The Bricks

This post is not about the BRICs coalition (though I certainly have some choice thoughts on how unhelpful they have been collectively during the invasion of Ukraine), but about books (or book series) that are very long and are (to many readers) intimidating.  Some people call them door-stoppers.

I've gotten through quite a number of them and enjoyed some very much.  Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy is one that probably should not be overlooked, even though it has fallen somewhat out of fashion.  I did struggle a fair bit with Mann's The Magic Mountain and especially Musil's The Man without Qualities.  The grand-daddy of them all, of course, is Proust, which I've written about already.  And in fact, I've even written previously about my thoughts on the next mega-book to read.  Since that post, I did get through The Magic Mountain and reread Crime and Punishment and Don Quixote and even Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, but I did not make as much progress as I wanted or had hoped on a few others.  

I was wavering on going to Detroit in a couple of weeks, esp. after it looked like the fed. govt. was about to shut down, making the border guards all cranky and adding a lot of time to the customs queues, but now there is a 45 day reprieve, so I think I'll just go ahead and do it.  On this trip, I think I'll take Fante's The Bandini Quartet ✓.  On a scheduled mid. Nov. trip to Montreal, I plan to take Perec's Life, A User's Manual ✓.  So I fully expect to be through these two before December, which would be great. 

I guess I'll just list the rest of them here*:
Atwood MaddAdam trilogy
Canetti Memoirs (The Tongue Set Free/The Torch in My Ear/The Play of the Eyes)
Doblin Berlin Alexanderplatz
Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov (this would be a rereading)
Durrell The Alexandria Quartet (ditto)
Frederick Exley A Fan's Notes & Pages From a Cold Island & Last Notes From Home
James Farrell Studs Lonigan trilogy 
Faulkner The Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet/The Town/The Mansion)
Fontane Before the Storm
Richard Ford The Bascombe trilogy & Let Me Frank with You & Be Mine
Leon Forrest Divine Days
Carlos Fuentes Terra Nostra
Gaddis The Recognitions
Grossman Stalingrad & Life and Fate
Hugo Les Miserables
Lessing The Children of Violence series
Mann Buddenbrooks
Olivia Manning The Balkan Trilogy
Olivia Manning The Levant Trilogy
Joseph McElroy Women and Men
A. Munif The Cities of Salt Trilogy**
Alvaro Mutis The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (NYRB)
Anais Nin Cities of the Interior
Pynchon Against the Day
Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow (potential reread)
Philip Roth Nemeses (LOA) (Everyman/Indignation/The Humbling/Nemesis)
Philip Roth The Zukerman Trilogy (rereading) & Exit Ghost
Richard Russo The Sully Trilogy (Nobody's Fool/Everybody's Fool/Somebody's Fool)
Tolstoy War and Peace
Trollope The Barsetshire series
Trollope He Knew He Was Right
Waugh The Sword of Honour trilogy

Looking at the list, it is still certainly a daunting one, but some books will be more entertaining than others, and some will be fairly easy, if long, reads; I think I have finally reached the point where I can drop books, even "must-read-before-one-dies" books, more readily, so that may help as well.  I suspect the two most daunting for me are Les Miserables and War and Peace.  One notable book not on the list is Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.†  I may listen to this one day but am just not sure I want to attempt to read the book, but I reserve the right to change my mind.  

I'm not going to add all the many non-fiction books that should perhaps be on this list, but I will mention that I hope to finally get through Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (one day) and de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (hopefully before it is extinguished) and The Journals of Lewis and Clark.  I guess I should note that I literally used Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (NYRB) as an actual door stop for a while.  It's pretty close to the bottom of the list, but I would like to skim through it one of these days.

* I could probably add every novel by Dickens to the list, but I will refrain.

** I often forget about this one, which I actually own, but now that I have reminded myself of it, I will try to make a push to read it (and the Mutis) at some point in 2024.

† I also have not added Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, which I have little desire to read at the moment, but of course that may change in the future.