Friday, March 23, 2012

Follow Friday - Herbie the Love Bug Is Car Number Fifty-Three


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Short and Sweet Reviews and Sarah's Books & Life.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: What is the longest book you’ve read? What are your favorite 600+ page reads?


Leaving aside books like The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1 (2,624 pages) and Volume 2 (also 2,624 pages), I suppose the longest books I've ever read are mostly casebooks I read in law school like Cases and Materials on Evidence by John Kaplan (1,604 pages) and Constitutional Law by Geoffrey R. Stone (1,600 pages). Or if I wanted to pick something that was mostly fiction I could select a work like Bulfinch's Mythology (1,040 pages)


Those probably aren't very good choices though, because they are more or less textbooks, which I don't think is what the question was intended to find out. The longest single volume I've read that would be classified as fiction would be Dragonlance: The Annotated Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (1,312 pages), but that is actually three books compiled together, so it doesn't really count. As a single work, I suppose the longest book I've read would be the history Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson (928 pages), which is obviously nonfiction. The longest work of fiction that I have read is Dhalgren (read review) by Samuel R. Delany (896 pages - for some reason, it always seems to come back to Delany for me).



I have read several books over six hundred pages long, too many to list them all. In addition to Dhalgren, my favorite "long" books include American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Brightness Reef and Earth, both by David Brin, Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer both coauthored by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Playgrounds of the Mind also by Larry Niven, A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (read review), The Once and Future King by T.H. White, and Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein.


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9 comments:

  1. It seems like A Game of Thrones is on everyone's list this week. I haven't heard of it before, but I'll be sure to check it out! Have a great Friday :)

    Here's my FF!

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  2. George R.R. Martin totally topped my list of longest read book.

    Here's my FF

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  3. Hopping through. We used Norton in my 11th grade English class. We called it the insomniac's dream.
    My Hop

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  4. @Jessica: A Game of Thrones is worth reading, here is my review of the book.

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  5. @Julia Rachel Barrett: Mine too! What a coincidence!

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  6. Vanya D.: Martin does write long books, doesn't he?

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  7. @Alison Can Read: I liked the Norton Anthologies when I read them as an undergraduate. They are incredibly long though.

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  8. @Maeva: I have read The Lord of the Rings in a couple different forms, both as a three volume set and with all three books bound in a single cover. I never regarded them as a single work, but if you do, then they would be one of the longer books I have read.

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