When January rolls around, I always spend the first half of the month thinking about my reading goals for the year. I inevitably sign up for way too many reading challenges on The StoryGraph app and this year is no exception. One thing I did this year, however, was to lower my ‘total books read’ goal to leave space for reading some hefty books.
A couple years ago I had a very high ‘total-books-read’ goal, but I also wanted to read “Les Miserables” and those two goals were diametrically opposed. I did manage to read Les Mis, but I did not reach my goal of 150 books.
This year I have left room in my book total to account for reading some high page-count books, such as “The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Priory of the Orange Tree” and “A Brief History of Seven Killings” amongst others that I’m sure to discover as the year rolls on.
Marisa Neyenhuis
One trick I’ve found that can be helpful when reading big books is to listen to the audiobook. There are folks out there that say listening to audiobooks doesn’t count as reading, but they are wrong. You are still consuming the author’s words and you can do it while driving, gardening, walking the dog, cleaning the house, crafting, etc. When trying to incorporate a 500-plus page book into your life, an audiobook can be the perfect solution. In honor of big books, I have included some of my favorite big books below.
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“The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray was one of those books that I started on a Friday and barely did anything but read for the entire weekend. I’ve talked about this one in previous columns, so I won’t go into great detail except to say that this one has fantastic characters and an ending that will make you gasp. It is well worth the 656 pages.
“Pay As You Go” by Eskor David Johnson was one of my favorite books of 2024. This 500-page book was like if Italo Calvino and David Foster Wallace had a literary baby. It was absurd and compelling and I really enjoyed it. This novel follows Slide, a barber who moves to the city of Polis. Slide spends the story bouncing from apartment to fold-out couch to disaster-relief tent in search of a place to call his own and in this search he runs into some ridiculous characters.
“The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBoise” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was an audiobook for me. I listened to this one every chance I got and the 30 hours of the audiobook flew by. This is a family epic that follows the main character, Ailey Pearl Garfield, as she delves into her family history and uncovers the shocking tales of her Indigenous, white and Black ancestors, all while navigating her modern life and figuring out her place in the world. I was so sad when this book was over and I didn’t have Ailey and her ancestors to accompany me through my day any longer.
One book that’s hard to recommend, but is a truly epic big book is “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. This one took me three tries to get past page 150, but once I did, I was hooked. This book is over 1000 pages and full of endnotes that seem to have no point. It’s confusing and frustrating, but somehow, when you get to the end, it’s all worth it.
For nonfiction fans, I highly recommend “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson. This 640-page tome follows three individuals as they migrate from the American South to the American North and West in the Great Migration that spanned the 1910’s through the 1970’s. This book follows Ida Mae Gladney who left her sharecropping life in Mississippi in 1937 to make a life in Chicago, George Starling who fled Florida for Harlem in 1945 and Robert Foster who left Louisiana in 1953 and eventually became a doctor in California, where he was the personal physician to Ray Charles. I learned so much in this book that was never covered in my American history class in the late ‘90s and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book to anyone.
I hope you’re able to fit at least one big book into your 2025 reading year and don’t forget that audiobooks count!
This post was originally published on here
