Happy New Year 2019! Any New Year’s Resolutions? “Reading more books” is on your list, right? But sometimes, reading a single book can be enough of a challenge, as the following epic 10 gems from our catalog will show.
What is the longest book you can think of? War and Peace, of course! Leo Tolstoy depicts Russian society in the Napoleonic Wars from 1805 to 1820. He needed 17 volumes for that – and our volunteers needed 64 hours to read it all.
Even longer than this – 66 hours – is Henry Gray’s textbook on the Anatomy of the Human Body. First published in 1858, it is still used by medical students to this day, although our 1918 edition may be not 100% up-to-date.
LibriVox is very much up-to-date and brings you the complete version of Historias de Herodoto in Spanish. The nine books of ancient history of the Middle East, Persia, and Greece, written by Herodotus around 440 BC was completed only a few days ago, and a single soloist read all 36 hours of it!
Equally long (38 hours even), equally daunting, and packed into a single volume is Middlemarch. It is a study of provincial life in the Midlands of the 1830s, with a hint of social commentary, masterfully written by George Eliot.
Ms. Eliot apparently had a liking for long tomes, since she translated David F. Strauss’ book The Life of Jesus Critically Examined into English. This book about the historical person Jesus clocks in at 58 hours and cost the original author his job.
Much more than that was at stake for Edmond Dantes in the famous novel by Alexandre Dumas. It took him years to become Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, and it takes more than 51 hours to tell the story.
Another life story (in two parts) is that of the scholar Faust. At a mere 11 hours 40 minutes, it seems pretty tame on this list, but don’t forget that Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote this as play to be performed on stage!
No mere childs play is the story of The Virginians, two brothers who end up at different sides of the American War for Independence. In some 40 hours, William M. Thackeray explores what can happen if you fall for the wrong woman.
Well, not every woman can be a Faerie Queene. With a runtime of 32 hours, Edmund Spenser produced one of the longest poems in English. And he didn’t even complete his goal to “fashion a gentleman in virtuous and gentle discipline”.
Don’t worry, not everything that is long has to be dead serious. Although, in a sense, our longest book on this list – 67 hours in 3 parts – is exactly this: Varney the Vampyre started as a “penny dreadful” serial by Thomas Prest, and became the mother of all vampire stories ever written.
Take your time and enjoy – and we hope that you’ll read more than one book this year! ;-)