There’s no greater feeling than finally putting down a really thick book and thinking “Yep, I read all that!”
Bearing in mind that the average word count for a novel is 250 – 300 words, we’ve rounded up some of our favourite long books:
ACID ALEX – AL LOVEJOY (400 pages)
Stuck at his first 9-5 and seeking a more exciting experience before his next music festival holiday, Try picked this raw and deeply moving autobiography set in 1970’s South Africa and two weeks later we found him in a corner weeping. A must-read.
À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME) – MARCEL PROUT (4 215 pages)
Back when Coin was working in a bookshop, getting through her French studies and reading up on existentialism. She discovered Proust and set out to read his chef d’oevure, which focuses on the nature of art and memory and how a work of art can attempt to recapture the past and save it from destruction, at least in our minds. Needless to say, she loved it and we’ll never hear the end of it.
MIDDLESEX – JEFFREY EUGENIDES (544 pages)
Try enjoys reading authors chronologically. So, just as he was done with The Virgin Suicides, we gifted him Eugenides’s second offering, a sublime novel about a Greek-American family, identity and mutated genes.
THE DIARIES OF EVELYN WAUGH – EVELYN WAUGH (818 PAGES)
Thanks to Sofia Coppola’s “Lost In Translation’, Ava would not have known who Evelyn Waugh was and when she finally discovered his works, she was gifted a copy of his diaries – which he kept from age seven until his death. This honest, sharp and menacing view of life is a must-read for devout fans looking for insight into the process behind his greatest works.
THE DIARIES OF JANE SOMERS – DORIS LESSING (512 pages)
Teeny-bopper Coin stumbled Doris Lessing in the community library when she’d read almost all the books in the teen section. She was looking for another famous diary (Anne Frank) but she was distracted by a whole shelf dedicated to Ms Lessing. She admired her courage to publish a novel under a pseudonym at the height f her career but the relationship between Jane and Maudie, especially Maudie’s life. kept her reading way past bedtime.
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