The Stars of The 1,000 Page Club

While we live in an era where a large portion of the population likely dedicates a vast majority of their leisurely reading time glossing over 140 character snippets from friends, family, and celebrities via Twitter, there is an alternative for brave individuals, the novel.
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While we live in an era where a large portion of the population likely dedicates a vast majority of their leisurely reading time glossing over 140 character snippets from friends, family, and celebrities via Twitter, there is an alternative for brave individuals, the novel. The debate of whether people actually read novels anymore is overplayed, and stated to extremes at times. However, the quality of the novels that people are reading is definitely subject for interpretation. Normally, a novel for the masses is a breezy three to four hundred page romp with short chapters designed to retain the attention of readers that have been so conditioned to desire a payoff instantaneously due to the ease of getting information in our technologically advanced society. Concentrating on a novel can sometimes be a struggle, but what wading through a long novel? Or a 1,000 page novel? In the publishing industry, novels that exit out of the hundreds of pages are somewhat of an anomaly since they are hard to get published in the first place unless the writer is very established, and who has time for that big of a novel anyways? For those that are interested in breathtaking tales that take serious dedication to finish, here are three of the very best novels that top 1,000 pages and are well worth your precious reading time. In no particular order:

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

When David Foster Wallace gave his editor, Michael Pietsch the original 1,600-page manuscript for what would become Wallace's defining work, Pietsch read two hundred before telling Wallace's agent that he wanted to publish the book more than he wanted to breathe. They butted heads during the editing process and while Wallace ended making some cuts, he strategically made it seem as if eliminated more text than in reality. While the actual story clocks in at just under the 1,000 mark, Wallace implemented one of the most difficult things to do in the construct of a novel: footnotes. Regularly reserved for articles written by scholars and in school textbooks, Infinite Jest contains nearly two hundred pages of detailed footnotes that are also noticeably smaller in font size than within the story. The effect of this creative approach to the aspects of a novel is one of the most daunting reading experiences available if the reader actually takes the time to refer to each footnote when working through the already hefty tome. Make no mistake though, the 1997 bestseller which probably stands as one of the most purchased books that is failed to be finished by readers, is worth the immense time commitment. Reading Wallace will make you smarter, make you think more outside the box, and give you one of the most breathtaking reading experiences available. In the over 500,000 words, Wallace uses an excess of 20,000 unique words which is mind boggling when thinking about an average person's vocabulary. Infinite Jest is a modern classic from the most brilliant writer of his generation. Wallace's untimely death was a tragedy for the literary world, but his mark was made with all of his writing from his short stories to essays to his three jaw dropping novels. No literary novel will ever be quite like Infinite Jest, and it cannot be praised enough.

The Stand by Stephen King

Stephen King was already very successful by the time his fourth novel (fifth if you count him writing as Richard Bachman) was released in 1978. Even with his commercial acclaim, he was not allowed to publish The Stand in its original form, because of printing costs, bookstores being reluctant to carry such a large book, and of course, the potential that it would be a flop. In hindsight we can conclude that King could have put out a 2000 page novel and it would have sold well. At that time though, it was released as a roughly eight hundred page post-apocalyptic epic. By 1990, he was one of the most read novelists of all time, and The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition hit shelves restoring the 150,000 words that were eliminated during the initial release. The remarkable part about that is that most novels are actually under 150,000 words by themselves, sometimes even half of that number. King cut novel length content from his work in order for it to see publication. The full edition is the one to read though, coming in just shy of 1,200 pages, The Stand is Stephen King's best novel and for a man with fifty four novels to his name with very few duds in the bunch, that is a testament to its quality. It was David Foster Wallace's second favorite novel of all time proving that it touched even the most literary of writers. There are ordinary genre fiction writers and then there is Stephen King. The Stand is arguably the best work of genre fiction of all time. When you get to the end of the novel, you will be wishing that it was longer which is the highest compliment that can be given to a book of its length.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

I may be cheating in a sense with this one since Proust's seven volume work was released over the span of fourteen years in France starting at the onset of the first World War, but even the if the Guinness World Records recognizes it as the longest of all time then I think it is a fair inclusion. Of course, the over 3,000 page novel had to be split into volumes for reasons such as not being able to bind a book that large, and no one would read a novel of that length in one volume, especially if it is complex and dense. Over the years we have received multiple translations of Proust's classic as it was once known as Remembrance of Things Past before being translated again to its proper name: In Search of Lost Time. If people have been dedicated enough to translate 3,000 pages into English then certainly we can dedicate ourselves to reading through each of the seven volumes. By no means is Proust's work simple, and each page is likely to take two or times as long to read and digest than a more approachable work. So why should you dedicate what will likely be months, maybe even years of your life to reading Marcel Proust's twentieth century classic? To be blunt, In Search of Lost Time is the most thought provoking and rewarding work of literature of all time. Its length is a virtue because by the time you finish the final volume, your perception on the world around you will undoubtedly change. Proust does this by delivering a time consuming narrative that will penetrate into your mind and opening doors to parts of your brain that were previously untouched.

The trio of Wallace, King and Proust may not seem very related to one another, but what they do have in common is their ability to tell a large, moving story that is well worth the time required to reach the end. Their styles and themes differ, but the quality of the work is constant, and over 1,000 pages of quality is a rare and extraordinary feat.

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