Flex Time. What's the longest (single) book you've ever read?

[carrottea]

You can go by page count or word count!

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[kittyray]

I'm pretty sure The Goldfinch is mine as well, but I've never tracked it carefully!

[Mario2302]

to be honest i absolutely have no clue, probably one of my science books that's about 1,5 A4 pages a page with mighty thin pages and a font so small you almost need a magnification glass to read it.
no page count and certainly no word count that can attest it though :(

[Ariealle]

I'd sadly have to say Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I did have to google now which book had the most words. :apple:

[Alister]

Probably The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny, 1,264 pages and an estimated 316k words.

[carrottea]

to be honest i absolutely have no clue, probably one of my science books that's about 1,5 A4 pages a page with mighty thin pages and a font so small you almost need a magnification glass to read it.
no page count and certainly no word count that can attest it though :(

Dang! That's fair. What specific flavor of science are we talking here?

[Mario2302]

biology as that's the only ones i was interested into enough to actually read completely although i didn't have to for my studies. some of them i've actually reread after my studies too (i'm crazy, i know :p)
Do also have some on chemistry, geology and physics.

[carrottea]

Ooh, did you read the classics, Lehninger, Alberts, etc.?

[Mario2302]

well both names are ringing loud bells but to be sure i'd have to go up to the study (it's been a while i've had time to go through them honestly :p)
quite sure i have alberts molecular biology of the cell there, not so sure about lehniger so potentially i don't have that one myself but looking up a bit i'm at least sure i've read that one too B)

[TsUNaMy WaVe]

For me, it's Gödel, Escher, Bach. Non-fiction, very interesting read.
The original English version is ~206,000 words. I read the Hebrew version but I believe it's probably around the same count.

Edit:
After reading Ariealle comment I checked and it looks like HP5 has more words, so I guess this is the longest I've ever read. But it's weird?? I guess since GEB is non-fiction, it felt harder while reading it, unlike the easy-to-read HP.

[kittyray]

For me, it's Gödel, Escher, Bach. Non-fiction, very interesting read.
The original English version is ~206,000 words. I read the Hebrew version but I believe it's probably around the same count.

Edit:
After reading Ariealle comment I checked and it looks like HP5 has more words, so I guess this is the longest I've ever read. But it's weird?? I guess since GEB is non-fiction, it felt harder while reading it, unlike the easy-to-read HP.

How did you like it? I bought Gödel, Escher, and Bach like 5-10 years ago, but I never got around to reading it. I don't think it's even on my shelf anymore, I think it's in a box that never got unpacked after college.

[nousha]

well both names are ringing loud bells but to be sure i'd have to go up to the study (it's been a while i've had time to go through them honestly :p)
quite sure i have alberts molecular biology of the cell there, not so sure about lehniger so potentially i don't have that one myself but looking up a bit i'm at least sure i've read that one too B)

It may well be the longest book I've ever read, Molecular Biology of the Cell, Alberts et all., I have the fourth edition but while preparing for my molecular biology exam in the uni, I've also read "Molecular Cell Biology" (Lodish et all.) that was, at the time, available for free in NCBI, if I'm not mistaken. They took it down a few years ago.
I have no idea how many words those are :)

Maybe the longest fiction book I've read is The Lord of the Rings (it got published as one book in my country, comprising the three parts).

And because GEB was mentioned, fun fact, I met my husband because of this book :) I still have it, still haven't read it through. He has :)

[TsUNaMy WaVe]

How did you like it? I bought Gödel, Escher, and Bach like 5-10 years ago, but I never got around to reading it. I don't think it's even on my shelf anymore, I think it's in a box that never got unpacked after college.
I liked it a lot!
During my first read the only subject the book covers that I was also knowledgeable in was the biology stuff, but it was still super interesting.
Now as an almost graduate CS major I feel like reading it will be even more fun. I hope to get around to do it soon~

[kittyray]

I liked it a lot!
During my first read the only subject the book covers that I was also knowledgeable in was the biology stuff, but it was still super interesting.
Now as an almost graduate CS major I feel like reading it will be even more fun. I hope to get around to do it soon~

ha! I feel like CS professors love to recommend that book, it's why I initially picked it up!

[Lyrichord]

Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens. It took me a full summer, but I enjoyed it. :)

I've struggled to find an accurate word count.

"The average reader will spend 22 hours and 7 minutes reading Nicholas Nickleby (Penguin Classics) at 250 WPM (words per minute)" leads to 331,750 words. I don't know of many people who can read Dickens that fast!

[Goddammit]

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Idk if I've ever read anything longer honestly. Maybe I have, I love to read but thats the biggest book I can remember reading so I googled the page count *shrug*

[cornishwall]

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: A Novel at over 1k pages and about 350k words. Soo many footnotes but a really interesting and well crafted world

[Koto]

Single book, academic history slogs aside, I think might be Shantaram, sitting at 944 pages. I feel like there's some trashy fiction (looking at you the copious amounts of horrific David Eddings I read as a teenager) that's up there as well, but off the top of my head I think it's that's the longest single​ book I've read.

[Cinnamoroll]

For me, it’s definitely Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The copyI had was 700+ pages.
My next biggest reading flex will be Stephen King’s IT. It’s almost 1200 pages! I’ve been putting off reading it because it’s so huge LOL. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf, staring at me, mocking me to read it. :o_o:

[Sanctus]

Last year I was part of a reading group trying to read Boccaccio's Decameron. Unfortunately the reading group fell apart, but... it took me 5 and a half months, but I finished it! The Penguin Classics edition comes out to about 909 pages. This year I'm trying to finish The Count of Monte Cristo, the unabridged edition of course, and in my edition that's about 1276 pages... I started that near the end of October last year and hopefully I'll finish it this year.

Edit: Ended up finishing The Count in October 2021! 1200 pages... Now (May 2023) I am currently working on The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, which is another doorstopper.