Your favorite voluminous novels.

Some of my favorite long books:

Middlemarch by George Eliot
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Man Without Qualities; Darconville's Cat; The Sleepwalkers.

Darconville's Cat,Kristin Lavransdatter, The Gormenghast Trilogy,Rabbit Runand the rest of the Rabbit hutch, Dickens, Dickens,Dickens, The Executioner's Song

War and Peace, Middlemarch, Kristin Lavransdatter, The Forsyte Sagaand, like Ganeshaka, Dickens, Dickens, Dickens, and Dickens!

I need to revisit The Pickwick Papers - another of my favorite novels.

I'm planning to read The Man Without Qualities in some months (a two volumes Norwegian version).
benwaugh, is it very "modern"?
I think I read somewhere that it is one of the three most famous novels from the "modernism period". I assume the other two mentioned were:
Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time.

That's interesting:
One in German, one in English, and one in French.

I'm reading The Forsyte Saga (vol. 1 of three) just now, and it is not very "modern", but I like Galsworthy's style and his ability to describe his characters. A straight-forward read.

And I've got lots of Dickens novels (in their original language and in Norwegian) I haven't read yet. I know I should, but when.....?
So far I've read Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, not very voluminous, but I surely like them, esp. Oliver Twist.

Edited to add Kristin Lavransdatter as one of my all times favorites.
(Shame on me forgetting this (these) great Norwegian novel(s))

I suppose you would call it modern... set in Vienna on the eve of the Great War... a novel of consciousness. There are novels of this period, which I love, that might make up for lack of volume in pulp through the densitry or strangeness of the prose. Such as:

Alfred Doeblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Herman Broch: The Death of Virgil
Samuel Beckett's early novels (Murphy, Watt, Molloy, etc.)
Knut Hamsun's Pan and Mysteries.
Hans Henny Jahn: The Ship
The novels of Witold Gombrowicz
The novels of Julien Gracq
Faulkner, James.................

Herman Broch: The Sleepwalkers is also set in this period, and is fantastic.

I love all of the above mentioned (except Kristin Lavransdatter which is on my TBR, and the Galsworthy which I haven't read.)

Dickens Dickens Dickens Dickens Dickens Dickens Dickens I think you got the point, and how about some more modern voluuuuuuuuminous books:

A suitable Boy
The Recognitions
Gravity's Rainbow
Infinite Jest
Life a Users Manual

well, I could go on, in fact I generally prefer long voluuuuuuminous books more than short slim novels.

Look at all these familiar faces: Fabulous!

My first ten (though not necessarily top ten, not yet mentioned by others) that immediately come to mind:

Les Miserables
The Yawning Heights by Alexander Zinoviev
The Tunnel
The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann
Hunger's Brides
Life And Fate
2666 haven't read it yet, but I'm 99.999% positive I'll love it once i do.
Clarissa okay, so I haven't read every letter, but how could one not include it anyway?
Juliette easily the funniest, most preposterous 1000-plus page tome ever penned.
The Tale of Genji hope to finish that one too someday!

Let's make it top eleven: Women and Men by Joseph McElroy

How could one forget Underworld and JR, the latter, even at less than 750 pages, reads like a thousand-pager simply because there is not one (uno nada!) chapter break in its entirety. It's 90% dense dialogue w/out the he said/she saids to help differentiate who's speaking. Very slow going, like that novel which begins with U and which I've vowed never to again mention.

Got my Underworld signed by the author when he was on a rare book-plugging tour. He was an affable person - he signed several other books while chatting shyly about The Man Without Qualities. Has anyone read The Recognitions? Any thoughts?

I read it last year. One of the best reads of the year. Very very dense prose, which I adore, with some writing that knocks everybody else in modern American literature off their socks. Dense with allusions to all kinds of stuff: Byzantine theology, art history, painting and forging, business, a hilarious chapter set in an advertising company lamppooning the industry, (Gaddis worked in advertising), and Gaddis's trademark dialogue. Difficult but very rewarding and very funny. It needs a few rereads I think to really get at the meat of it, like Gravity's Rainbow. I wanted to write about it but it defeated me. I will read it again.

I also enjoyed Underworld very much, but I think Gaddis is even better. He should be much more widely recognized than he is. I haven't read JR yet, coz I want to keep it in reserve for when I have read everything else. I couldn't live without the thought that there are no new Gaddis books for me to read. Carpenter's Gothic is also brilliant, and shorter but no less dense. I recommend it as a way into Gaddis if you've not read him before.

I humbly post a link to my review of that here:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2007/01/carpenters-gothic-william-gaddis.html

and Underworld here:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/search/label/Reviews?updated-max=2008-05-12T21%3A...

Brent, can you tell us something about JR?

Be glad to....having html technical difficulties at the moment...below is my slightly revised review...

If you thought David Foster Wallace wrote obscenely long convoluted sentences, try reading this (JR) two pound behemoth that has not one (not one I tell you!) chapter break in its entirety. It's like reading The Neverending Paragraph. If that sounds daunting enough, factor in that the narrative is ninety per cent dialogue, only the dialogue doesn't increase reading speed because it's dialogue that Gaddis has purposely not clearly delineated who's speaking what to whom ninety-nine per cent of the time (sound confusing, try reading it) for one must deduce who's speaking without any he said/she saids to help you sort it all out, similar to the unspecified-as-to who's-speaking-dialogue featured in "A Clean, Well Lighted Place," only J R, mind you, is not a ten page short story by Hemingway, but a 752 page menacing gargoyle of a novel comprising vast Himalayan-like exchanges of dialogue (inevitably on the telephone) and it takes at times the concentration or meditation of a Tibetan monk to decipher what it all means, let alone figuring out who's speaking. It's scary to face, yes, and it's hard keeping track of who said what to whom what where when why and how, true, and it mocks the comprehension of one accustomed to instant gratification in light easy reading, but other than that, it's a real breeze. A nice cool refreshing breeze after running a marathon.

And since it's about money and capitalism gone so wild and satirically haywire that even a precocious elementary school kid working a payphone at recess as if he were a bookie, or working a payphone out on a school field trip to the local stock exchange, can become a zillionaire practically overnight on stocks and bonds, it's quite topical to boot given the present state of our abysmal and, some might argue, broken economy run into the ground by children dressed up all nice and spiffy as if they were genuine businessmen and women not certainly seeking to go Ponzi on an all too gullible American public willing to buy anything. It's funny too, and not quite as depressing as our abysmal and, some might argue, broken economy run into the ground by children dressed up all nice and spiffy as if they were genuine businessmen and women not certainly seeking to go Ponzi on an all too gullible American public willing to buy anything. So stop overlooking William Gaddis and I'll stop being redundant, wordy, and pontificating, too. Just put down the Pynchon for a sec (no offense, Thomas!) and give this neglected great master postmodernist whom Pynchon actually idolized once upon a time in his young'n days before V had been conceived -- and the 1976 National Book Award Winner for crying out loud -- the larger audience he finally deserves.

You know how dense lead is? or magnets?

J R is denser than lead or magnets. Read it five years ago and am still haunted by its remarkable prescience especially in light of today's USA economies foibles and frauds. However, I am slightly more haunted by his debut. But that's like saying Mt. Everest is more sublime than K2.

i adored The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser when i read it, but i don't think i will ever have the stamina for it again.

The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer is still one of my favorites, as is Leaves of Grass by Whitman.

my newest favorite voluminous novel is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke.

Anyone for a JR group read at some point, perhaps the coming summer? I've had a copy for quite a while and I'm just burning to read it (Recognitions being one of my favourite novels) but I keep shirking in the face of it. As EnriqueFreeque's review suggests, this would be a marvelously appropriate time for tackling it.

6—The Man Without Qualities is not "modern" in the sense of "experimental". It dissects modernism even as it's happening, in surprisingly accessible and inspiring fashion, and is immensely perceptive at it. When I read it I was constantly amazed how the man at a typewriter in 1935, writing about 1913, is saying things that would seem current on a blog.

Some of my favorite voluminous books (I tag them BFB in my library for big fat book)

Tristram Shandy
Life A User's Manual
The Goldbug Variations
Buddenbrooks
Underworld
Middlemarch
Vanity Fair
David Copperfield
Bleak House

I have The Sleepwalkers home from the library now, and The Man Without Qualities is on my shelf.

#16 -- darsu, I think a JR group read's a great idea. Summer might be too soon for me as I'll just by then be coming down off Ulysses and undoubtedly need some time for decompression & heal frostbite on the appendages, but I could see jumping back into that say maybe in the Fall?

Wanted to add House Of Leaves to the mix. Unforgettable, modern macabre masterpiece. aethercowboy has written a solid summary review on it if you'd like more info.

Oh, I was just throwing it in the air in case coordinated activity should emerge at some point under this heading. I have my own solo ascents already laid out for the next few months as well.

While obviously not in the major leagues of Voluminous novels, I would still recommend ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by Mark Twain and THE STAND by Stephen King.
OK, call me a middle-brow. I deserve it.
Oh Yeah, if you want to try a book that you will never be able to finish, try to read '120 DAYS OF SODOM by the Marquis de Sade. It is totally Psychotic.

I second The Stand, plus add The Mists of Avalon. Currently reading Illywhacker which is much longer than I thought it was (but may not count at just under 700 pages), but I started it yesterday and can hardly put it down.

I'll third The Stand though I actually prefer the original version to the "Complete & Uncut Edition". If you like The Stand, you might also want to check out Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon. Macabre-horrific-apocalyptic just-under-1000-pages masterpiece.

I wouldn't mind doing a group read of The Recognitions again sometime, when I get out of my Russian exile. JR would also be good, after reading your excellent post, EF.

It looks like a lot of my favorites have already been listed - Proust, Undset, Eliot, Bleak House - but I'll mention Anthony Trollope (probably The Last Chronicle of Barset and Can You Forgive Her?, though The Way We Live Now would be an especially appropriate pick right now) and a couple other Thomas Manns - Doctor Faustus and The Magic Mountain.

I'll second Fledermaus's nomination of The Last Chronicle and add Phineas Finn and He Knew He Was Right. And I do like Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield and Bleak House.

No one for Don Quixote? Shame on me for not listing it earlier.

>26 Randy_Hierodule: My copy of Don Quixote languishes on the to-be-read pile :)

War and Peace
David Copperfield
Forsyte Saga
The Idiot
Far Pavillions
Gone with the Wind
The Little Prince
The Harry Potter series -only if read by Jim Dale

I assume Forsyte Saga will become one of my favorite voluminous novels. It is so far, although I've finished (soon) only one of the three trilogies (Group read). I think I'll have to read the next two trilogies quite soon as well, perhaps by postponing some other books ....

And I must add a trilogy by my all time favorite author Knut Hamsun, i.e. the trilogy about the Norwegian world traveller August. The novels are:
Landstrykere (Wayfarers)
August
and
Men livet lever (The Road Leads On)

Are we allowed to add:

Shogun by James Clavell
Years of Lyndon Johnson 3 vols and 4th to come.
Last Lion 3 vols. and 4th that will never be...
Power Broker by Robert Caro
The Titan by Ron Chernow
Alexander Hamilton' by Ron Chernow

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
Ulysses by James Joyce
Molloy by Samuel Beckett
Watt by Samuel Beckett
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
The Tunnel by William H. Gass
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Took advantage of copy and paste of all the touchstones currently showing and then deleted all the ones that I haven't read.
I would like to claim that every book is my favourite because I can't decide which is my favourite. If I had to go to a desert island with one book, I would go with maximum pages, maybe something like the complete works of Shakespeare, but I have read it already, with some plays having been read 5 or 6 times, so maybe I would put Remembrance of Things Past since I am only about an eighth of the way through it so far.

Other books that I would like to add to my favourites that I have not seen on the touchstones yet are Henry, King of France and Young Henry of Navarre, both by Heinrich Mann.

Ever since I started getting those flyers from my elementary grade teachers for Scholastic Book Orders, can you believe that I always picked the two or three books with the most pages, almost regardless of the topic? When my own kids started to bring those same things home from the same company twenty years later, I was heartbroken, because I saw that in the meantime, two things had started happening that I never remember having seem in my young days:

1.) Series books were featured in Scholastic flyers.
2.) After the initial brouhaha had died down and sales of a series would start dropping, there would be a clear-out of 5 or 10 or 15 series books bundled together into a bargain set. This set would sell for a low, low, low price that worked out to something like $1.50 or $2.00 a book, instead of the $4 or $6 that were charged initially when they were just being sold as single titles.

I have kept all my Scholastic Books from those days and they are one of the most treasured parts of my collection. Sorry for straying from the prescribed topic, but I could go downstairs and get Secret Sea by Robb White and enter it here. (For me in grade 4, 300 pages was a monster book.)

Some of my favorite tomes are:
Vanity Fair,
Les Miserables,
War and Peace,
Anna Karenina,
Gone With the Wind,
2666,
The Far Pavilions,
Life and Fate, and
I read and loved The Canterbury Tales when I was in my teens and Whitman's Leaves of Grass sits on my nightstand for whenever I get hungry for him.
I am looking forward to beginning Proust's In Search of Lost Time this spring or summer as part of another G/R. I so hope it is not over my head.
belva

War and Peace - still my all time favourite, on schedule for rereading this summer
Vanity Fair
Buddenbrooks - and hoping to read other Thomas Manns soon.
Oblomov - though sometimes it was a bit too boring even for my tastes
The Brothers Karamazov
Lost Illusions - I really should read more Balzac and so should all of you!
Anna Karenina
The Sorrow of Belgium - didn't get it when I first read it (too young I guess), was overwhelmed the second time; but I'm not sure if it will get across if you're not from Belgium
The Discovery of Heaven
Tristram Shandy - is it really that voluminous?

Edited to add: The Good soldier Svejk by Hasek. If you love Tristram Shandy you'll laugh yourself to bits with this one!

War and Peace
Battle Cry of Freedom
Gone With the Wind
Doctor Zhivago
Anna Karinina
2666
The Count of Monte Cristo
Life and Fate
Les Miserables
Vanity Fair
The Far Pavilions
Ivanhoe
John Adams

Some of my favorite tomes over the years:

The Tale of Genji, in the Arthur Waley translation (longer than the original).

Dahlgren by Samuel R. Delaney

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

The Portable Faulkner an editorial tour de force by Malcolm Cowley who created a chronological history of Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants with excerpts from Faulkner's novels and stories, from pre-settlement times through the Civil War and Reconstruction into the mid-twentieth century.

Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. I got through it two pages every night before going to sleep. It made me feel lonely when I finished. I almost started again, especially because the last sentence segues right into the first.

Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard Not a novel, but contains the infamous "Diary of a Seducer" and the rest of the book is fictionalized philosophy as well.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Not to mention a number of the titles mentioned in previous posts, by such authors as Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Undset, etc. On my TBR: Gaddis, Powers, Proust, Joseph and His Brothers, more Dickens and Henry James. C. P. Snow: Strangers and Brothers. I Promessi Sposi by Manzoni. Etc. There's lots. Rabelais.

I'm fond of voluminous novels.

My favourite ones are

Anna Karenina by Tolstoj
The Karamazov Brothers by Dostoevkij
War and Peace by Tolstoj
Les Miserables by Hugo
Arabian Nights
Buddenbrooks by Mann
The Idiot by Dostoevskij
Faust by Goethe - oh well, does it count as a voluminous novel? It isn't even a novel, to begin with. Nevermind.
The Glass Bead Game by Hesse
...

...oh my, there's so many of them. I'm not even sure I've mentioned them all...

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I picked it up at the $1 table at the used book store 1 block--a short block--away from where I moved to 4 months ago. I see that my life has become suddenly much more dangerous, as my old lodging was at least 1.5 km from the nearest bookstore. My only other book so far by David Foster Wallace is Oblivion: Stories.

About 25 years ago I read the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake and I would like to return to it once again.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

Miss Macintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young

Lucked into a two-volume edition. Haven't completely read it, but it definitely fits the category of voluminous novels.

The Instructions ~ Adam Levin

McSweeney's 1000-plus pager.

I've looked at The Instros a few times, want to like it, like the idea of it, but I read a few pages and set it back on the bookstore shelf each time.

La baie des anges by Max Gallo, a multi-generational family saga in trilogy format. It tells the story of 3 brothers who have recently become orphans. They move from Piedmont in Italy, over the mountains on foot, to Nice on the Mediterranean coast, late in the 19th century. One of the notable themes is the conflict between fascism and socialism or communism. I had always heard that by the 1960s or 1970s, socialism was reached its pinnacle. But this book shows the struggle, not just during the Resistance against the Collaborators during the Pétain regime, but throughout the decades leading up to the Second World War.
Please pardon the inclusion in an English-language thread of a book that I so far have only been able to find in French, but perhaps any bilingual English/French members may be interested in it.
I will keep looking for an English version of this book. But if you are intrigued by Max Gallo, a member of L'Academie Francaise, there are translations of his novelistic treatment of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte in four volumes, of which volume 1 is The Song of Departure:
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=6341345469&searchurl=kn%3Dm...

My favorites:

Bleak House
Little Dorrit
Kristin Lavransdatter
Middlemarch
Daniel Deronda
Anna Karenina

Enjoyed, but need to read again to really appreciate: War and Peace

Couldn't stand: Vanity Fair

You know me. Numbers 1-14 = DICKENS! (except for Oliver Twist which is not a chunkster and Barnaby Rudge that is)
The Raj Quartet
Infinite Jest
A Dance to the Music of Time
The Magic Mountain
The Goldbug Variations and The Time of our Singing
Middlemarch
Moby-Dick
A Glastonbury Romance
I'll be back later as I think of more... I also need to reread War and Peace but don't think I'll ever reread Don Quixote.

So many good ones mentioned above ... wow, picking favourites among large books I've read ... I'm not good at that.

Moby Dick for sure
The Lord of the Rings
Hawaii, Alaska or Chesapeake, can't choose my favourite Michener
Aztec, gotta reread that someday
War and Peace
Battlefield Earth, lowest of the lowbrow but fun
Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Toland's The Rising Sun
Shogun, Noble House and Whirlwind
The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum
Hunger's Brides, which I'm glad someone else mentioned too
The Autobiography of Henry VIII
The Raj Quartet, read 3/4ths so far
Gardens of the Moon and sequels (The Malazan Book of the Fallen)
The Pickwick Papers and looking forward to much more by Dickens

Just found this thread. Here's an off the top of my head list for me:

Moby Dick
Lord of the Rings
From Here to Eternity by James Jones
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Nostromo Joseph Conrad

Nonfiction*
Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael A. Hiltzik
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll
The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor
Russia at War by Alexander Werth

*Strictly speaking, off-topic, but these are among my favorite books read over the past few years, all in all.