Next mega-book?

I'm still a bit drained from getting through Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  That was an extremely long slog, particularly the last 150 pages.  It didn't help that I knew there was no meaningful ending, but it sort of dissolved into a variety of possible directions!

Perhaps I should focus on shorter books for a while.  One author that I haven't really investigated as much as I should is the acid-penned Evelyn Waugh, so maybe I'll grab one of his short novels.

Nonetheless, I have made quite major strides in getting through the rarefied parts of the canon.  I'm certainly the only person I know that has managed to read Joyce's Ulysses (twice!), Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  Quite the trifecta...

That's not to say that some other people have done so.  While I wasn't that interested (or in fact interested at all) in the artworks in the exhibit focusing on Gregg Bordowitz at the Art Institute, I was interested that they included an entire wall of bookcases from his personal library.  I saw we had fairly similar tastes, at least in keeping "important" books.  He had the same edition of Musil and Proust, though he had the "corrected" Ulysses, which I've always felt was a mistake.  He also had a slightly different edition of Montaigne's Essays, speaking of another major milestone I've gotten around to recently.  And a one-volume set of Canetti's Memoirs.  In fact, there was a huge overlap between his shelves and mine, though I had more Canadian authors, as well as authors from South America (I didn't see Garcia Marquez for instance) as well as the obscure Russian writers that NYRB has been promoting.  Naturally, I didn't have nearly as many books on art nor on history or philosophy (as that is all stored in the basement).

Grossman's Stalingrad has just been shipped to me, and I am certainly tempted to read that along with Life and Fate, though I think I probably should read War and Peace beforehand, and maybe Fontane's Before the Storm, but then this becomes a many month process, and I really ought to wait for poorer weather when I am back on the TTC on a routine basis. 

In terms of stand-alone mega-novels, I could read the new(ish) translation of Don Quixote, Fuentes's Terra Nostra, Leon Forrest's Divine Days, Gaddis's The Recognitions, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, Murakami's Kafka on the Shore or Perec's Life: A User's Manual (to say nothing of the long shelf of Dickens...).  If I complicate things even more by adding in multi-book series, that would include Canetti's Memoirs, Fante's The Bandini Quartet and rereading Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  While I do hope to get through all of these in the next five years or so (though maybe not all of the Dickens...), I think the ones that are calling the strongest are Terra Nostra, Life: A User's Manual and Kafka on the Shore.  Maybe I should just roll the dice to decide what to bring along on the next long train ride.