I usually don't go over 400 pages because I know that I'm likely to give up, more because I can't resist starting something new than out of dissatisfaction with the current read.
That said, I struggled through Middlemarch, but can't remember a word of it, and flew through Moby Dick, which is surely one of the greatest novels ever written.

I have Infinite Jest at home waiting for me, looming on my shelf, daring me to take it down and crack its spine. But Im so very afraid. Seriously big book. Is it worth it ? Anyone ?

is a serious commitment which I will hesitate to do again.

Neal Stephenson has written a trilogy of books called The Baroque Cycle - each one is well over 800 pages. I gave up after the second one.

Stephen King's IT is well worth the thousand or so pages.

"I read a book once. Green, it was"

These things sorta get stuck in my head...

"Remembrance of Things Past" came in three thumping great volumes , each over 1,000 pages. I was reading between college years, but I had got to about 100 pages into the third volume when I had to return to full time education.

I was enjoying it too ! But somehow I suspect won't be starting it again unless I find myself detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure.

Every 4 or 5 years I put aside a summer to re-read it from soup to nuts (or, for those who know the book - from brazier to explosions)

Yes definitely worth it one of the greatest ever books

I had to read this as an undergrad, and I needed a few attempts to get to the end and get some sort of basic, exam question attempting understanding out of it. Not half the book that the mighty "Count of Monte Cristo" is. If you're a real gluton for punishment you should give the complete d'Artagnan Romances a go. It will take you a while though.

Currently halfway through this 983 page fictional memoir of an SS Officer, after a week and a half, and I'm not on holiday. By turns it is compelling, repellant, horrifying, hugely informative, deeply disturbing and even, in places, dull. If ever a book needed a better editor this is it. But it's a stunning achievement, especially for a writer (Jonathan Littell) on only his second novel.

I don't think I've tackled anything over 1,000 pages, but I have read "Gravity's Rainbow", "V" and "Bleak House", which put me off Dickens for life, so far.

cormac mcarthy's 'border trilogy'

technically three novels, but i bought them in one edition, and the page numbers go up to 1037, so i'm counting it.

worth it?

oh yes.

word of warning though - much of the dialogue is in spanish, with no translation. my rusty grasp of the language got me through, but i lived there for three years. could piss some people off if they bought it and realised that much of the dialogue is impossible to understand.

if three novels in one don't count, then John Fowles The Magus is 676 pages.

worth it?

oh yes.

re dickens comments above - great expectations beats all of them imo, and it's shorter than most.

I just finished Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Self-explanatory. really. Except that it covers the history of nuclear science from the beginning of the 20th century, including biographies of all the major scientists, plus the lead up to the war, plus the politics behind the implementation and use of the bomb. It's hugely engrossing, but you have to take it slowly (10 pages at a time). Pages ? 700, I think...

He did a sequel (!). Dark Sun. About the hydrogen bomb. I'm waiting for a suitably long holiday to start that...

When is the album by Infinite Jest coming out?

I enjoyed it, once I'd got a handle on all the characters, which didn't happen overnight. It took me a few months to read the first thousand pages but it was downhill after that and I knocked off the last 500 in a couple of weeks. If that makes it sound like a trial of strength rather than a book it's because I don't have Tolstoy's command of language.

I've also 'done' Ulysses. That took a while. Every single word carries so much meaning and is so carefully chosen it's more like reading a poem than a novel. You can't switch off for a moment. 900 pages of intellectual effort required and I found I could often only manage 10 pages at a time. It is good though yes I mean yes I'm glad I read it yes.

I've only got Finnegan's Wake left to go in the Joyce canon but that's currently looking like one of my "after I've retired" projects - along with learning the Uillean Pipes and clearing out the loft.

Currently re-reading, after about 20 years, Philip Norman's fantastic 'Shout' (great title as well, incidentally). Part of a rather good 'rock music' paperback box set (available from a certain supermarket that dare not speak its name in polite society) I was given as a present by the GLW recently. Norman makes it clear he is a 'John' rather than a 'Paul' person, and that's fine, if we must take sides. Just wondering whether to invest in his 'John Lennon - The Life'. My initial impression is that it is a bit weighty, given that it dwarfs 'Shout' - about the whole band after all. Any recommendations?

Perhaps it was because I was reading for my degree, and not under my own steam, but I found this utterly tedious. Same with all the Joyce I've read, really, I just don't like his writing at all.

A great book once you get into it and well worth reading despite whatever flaws it may have.

**MINI-SPOILER**
Just a shame the ending is silly. It's a forensic dissection of several social worlds written by a scrupulous reporter who researches every word he writes. And yet it ends with someone creating their own religion? A weird, out of nowhere silly ending in my opinion.

which is substantial, and American tabloid by James Elroy.
I must admit to not liking long books preferring a series of short ones. A book has to be gripping to maintain my interest I have never really held with the idea of having ploughing through hundreds of pages to get to the good stuff. It's all a bit "you can't have your pudding until you've eaten all your sprouts".

Also as I read on transport and late at night so slow evolving pages aren't easy to stay with, this is all probably my loss.
Do people have more than one book on the go at a time my dad does this I can't hold all the plots in mind at once?

A plain terrifying 1500 or so pages that actually zip along. I read it while travelling in Mexico a few years back and the story was so vivid that sometimes when I looked up from a particularly long stint of reading, I'd be genuinely confused about which country I was in.

Would utterly recommend it - you can buy it in 3 volumes if you want to make it easier. The guardian is reporting today that he's working on a sequel: http://tinyurl.com/lzyaue

I am surprised that no one has mentioned Lord of the Rings.

I speed read War & Peace.

It's about some Russians.

- due to my inability to read more than a paragraph without falling asleep. Even Ian McEwan takes me months to get through.

I have read The Lord Of the Rings a few times, and love it. The longest non-fiction book I've read is the Penguin History of the world by JM Roberts. A magisterial work, about the same length as LOTR, probably the only thing the two have in common.

There are those Patrick O'Brian obsessives who argue, not without some reason, that the Aubrey/Maturin novels could be regarded as one long novel, in 20 parts. In that case, having read the first ten, I could say I'm halfway through a novel of more than 6,000 pages!

several times. It's not the easiest read in the world, with a very dense non-linear narrative and full to the gunwales with 70's trippy, far-out drug references, very weird sex scenes, spectral Nazi ghost armies and the biggest conspiracy theory in the history of the world. And apart from its own footnotes, it also ties into the Principia Discordia.

Some may find it unreadable, though I thought it was a riot

I also read Stephen King's It, which manages around 1100 pages, I think, and is better than it has any real right to be.

[it has just occured to be that, given my screen name, this must look ever so slightly suspicious. Well, the two are not entirely unconnected, though the connection is not as unsubtle as one may think]

It's a hefty tome of some 900 pages (I think) and hugely rewarding.
But, it's the first 100 or so pages which really steal the show with a brilliant fictionalisation of the 1951 baseball play-off game starring Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, J Edgar Hoover and a load of civilians.
You could put it down at page 97 blown away and not lose out on anything.

Shogun is the longest book I´ve ever read and also one of my all time favourites. I can´t seem to find it right now, but I thinks it was more than 1000 pages. Considering that I was 19 at the time I´m sure it made me proud.

The development of the story is great and it´s one of those books you really live inside of while you read it. Seem to recall I went for some 250 pages a day to try to keep up with the series that was on telly the same week I read it.

Don´t think I got much else done that week...

Recommended read and/or watch if you like history, Japan, romance, character development, chopped off heads or just a great adventure in general.

Lord Of the Rings - loved it as a teenager, too scared to spoil the memories and read it again.

Ulysses - infuriating, difficult, annoying in places. Extremely funny in others. Favorite quote - "A finer man never shat on shamrock."

War and Peace - Really loved it, blew me away, took me ages to read.
Anna Karenina - Ditto.

Moby Dick - vivid as hell, visionary, poetic, pressed it onto people afterwards.

Middlemarch - used to think all 19th Century English novels were crap. This changed my mind.

The Border Trilogy - ground to a halt half way through The Crossing as my brain was hurting and all the Spanish was confusing.

Bleak House - couldn't finish this. I suspect the problem lies with me and not the book.

Pillars Of the Earth - A lot of fun, genuinely galloped through it. Who'd have thunk a book about building a cathedral could be enjoyable?

Cryptonomicom- unsure about this. Seemed padded out, ended up being a fairly straightforward treasure hunt story, didn't think it justified 900 pages.

Gravity's Rainbow- bewildering stuff, understood not a word, failed to finish it.

By the late great Chilean Roberto Bolano. It's immense but approachable, divided as it is into five connected but fairly discrete parts. Don't be thrown by the title, it's not some future dystopian thing. It's completely contemporary and completely brilliant.

Don Quixote. Somewhere round 1,000 pages but mostly very readable, and genuinely funny in places. Some of the contemporaneous morality is quite shocking, though: if you managed to persuade/force a woman to sleep with you, she'd then have to marry you.

The Lives & Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The first post-modern novel. It IS hard-going in places - the humour is egregiously arcane (and archaic) – but it's also a lot of fun.

eek, not only have I read the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon both twice each but I even waded my way through his latest doorstop Anathem (which sounds like it could be anathema to many people out there!) - I do recommend it though and the Baroque stuff is very entertaining even though it does feel pretty educational at times (it gets better the second time around, trust me)

I read War & Peace because I thought I should do it at least once but found I was skipping huge bits of the "war" sections (rather like getting bored with all the "faerie" footnotes in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell)

...I have often thought about , but have never actually opened , Anthony Powell's " A Dance To The Music Of Time " series .
Not actually all that long here , but I once had a " most complete English translation ever " of de Toqueville's " Democracy In America " , but it got stolen before I finished it !