Just read shorter books OP! If you want shorter reads, that seems to make sense.

Middlemarch.

I read it a few years ago while on a pretty long plane ride (well, I had started it before the trip but finished it, in about 5-6 hours, while in the air). It’s a novel that needs a bit of work and attention but there’s great pay off. I still think about lines from it sometimes. A truly wonderful book.

Anonymous wrote: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

Oh,Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller were both great. Circe I actually liked more, both were not too long.

Anonymous wrote:I’m reading Demon Copperhead. 600 hundred pages long and it is sagging. I want to quit! I can’t bare to read it anymore, I don’t care about Demon. Too much internal dialogue and not enough plot.

That book was terrible. I wish I did quit it! Don't waste your time.

Anonymous wrote:1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Now I feel like re-reading it.

I was gonna say the same thing! So long, but so good!

Possession, AS Byatt

Scrolling through my kindle library and these are some longer books I loved, various genres

The Covenant of Water was amazing

I just finished reading Shanghai Girls and Finding Joy (its sequel) by Lisa See. Both were wonderful.

The Henna Artist series

The Beartown (Fredrik Backman) series

anything by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Jodi Picoult and Diane Chamberlain

Almost anything by Ken Follett (his Fall of Giants and Pillars of the Earth series in particular

Empire of Pain

Andre Agassi's autobiography

Hail Mary by Andrew Weir

Gone with the Wind - book is better than the movie in my opinion.

I did not like Demon Copperhead I gave up on it.


Prairie Fires - The story behind Laura Ingalls Wilder, it's more about her adult life and how the books came to be and her relationship with her daughter. Also basically how she made it threw adulthood. Very hardscrabble life.

The Bee Sting

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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!

Charm School poster here, and no, I haven’t read The Gold Coast’s but it looks great! Thank you for the suggestion.

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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.

Didn't care for The Goldfinch overall; most of the characters were irritating and the plot made no sense. But I sort of had a soft spot for the Russian guy because he was so over the top and ridiculous. Like Boris from Rocky & Bullwinkle.

The Bee Sting is incredible. It's big, and I actually got it on Kindle and on Audible so I could carry it around and listen to it in the car. It's amazing.

Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne

History of Paris from Roman founding to present focusing on how political/social interactions shaped the city, if not France

~400 pages, but very small print (trade paperback) makes it read at 500+

writing can be muddled at times, but the overall ideas/themes make up for that

Anonymous wrote: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.

Posted in another thread. Went to college with him - brilliant.

The Great Circle - Maggie Shipstead