Twenty-six very long books worth the time

Boris Kachka is the books editor for New York magazine and the author of Hothouse and Becoming a Veterinarian. At Vulture.com he tagged twenty-six very long books worth the time they’ll take to read, including:

Middlemarch, by George Eliot (1872, 880 pp.)

Eliot was a world-builder in the classic sense; her fictional Middlemarch is an English town like many others, exemplary of bourgeois mores and the site of many parallel plots. The epic is made ordinary, and vice versa.

Learn about the other books on the list.

Middlemarch also made Mary Gordon's list of ten desert island books, Kirsty Gunn's top ten list of books about unrequited love, Jeff Somers's top five memorable books set on New Year’s Eve (and Day), Lauren Groff's list of six favorite portrayals of marriage in literature, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best bankers in literature, ten of the best marital rows, ten of the best examples of unrequited love, ten of the best funerals in literature, and ten of the best deathbed scenes in literature. It is among Emrys Westacott's five top books on philosophy & everyday living, Selma Dabbagh's top 10 stories of reluctant revolutionaries, Philip Pullman's six best books, Rebecca Goldstein's five best of novels of ideas, Tina Brown's five best books on reputation, Elizabeth Kostova favorite books, and Miss Manners' favorite novels. John Banville and Nick Hornby have not read it.

--Marshal Zeringue