November 16th, 2011 / 4:55 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
What are your favorite long (500pp+) novels?
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Meta
Living in Little Rock With Miss Little Rock by Jack Butler. Came out in early 90s, nominated for Pulitzer Prize. Under-appreciated, and a must read for postmodern and meta fans. The narrator is the Holy Ghost.
Ulysses, Hopscotch, 2666 ..
A lot of the usual Barthian suspects, but one that came out recently I enjoyed was Zone by Mathias Ethiard.
2666
Infinite Jest
V.
Ulysses, Don Quixote, Magic Mountain, 2666, Anna Karenina, Augie March, Cloud Atlas
i can’t choose between “the tunnel” and “it”
Don Quixote is good. what do you count Executioner’s Song as? East of Eden also pretty good.
Mason & Dixon
JR
Hopscotch
Ulysses, Moby-Dick, The Magus, Man Without Qualities, Middlemarch, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Brothers Karamazov, Mason & Dixon
tristram shandy
Grapes of Wrath, Crime & Punishment, & 2666
The Recognitions.
Sometimes a Great Notion
2666 and Moby Dick.
The Instructions.
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra and A Fine Balance by Rohinton MIstry.
The Kindly Ones, 2666, The Brothers Karamozov
Yes, to Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey + crazy.
À la recherche du temps perdu, duh.
I also really liked Kavalier and Clay and Fortress of Solitude and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, none of which seem very “cool” to say in comparison to everything else mentioned, nor did they seem like “long” novels but I think they were all >500pp. Still, Levin damaged all of ’em.
2666 of course.
Moby Dick, Hopscotch, Savage Detectives, maybe Crime & Punishment
I don’t read these often, might try Dhalgren this winter
We, the Drowned
The Pale King
The Idiot
“Frog” by Stephen Dixon and “Three Blondes & Death” by Yuriy Tarnawsky
Underworld. 2666. The Recognitions. Them. The Making of Americans. Gravity’s Rainbow.
And I’m currently reading Youngblood Hawke, Herman Wouk’s big ultra-realist novelist-novel of the sixties and it’s damn good.
2666, Bolano
Savage Detectives, BolanoHopscotch, CortazarBook of Memories, NadasMoby Dick, Melville
Ulysses
The Blah Story
The Idiot
Ohio, Stand Up
Underworld
Tree of Smoke
Gravity’s Rainbow
V.
The Brothers Karamazov
Light in August
The Adventures of Augie March
The Corrections
Everybody has said nearly all of mine, so I’ll second Sometimes A Great Notion, The Instructions, Infinite Jest, JR, Gravity’s Rainbow, V., The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, Moby-Dick, and has anyone said Cloud Atlas? Cuz, Cloud Atlas. And Catch-22. And Crime and Punishment.
War and Peace never flags, even in its lulls of ‘action’, which I wouldn’t say of some of the greats (of the ones I’ve read) listed here.
The Engineer of Human Souls
The Engineer of Human Souls
the recognitions, william gaddis…also the children’s hospital by chris adrian
a dance to the music of time, the sleepwalkers, gravity’s rainbow, war and peace, insatiability, the sea of fertility, ulysses, proust’s time regained or the past recaptured, the man without qualities, lookout cartridge, the devils (aka demons, aka the possessed), histoire (claude simon), the death of virgil, the radetzsky march, the doll (boleslaw prus), the years, life: a user’s manual, peregrine pickle, berlin alexanderplatz, the magic mountain, the executioner’s song (wondering meanwhile if lawrence schiller deserves co-authorship), the idiot
Man, I remember wanting The Children’s Hospital to be so much better than it was
finnegan’s wake and gravity’s rainbow
…just kidding obv l o l
Wolf Hall, The Name of the Wind, Ulysses, Anna Karenina, The Recognitions, Almanac of the Dead, Moby Dick, Kavalier and Clay
I’ll second Life: A User’s Manual.
Vanity Fair
David Copperfield
Portrait of a Lady (people who talk shit about Henry James haven’t read his best novel)
Middlemarch
The Collected Posts of deadgod, Vol. 1A
Kavalier and Clay is one of my favorite books.
USA Trilogy, Life and Fate.
Guys, not to put on the nerd glasses, but I think Crime and Punishment is, like, 400 pages.
the instructions, 1Q84, bros k
I actually really love Trollope, a comedy of manners. And Israel Zangwill, but these are Victorians….
Dostoevsky is always good, too.
The Way We Live Now by Trollope is quite funny.
Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again, both by Thomas Wolfe
that list is pretty cool but are you sure that you didn’t just list every 500pp+ novel that you’ve read?
like 600 pp. into a huge novel, when you start looking forward to returning (vs. worrying about leaving for too long), that’s a good feeling
people who finish big books are less likely to be “competitive readers”
first experience with a big book was with the old testament, NIV translation, one of the not-literary ones. moments of engrossment interspersed in long stretches of boredom resembled something like religious experience. takes me back whenever there is a list section in a big book.
it took me a couple tries to get through savage detectives. didn’t realize how much I liked it until most of the way through, whereas 2666 was much more even.. still enjoyed 2666 more tho.
is “the man without qualities” worth the hard slog? coming from someone who’s currently in a golden age of reading lengthy fiction
why is it whenever i see a huge-ass book i’m all oooh like in a candy store. i keep looking at 1Q84 even though i haven’t really liked any of murakami’s novels.
totally worth it
1Q84, eh.
Les Miserables
and DQ
If the fella 40 posts above me actually finished The Making of Americans I’d be extremely impressed. I’d say The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien and Moby Dick. And def. not Ulysses but Beckett’s trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. Does that count? There are a lot of books existing today.
If the fella 40 posts above me actually finished The Making of Americans I’d be extremely impressed. I’d say The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien and Moby Dick. And def. not Ulysses but Beckett’s trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. Does that count? There are a lot of books existing today.
If the fella 40 posts above me actually finished The Making of Americans I’d be extremely impressed. I’d say The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien and Moby Dick. And def. not Ulysses but Beckett’s trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. Does that count? There are a lot of books existing today.
If the fella 40 posts above me actually finished The Making of Americans I’d be extremely impressed. I’d say The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien and Moby Dick. And def. not Ulysses but Beckett’s trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. Does that count? There are a lot of books existing today.
Stanley Elkin’s GEORGE MILLS
The Stand
The Stand
The Stand
The Stand
Stephen King’s The Stand
Stephen’s King The Stand
Stephen King’s The Stand
Stephen Kinging The Stand
Stephen King, The Stand By Me
“Classics”
“Stand By Me” The Stephen King
the complete david bowie
yeah, i am sure.
i thought about adding an anti-list of long books i don’t think are especially good, but many of these would have been in contradiction to what others above said they liked. so the omissions are meaningful (to me).
but sure, some choices are “softer” than others. for instance, the doll. and i thought about gottfried keller’s green henry but decided no, because it sort of fizzles after a while. i was absorbed by the magus when i was 18 but tried to reread it a few years ago and just couldn’t.
someone mentioned the wind-up bird chronicle but i’d like to reread it before i’m sure. it probably holds up. (more than wild sheep chase or hardboiled wonderland and etc.)
maybe putting peregrine pickle on such a list is an affectation because to read it again i might have to really be in the mood. but i think it might put me in the mood. it’s not like the sot weed factor or mason and dixon. in other words, it’s not a literistic exercise.
lots of material which dazzled my 20 year old brain struck me as jejeune when revisited later on. on the other hand, proust becomes better and better, both more lucid and clear yet essentially incommunicable as well. always, some mysteries remain. (uh, thank god.)
anthony powell’s dance only gets better. so too ulysses, though the walpugisnacht sequence now seems a longueur.
oh fuck i left out louis-ferdinand celine! both journey to the end of the night and mort au credit qualify and hold up. i just read a biography of him not that long ago. well, drugs.
Women and Men, McElroy
Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon
Underworld, DeLilo
Finnegans Wake, Joyce (for real)
2666, Bolano
The Making of Americans, Stein (for real)
War and Peace, Tolstoy
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young
The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann. Powerful and hallucinatory.
Have Sacred Games sitting on my shelf. Now it is glaring at me. Saying, like, “see?”
Haven’t finished WITZ yet but it’s a contender.
Yes – Jeff (below) mentions Beckett’s ‘trilogy’, which, in my Grove Press edition is 407 pages. I checked V. and Cloud Atlas, but they’re both, indeed, >500 pages. It’s an odd accordioning of writing length in one’s psychology, how a fluent read can feel ‘shorter’ than a somehow obstructive text–and, I guess, how a reputation can govern perception.
multiple first persons running side by side. haven’t read it but i’m happy to know of it
That’s why I was bringing it up, too. I never thought C+P felt like a long novel. I mean, it primarily follows one character over the course of a couple of days? Aside from the epilogue it’s action-packed!
Lol 300+ is long for me
ones i didn’t see above: garganuta and pantagreul, the unconsoled, you bright and risen angels.
Need to actually read more longer novels, but since it’s one of my favorite novels in general, I’ll say the Cloud Atlas.
Haha, this is great! So many books are going on my “books to read” list! Now we need to to a list of books under 200 hundred pages so I can actually cross things off my list…
Another tally for Moby Dick, for whoever is counting.
are there any women who have written “notable 500+ page books” other than place, stein, & young?
At 446 pages, Midnight’s Children
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook.
The Perennial edition falls about 50 pages short, but I’m going to say One Hundred Years of Solitude anyway. And The Corrections. I’m unspeakably dull.
Middlemarch, Tale of Genji, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Vanity Fair, Wilhelm Meister, Bleak House, Tristram Shandy, Golden Bowl, The Idiot, The Maias (Eca de Queiros), Such Is Life (Furphy), Fortunes of Richard Mahony (HH Richardson), Lost Illusions, Recognitions, Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, Man Without Qualities, In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Man Who Loved Children, Journey to the End of the Night, USA (Dos P), Devil to Pay in the Backlands, Book of Disquiet, Savage Detectives, 2666, Floating Cities (Tsirkas), Berlin Alexanderplatz, Buddenbrooks, Death of Virgil, Makioka Sisters, Insatiability (Witkiewicz), Petals of Blood (N’gugi). Voss, Under the Volcano and Beckett’s Trilogy a little shorter than 500pp but much deeper than they are long.
the wind-up bird chronicle
The Instructions is a phenomenal book.
War and Peace.
It’s cheating, but I’ll go with Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy omnibus.
And they aren’t fashionable, but Game of Thrones and HP & The Goblet of Fire were both awesome.
I love MOBY DICK and THE INSTRUCTIONS. THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD is also good.
Eliot
Annie Dillard’s The Living only clocks in around 450, but it’s pretty friggin’ good.
To the original question, Ellison’s Invisible Man is essential.
Well, I just checked the first paperback at Amazon – Bantam Mass Paperback – , and it clocks in at 576 pages. (Don’t know how many of them are for intro, notes, other apparatuses.) I read the thing in a paperback-sized hard cover (Modern Library?), with very thin paper and, as I remember, tiny type, and it seemed lugubriously garish and, to me, long. ‘Lugubriously garish’, I’d still attach to Dostoevsky–not as a bad thing, and perhaps to his pleasure, ha ha. The action is more intense than the thick-fingered patty-cake of, say, Ellis – but “action-packed“?? Ha ha ha. . . . maybe I should read it again.
Lonesome Dove
I love many of the books already mentioned, but REALLY loved The Kindly Ones. What a fucking sick amazing book.
Both of Norman Rush’s novels
Life: A User’s Manual
Harlot’s Ghost
Hopscotch
Humboldt’s Gift
Under the Volcano
Ulysses
Mason & Dixon
the love story was compelling, but found the history sometimes tiresome. but overall, was worth more than the two months it took me to finish it.
east of eden was fat sugar salt.
haven’t finished dhalgren, it wants me to
nicholas nickleby
Don Quixote, East of Eden, Moby-Dick, Proust vol 2: Within a Budding Grove
darkmans, gravity’s rainbow, the recognitions, the once and future king, and (although it’s a few pages shy of the 500 mark) – watership down.
all work and no play makes bermudaern a doll boy
War and Peace, 2666. If you count a novel series, Mishima’s Sea of Fertility Tetralogy and Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
the royal family is a beast
Infinite Jest, 100 Years in Solitude, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I think those are the only books over 500 pages that I like.
havent seen europe central mentioned. i have it on my shelf waiting. did no one like that one?
the 300 pages i got thru were brilliant, thick. i had to come up for air or something.
Native Son
My favorite 500 page novel was deadgod’s reply to some schmuck last week on htmlgiant.
I agree. I wish Vollmann would start writing novels again; I think he’s stuck in a nonfiction rut. I tried reading Europe Central, but I just couldn’t finish it. Perhaps EC killed it for him… writing fiction, that is. 100 pgs. in and I couldn’t find any joy in that book. Maybe Bill will come back to writing novels soon… perhaps start off with a small one, something along the (length)lines of Whores for Gloria? (which was really just a prelude to The Royal Family, anyway). I love Bill Vollmann! I love that he loves hookers, trannies, druggies and the down and out marginalia of society!
Ohio, Stand Up (What’s this???)
Women and Men, Lookout Cartridge, Joseph McElroy
You Bright and Risen Angels, Europe Central, William T. Vollmann
JR, Gaddis
Infinite Jest
Darkmans
what about GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, you guys?
lol tara, that’s sweet; i need u to go to pitchfork and type “what about RADIOHEAD, you guys?” this would make me less unhappy 2nite
Amazing writer, very tough book. Have you tried Magic Kingdom?
I just saw another copy at 750! Maybe I was wrong after all.
I think you should read it again. Maybe action-packed is the wrong word, but it’s a book all about constant movement. Think about it — Raskolnikov is constantly going somewhere, meeting someone, doing something… there isn’t a whole lotta stasis in there. And the characters are so good! Svidragilov, Razumhin, Porfiry, basically every character brings a wonderful dynamic!
Sincerely,
A drunk and sad Jets fan
Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian
Okay, I just checked the Modern Library hardcover, and it’s 531 pages–close!
I had a feeling that Ryan would out-misundercoach Fox, but I was too weak to go with my gut (in my pools). Already a game behind – rats.
I’m pretty sure my uppance will come in the divisional round of the playoffs (Niners fan).
Yeah. The NFC is kind of stacked.
dhalgren is super great. the last 200 or whatever pages are amazing
moby dick, underworld
Two that have gone unmentioned:
The Death of Virgil
The Public Burning
It is not a slog at all. Nearly every page of the first volume holds a quote that belongs in a book of epigrams.
http://youtubedotcom.tumblr.com/post/1196326024/ohio-stand-up
David Hayden (and others?) mentions Death of Virgil. The Vintage edition has 496 pages–I’d have guessed a higher number.
Fortunata and Jacinda, Under the Volcano, Underworld and Libra, Tree of Smoke, The Recognitions, The Public Burning, Dhalgren, The Fortress of Solitude, Another Country, and Trance by Christopher Sorrentino
oh my god
He sure did. Missed it as I skimmed his rich list. Thx for the two corrections.
I can’t believe I had to scroll this far down before seeing War and Peace mentioned. Well, I can, but that doesn’t mean I like it.
To add one that I don’t think I saw, News From the Empire (Fernando del Paso) has both the length and breadth of the typical “big” novel, which I think goes way beyond just page count.
Clockers is really good. No one would set it on top of this summit, but I think it will be looked back upon as a vital work from this period.
The Instructions. Yes. So good.
Agreement with much of the above.
I didn’t see the following listed:Clive Barker WeaveworldMichael Brodsky XmanJohn Brunner Stand on ZanzibarFanny Burney CeciliaBruce Duffy The World as I Found ItMacKinlay KantorAndersonvilleHarry Mulisch The Discovery of HeavenCharles Palliser The QuincunxRichard Powers The Time of Our SingingAnn Radcliffe The Mysteries of UdolphoSir Walter Scott WaverleyAlexandr Solzhenitsyn The First CircleGilbert Sorrentino Mulligan StewPatrick White The VivisectorDavid Wroblewski The Story of Edgar SawtelleNote that a new uncensored(!) edition of The First Circle was recently published, about 10% longer. Now everybody…
M. Proust, Romance of The Three Kingdoms, Tale of Genji, and for a really really long read- The Mahabharata
East of Eden