a good question is, if you had to bring 2 books for trip like this, what would you choose?

LoLth wrote: »

I would like to suggest that you bring all four dan browne books with you. force yourself to read through every single page (deception point being the most challenging for this) and then when you finish each novel, write out every fault you can find with it and any way in which you think the touch of a 3 year old would improve upon the plot/details/character development. the reading will fly past - but will *feel* like years - and the writing will last you several journeys!

Excellent!! And I'll always have copious amounts of toilet paper at hand if needed too! Read in a Sunday paper that he has "writers block" with his new novel about the Stonemasons, I thought to myself shouldn't that just be "block".

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#19 08-02-2008 5:14pm
John

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Ulysses as it's:
a) long
b) very, very good
c) heavy going so you won't just rip through it

When I was backpacking around Poland I did about 20 hours on trains and only managed about half of it.

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#20 08-02-2008 8:04pm
Joe Cool

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Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

If you plan on reading Ulysses find the pages where the chapters divide and it shouldn't be too much of a bother. Reading it through as a single story gets confusing, for me anyway.

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#21 08-02-2008 8:58pm
sxt

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"The stand" is a great book weighing in at over 15oo pages:).

The illumantis trilogy as mentioned before as well

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#22 10-02-2008 3:45pm
shockwave

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If you like sci-fi then Peter F Hamilton is your man, the Nights Dawn trliogy is good and very long with each book over 1000 pages long.

Should keep you going for a while.

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#23 10-02-2008 6:15pm
Red Hand

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The Little Friend by Donna Tart. Brilliant book and very readable even though its pretty long, around 1050 pages.

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#24 10-02-2008 6:25pm
Jack Sheehan

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The fountainhead +1.
I'd also recommend Magician if you're into fantasy. (Raymond E Feist)

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#25 12-02-2008 6:18pm
Dades

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Surprised nobody has mentioned "Shantaram", yet. (See thread here).

Definitely a voluminous book, and has a genuine travel/adventure theme.

And it's f*cking brilliant too.

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#26 12-02-2008 9:48pm
studiorat

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buck65 wrote: »

A suitable boy - Vikram Seth
War and Peace or Anna Karenina.

+1 for the Russians.

Or Crime and Punishment.

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#27 13-02-2008 12:27am
cailinoBAC

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Most of Solzhenitsyn it quite long. And if not long, then heavy...Brothers Kamarazov by Dostoevsky....haven't actually finished that one yet.

Also, Les Miserables

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#28 13-02-2008 12:58pm
Mainstay

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Any Thomas Pynchon Novel would do.

Most of them are quite long and all of them are quite dense and take a lot of attention to read.

Otherwise Underworld by Don Del Lillo weighs in around 800 pages and is an excellent read.

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#29 13-02-2008 8:06pm
sdep

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Some long-ish books I've enjoyed are:

Vanity Fair - Thackeray's rumbustious novel of society and scandal in Napoleonic era England - 800 pages, but a proper page turner.

Tristram Shandy (Sterne) - a meandering account of the life of the eponymous hero, full of jokes and tangents, and quite bonkers. The longest shaggy dog story committed to print - about 600 pages.

Collected Fictions (Borges) - a treasury of paradoxical, apocryphal and fantastical tales and musings - about 500 pages, but when done, you can start again at the beginning.

I'd throw in Hunter S. Thompson's 'Great Shark Hunt' - stranger than fiction, substance-inspired commentary on 60's & 70's America - but, though it's a 600-pager, you can blast through it.

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#30 16-02-2008 5:38am
inverted_world

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If you are looking for contemporary, engaging, and very well written, I would highly recommend:

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen

If I was in your situation, I would bring these and a collection of short stories. (Roald Dahl's are great.) Last year, whenever I travelled I brought two books: a novel and Donald Barthelme's "Sixty Stories".
Good short stories are wonderful in their own right, but also great if someone needs a break from what they are reading, or if they are finished a novel and waiting for the other person to finish their book so that they can swap.

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#31 16-02-2008 4:33pm
jackbhoy

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Jack Sheehan wrote: »

The fountainhead +1.

Bought this in Rathmines bookshop this afternoon (for €0.99!), now I just need to resist the temptation to start reading it!

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