That's right! I read stuff and this is one of the longest books I have ever taken on. It was so long in fact that when I was presented it by the person I know that lives here that has a library of sorts that I nearly handed it back to him because it just seemed too daunting.
I thought that it might be the longest book I have ever read cover-to-cover but as it turns out it is the 3rd longest. Here are those tomes is if you are interested
- Lord of the Rings including The Hobbit is 575,000 words
- Atlas Shrugged is 570,000 words
- Gone with the Wind is a paltry 420,000 words
Obviously these numbers are rounded because no author would intentionally make certain to end on a perfectly round 100-digit number.
Here is the problem I have with really long books for the most part: There isn't a huge story in there, just a huge amount of words getting to a very small story. I am not a fan of flowery and extremely drawn out descriptions of things and this is what authors like Stephen King do (or at least did) on a regular basis. I can't believe King has sold as many books as he does to be honest since I find most of his stuff to be garbage especially the Richard Bachman pseudonym ones.
Anyway, back to Gone with the Wind.
I think that this book does in fact start a little slow but unlike other books that are long, there is a lot going on. The first 100 pages or so where the story seems to drag a bit is actually extremely crucial in character development that doesn't seem all that important until you realize that it is very much so hundreds of pages later.
While I am certain that a lot of people have seen the film and not read the book, I was the other way around or at least I am now. I have never seen the film and plan to do so, perhaps this afternoon if I decide to not drink beer.
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The movie was apparently a very big undertaking considering the time period and I am looking forward to seeing it. The book was released in a strange time for the world, in the late 30's. The book was released in 1936 and won a Pulitzer Prize the following year. For the most part the story is told from the perspective of Scarlett O'Hara, which is a name you have probably heard said even if you have no idea about the book or the film.
A large portion of the book tells the story of the U.S. Civil War from a southerner's perspective, which isn't something you often see in books or in film. It presents the south as being victims of the terrorization of the northern forces and even goes so far as to suggest that blacks and even blacks that were slaves were better off under the leadership of the Confederacy. I doubt there is very much truth to this but the way in which they tell it is just vague enough to kind of leave it up to you, the reader, as to whether or not you think this is true.
Almost everyone in the story sees their opulent lives turned upside down by the war and this of course includes Scarlett O'Hara, whose estate is practically reduced to nothing. She is a very tough and hard-headed woman and uses every tool at her disposal in order to restore some semblance of wealth to what remains of her family and those she was close to.
One thing I learned from Wikipedia after reading the book that I found very interesting is that according to something called a "Harris poll" Gone with the Wind is the 2nd most popular book amongst Americans, second only to the Bible.
The book should not be ignored because of its length because I found it to be extremely entertaining all the way through and when it finally was over after over a thousand pages, I would have been happy had they carried it on for a thousand more. Of course the binding would fall apart at that point but honestly, even with Atlas Shrugged which I thought was an amazing read, I have never been so captivated for so long by a book of this length.
Unlike a lot of other books I have read, I do not feel as though any time or chapters are wasted simply for the sake of making the book longer. You may recall that this was a big problem I had with the book Watership Down. The book is magnificently long for a children's book, yet only about 4 or 5 events actually happen in the entire thing.
In Gone with the Wind each chapter has a purpose, each character has meaning, very few words are overly flowery unless it is necessary to describe how important something is in the mind of Scarlett such as her love for her home of Tara.
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For anyone that is interested, the Tara Plantation is a real place, sort of. It was built for the sake of the film and there wasn't really much of an interior. It was used mostly just for exterior shots as far as I can tell. The structure was torn down 20 years after the movie was filmed but some of the remnants still exist today. You can own a shutter from the film for a mere $20-$40 thousand dollars!
I guess I kind of went off on a tangent about the film even though I haven't even watched it yet. So I am here to tell you that even though this book is extremely long, you really should read it. It took me 3 weeks to read it and that is a long time for me but to be fair I had quite a lot going on in the past month that got in the way of me getting through it.
There have been very few books that I have read in my life that have actually kept me up past my bedtime because I wanted to read "just one more chapter" but this book, is one of them.
that´s a lot of words
yeah, i was intimidated by it for a long time. I'm proud of myself for having finished it. I started another rather long book called East of Eden immediately afterwards.
I like to read but this is a book I have never picked up.
The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are easily my favorite books. The only part where I thought those dragged was the journey through Mordor.
I 've always thought Stephen King was an excellent writer though I thought his stories were better in the first half of his career.
I've never read Atlus Shrugged (or any other Ayn Rand books) but it's been on my list for a long time.
One of my favorite authors (and one that often writes long books) is Neal Stephenson. I hated his last book though. Part of the length of his books comes from various tangents they will go off on related to some technology or philosophy or piece of history relevant to the story. I tend to find the things he writes about interesting so this enhances the books for me. I've heard others complain about that though as for them it makes the books drag.
Can you tell me the title of your favorite book by him? We don't have great access to English-language books over here and mostly I just take what I can get. But there's always Kindle
That's a tough one. Probably easier to describe his best books and then you pick the one that sounds most interesting.
Snow Crash - This is the book that made him famous. The genre has been described as 'post cyberpunk'. It's sort of like what Neuromancer by William Gibson might have been had it been written a decade or so later.
The Diamond Age - A sci-fi book featuring nanotechnology and dealing with themes such as education, social class, and artificial intelligence.
Cryptonomicon - The first Neal Stephenson book I read. I picked it up randomly in a book store years ago while on a work trip. Set in World War II and the 1990s and deals with topics such as cryptography, the internet and data havens. A contender for my favorite.
The Baroque Cycle - Actually a trilogy of books, all of them pretty long. These may be my favorites but I wouldn't necessarily recommend them as someone's first Neal Stephenson books to read. If you were going to try to pigeon-hole them into a genre you would have to say they were historical fiction. They deal with topics such as monetary systems, mathematics and physics. Titles are 'Quicksilver', 'The Confusion', and 'The System of the World'. They cover a time period between the Mid 1600s and early 1700s.
Anathem - Hard to describe. A post apocalyptic novel in which the planet's intellectuals sequestered themselves into monestaries before the collapse of society. Features topics such as quantum mechanics. A very long, very good book but this is another I probably wouldn't recommend as a first read.
Seveneves - A hard sci-fi book that starts in the present day and deals with the short and long term consequences of the break-up of the moon, including the near extinction of mankind. At one point there was discussion of this one being made into a movie.
Reamde - A thriller set in the "present" (written in 2011) that deals with a group of MMORPG developers caught in the middle of Chinese cyber-criminals, Islamic terrorists and the Russian mafia.
He's written others but the above are the best. I would pick 1, 3 or 7 to start with...whichever sounds most interesting to you.
thanks a lot for that. That was a much more concise answer than I was expecting!
After reading one book I think it must be the super excited feeling especially with the longest book.Great to see your blog!
Very interesting. I have never read the book or seen the movie. It's something that I just never really paid too much attention to. Of course I know the famous lines and stuff, but other than that it kind of passed me by. I have a book in my drawer right now that my father in law game me and I haven't gotten around to reading it because it just looks really thick and long. I am procrastinating. It's We Were Soliders Once. I never watched the Mel Gibson show they did of it either. I will have to get around to it one day.
Ah, I didn't realize that the Gibson movie ever was a book. I suppose most movies were at one point though.
I've read more books in 2023 than probably the 10 previous years combined. I think it has done me some good but every now and then I run into a word and don't know what it means. This is easily solved on a Kindle because you just hold your finger down on the word and the dictionary automatically defines it. One time, I found myself in a "derp" moment when i was pressing my finger down on a paper page waiting for the dictionary to kick in. It was time to go to sleep at that point.
Haha, that is too funny about pressing down on the page. I think I have been there in the past. Like trying to zoom on something that isn't even a touchscreen! I love my Kindle app. When I do read that is my preferred method. We have one of the old school paperwhite Kindles, but I don't know if it will even power on anymore! I agree, I think most things were already a book or have been adapted from a book. Even TV series seem to pull inspiration from books now.
My Kindle is the ones that came before the Paperwhite and I am in awe that it still functions at all. The "home" button no longer works so when you are finished with a book you have to hard restart it in order to get back to the screen where you select a new book to read.
Oh dang, that is crazy. I think that would drive me nuts having to reset like that. It still works though, so I guess you can complain. We have the really thin black and white one that has the full keyboard just below the screen. I mainly just use the app on my phone now though.
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⋆ sᴜʙsᴄʀɪʙᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴀsᴇᴀɴ ʜɪᴠᴇ ᴄᴏᴍᴍᴜɴɪᴛʏ
⋆ ғᴏʟʟᴏᴡ ᴛʜᴇ ᴀsᴇᴀɴ ʜɪᴠᴇ ᴄᴏᴍᴍᴜɴɪᴛʏ ᴠᴏᴛɪɴɢ ᴛʀᴀɪʟ
⋆ ᴅᴇʟᴇɢᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ʟɪɴᴋs 25 ʜᴘ⇾50 ʜᴘ⇾100 ʜᴘ⇾500 ʜᴘ⇾1,000 ʜᴘ
Books are always better than the film so your expectations may be higher having read the book. Normally if I have read the book I dodge the film as it is always guaranteed to be a total let down.
Yeah I already watched the movie and was a little less than impressed.
I feel like I attempted this book back in my highschool days for some reason, but within the first 50 pages I realized I bit off more than I could chew. I have seen the movie though. I am also reminded of Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, and how not politically correct these books are nowadays. One of them referred to Ni**er Jim, and I can't remember the angst of reading that out loud in public school 🤦♂️.
Well, at least if gets too daunting, you've got Nadi who can obviously read it for you and digest the highlights. Ayn Rand is also an interesting character, and although I don't agree with her politics, her ideology is one followed by many of the most powerful people in the USA, so it's worth knowing what makes these folks tick. I've watched a doc series by Adam Curtis that covers Ayn Rand quite a bit, and her nemesis George R. Price, someone that believed in altruism. The doc series is called "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" in case it interests you.
i will definitely be checking out that doc series. Thanks for the tip.
I was apprehensive to take on the book especially when I opened the gigantic tome to be greeted with a very small font. It is so long that I consider it to be quite the accomplishment that I finished it.