Recommend A "Long" Book!!

jackbhoy

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. Bought three of your recommendations so far that I think will be coming with me, they are Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Fountainhead.

FruitLover

LoLth wrote: »

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)

I was just logging in to recommend this - 900-odd pages of crypto, ww2 and cracking story. What more could you want? (except dinosaurs)

johnnyskeleton

jackbhoy wrote: »

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. Bought three of your recommendations so far that I think will be coming with me, they are Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Fountainhead.

If you like the Count of Monte Cristo, follow it up with The Three Musketeers, 10 Years Later, and The Vicomte de Bragllione (Louise de Valliers, the Vicomte de Bragllione and The Man in the Iron Mask). Swashbuckling at it's best. Alternatively, you can watch Dogtanian and the muskehounds as the most accurate television version of the books.

Morva

I know I recommended Lord of the Rings, but I just thought of another, well, okay, that's...if you have a lot of room in your suitcase for paperbacks, the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs is terrific. There are 26 books, I believe, and they're just plain fun; also, they follow a true sequence, so things from previous book(s) are referenced in each current one. Used to be for kids and teens, but I've always loved them and still do (and I'm kind of at the other end of "teen" right now. . .

gaf1983

If you're looking for non-fiction I'd like to recommend "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East" by Robert Fisk. 1392 pages. It can be very gripping in parts, and each chapter is kind of a self-contained unit so it wouldn't matter if you put it down for a while while travelling.

I'm currently making my way through David Goldblatt's "The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football." Clocks in at 992 pages. I really like it, not sure if it would be everyone's cup of tea though, I suppose you do have to be a bit of an anorak to want to know how the First World War affected the nascent Vienna league. That would be me then.

Closer to home why not try Joseph Lee's "Ireland, Politics and Society, 1912-1985." Plenty of detail there, but also very readable. I read the first 100 pages and have always wanted to go back and finish it.

Norman Davies' "Europe: A History" (1385pages) might be suitable for the European leg of the trip.

theCzar

My favourite (long) long books would be:
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexander Dumas
Lord of the Rings (Duh) - JRR Tolkein
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Shogun - James Clavell - actually Whirlwhind and Tai-Pan as well.

K4t

Ulysses or Angela's Ashes

cailinoBAC

Any long books to do with or set in South America? Don't really feel like reading a long Russian novel when I'm travelling in South America!

gaf1983

cailinoBAC wrote: »

Any long books to do with or set in South America? Don't really feel like reading a long Russian novel when I'm travelling in South America!

Jon Lee Anderson's biography of Che Guevara. While it's non-fiction, it ticks the boxes of being long and having a lot of it set in South America.

theCzar

Eduardo Galleano's Genesis trilogy are fantastic. On their own they're short, but they'er best read together. They're fairly hard to find, or they were anyway, and I don't know if you can get the the trilogy in a single edition or not.

The three books basically tell the history of South and Central America from pre-historic tribes through to modern day, but each chapter is written as a short story (mix of fiction and non-fiction) set in some instance of real history. They're excellent fiction, deeply interesting historical lessons and moving social commentaries. I simply can't recommend them highly enough.

The catholic church and the european powers really don't come out smelling of roses!

cailinoBAC

Oh, I'll have a look out for it. Not going for 4 months so plenty of time yet!

randomguy

cailinoBAC wrote: »

Any long books to do with or set in South America? Don't really feel like reading a long Russian novel when I'm travelling in South America!

I have something at the back of my mind that I can't quite get, so in the meanwhile here are some others I thought of while trying to remember...

100 years of solitude - not too long, but dense, and good fun (and a good summary of the history and culture of South America).

Borges - collected fictions - seriously good if you are into literature, meta-narrative and that sort of malarky, but emotionally empty.

The Feast of the Goat (llosa) - goes really well with the Che Biography mentioned above, since it shows the other side of the coin. Very depressing.

City of God (Paulo Lins) - the film is based on it - enjoyable but maybe a bit bitty and shallow. Long enough.

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (Tom Robbins) - only qualifies because it is partly set amongst an amazon tribe (a bit of a satire on Castanedes and on new-age anthropology), so in South America; but it is a great book that deserves to be read more so I am giving it a mention...

randomguy

randomguy wrote: »

I have something at the back of my mind that I can't quite get, so in the meanwhile here are some others I thought of while trying to remember...

100 years of solitude - not too long, but dense, and good fun (and a good summary of the history and culture of South America).

Borges - collected fictions - seriously good if you are into literature, meta-narrative and that sort of malarky, but emotionally empty.

The Feast of the Goat (llosa) - goes really well with the Che Biography mentioned above, since it shows the other side of the coin. Very depressing.

City of God (Paulo Lins) - the film is based on it - enjoyable but maybe a bit bitty and shallow. Long enough.

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (Tom Robbins) - only qualifies because it is partly set amongst an amazon tribe (a bit of a satire on Castanedes and on new-age anthropology), so in South America; but it is a great book that deserves to be read more so I am giving it a mention...

Louis de Berniere's Latin American Trilogy is the one I was trying to remember - I am really slow to recommend something that I haven't read, but I have heard great things about these 3 (The War Of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord, and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman) and have been meaning to read them for years now. It might not be one long book, but you can buy the 3 in paperbacks as a box-set.

rejkin

ok maybe someone has already posted about these books but too lazy to check.

The collected stories by Arthur C Clarke is a about 900 pages along and contains all of Artur Clarkes short stories he wrote since 1939.Great Sci-fi stories,thought they would show their age but they are so great,I dont think they will ever show their age.

Also American gods by Neil gaiman is a great read,long enough. Integrates the many forgotten gods of lost religions into the story.Its one of the best books I have ever read.

surm00

http://www.amazon.com/Shantaram-Novel-Gregory-David-Roberts/dp/0312330537/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209334471&sr=1-2

jackbhoy

shockwave wrote: »

Have you considered audio books.

I downloaded all of The fire & ice series by george rr martin and put it on my ipod. It took weeks to listen to it all.

This is good suggestion, can you or anyone else here recommend good sites to download from?

Ho-Hum

Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is very good and quite long

Shryke

I've just finished The Terror by Dan Simmons which was fairly long. The book itself is a brick at least. It's about the doomed Sir John Franklins expedition to discover the north west passage, with a dollop of demented monster out on the ice. Not bad at all.