What's the Heaviest Book You've Loved and Finished?

[NotQuiteCockney]

For me, it's Infinite Jest. I loved loved loved it, all 8 gazillion pages of teeny tiny footnotes about tennis.

I'm debating starting up with Gravity's Rainbow, or maybe Mason & Dixon again. I loved what bits of Gravity's Rainbow I got through, but I didn't get through much.

Vikram Seth Soph?
Respect - I found that grindingly unreadable
I really wanted to be able to say I'd read it but coudn't...

i was going to say A Suitable Boy, too. Mind you i intend to re-read it and can't quite bring myself too.

Oh yes - I read a Suitable Boy too, and enjoyed it. Managed to finish War and Peace, but definitely didn't enjoy it. Love Anna Karenina and Vanity Fair. Also Lord of the Rings (I first read it age about 13 too, Bink.

What counts as heavy?
Does it count if something was written 150/250 years ago as light entertainment (Dickens/Fielding)?
Or if something is modern and highly theoretical but so well written that you whizz through it?
Or does heavy just mean boring in which case doesn't that mean you don't love it? [confused emoticon]

Heavy means heavy!

No idea, really.

Big, complicated, but engrossing, I guess.

Personally, I don't like old literature, so am not impressed by Dickens etc.

Oh, I quite liked everything by Neil Stephenson, and the latest trilogy (a historical novel with Isaac Newton etc in it) certainly counted as heavy in some sense, but was really just a rollicking adventure.

no-one else gone for heavy in the sense of being about horrific things you know to be true then? if heavy is serious, important, then don't these have a massive lead? Eichmann in Jerusalem is another one (that, yet again, I can't really count cos I haven't read it all) but it's terrifying.

'Heaviest' the works of St Augustine or Kant, HEAVIEST the Poisonwood Bible as my hand ached but LOVED it. Am very impressed with all you Proustians...

6War and Peace^, definitely.

St Augustine's City of God is huge (nearly 1100)page in the Penguin translation, but surprisingly readable.

So much for me coming over all academic with the italics, then

Also space bar not working well atm. (I blame all the biscuit crumbs down there!)

'If this is a man'. quite a short piece, but very moving - I must admit I only read it as it was a book group choice, but it did impact me, the horror described in such a matter of fact way.

Finegan's Wake - but that was at university and not by choice.
I love and re-read War and Peace and Vanity Fair.

Foucault's Pendulum in hardback, also loved but not perhaps as much as the woman who came up to me when I was reading it on a train, clasped my hand, looked into my eyes and said it was the best book I would ever read. I remember she was exquisitely groomed, Italian and, as I then thought, middle-aged but in fact the age that I am now.

The physical heaviest was a hardback copy of Gone with the Wind that belonged to my mother.

My favourite books are the Flashman ones though. Neither heavy nor heavy but I like!

I read every word of all 6 volumes of Winston Churchill's History of the Second World War, and several others by and about Churchill.

I gave up on Vol 2 of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, and Proust. I have read Les Liaisons Dangereuses (in English - sorry NQC), Tristram Shandy, A Suitable Boy etc. There are several heavyweight hardbacks that I have started and put aside, e.g. Alan Bennett. I really only read on the underground to and from work, and heavy books are a pain to carry around.

clarkKent - I loved Dangerous Liaisons (the translated version), but Tristram Shandy is one book that I actually haven't managed to finish. Just couldn't do it. And I don't think there are any other books I can say that about: I'll continue to plough through things with metaphorical gritted teeth even if I'm not enjoying them.

Jackie, I really enjoyed it too. That was years before the stage production/films came out - I think my brother was studying it in French for A levels, and I borrowed his English language text.

I would suggest "The Autumn of the Middle Ages" by Johan Huizinga. It is an incredible book by an historian on several aspects of ordinary life at the end of the Middle Ages -love, war, etc.-, with anecdotes from chronicles of the period. I expected to hate it, instead it fascinates me.

I hated Infinite Jest, but made myself finish it!

Does Midnight's Children count? Is one of my all-time favourites, but I did find it hard going at the beginning.

I have nothing against other people reading French works in translation! I read Spanish stuff in translation (although I don't think GG Marquez is heavy at all! I love him, and find him quite light, really). The no French in translation rule only applies to me! (I wouldn't read English books in French, either, come to think of it ...)

Lots of interesting-sounding books in here. VIF, why did you hate Infinite Jest?

Mumj06, have you also read Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie's fabulous Montaillou (in translation in Penguin). Deeply moving book of eyewitness accounts of life in a French mountain village at the time of the Cathars.

expat - impressed by Les Miz in french, my french isn't that good. I know some things get lost in translation like the whole 'horns & woods' pun in Dangerous Liaisons, should try a bit harder really I suppose.

Most of the Dickens ones - Our Mutual Friend. Loved Brothers Karamazov but had to keep turning back for the Russian Names . Vol de Nuit - St. Exupery. Camus - La Peste.

Alibaldi, I like plague books - Camus, Daniel Defoe. Never really liked Dickens, nor many Russians. Would The Master and Margerita qualify for this list (if I had loved it)? I agree with NQC that Marquez is light.

has anyone mentioned A SUitable Boy?
I love it love it love it love it
and have read it at least 10 times, though it weighs a ton

Oh, I liked the Master and Margerita. But I think it's like Kobo Abe, harder going for foreigners than natives, as we don't really "get" the humour.

I didn't think it was actually hard going, though.

I'll have to try more Russians, I really didn't mind Anna Karenina, at least not in the new translation.