What’s the Longest Book you’ve Read?

I know long books intimidate people a lot of the time, but finally finishing a thick volume is one of the most satisfying feelings someone can have. But “long” means different things to different people. When it comes to word count, what do you think is the longest book you’ve ever read?

How Long is a Novel?

A common standard minimum word count for a novel is 50,000 words. There are plenty of books a little shorter than this that people still consider novels, but 50,000 is a nice round number. In my opinion, the common novel probably won’t often go over 100,000 words. At that point, casual readers are often turned away.

Epic fantasy and science fiction novels are often MUCH larger, though. Considering how George R. R. Martin and Brandon Sanderson have multiple novels of 400,000+ words, things change by genre. Most of the Song of Ice and Fire books are in that range, and most if not all of Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive are too. I don’t have the distinction of having read (much less written) a single book that long, but I am getting close with a book I’m drafting.

The Longest Books in the World…

If you’ve read the entire Holy Bible, you can brag that you’ve read something far longer than almost any fantasy novel. The King James version of the Bible is over 780,000 words. Not quite a million, but it’s most of the way there. There are bigger books though, and a lot of them are also religious in nature. Indian texts like the Mahabharata go well over a million words. In terms of novels though, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is considered the longest novel at 1.2 million words. Yeah, no thank you. I love reading, but not that much.

Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s page “List of Longest Novels.”

How Long is Withered Kingdom?

My latest fantasy novel is a far more digestible 60,716 words. That’s taking the word count directly from a Microsoft Word file that includes all the typesetting and formatting for the paperback version. That’s easy enough for someone to read in a week at a leisurely pace. To compare, The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin (of the Earthsea series) is just a hair shorter. If you’ve read The Hobbit, that hits 95,000 words, yet it’s shorter than any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy books.

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