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Doorstopper / Literature

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General:

  • A lot of epics - by definition - are doorstoppers. (But not all of them.) i.e., Spenser's The Faerie Queene or Milton's Paradise Lost. The one that takes the cake - and is THE longest piece of literature in the world - has never been definitively compiled. This is because the work, The Epic of King Gesar, is some 20 million words long and would take an estimate of 120 volumes to complete.
  • Many occult books and grimoires could be considered this. The two most well-known examples are probably Aleister Crowley's magnum opus, 'Magick: Liber ABA, Book 4' which is a whopping 844 pages, and is affectionately referred to by many a Crowley-student as the 'Big Blue Brick'. The other is Israel Regardie's 'The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order' its most recent edition standing at 960 pages. Both are chock full of details on meditation, yoga, ceremonies and rituals, methods of creating, consecrating and using ritual tools and circles, outlines of rituals, spells, designs for talismans, and everything else needed to ensure that these two books go on to become two of the largest influences on modern ceremonial magic.
    • Other lesser-known or more modern examples also include the 'Book of Oberon', a recent translation and transcription of a 16th century manuscript that was held in the Folger Shakespeare Library, at 600 pages of spells, prayers, descriptions of spirits and demons and suchlike. Another example is the recent 'Foundations of Practical Sorcery: Collected Works', though this may not count since, while its collected edition is a hefty 848 pages long, it is technically made up of seven volumes that are available separately, each one based on a different branch of ceremonial magic (ritual tools, geomancy, scrying, Kabbalah, talismans, spirits of the cardinal directions and spirits of the Goetia).

By Author:

  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
    • The Gulag Archipelago clocks in at 1,930 pages split across three volumes, the latter two of which appear to be out of print, while the first volume and an abridged one-volume edition remain in print.
    • The Red Wheel, a multi-volume epic. It is sixteen volumes long, which count 6600 pages in total. And he was going to write four more volumes.
  • Alexandre Dumas in general is almost king of this trope. His novels were serialized in newspapers initially, the longer it lasted the more he was paid.
    • The Count of Monte Cristo. The original, unabridged novel, printed on flimsy paper and in small type, produces an over-sized paperback volume a good four inches thick. Dumas was originally paid by the word for the original serial novel (published by chapter in the newspaper) and he made the most of it.
    • The Three Musketeers is only one of three novels that comprise the D'Artagnan Romances — the other two being Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. The first two are over 900 pages in most editions. The Vicomte de Bragelonne meanwhile is usually divided into three books, and each one of them is over 800 pages long.
  • Paul Féval's Le Bossu is over 500 pages long. His son Paul Féval Fils wrote continuation works, but they're all much shorter.
  • Anthony Trollope began writing novels to pass the time during train journeys in his capacity as a civil servant in the 1840s, and there are enough doorstoppers in his most widely read series for every door in the house.
    • In most editions of The Chronicles of Barsetshire, The Warden is about 250 pages, but Barchester Towers is nearly twice that, Doctor Thorne and Framley Parsonage are over 500 pages, The Small House at Alligton is over 700 pages, and The Last Chronicle of Barset is over 900 pages.
    • All six of the Palliser novels are over 600 pages in most editions, with the first and longest, Can You Forgive Her?, topping 800 pages (leading Stephen King to give it the sardonic nickname Can You Finish It? in his On Writing).
  • Ayn Rand is infamous for writing these despite the fact that it only actually applies to her two most famous works, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The first edition of Atlas Shrugged was over 1,000 pages and The Fountainhead was over 700. Atlas Shrugged also very infamously fills over fifty pages with a monologue from one of the novel's heroes. Atlas must have Shrugged because he was tired of carrying the Writer on Board.
  • The Black Library, the publisher for Warhammer 40,000 fiction, tends to produce "omnibuses", which are collections of novels gathered into large, and, fittingly for the franchise, lethally heavy volumes. These include:
    • The Space Wolves Omnibus.
    • The SoulDrinkers Omnibus
    • Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain omnibuses Hero of the Imperium and Defender of the Imperium.
    • Three Gaunt's Ghosts omnibuses (by Dan Abnett) titled The Founding, The Saint and The Lost.
    • The Black Library also has Warhammer Fantasy fiction and has several omnibuses there too, among others is Gotrek and Felix, and Malus Darkblade.
  • Brandon Sanderson's early novels such as Elantris and Mistborn: The Original Trilogy were in the already bulky range of 500-600 pages, however the The Stormlight Archive take this to extreme degrees. The second book Words of Radiance comes in at 1088 pages, the maximum the publisher was physically capable of printing at the time (the original title was The Book of Endless Pages, named after an in-universe book, but his editor thought it was a bit on the nose considering its length). Apparently, they worked out a new system, as Oathbringer and Rhythm of War clock in at an enormous 1248 pages and 1212 pages, respectively. Sanderson has said he treats Stormlight books the same way he treats a trilogy of regular books, which the page count certainly reflects.
    • Even his novellas have started getting longer. Dawnshard is about 270 pages and 56,000 words. Certainly on the short side for a novel, but considerably longer than the 40,000 words commonly used as a cut off point for what can be considered a novella.
    • He also jokes about the Doorstopper-ness of his own books in the Alcatraz Series, when the First-Person Smartass narrator suggests that you could use one of his books to deliver a Tap on the Head to forget something.
  • Several of Charles Dickens's novels are massive due to their origin as serials. Dave Barry once gave a joke etymology about "hurting like the dickens" being representative of the pain of having the entirety of the writings of Charles Dickens (consisting of voluminous volumes, considering how prolific the guy was) dropped on someone from a window. Among Dickens’s fourteen completed novels, eight - The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend - are well over 800 pages in most editions; some are over 1000 pages with annotations and footnotes.note 
  • Cornelia Funke:
    • The books of The Inkworld Trilogy, Inkheart, Inkspell, and Inkdeath, are 534, 635, and 683 pages respectively.
    • Dragon Rider is 536 pages. Individually, none of these books could actually stop a door, but two or three piled on top of each other probably could.
  • Cormac McCarthy:
    • The Border Trilogy (which comprises All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) is a staggering 1040 pages long.
    • The Passenger (which comprises The Passenger and Stella Maris) is more modest at 608 pages.
  • Any book by Edward Rutherfurd, an author who likes, in all his books, to start at day one and move up through the millennia of whatever area he is currently writing about. Historical fiction, very heavy on the details and that in turn makes very heavy doorstoppers. The paperback edition of his novel The Forest is 883 pages long and the paperback edition of London is a whopping 1299 pages!
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky:
    • Crime and Punishment is well over 500 pages.
    • One edition of The Brothers Karamazov is 720 pages long.
    • Penguin Classics' edition of The Brothers K is (with around 12 pages of notes at the end) 1,013 pages long due to its more detailed, faithful translation.
  • Initially published as three separate books, the most readily available incarnation of Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry is a single-volume printing of 792 pages. He wrote a legitimate Doorstopper later on with Tigana (688 pages).
  • Henry Darger wrote several monumental examples while toiling in obscurity as a janitor.
  • Historian Ian Kershaw's two biographies of Adolf Hitler, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis are both pretty large but neither quite qualifies as a doorstopper on its own. When published as a single combined volume, however, as they were in 2008, the book is just short of 1000 pages long, and that's excluding the new introduction and the index.
  • Irvine Welsh's Glue and Skagboys are 560 and 548 pages, respectively.
  • Isaac Asimov:
  • All of J. K. Rowling's written work between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Career of Evil was at least 400 pages long. The streak was finally broken with the published script for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (304 pages); though this is justified by it being a film script rather than a novel, and 300+ pages is still extremely hefty for a script.
    • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in particular (the longest in the series, at 700-800+ pages depending on the edition) certainly qualifies as this; Goblet of Fire and Deathly Hallows are fairly substantial and almost as long. Half-Blood Prince as well, though it's not quite as long as the others mentioned but still over 500 pages. It's especially funny when you read that one of the excuses publishers used when repeatedly rejecting the first book of the series (clocking in at a fairly "slim" 300-odd pages) was "it's too long and kids won't read long books."
    • Lampshaded in Return of the Bunny Suicides, where a bunny orders Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix so that it can wait under the mail slot and be killed when the book drops on its head.
    • A common joke around the time due to the size and print demand was saying book 6 (if larger than Order of the Phoenix; it wasn't) would be called Harry Potter and the End of Trees. This actually prompted J. K. Rowling to insist that every edition of Deathly Hallows contain at least 30% recycled fiber.
    • Rowling's Cormoran Strike Novels, a detective series, have followed the same pattern as the Harry Potter books. HP #5, Order of the Phoenix, was the longest book and much longer than the earlier ones. The fifth Strike novel, Troubled Blood, is 944 pages in hardcover, 50% bigger than the fourth Strike novel and twice as long as any of the first three.
  • James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential is just barely short of 500 pages, but is still pretty fast paced with its many characters all ending up with some important role in the story. His next book, White Jazz, was originally around 700 pages. When the publisher asked Ellroy to trim it down, he responded by removing every single word that could even remotely be considered extraneous, resulting in a 350-something page book which is insanely dense and has to be read incredibly carefully. There are even a few conversations where it takes quite a while to get any hints outside of the dialogue itself about who's talking.
  • James Joyce:
    • Ulysses - nearly 1000 pages with notes, and you’d better believe you need them.
    • Finnegans Wake — not as long (628 pages), but just as difficult to read.
  • Anything by James Michener, notably Centennial. 1200 pages. Mr. Michener's writing is entertaining, but it's true that his later books should be under the by-line "James Michener and his Research Team".
    • His books also tend to span a large number of characters and/or time periods, so there are some nicely isolated sections, even if you lose some of the recurring themes from doing so. You might not be able to take a small part out of Space too easily, but some chapters of The Source can be taken out to (say) get a class full of high school students to get a feel for David's Israel and just how much sleuth work archaeologists have done on it.
  • A full edition of Jean de La Fontaine's fables, with large illustrations by Gustave Dore, can become a hefty 900-page hardback.
  • Jin Yong specialised in long novels. His longest are The Deer and the Cauldron (over 1,230,000 Chinese characters) and Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (over 1,211,000 Chinese characters).
  • John MacGregor, an art historian with a psychology degree, published a 720-page oversized book about Darger's life and work; In the Realms of the Unreal. Crammed with Mac's own speculations and ramblings, it's quite a doorstopper in its own right.
  • John Ringo's novels tend to be somewhat long but not long enough to qualify, in general; however, the last two books of the original set for the Legacy of the Aldenata series, Hell's Faire and When the Devil Dances, were originally to be one novel. The events of 9/11 threw off Ringo's muse, according to him in the afterword for HF, and the work was broken up to get a book to the printers before it got ridiculously late (instead of the actual somewhat late).
  • All of Ken Follett's historical epics, including The Pillars of the Earth, its sequel World Without End, and the two (so far) books of The Century Trilogy. World Without End is the worst offender in this regard, clocking in over 1200 pages in paperback, perhaps fitting the book's title.
  • The books Kyougoku Natsuhiko, a Japanese mystery writer, wrote, are nothing to sneeze at either: Tesso no Ori (鉄鼠の檻) is 826 pages long, Jorōgumo no Kotowari (絡新婦の理) is 829 pages long, Nuribotoke no Utage, Utage no Shitaku (塗仏の宴　宴の支度) and Nuribotoke no Utage, Utage no Shimatsu (塗仏の宴　宴の始末), a novel in two volumes, is 1248 pages long in total.
  • When L. Ron Hubbard wasn't busy founding religions, he was writing tons and tons of science fiction. Sometimes all in the same book.
    • Mission Earth was published in ten parts and therefore advertised as a "dekalogy", a word coined by his publishing company specifically for its advertising. The hardcover pressing of the book's volumes add up to 3,992 pages. Folks, that's longer than all of The Lord of the Rings (1,178 pages) and AKIRA (2,182 pages) combined, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (607 pages in the original U.K. pressing) thrown in for good measure.
    • Battlefield Earth is also over a thousand pages. The infamous movie covers only about the first third or half, depending on who you ask.
  • Lance Parkin's AHistory Universe Concordance for the Whoniverse (originally published in 1996) started as a relatively modest 273-page volume chronicling the TV series (which of course, ended in 1989) plus the New Adventures and Missing Adventures novels. Increases in material (both in the widening of what "counted" and the continued production of more stories, including the revived series) led to subsequent editions becoming substantially heftier. The 2018 fourth edition comprises three volumes, each running to over 400 pages, in a valiant attempt to provide a timeline of the entire Doctor Who Expanded Universe. And they're still making more Who...
  • Marcel Proust:
    • At 1.5 million words, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, note  holds the Guinness Book of Records title as Longest Novel. Monty Python's Flying Circus did a sketch on summarizing the whole thing in 15 seconds. Proust was still adding to it and revising the last three volumes at the time of his death. One can only imagine how long the novel would have become if Proust had finished it to his liking.
  • The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, 637 pages and 528 pages respectively.
  • Mark Z. Danielewski:
    • House of Leaves is over 700 pages in paperback, all of them containing copious amounts of Mind Screw. But some of those pages have one word on them, due to the Unconventional Formatting, so it's more a Doorstopper in execution than in theory.
    • And then he published The Familiar, which is 880 pages and weighs a hefty 3.6 pounds (it is printed on much thicker paper than House of Leaves was). It's exaggerated, considering that that was only the first book of a series of twenty-seven. Like this series? Reserve at least three shelves of your bookcase, and expect to only lift three of the twenty-seven at a time!note 
  • Most of Melanie Rawn's works. She just doesn't do less than 800 pages in paperback with 8-point type, which just might be why you've never heard of her. Both Dragon Prince and Dragon Star are trilogies of incredible length, with a frustrating number of similarly-named characters. Not works for the faint of heart, or sound of mind.
  • Minoru Kawakami is used as an example of why the "Light" in Light Novels does not actually refer to their usual length. It refers instead to the limits of what kanji can be used.
  • The works of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu: Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi has 113 chapters and 13 extras, Heaven Official’s Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu has 244 chapters and 8 extras, and the main novel of The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong has only 81 chapters, but it has 20 extras.
  • More or less anything by Neal Stephenson after he gained any success.
    • Anathem is 1000 pages long, complete with a glossary, 3 appendices, and, in the promo copy sent to reviewers and book stores, actual, factual Feelies.
    • Cryptonomicon. The fact that it's printed in a small typeface is a telling indication that you should be grateful that it's only 918 pages long. Some printings break the four-digit mark, coming in at 1054 pages. Latin America, thankfully, saw it released as three separate tomes.
    • Similarly, any volumes of his Baroque Cycle, which each top 900 pages (admittedly because Stephenson really wanted either one enormous book or 8 novels, and instead we get a trilogy with each book containing 2-3 of the 'novels'). And if you want to see a real Door Stopper, Stephenson's handwritten manuscript (on display at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle) is taller than he is.
    • Lampshaded in The Baroque Cycle where one character mentions using the in-universe Cryptonomicon (a text on cryptography) to hold a door open.
    • REAMDE. This door stopper clocks in at 1044 pages.
    • Seveneves is actually a slight departure from his record, but still a very heavy volume at 861 pages.
  • The first two books in the Ender series by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, are under 400 pages, but third and fourth books, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, were originally one massive novel that would have been about 962 pages in paperback. Even with this division, the third book was still the longest in the main series at nearly 600 pages.
  • Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton, each clocking in at around 1,200 pages (in paperback). One wonders why he didn't just make it a trilogy.
    • The same author's Void Trilogy—three books of 1200+ pages each. Really, though, the first two are more like one book. Trust the voice of experience.
      • Hamilton seems incapable of finishing his books properly (good books tho'). His only "ends" are the ends of series. Only The Evolutionary Void seems to avoid this.
    • The Night's Dawn Trilogy in the States had to be broken up into 6 volumes for its original print run (though still billed as a trilogy). The second US print and international versions had three books of 1200+ pages each; buy the complete trilogy and you'll need a truck to get it home.
    • Hamilton's 2012 standalone Great North Road is vast even by his usual standards, weighing in at over 1000 pages in hardback. By comparison, the Void Trilogy hardbacks had ~700.
  • The Complete Works of Plato, in an incredibly small typeface, clock at just under 2000 pages on a page size just under A4. This is without any Footnotes or annotations.
  • A more recent historian, Rick Perlstein, has written several tomes chronicling the rise of political conservatism in America (Before the Storm, Nixonland). His most recent work, The Invisible Bridge, runs to 860-odd pages, with Perlstein publishing his endnotes online. And Perlstein's confirmed there's at least one more book to come.
  • Robert Coover:
  • Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and 2666 are 610 and 898 pages, respectively.
  • Robert R. McCammon:
    • Swan Song. The paperback edition is 956 pages.
    • The Queen of Bedlam is 656 pages in paperback.
    • Speaks the Nightbird is 816 pages and was originally released in two volumes.
  • Servire published a 500+ page volume in 1970, titled Science Fiction Omnibus, a Dutch translation of four American Science Fiction Novels; The Big Eye by Max Ehrlich, The Man Who Sold The Moon by Robert A. Heinlein, Requiem by Robert A. Heinlein, and Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov.
  • Stephen King can write short stories, short books, long books, and long books.
    • The later books of the epic The Dark Tower are pretty long. The last two books are 800 and 1,100 pages, respectively.
    • How about the uncut version of The Stand, which is 1,153 pages with 400 extra pages added back in?
    • In the Netherlands, a woman pressed charges against a mail company because a copy of King’s IT killed her chihuahua when it dropped through the mail chute. The hardcover copy of IT is 1,135 pages long, and both adaptations had to be split into two parts to adequately convey the entire story.
    • Under the Dome clocks in at 1,074 pages in hardcover. A 2014 mass-market paperback edition split it into two volumes, at over 600 pages each.
    • Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers fell on the floor. Made a hole where there wasn't one before.
    • Insomnia could practically serve as a cure for that particular malady, being thick enough to knock the sufferer unconscious.
    • King himself has made light of the fact that his books tend to be long. When he announced that he would go into semi-retirement, he claimed that he had "killed enough trees."
  • Stephenie Meyer:
  • Anything written by the author Tad Williams end up like this.
    • To Green Angel Tower was so big, it had to be split into two parts when printed as a mass-market paperback.
    • The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy was released as twelve volumes in Finland.
    • The Otherland series of which there are four volumes.
  • Tamora Pierce started writing these after Harry Potter made publishers realize that long YA books can sell. The Trickster's Duet is about as long as the quartets despite being two books. The Beka Cooper books are longer yet, with Mastiff clocking in at 500+ pages. Her later Circleverse books are pretty long, too.
  • Thomas Pynchon:
    • Gravity's Rainbow mixes Door Stopper (760 pages) with Mind Screw for a tome you will not be able to finish. (Which is why it didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize—half the committee wanted it to win, the other half couldn't finish it.)
    • Pynchon's later novels Mason & Dixon and Against the Day are 773 and 1220 pages, respectively.
    • His first, V., is a bit more concise at 492 pages.
  • Pretty much any fiction work that Tom Clancy ever wrote exceeded 400 pages, and sometimes by a healthy degree. The worst offender is The Bear and the Dragon, which clocked in at 1,028 pages on hardback.
  • Unicorn Press published a 4-in-1 volume with over 900 pages in 1950, including Bland Beginning, Pebble in the Sky, Just For The Bride, and The Owl And The Pussycat.
  • Most of Wayne Johnston's novels are doorstoppers - The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is over 600 pages... in trade paperback, and they look much longer than that in hardcover. And they are very heavy to lift.
  • William Gaddis' The Recognitions and JR are 956 and 726 pages, respectively.
  • Dr. William Samuel Sadler wrote some forty or fifty books which include Modern Psychiatry (896 pages) and Theory and Practice of Psychiatry (1231 pages).

By Title:

  • 1Q84: The original Japanese is 1,600 pages long and the English translation is 1,100 pages with fairly small text.
  • 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die is 960 pages and has been updated annually since 2003. It has since gotten spin-offs regarding other media, including video games, all of whom are just as long.
  • 101 Years' Entertainment (edited by Ellery Queen) contains 995 pages of detective stories of varying quality.
  • George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff's All and Everything spends 1266 pages attempting to live up to its title.
  • American Gods by Neil Gaiman is 629 pages.
  • A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles has 968 pages.
  • An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, with more than 800 pages, is a classic example.
  • The novel ...And Ladies of the Club is over 1,000 pages long, supposedly took the author over 50 years to write, and is about, well, the founding members of a ladies book club in Ohio from post-Civil War to the 1930's. It's much more readable than it sounds.
  • The single volume edition of Annals of the Former World by John McPhee has 720 pages.
  • Approaches to Science Fiction: Even with restricting itself to excerpts of the novel-length fiction, this book adds up to over 570 pages.
  • Sir Richard Francis Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights — sixteen massive volumes. The Project Gutenberg .txt files together weigh in at nearly 14 megabytes of text! It is said that one cannot read all of it in one sitting because the reader will go insane from the sheer majesty of it all. Maybe there's some truth to that — it's probably because the reader would experience massive sleep deprivation in the process.
    • The earliest manuscripts of the Arabian Nights, from the 13th century, contained a manageable 20 stories or so, all folktales, divided into less than 300 nights. The editors of 18th- and 19th-century Egyptian versions, driven to "complete" the 1001 nights, kept adding a mishmash of folktales from various sources, erotic stories, literary works, legends, until the result was a sprawling, heterogeneous monster.
  • Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus is 13,095 pages in 10 parts of 3 volumes each and approximately 1.95 million words long, and was the former top of Wikipedia's list of longest novels.
  • Vox Day's fantasy series The Arts of Dark and Light. At 900-some small-type pages, A Throne of Bones (the first volume) can certainly match the great fantasy writers in bulk. A Sea of Skulls is somewhat shorter... which the author has jokingly(?) promised to remedy by releasing an expanded edition.
  • Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History is one volume of over 1100 pages, although it was split into four for its US paperback printing.
  • Four of the six books of James Clavell's Asian Saga are over 1000 pages long, including Shogun. The other two (as it happens, the first two to be written) are over 500.
  • The Light Novel editions of Avesta of Black and White end up as pretty chunky at over 500 pages each spread across 4 volumes to tell a continuous story of just a few characters. Not surprising given that it is written by the same author that made Dies Irae.
  • Battle Royale is 619 pages long, and it's mostly about students killing each other.
  • In France, the immensely prestigious critical editions of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade should be this... However, the print is tiny, and the pages are Bible paper, which means that although you do get a huge amount of text, they probably wouldn't make very good doorstoppers...
  • The Bonfire of the Vanities at just over 700 pages usually, and another example here that was originally published serially (though it was revised for its release as a novel).
  • Miyuki Miyabe's Brave Story is, at least in its English translation, 816 pages. Sadly, it takes until page 222 to really get into the story proper.
  • The Brightest Shadow: The first book of the series is fairly long, clocking in at 687 pages in paperback, with the others planned to be the same length.
  • Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy, which consists of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, has 1368 pages.
  • The Canterbury Tales. Notably, it’s still a Doorstopper even though Chaucer was a long way from completing it when he Died During Production. Each pilgrim was supposed to tell four stories: not all of them got to tell one, and none of them got past their first. However, it’s only a Doorstopper when it's kept in verse. A prose edition is about 370 pages.
  • John Lanchester's huge state-of-the-nation novel, Capital.
  • The Great Book of Amber, by Roger Zelazny, is actually ten fairly small books making up the entirety of The Chronicles of Amber series. However, unless you're prepared to search, this is the only version actually available and has been the only one in print for years, except for the two-volume book club edition. Clocks in at somewhere around 1200 pages if I'm not mistaken. All the more irritating because neither the omnibus nor the individual novels were available as ebooks until April 2020.
  • The Chung Kuo series of science fiction novels by David Wingrove. First published as eight hefty volumes of 600-700 pages each, it is due to be re-released in 2010 as eighteen books of presumably more reasonable size. It is eighteen because the original series was supposed to be nine books, but Wingrove's publisher refused to publish the ninth, forcing him to combine the last two books. The new release will include the complete nine books at two volumes per book...
  • Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative has three volumes, each running to about 1,000 pages. Foote's work is so long and densely detailed (but also well-written and enjoyable) that individual chapters have been published as standalone works, eg. The Stars in Their Courses about Gettysburg.
  • Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. At 1,500+ pages, it is the longest published novel originally written in English.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Land is just over 600 pages.
  • The Collected Works of William Shakespeare clocks in at 1448 pages. Very thin pages, everything double-columned. This is why in many times any "complete works" of his get separated into multiple volumes.
  • Possibly the ultimate single-volume Doorstopper: Someone has published Agatha Christie's The Complete Miss Marple in one volume of 4,032 pages massing 8kg! To visualize that, the book is over a foot thick.
  • The 1975 edition of The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe clocks in at 1026 pages.
  • Crescent City: The first two books are pretty hefty, with both of them being over 700 pages long; House of Earth and Blood is 816 pages and House of Sky and Breath is 768 pages. Usually with Maas' books, the first few novels are shorter and the page count doesn't balloon until later installments, although Crescent City is her first series aimed explicitly at an adult demographic rather than young adult, so that could explain the increased length.
  • Cultivation Chat Group has 3,165 chapters and 8 side stories. Yes, you read that right: it has over three thousand chapters.
  • If you'd print out the web-published Alternate History Decades of Darkness, you'd need more than 1800 sheets of paper (using an average-sized font and paper).
  • Demon Sword Maiden has 19 volumes and 2,425 chapters.
  • Desolate Era has 45 volumes and 1,450 chapters.
  • Devta, a work serialised in a Pakistani suspense magazine for 33 years and spanning 11.2 million (Urdu) words in 56 volumes, or about 200,000 per volume; formerly on the Wikipedia list before someone pointed out that serials weren't counted. Details on the work in English are scarce, though it apparently focuses on a man who gains telepathic powers.
  • Samuel Delany's Dhalgren runs to about 800 pages.
  • Many of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt Adventures novels are this. From Treasure onward, they're routinely over 500 pages long.
  • The omnibus editions of Discworld (collecting three novels on a theme, such as three about the Lancre Witches, Rincewind, or the gods) tend to be this. Around Going Postal onward, some of the the individual novels count as well, breaking the 500-page mark. Snuff is about the same thickness as an omnibus of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic.
  • The Distinguished Cute Master has 1,286 chapters.
  • Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha) by Miguel de Cervantes is quite long, since it was originally two volumes which are now usually printed together.
  • The Dragonlance Trilogy has been combined into a single doorstopper. The Annotated Dragonlance is even worse because of all the, y'know, annotations and stuff.
  • While not as hefty as some other entries on the list, The Dream Merchant still manages to clock in a respectable 640 pages.
  • Dream of the Red Chamber, written in China during the mid-18th century by Cao Xueqin, has one hundred and twenty chapters, each of which lasting several pages. That marks the total page count at the hundreds at least, if not exceeding a thousand.
  • Duncton Wood chronicles the entire life story of a pair of moles, from their birth to their death, so it's no wonder it's around 800 pages.
  • Dune by Frank Herbert (though the second installment, Dune Messiah, is an exception). There's an omnibus edition of the first three novels, called "The Great Dune Trilogy". With appendices etc., it clocks in at a reasonable 912 pages.
    • The first book is often printed on bible-style thin paper, with a small font size. If you buy the rest of the books from the same publisher, more often than not, the first book doesn't stand out in size. Indeed, it is often at size parity with Dune Messiah and smaller than Children of Dune. Pick it up, however, and you'll be surprised at its weight.
      • Get it in large print and laugh helplessly as it tears a hole through your bag like a brick through wet tissue paper!
    • The first book was originally conceived and serialized (in Analog magazine) as two separate novels, Dune World and The Prophet of Dune. The book seamlessly combines both texts and adds a whole wad of appendices.
      • Dune Messiah (serialized in Galaxy) is actually only slightly shorter than the first two serials, but ended up being published as a standalone. Children of Dune (back to Analognote ) had much bigger installments, often leaving space for only a handful of short stories and articles.
    • According to legend, when the Dune film was being developed, the first draft of the screenplay, written by Frank Herbert himself, was the size of a phone book...
  • Earth's Children:
    • The Shelters of Stone could be at least 200 pages shorter by the judicious use of the sentence, "And Ayla introduced herself again." Every time she meets someone she has to tell her whole backstory. Another few hundred, if you'd leave out the sex scenes. But then, the books wouldn't have become the best sellers they were. You could chop a good 50 pages off of the series just by omitting all descriptions of genitals.
    • The Land of Painted Caves, the sixth and final novel in the series, would be half as long if Ayla hadn't introduced herself, explained her backstory, and explained how she got Wolf every time she met someone new, and if every cave wasn't described in minute detail despite them all being fairly similar.
  • A complete edition of Michel de Montaigne's Essays, containing essays long and short on nearly every subject, is a brick of over 1300 pages. Of special note is the essay "Apology for Raimond Sebond", which at over 70,000 words is the length of a novel.
  • Philip K. Dick's unfinished Exegesis was said to be around 8,000 pages long before he died. Eight thousand. note 
  • The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser; over 1000 pages of verse poetry. And, like Chaucer, he didn't get close to finishing it before dying; he planned 24 'books' and finished only 6 of them.
  • The Fatal Dream by Ian Hastings is 806 pages long.
  • The historical romance novel by Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber, runs to over 900 pages.
  • John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga, published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, has 872 pages.
  • From Here to Eternity, from James Jones, is over 800 pages long. Just the description of a poker game is close to 20 pages. Its famous film adaptation, however, is 118 minutes long, so not overly long.
  • Ryu Murakami's dystopian epic From The Fatherland With Love is 672 pages long.
  • Game Design Companion: A critical analysis of Wario Land 4 is a 600-page eBook that pretty much does Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • God Clads is an ongoing story that is currently around 1656 pages long or around 460 thousand words and shows no sign of stopping any time soon.
  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is 864 pages long.
  • The Gone books. While average-sized for most adult novels, at 500 to 600 pages apiece, the books are gigantic for young adult novels. They steadily decreased in length as the series drew to its conclusion, however.
  • Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell is just over 1000 pages.
  • The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek is over 700 pages long, and it's not even finished, due to Hašek's death.
  • Googol by H.D.Klein, 1056 pages (in German). Now I wonder whether the title is a lampshade...Oh, and it has a follow-up, Googolplex (but with meagre 592 pages).
  • Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels are available in omnibus form, which is in the neighbourhood of 1000 pages of novel and 150-odd of critical essays. He had planned to write seven volumes, but couldn't finish them.
  • The Great SF Stories: Each of the omnibus volumes exceeded six hundred pages; Third Series is the shortest, due to omitting five stories.
  • From Timothy Zahn's The Hand of Thrawn, Vision of the Future clocks in at 720 pages in one paperback version, though other versions and the hardcover aren't quite as pagy. Shorter than most of these, but that's the longest novel of the Star Wars Expanded Universe to date. The German version was split into two separate books.
  • Richard Bausch's Hello to the Cannibals is 840 pages long.
  • The The Heroes of Olympus books, particularly compared to similar middle grade books (and even other books by Rick Riordan). All of them are over 500 pages in hardcover and over 600 in paperback; the longest, The House of Hades, is 597 pages in hardcover. This is mainly because they juggle the POV of many different characters compared to a single characters POV. In comparison, its predecessor, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, range from about 300-400 pages depending on the edition and its successor, The Trials of Apollo, are a bit longer but still all come in under 500 pages.
  • The Honor Harrington books by David Weber. They start at 300 pages of character development, climax, cleanup (and lots of death), and spiral into 900+ page space soap operas filled with dating troubles, feudal succession, poker games and political intrigue. And that's abridged versions! Ashes of Victory, ticking at 800+ pages as it is, had the whole subplot about Esther McQueen's rebellion cut out from the draft. It was later published as a separate novella, in an anthology. The series then split into three branches, each one dealing with various subplots happening at roughly the same time. Each one a doorstopper in its own right, and the only way to know everything is to read them all.
  • Altogether, the Hyperion Cantos clocks in at over 1700 pages. It weighs 2.3 kilograms in paperback.
    • The Endymion Omnibus by Dan Simmons, which contains Endymion and its sequel The Rise of Endymion, is a few pages shy of the 1000-page mark, and definitely of doorstopper thickness.
  • Jacek Dukaj's Ice has over one thousand pages. And through most of the book the main character doesn't believe he exists. Yay.
  • Imajica, by Clive Barker, also had to be split into two volumes when released as a paperback. On the second printing. The first printing that was in one single book fairly quickly split itself into two volumes.
  • Judy Jones and William Wilson's An Incomplete Education contains 638 pages worth of everything you need to know to fake being "well-rounded."
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. 1,079 pages, including 96 pages of footnotes. Infinite indeed. And woe betide you if you skip the footnotes; important plot points occur there, so if you don’t read them and read them carefully, you’ll be hopelessly lost. (If you do read them, you will also be lost, but not hopelessly.)
  • All four books in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle series, with the final book, Inheritance, being 849 pages in hardcover. And this was after it was broken off from its first half, Brisingr, which was 748 pages long. Paolini originally wanted to publish them together, but realized that meant the book would have been over 1500 pages. Hence, Inheritance Trilogy became Inheritance Cycle.
  • The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick is 533 pages. An homage to silent movies, the novel seamlessly alternates between prose and illustrations to the point where if you skip the pictures you will not know what is going on. As a result, it is the longest book to win the Caldecott Medal (best illustrations), an award that normally goes to picture books.
  • "Jean Christophe", by French writer Romain Rolland, has ten volumes, and a total of more than 2,000 pages.
  • Jerusalem by Alan Moore is over 600,000 words and 1200 pages, there is also a 3-volume edition.
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. To the point that internet reviewers use it to simulate "Death-by-hitting-yourself-with-a-book".
  • The Joy of Cooking is one of the most famous cookbooks in America. The 75th anniversary edition is over 1000 pages long. Unlike many other cookbooks of the time, it was a much more foundational book, focused on easier, relatively quick recipes that would be appropriate for the average family. It also includes general advice on different ingredients, how to use cooking utensils, how to store foods, and other things beginner cooks would need to learn, as well as first-person conversational narration from the author (Irma Rombauer), although this was dropped in some later editions.
  • The Living Dead by George Romero and Daniel Kraus is a Zombie Apocalypse epic that covers multiple characters during a 15 year period. It is 656 pages long, with the last 20 pages being an afterword by the author detailing the creative process of writing the book.
  • The Khaavren Romances are one big homage to Alexandre Dumas, so they are naturally very long. The Viscount of Adrilankha in particular is technically a trilogy, but the chapter numbering continues between them, so that by the end you have a 3-volume, 102* -chapter epic where each third of it is at least 500 or 600 pages.
  • The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (not to be confused with the Sandman collection above) clocks in at 992 pages in its English translation.
  • The books of The Kingkiller Chronicle are extremely long. The hardcover version of The Wise Man's Fear is 994 pages long. The author, Patrick Rothfuss, mentioned in one of his blogs while revising the second book before publication he'd added 60 000 words to The Wise Man's Fear. That's as long as one regular-length novel.
  • The King's Avatar has 1,728 chapters.
  • Set aside some time if you're going to read Kushiel's Legacy- each book of the first trilogy is over 700 pages.
  • The individual Land of Oz stories written by L. Frank Baum don't qualify (they're each only about 150 pages long), but Treasury of Oz, which is an Omnibus edition of all 14 Oz novels by Baum, is about 25cm high, 18cm wide, and 4cm think. That's a book that's nearly standard A4 paper-sized and with 784 pages. And probably weighs more than most household appliances.
  • The Language of Literature (Grade 6): There's over one thousand pages in this book, not including the index and the copyright pages.
  • A Lanterna na Popa note , autobiography of Brazilian economist and politician Roberto Campos. The unwieldy '94 original release is 1417 pages long. Later editions split it in two volumes.
  • James Tyler Kent's Lectures on Homeopathic Medicine has 982 pages of debatable worth.
  • Li Zi Cheng by Yao Xue Yin is currently the longest novel written in modern Chinese. It has well over three million Chinese characters.
  • Graphic novel Lighter Than my Shadow by Katie Green is over 500 pages long, as well as having A4 pages.
  • Lord of Mysteries has 1,394 chapters and 36 extras.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , internally divided into Books I-VI and Appendices (which were adapted into The Lord of the Rings trilogy , respectively, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), has about 1000 pages. Its size, conjoined with the post-war paper shortages, was one of the factors contributing to it being Divided for Publication (split into three volumes, two "books" to each) to reduce the financial risk for the publisher. Technically, it is six books and an appendix volume. The hardcover anniversary set, which is divided into seven volumes, can actually stop a door, as can the new 1,178-page single-volume edition.
  • Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans clocks in at a solid 925 pages, and also has the benefit of being written in abstract prose that's completely incomprehensible.
  • Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series contains no novel of less than 200,000 words, which at a minimum means 600 pages. Erikson lampshades this in an author's note in the ninth book when he sarcastically notes that he is "not known for writing door-stopper tomes".
  • Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities is 1152 pages. The original German language is 2160 pages.
  • Maradonia Saga: Maradonia and the Seven Bridges is over 800 pages, and Gloria Tesch likes to brag about it, calling herself the world's youngest novelist. Too bad it'd be a lot shorter if it weren't for the huge typeface, the terrible formatting, and the padding.
  • Marienbad My Love by Mark Leach claims to be the world's longest novel, weighing in at over 100 million characters, 17 million words, over 10,000 pages and 65 pounds across 17 volumes. Even more: the novel's title is 6,700 words long. It contains a 4.4-million-letter noun, "The Holy Jah" for short, as well as a 3 million-word-long sentence.
  • Any one book of Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series is quite an intimidating sight, and the series is now seven books and counting. They're not quite as bad as they look due to the sizeable introductions, afterwards, and glossaries, but each story is still 950-1050 pages.
  • Middlemarch goes up to book VIII, and each and every section is 100+ pages long.
  • Les Misérables by Victor Hugo ranks as one of the longest novels ever made, to the point where fans refer to the unabridged version as "the Brick." It comes in at a whopping 545,925 words in the English translation, which has caused many to wonder if he was paid by the word.note 
    • In one section, Hugo describes, in lavish detail (well, lavish might not fit) a crack in the wall, through which a character looks. This description takes up at least a page and a half in the abridged version alone.
    • The unabridged version contains a 50-page essay on the battle of Waterloo. The reveal that is important to the plot appears on the last page.
    • Another essay is about Parisian Sewers, including history and network. Again, it becomes relevant later in the plot.
    • Hugo spends at least 50 pages near the beginning describing a picnic with Fantine and her friends that has no bearing on the rest of the plot.
    • The book opens with several chapters describing the life of the Bishop of Digne, all of which could have been summed up with the sentence "the Bishop was a good man". Indeed, far clearer and more succinct characterization is done in the two minutes he's onstage in the musical adaptation than in this entire section. We don't actually meet the protagonist of the story (Jean Valjean) until the end of this section, when he enters Digne (the village where the Bishop lives).
  • Moby-Dick attempted to be a lot of things about whales, including a food blog, a bestiary, a travelogue, history and oh, a story with a plot. It also delves into geography, philosophy, religion, race relations, the nature of civilization versus savagery...there are some scholars who think Melville intended the book to be an 'encyclopedia of everything he knew'. An abridged version for kids probably fits onto ten pages - that ratio should be a record for any doorstopper on this list.
  • Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur is over 900 pages, divided into 507 chapters, admittedly short ones by modern standards.
  • Tyra Banks' novel Modelland is 576 pages.
  • Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi, a fictionalized version of the life of Miyamoto Musashi, is 970 pages long, typically printed on unusually thin paper or as three separate volumes. It was originally a multi-year newspaper serial.
  • My Best Science Fiction Story: The original hardcover version clocks in at around 560 pages, depending on how you count the i - xiv pages.
  • Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft has 895 pages.
  • Nine Star Hegemon Body Art has 4,329 chapters and is still on-going.
  • Any Norton Anthology. The print is microscopic, and yet they could still be used as bludgeons. The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume 1) in paperback runs to 2518 pages of thin paper, not counting indexes and appendices.
    • The Norton Introduction to Literature: the shorter tenth edition is still 1844 pages.
  • The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus: The Omnibus itself has 592 pages, not including the introduction and copyright pages.
  • Perry Rhodan has to be the ultimate example. An on-going German science-fiction EPIC that calls itself the biggest science-fiction series for a reason. Since 1961 there's been over 2700 (in 2013) weekly novella-sized, pulp booklets released. These issues have been collected in books of about 400 pages long each. There's been over 100 of these books released and that still only covers about a third of the whole series. And those books are shortened quite a bit.
  • Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree is 830 pages. Reportedly, she's working on another book that takes place within the same universe... that will be even longer.
  • The original novel of The Princess Bride is stated in character to be William Goldman's "good bits" abridgment of a 1000-page novel.
  • Then there's Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, an exhaustive debunking of every conceivable JFK Assassination conspiracy theory that runs to a staggering 1,648 pages, plus an additional 1,000 pages worth of endnotes on an attached disc.
  • The Record of Unusual Creatures has 1,773 chapters.
  • Red Queen's War Storm is 662 pages in hardcover.
  • Release That Witch has 1,498 chapters.
  • While most of the books in The Riftwar Cycle do not qualify, the first book, Magician, had to be divided into two books, Magician: Apprentice, and Magician: Master in paperback format due to its length. And that was after the editor told the author to shorten the story by 50,000 words. The Author's Preferred Edition, which has the 50,000 words of various minor scenes put back in, definitely qualifies.
  • Ripped from a Dream: A Nightmare on Elm Street Omnibus collects the first three of Black Flame's Nightmare on Elm Street novels (Suffer the Children, Dreamspawn and Protegé). Each individual book is a little over 400 pages long, so that's a lot of Freddy (or not, in the case of Dreamspawn).
  • William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is about 1143 pages long, with the index and footnotes adding 102 more pages.
  • The Pacific Theater equivalent of Shirer is John Toland's The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, which weighs in at 954 pages in its first edition.
  • All three books in The Riyria Revelations series, clocking in at 704 pages, 816 pages, and 960 pages in paperback, due to the series having been originally planned as six e-books. Interestingly, possibly due to a different binding technique, the second and third books, despite being longer than the first, are slightly thinner than book one in paperback.
  • Romance of the Three Kingdoms typically runs to over 2300 pages.
  • Vikram Chandra's very good crime thriller epic Sacred Games is the novel equivalent of a Bollywood movie. (Over 1080 pages.)
  • The novels in Julian May's Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu (four in the former and three in the latter) are all rather long (over 400 pages each); the two books set between them, Surveillance and Metaconcert are also lengthy... and in the UK they were combined into one shockingly long volume...
  • Science Fiction Special: Each book is an Omnibus, and tends to run to high page counts:
    • Science Fiction Special 1 is made from three novels: 192 pages, 180 pages, and 175 pages respectively, totaling 547 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 2 is made from three novels: 192 pages, 192 pages, and 188 pages respectively, totaling 572 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 3 is made from three novels: 284 pages, 182 pages, and 192 pages respectively, totaling 658 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 4 is made from three novels: 190 pages, 191 pages, and 192 pages respectively, totaling 573 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 5 is made from three novels: 254 pages, 190 pages, and 191 pages respectively, totaling 635 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 7 is made from two previous Omnibuses: 447 pages and 428 pages respectively, totaling 875 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 8 is made from three novels: 156 pages, 253 pages, and 190 pages respectively, totaling 599 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 10 is made from three novels: 190 pages, 189 pages, and 159 pages respectively, totaling 538 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 11 is made from two novels and a Genre Anthology: 140 pages, 191 pages, and 280 pages respectively, totaling 611 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 12 is made from three novels: 210 pages, 235 pages, and 192 pages respectively, totaling 637 pages.
    • Science Fiction Special 43 is made from a 200-page novel and a 317-page anthology, totaling 517 pages.
  • The entire Shadowhunter Chronicles (The Mortal Instruments, The Infernal Devices, The Dark Artifices, and The Last Hours). There's no book that is less than 400 pages.
    • Special mention goes to The Dark Artifices series, whose books seem to be designed to cram as much space in a bookshelf as they can. The first two books (Lady Midnight and Lords of Shadows) are around 700 pages long, while the final one, Queen of Air and Darkness, has 912 pages, more than twice as long as the franchise's shortest book, City of Fallen Angels (432 pages).
    • The Red Scrolls of Magic, the first entry of The Eldest Curses is the only full-length novel has less than 400 pages, but it's worth noting that Cassandra Clare didn't start to regard the series as proper mainline titles until the second entry, The Lost Book of the White...which has exactly 400 pages in hardcover.
  • Ferdowsi's The Shahnameh. The abridged English prose translation by Dick Davis still manages to run close to 1,000 pages and according to the introduction the current full English verse translation is nine volumes long. Even if they're slim volumes with reasonable font sizes, that's still pretty impressive
  • Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts clocks in at 933 pages.
    • The sequel Mountain Shadow is 871 pages long.
  • The complete, collected adventures of Sherlock Holmes (four novels and five story collections, written over a period of about 40 years) amount to over 1200 very large pages of very small text.
  • The Silerian Trilogy: The first book (In Fire Forged) was over seven hundred pages, the second (The White Dragon) was over six hundred fifty pages, with the last (The Destroyer Goddess) being comparatively shorter at just under five hundred pages (hardback).
  • George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (which was adapted into Game of Thrones). The mean length of the main books is around 830 pages.
    • The third book, A Storm of Swords, has 973 pages, a record that would not be topped until eleven years later. It is so long that in many countries, the book was Divided for Publication. In France, where the publishers had made the policy since day one, it was divided into four parts.
    • The fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, is infamously long—including a sample of the eventual sequel The Winds of Winter and all the extra pages for the copyright disclosure, etc., the US edition of the book clocks in at 1056 pages. Perhaps not as long as other examples on this page, but the story behind the book as published is an interesting one. Basically, Dance is forced to end right before the climaxes of several plotlines because George R.R. Martin's editor had to cut him off before he exceeded the physical limits of a typical bookbinding, and he had already blown through his deadlines so many times that it was no longer feasible to find a way to include those climaxes and trim enough fat to stay within the page limit.
    • While the remaining books in the series, The Winds of Winter, and A Dream of Spring, have yet to be released, Martin has suggested that they will consist of up to 1,500 manuscript pages (though the page count will be different on publishing depending on editions). For those wondering, that is around the limit of how long a book can be before the printers start having problems.
    • While the spin-offs are mostly subdued in length, Fire & Blood, a prequel novel that focuses on the history of House Targaryen and would serve as basis for House of the Dragon, has 736 pages, nearly as long as A Feast for Crows.
  • The Stone Dance of the Chameleon: three books, the shortest of which is just over 700 pages.
  • The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov has 720 pages.
  • A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth. Some editions run more than 1500 pages.
  • Michelle West's epic fantasy series The Sun Sword. The shortest book in it is 687 pages, the other five range from 737-957 pages. To top it off, the longest book in the series (The Sun Sword, the sixth and final book) also has smaller font than the other five books (which didn't exactly have large font before. I'd guess it to be 8-point font.). They're only available as mass-market paperbacks so one wouldn't be much of a weapon. All six together though? Be afraid, be very afraid.
  • Sharon Penman's The Sunne in Splendour, which is at least 1000 pages long and de-villainises King Richard III, turning him into a sympathetic protagonist who adores his wife Anne Neville. It also gives readers an inside look at the shifting loyalties and political intrigue of the Wars of the Roses.
  • The Sword of Shannara was a painfully long rip off of The Lord of the Rings. The later books in the series were thankfully shorter and more original. This is because Sword of Shannara is the entire Lord of the Rings as one book with a sword instead of a ring as the Plot Device.
  • Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. Eleven of the buggers, though the last three are a lot shorter than the others. The second one takes the cake; it can clock in at just shy of 1,000 pages, and some editions go well over.
  • The Tale of Genji. One copy is 1090 pages long, with thin paper, small type and the occasional illustration. Its length varies by language and translator, but one copy is a set of 2 doorstoppers in small print.
  • Richard Evans' The Third Reich trilogy has collective 2576 pages in three volumes.
  • Aidan Chambers' novel This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn tops out at 808 pages, a colossus of a young adult novel.
  • Ian Irvine's The Three Worlds Cycle. The first book alone, A Shadow on the Glass, is over 600 pages long, and the rest of the series doesn't let up either in terms of size. As of this post being written, the series stands at eleven books of roughly equal length, with at least three more planned.
  • Most of the Throne of Glass books are surprisingly long for a young adult series. It's not applicable to the first two books and the prequel (the latter of which is made up of short stories), which are all under 500 pages long. From Heir of Fire onwards, though, the page count creeps increasingly higher, generally falling between 500 and 700 pages. The final book, Kingdom of Ashes, is a real whopper, being nearly 1000 pages long.
  • The novel A Time to Kill by John Grisham is 672 pages long.
  • The Trouble's Tales series is probably the closest thing the Furry Fandom has to an original literary epic, with the individual chapters alone being at long as most novels, and with good reason! One of the advertising taglines for it accurately states that the series has everything, and by "everything" we do mean everything. (Mostly every kind of sex ever conceived by mankind, and several conceived by wombats, but also a fair dose of action and sci-fi.) Luckily, every single story is available to read for free online, and can only be bought in physical form via an online retailer who makes them one at a time — because, well, it's huge!
  • Although the books are average in length individually, the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, combining all the novels, is 832 pages long.
  • Don DeLillo's only long novel Underworld (1997) is extremely long, clocking at 827 pages. Even several highbrow critics agree that it's too long.
  • The complete printed text of Varney the Vampire, compiling a 220-chapter "penny dreadful" serial from the early 1800s, runs on (and on and on) for some 868 double-column pages. A recent, three-volume paperback release of it consists of a total of 1440 very large pages.
  • Video Hound Golden Movie Retriever, which as of 2021 is still updated annually, includes not only thousands of reviews but indexes them all by cast members, genre, location, and many other categories. The 2021 edition runs to 2157 pages.
  • Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, famously so. In fact, the adjective "tolstoy"note  has become the Russian language's word for a Door Stopper-y book. Late-19th century Russian authors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were paid by the page, hence the length of their works. It's also worth noting that many of these books were published in serial installments, so the authors were not thinking in terms of one collected volume when the stories were written.
    • This is the subject of a joke from the Black Dog Games Factory game Human Occupied Landfill. The Dickens Boys (killer librarians) wear "War and Peace armour" because "nothing can get through War and Peace".
    • The book's name directly translates to "Guerre et Paix" in French, which just happens to be a homonym for "not very thick" ("guère épais"). The irony too is very thick. Presumably this is why it's usually titled "La guerre et la paix".
  • The appropriately titled Warriors Super Editions. The shortest Super Edition is 425 pages, and the rest are around 500. A total of eleven have been released as of September 2018.
  • Every book in Wars of Light and Shadow qualifies, but special honor has to go to the second book, Ships of Merior. That one had to be divided into two volumes when released in paperback format, entitled Ships of Merior and Warhosts of Vastmark.
  • Water Margin is over 2000 pages in paperback. A four-volume edition weighs more than a kilogram.
  • Way of Choices has 1,184 chapters.
  • The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish is 560 pages long, with some versions of the novel going over 600.
  • We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen has 688 pages.
  • Whateley Universe: The series has a bit over 9 million words for the first year of Generation 1 alone, close to 14 million words total. The Phase story "Ayla and the Birthday Brawl" is long (370,868 words).
  • Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series is a sprawling epic of doorstoppers, 14 in all, ranging from 530 to 900 pages each. In all, the series has about 11,500 pages and 4.3 million words, not counting the relatively short ("only" 350 page) standalone prequel. The series was supposed to be 12 books long, with Jordan promising that the 12th would be his last even if it had to come with its own library cart, but after Jordan’s death, fellow Doorstopper author Brandon Sanderson had to take his notes for the final book and split them into three 8-900 page novels.
  • Zettel's Traum by Arno Schmidt, Bottom's Dream in English translation, is more than 1,000,000 words and has 1334 (1496 in translation) pages in folio format. It weighs over 13 pounds.

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