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What's your favorite book that's over 600 pages?

Asked by Rachel Syme
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  • 344 Replies
  • Sep 6, 2022
  • twitter.com

let's say i wanted to read a Big Book this fall. what's your favorite book that's over 600 pages? please don't all say anna karenina at once

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Recommended by Xena Stands with Ukraine L.D. Burnett Dr Mark Anderson and 18 others
Book 1871
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Middlemarch
  • by
    George Eliot
Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Doro
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Xena Stands with Ukraine 4 months ago

Agree with Middlemarch; it’s my all-time favorite novel.

Susanna Marlowe 4 months ago

For sure Middlemarch!

Kate Stoia for D8 Supervisor 4 months ago

Love how many people are saying Middlemarch. I loved that book.

Jeffrey 4 months ago

Not a recommendation because I haven’t read it but Brothers Karamazov is on my big book list. I’m starting to think Middlemarch needs to be on there given the replies

With Militant Love, Cordelia 4 months ago

#1 is Brothers Karamazov, but I've decided that it's hard to parse the cultural stuff to get to why it's great, so I usually recommend #2, which is like unto it, Middlemarch...

Lucy Jordan 4 months ago

I went away for a hiking weekend in the woods with my then-boyfriend and two of his friends once, years ago. Broke my foot on the first day and spent the next three days on the deck, on my own, with a flask of tea, reading Middlemarch. One of my favourite ever weekends!

BoxWalla 4 months ago

Love Middlemarch.

Shalyn Claggett 4 months ago

I have read all replies. And while I suspect it unlikely @rachsyme is actually reviewing the suggestions, I will observe that when you cut all the books under 600 pages (most), only ONE is written by a woman. It is Middlemarch by George Eliot. And it is the correct answer.

Monica Potts 4 months ago

Middlemarch is a good fall/winter long book.

Nick 4 months ago

A person should read Middlemarch at least once, slowly, as a grown-up. And perhaps every ten years or so if time allows. (My other Big Book is Boswell's 'Life of Johnson', but I go back to that in chunks.)

Mary South 4 months ago

Middlemarch (though I'm guessing there's a high likelihood you're already a fan!)

Morgan Fahey 4 months ago

Middlemarch! Not least because it contains the surprisingly contemporary phrase “swamp of awkwardness” re: social anxiety.

Stephen Ira 4 months ago

middlemarch!! it has EVERYTHING--life, death, grief abuse, manipulation, cross-class romance, evil machinations, their defeat, polish identity, a dorky uncle with a heart of gold who attempts an ill-fated run for public office--EVERYTHING.

Recommended by L.D. Burnett Dr Amber Pouliot Stephen Fishbach and 7 others
Book 1853
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Bleak House
  • by
    Charles Dickens
Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of
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Dr Amber Pouliot 4 months ago

BLEAK HOUSE! It's funny and sad and suspenseful and heartwarming and infuriating. I loved it.

Andrew Ordover 4 months ago

Bleak House. SO MUCH better than I thought it would be, and so much better than all the other Dickens I read in school.

LarryKellogg 4 months ago

Agreed. Bleak House is wonderful.

Daniel Martin 4 months ago

Dickens's Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend. Bleak House is my personal favorite. My undergrad students were surprised at how much they loved it when I taught it last.

Julie Powell 4 months ago

I read Bleak House while doing jury duty and found it weirdly satisfying.

Recommended by Dominic Nozahic Failson Agonistes Taylor Grossman and 6 others
Book Sep 8, 2004
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
  • by
    Susanna Clarke
Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more. English magicians were once the wonder
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Dominic Nozahic 4 months ago

i read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell earlier this year and thought it was just phenomenal. great if you like page-turning intrigue, some historical fiction mixed in with some fictional magic, multi-faceted characters with complex relationships, really good writing.

Failson Agonistes 4 months ago

I stupidly pushed through a lot of Big Books but Infinite Jest, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and House of Leaves all felt worth my time

Bailey Seitter 4 months ago

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell! esp if you’re a fan of footnotes

Sarah Sloat 4 months ago

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke! The right mix of Napoleonic Wars and magicians for fall

Recommended by Shaye Weaver A Jelly Squishes Slowly By Birdie and 5 others
Book 1844
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The Count of Monte Cristo
  • by
    Alexandre Dumas
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction o
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A Jelly Squishes Slowly By 4 months ago

Count of Monte Cristo because it’s essentially an unending opera of Drama, Suspense, Romance, and Betrayal. Also lesbians

Dr. Emily Petroff 4 months ago

The Count of Monte Cristo. There is no other answer.

ilona 4 months ago

If you are in the mood for a classic nothing beats "The Count of Monte Cristo"

Anna Carey 4 months ago

The Count of Monte Cristo. Read it during lockdown in 2020 and was totally gripped. Beforehand I thought it would basically just be swashbuckling which wasn’t insanely appealing but I was wrong - it was SO much more and so satisfying. Def try the Penguin Classics translation

Recommended by Madhulika Sikka Sarah Schenning Sara Ferguson and 5 others
Book Aug 24, 2021
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
  • by
    Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
An Oprah’s Book Club Selection A New York Times Notable Book (2021) “This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain…and so much more. In Jeffers' deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American no
www.goodreads.com
Sasha Nyary 4 months ago

Love Songs of WEB du Bois. Could not put it down. @BlkLibraryGirl is brilliant. My book group really liked it too.

Pia Owens 4 months ago

Min Jin Lee's Pachinko immediately came to mind, but since you've already read it, how about The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois by Honore Fannone Jeffers?

Spines & Vines® 4 months ago

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by @BlkLibraryGirl!! It’s a masterpiece!! 👏🏽👏🏽

Recommended by Jenny Bhatt Andy Randall Anushay Hossain and 5 others
Book May 1, 1993
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A Suitable Boy (A Bridge of Leaves, #1)
  • by
    Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find—through love or through exacting maternal appraisal—a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suit
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Dr Sophie Meekings (she/her) 4 months ago

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry are both unputdownable chunks (I always think of these books as a pair bc I read them close together and they're both set in India and they both chewed me up and spat me out like a good book does).

Recommended by Alexander Chee Ian Frisch Meredith Francis and 4 others
Book Sep 19, 2000
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  • by
    Michael Chabon
Joe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit
www.goodreads.com
Ian Frisch 4 months ago

I second TAAOKAC. Just re-read it. Masterful.

Alissa Wilkinson 4 months ago

ooh Kavalier + Clay is a great call

Sam Diss 4 months ago

currently ploughing my way through Kavalier & Clay and loving every minute of it

Recommended by Michael Hall L.D. Burnett Jesse Post and 4 others
Book Oct 18, 1851
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Moby-Dick or, the Whale
  • by
    Herman Melville
"It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it." So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eeril
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Michael Hall 4 months ago

Moby-Dick, that is if you like stories about obsession, madness, death, & the nature of reality that include fart jokes, snuggling with cannibals, & harpoons bursting into flames. Funny, too: “Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.”

Jesse Post 4 months ago

Whenever this comes up at the bookstore I like to recommend SWANN'S WAY by Marcel Proust, which is way more ebullient and entertaining than we all think it is! And I'll be the 19th vote in this thread for MOBY DICK. 😄 🐳

Libby Weber 4 months ago

Wooo hoo! Here for the MOBY-DICK love! So far ahead of its time in just about every respect, and gripping AF.

Leslie Pietrzyk 4 months ago

Haha...but I did just reread AK and it's fantastic! Otherwise, not sure how long PORTRAIT OF A LADY is, but I was surprised at how well it had aged since undergrad days. And MOBY-DICK is the best post-modern novel out there. Happy reading!

Winston Shaw 4 months ago

Moby Dick is amazing, but just as good on audiobook as chapters on how whit the sperm is and all the different *incorrect* taxonomies can be dull.

Recommended by internet baby Jonny Auping dongwon 송동원 and 4 others
Book 1985
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Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove #1)
  • by
    Larry McMurtry
A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome
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internet baby 4 months ago

lonesome dove! and i'm not even big on westerns

Jonny Auping 4 months ago

natalie read lonesome dove in a week last month. every so often i would hear her weeping in the other room bc a character died

Sarah Beth 4 months ago

The very best one of all is Lonesome Dove.

Jackie Daytona, Regular Human Writer 4 months ago

Lonesome Dove is an 800 page book about cowboys on a cattle drive and it's the greatest thing I've ever read

Schuyler Velasco 4 months ago

My dad and I read Lonesome Dove together last year. Would never have picked it myself. Loved it so so so much.

Recommended by elliott holt prof of logic (U of Science) Anja Skoglund and 4 others
Book 2004
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2666
  • by
    Roberto Bolaño
A cuatro profesores de literatura, Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza y Norton, los une su fascinación por la obra de Beno von Archimboldi, un enigmático escritor alemán cuyo prestigio crece en todo el mundo. La complicidad se vuelve vodevil intelectual y desemboca en un peregrinaje a Santa Teresa (trasunt
www.goodreads.com
prof of logic (U of Science) 4 months ago

2666...it's heavy and dark but much more serious, grounded, varied, and beautiful than other masterpieces whatever you read, hope you enjoy!

Anja Skoglund 4 months ago

Yes! It’s a hard hitter for sure.

carmen 4 months ago

2666. riveting after you get through the strange rather slow start

Recommended by Nick Craske LarryKellogg (((Dr. Kevin Joel Berland))) BLM🍁☮️✡️ 🎨🎶🕊 and 3 others
Book Aug, 1997
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Mason & Dixon
  • by
    Thomas Pynchon
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier fol
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LarryKellogg 4 months ago

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, with 773 pages, is a great book.

Zack Handlen 4 months ago

my persona faves are probably Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon (or, hell, IT), but i remember absolutely tearing through Vanity Fair.

Batthew Returns 4 months ago

Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon is a nice cozy fall/winter book, IMO.

Recommended by Tess Malone Cristina Sorice LF and 2 others
Book 1952
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East of Eden
  • by
    John Steinbeck
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the
www.goodreads.com
Tess Malone 4 months ago

I love East of Eden. It's a slow burn.

LF 4 months ago

I am bad at reading big books and books older than 10 years but I kind of want to read East of Eden

carmen 4 months ago

you’ve most likely read this but East of Eden is fucking fabulous

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