I just listened to The Historians after a recommendation from a friend. It's a book about a girl who discovers that her father may have a tie to vampires. It was pretty engaging, lots of back and forth, and quite long. I don't know how I would have felt if I had actually read it - sometimes it's easier to listen to long books because you can do other things if they drone on. But it was pretty clever and definitely made me want to visit Romania.

Anonymous wrote:Stephen King's The Stand.

+1

Just reread that last year

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Anonymous wrote:My unpopular opinion: The Goldfinch

I’m there with you. I’m surprised by how many people didn’t like this one.

Me. I hated it, and would have cut out whole storylines.

It needed editing.

I hated The Goldfinch too. Too many cliched characters. The uber-cool artist Native mom. The fun Russian sidekick friend (I kept imagining him as one of those Disney movie sidekicks). The wise older gay man. And then suddenly we're in gangland in Amsterdam. Absolutely nothing original.

I listened to it on audiobook. I drove to Pittsburgh listening to it. I drove back. I still had to listen to many more hours.

Anonymous wrote:I cannot understand the Ken Follett love. I bought PotE on a recommendation and I thought it was pretty bad. Written on a fifth grade level. It reads like the rambling fanfic of a teenager.

I won't read that one but I did really like Never by KF.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

I cannot understand the Ken Follett love. I bought PotE on a recommendation and I thought it was pretty bad. Written on a fifth grade level. It reads like the rambling fanfic of a teenager.

I liked The Goldfinch and loved A Little Life.

I thought Pillars of the Earth was a bit silly.

Thanks for the reviews on Covenant of Water. I love Verghese's nonfiction, but I'm not sure I like his fiction as much.

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Anonymous wrote:Anna Karenina

Agreed. Also Les Miserables

I haven't read Les Miserables, but have been meaning to. I absolutely adored The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (aka Notre-Dame de Paris). I also loved War and Peace. Other long book faves are Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Brothers Karamazov, Wolf Hall, Cloud Cuckoo Land, The Red and the Black, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Moonstone was also fun.

How To Survive a Plague by David France. It’s a massive detailed history of the early AIDS epidemic in NYC (start to the advent of protease inhibitors), focusing on the activists and science of the era. It’s engaging and very well written, both a great informational text and memoir (David France is a survivor of the time). Really really long and incredibly sad, though.

Anna Karenina or War and Peace

I consider anything over 400 pages to be long. This is a list of my favorites from Goodreads that are over 400 pages:

Conte of Monte Cristo
Pillars of the Earth
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Crime & Punishment
Pachinko
A Take of Two Cities
The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. All three are pretty long if I recall correctly.
The Grapes of Wrath
Cath-22
Dead Wake
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Water Dancer
Song of Achilles
Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Anonymous wrote:Just finished Charm School by Nelson DeMille. Been meaning to read it forever and finally got around to it.

It's long but I'm glad I stuck it out.

Have you read The Gold Coast? I loved that book!

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Anonymous wrote:Cutting for Stone was excellent.

Have you tried his new book?

I'm a DP and while it was good, The Covenant of Water pales in comparison to Cutting for Stone.

But both fall into the longish-but-worth-reading category for me.

I absolutely hated the Covenant of Water. Felt like trauma porn after a while.

I replied to the first mention of CofW. I ended up enjoying the book, but I have to agree it did feel like trauma porn. Almost gratuitous at time. A Little Life (which I also mentioned) is far more traumatic than CofW, but it felt real and a natural progression.

That said, I did want to know how it ended.

Agree that Covenant of Water did start to feel like trauma porn. And I didn't like all the characters--I got tired of hearing how Elsie was such a great artist and the reveal at the end didn't really fix it for me. But other characters were really memorable, especially the two Mariammas.

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Anonymous wrote:My unpopular opinion: The Goldfinch

I’m there with you. I’m surprised by how many people didn’t like this one.

Me. I hated it, and would have cut out whole storylines.

It needed editing.

I'm OP and have stayed quiet this whole time because I've enjoyed this thread taking off. Books like the Goldfinch (which I hated) is what made me ask the question.

I read an Op-ed about The Goldfinch that said, basically, that we tell non-readers how great it is but it really isn't all that great, so we're doing them a big disservice.

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Anonymous wrote:My unpopular opinion: The Goldfinch

I’m there with you. I’m surprised by how many people didn’t like this one.

Me. I hated it, and would have cut out whole storylines.

It needed editing.

I hated The Goldfinch too. Too many cliched characters. The uber-cool artist Native mom. The fun Russian sidekick friend (I kept imagining him as one of those Disney movie sidekicks). The wise older gay man. And then suddenly we're in gangland in Amsterdam. Absolutely nothing original.