Twenty Favorite Very Long Novels
(I don’t think the longer novel is necessarily the greater achievement; if anything, I have the opposite bias. I prefer The Virgin Suicides to Middlesex, Jesus’ Son to Tree of Smoke, Nazi Literature in the Americas to The Savage Detectives, The Pale King (though really the essays) to Infinite Jest—and, if you’re curious, you can click here for a list of my twenty favorite very short novels. That said, there are mammoth books whose length benefits them, and that I treasure. These, then, are my twenty favorite novels of more than 650 pages, arranged in descending order by page count. Two notes: (1) Though page counts are a misleading metric, they’re much easier to determine than word counts, so that’s the metric I’m using—the page tally of whatever edition I happen to own. (2) I’m restricting myself to novels and—with the exception of the Álvaro Mutis book, which I didn’t realize was originally published as seven shorter works when I read it and I can’t resist continuing to regard as one long picaresque narrative, and of Don Quixote, which pretty much everyone now reads as one book rather than two—to novels that were released under a single binding. This rules out, say, In Search of Lost Time or Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster books.)
1386 pages: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
1153 pages: IT by Stephen King
1153 pages: The Stand: Complete and Uncut Edition by Stephen King
949 pages: The Deluge by Stephen Markley
940 pages: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
925 pages: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
918 pages: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
882 pages: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
853 pages: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
827 pages: Underworld by Don DeLillo
792 pages: A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin
782 pages: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
766 pages: Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
720 pages: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
706 pages: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
700 pages: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis
673 pages: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
666 pages: Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
666 pages: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
661 pages: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
— November 13, 2021