# The longest its ever taken you to finish a book?



## Jackal Lantern Books (Aug 30, 2011)

I had an interesting conversation with a friend earlier today and it got me to thinking. She had this book she had been trying to finish reading for over 10 years! Now to her credit, this was not just your typical 80-90 thousand word fiction novel, it was a very long philosophical story. And she did finally finish and told me she was glad that she had done it, as it felt like a very long project that was now finished. Did she learn anything from it? Not really... but she felt this drive to finish it, after spending so many years trying.  

I cannot top her 10 years, but I can say that I did take well over a year to read a book once, which seems pathetic as I can usually read a book in a day, depending on my schedule. The book I had trouble with was Brisingr, part of the Inheritance Series. I had read the first 2 books and liked the series, not as much as others, but enough to want to read the next, and I definitely felt invested after the first 2. However, every time I started to read Brisingr I just couldn't get passed the 1st chapter. It felt bogged down and heavy to me. Almost painful to read. I did, after many attempts, make it a few chapters in and then let it sit for about 6 months or so before picking it up again. I guess I was determined to read it because I had actually gone out and bought the hard cover the first week it was published, and I did care about the characters enough that I did want to know what happened to them. 

I don't know as I can honestly say I finished it, even though I did read the final pages...  as I skipped a few pages here and there that just felt labored to read and bogged down with detail. I really wanted to enjoy it, but I just couldn't force myself to. 

But I am curious now as to who else has taken a really long time to read a book, but actually did complete it, and how you felt about it after. Was it worth it? Do you feel like you wasted many hours you can't get back? What drove you to finish it?


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## Rook (Sep 6, 2011)

I spent a year nibbling away at the Mahabharata... the version I read was abridged to only 1,000 pages (the original is many times longer). But your friend has me beat-- it takes true patience to read something for a decade!


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## Geoffrey (Jun 20, 2009)

I was supposed to read _Paradise Lost_ in 1986 for one of my English classes and still haven't finished it .... does that count?


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## Todd Young (May 2, 2011)

I had to study Middlemarch and somehow got through only reading about a quarter of the book. A year or two later I read the whole thing and really enjoyed it.


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## Sean Patrick Fox (Dec 3, 2011)

Geoffrey said:


> I was supposed to read _Paradise Lost_ in 1986 for one of my English classes and still haven't finished it .... does that count?


 

1/2 credit


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## intinst (Dec 23, 2008)

Geoffrey said:


> I was supposed to read _Paradise Lost_ in 1986 for one of my English classes and still haven't finished it .... does that count?


Got you beat. I've been trying to read _Lord Jim_ since1968. Tried again with the Kindle version and made it a fourth of the way through before I gave up again.


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## Geoffrey (Jun 20, 2009)

Everytime I tried to read it I fell asleep ....


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## Kathelm (Sep 27, 2010)

I read an abridged version of "Three Kingdoms" over the course of a year.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

I've been working on Ulysses since last Bloomsday*.

Probably will still be working on it when this Bloomsday rolls around. 

*


Spoiler



June 16, the date the novel takes place.


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## 31842 (Jan 11, 2011)

I started Ivanhoe in 1988.  I just decided this week it might be time to give up on the dream.


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## Jorja Tabu (Feb 6, 2012)

livinginfantasyland said:


> She had this book she had been trying to finish reading for over 10 years!


Wow! I thought I was bad at two years... And it's a text book, LOL!


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## acellis (Oct 10, 2011)

Dan Brown's _*The Da Vinci Code*_. Started it just before having a heart attack, took it into the hospital with me, and finished reading it through most of my recovery (about 3 months.)


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## psychotick (Jan 26, 2012)

The Grapes of Wrath - currently sitting at roughly thirty years and counting. I suffered through Cannery Row and hated it in English, and when they gave us Grapes I sort of gave up after a few chapters. It's still sitting on my shelves though, so maybe some day. 

Cheers, Greg.


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## Jon Olson (Dec 10, 2010)

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Took me months and months and months. And yet, it was fascinating. I know I'm sunk though when I find myself picking up magazines and checking email 18 times a day.


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## anguabell (Jan 9, 2011)

OK, now I feel better. I have been reading Cordelia Underwood for over 4 years now. It is a nice, interesting book in its own bizarre way but any time I open it I just fall asleep. 
http://www.amazon.com/Cordelia-Underwood-Marvelous-Beginnings-Moosepath/dp/B000EPFVTQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329690266&sr=1-1


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## Jon Olson (Dec 10, 2010)

anguabell said:


> OK, now I feel better. I have been reading Cordelia Underwood for over 4 years now. It is a nice, interesting book in its own bizarre way but any time I open it I just fall asleep.
> http://www.amazon.com/Cordelia-Underwood-Marvelous-Beginnings-Moosepath/dp/B000EPFVTQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329690266&sr=1-1


Move on, I recommend. Four years is, like, Bible-length reading time.


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## B.A. Spangler (Jan 25, 2012)

Gotta be SK's Under the Dome ... No idea why? Not like it is a bad read. It could be that I was so busy editing my own book and trying to get that completed.
Putting my own book aside, I don't ever remember spending soooo much time on one Stephen King book.


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## jaimee83 (Sep 2, 2009)

Mitchner's POLAND beat me badly, after @25 years I can walk by it but can't approach it.


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## Jan Strnad (May 27, 2010)

I guess it's been about a year and half since I started _Of Human Bondage_. At this point, I might just consider it abandoned.


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## nmg222 (Sep 14, 2010)

Moby Dick - took me two months to sludge through that.


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## Elmore Hammes (Jun 23, 2009)

It took me several months to force my eyes to scan the pages word by word read _Ulysses_. I made it a project to go through the Modern Library's Top 100 books of the 20th Century, or I never would have bothered. I did, however, love _Dubliners_, a much more approachable Joyce story. And I also found a lot of other very readable, wonderful books from that list that I probably would not have taken the time to read otherwise.

On the incomplete works front, I tried to get through _The Silmarillion_ back in the late 70's, and a couple times since then, but it never captured me like _The Lord of the Rings_.


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## Carl Ashmore (Oct 12, 2010)

It would have to be Fellowship of the Rings - it took me years of trying and I finally completed it after several months


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## pahiker (Feb 27, 2010)

I have to confess that I bought Brsingr when it first came out and I haven't finished it yet.


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## D/W (Dec 29, 2010)

Wow, some of you are certainly tenacious readers! If I haven't finished reading a book within a few weeks, I generally lose interest, give up and move on to the next book.


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## Ty Johnston (Jun 19, 2009)

When it comes to fiction, it took me a couple of months to get through _War and Peace_ and later the unabridged _The Count of Monte Cristo_. In non-fiction, it took me a year to get through Bill Clinton's _My Life_. Bill is just soooooooooooooo boring a writer.


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## Nick Steckel (Sep 2, 2010)

While it isn't a book, rather it's a series, I started the first Malazan Book of the Fallen at some point in late 2006 or early 2007.

I'm on the fourth book now. At this rate, I'll finish the ten-book series in mid-2021.


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## Borislava Borissova (Sep 9, 2011)

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray took me a long time to read, I felt bored.


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## ZiKehimkar (Dec 10, 2011)

Wow, an entire decade. That's dedication. It took me three years to complete the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I finished the first in about 8 months, the second in about 9 months and the rest on the last book, totaling up to three full years. I was determined to read them though, since I loved the movies so much. I'm happy to be able to say I've read them, but I must say that I still prefer the movies.


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## Neil Ostroff (Mar 25, 2011)

Still havent finished Twilight. Just can't get through it.


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## philippebert (Feb 25, 2012)

2 years. Moby Dick (unabridged). Good book, but too many descriptions of Whales.


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## JFHilborne (Jan 22, 2011)

Girl with Dragon Tattoo took me several attempts and a while to read, but there are some books I've never finished.....


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## shelbymhailstone (Jan 17, 2012)

The second book of the Icemark Chronicles. I started it over Christmas, and I'm still only a few chapters in. It just hasn't . . . captured me. I think I'm mostly reading this series because it was a Christmas present and I would feel bad if I didn't, which makes it hard to get through.


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## pavb2 (Feb 29, 2012)

Can't remember exactly why maybe because it is a slow burner but I took about 6 months to read Stephen Kings - The Stand


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## jumbojohnny (Dec 25, 2011)

A year or so. With huge tomes with small print, I deliberately take my time so as not to strain my eyes or get bored. The last time this happened was with the Wally Lamb epic, the hour I first believed.


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## Mike McIntyre (Jan 19, 2011)

I started _Ulysses_ in 1980. I've bought it three times, and I still haven't finished.


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## Denise DeSio (Dec 9, 2011)

Let me just say, I'm a speed reader, but I received a read to review copy of The Orphan Master's Son about 4 months ago and it's so testosterone-laden that I force myself to read about 5 pages a week. I'm about a third of the way through it. There really is just so much I can take of violence and deceit. 

I guess that's a promotion for male readers!


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## tedkeller (Feb 14, 2012)

Clive Barker's Great and Secret Show and Ludlum's Bourne Identity. I started them in 2010 and revisit them once a few months and fall asleep after five pages.


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## planet_janet (Feb 23, 2010)

It took me an entire summer to read Justin Cronin's _The Passage_. It kept me just interested enough to keep going, but not interested enough to read it daily.


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## Mel Odious (Feb 29, 2012)

_Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_. Some books are page turners, and some seem to stop you on every page and beg you to ponder. As for me and _Popular Delusions_, I most recently stopped on the page where the hunchback rented-out his humped back as a writing desk. That was around 1995, I think.


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## D.A. Boulter (Jun 11, 2010)

tkkenyon said:


> Gravity's Rainbow. 10 years and counting. (Yawn!)
> 
> TK Kenyon


Ha! That's mine, too. 6 months. My cousin gave it to me and said that he wanted to discuss it after I'd read it. So I forced myself to keep going back to it after each time I put it down. Normally a book of that size would take me a couple of days to finish if it caught my interest. If I found it really good, I'd pull an all-nighter and finish it off in one day. Six months! And I was on a DEWLine site in the arctic, so it wasn't as if there were a lot of other things keeping me from it.

So, I finished it and found out my cousin had only sent it to me in order to share the misery. I think I called him a few names.


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## Seanathin23 (Jul 24, 2011)

Fellowship of the Ring took me close to a year of starting and stopping to finally finish. I remember picking it up when the first trailer for the movie came out, and finishing it about a week before the movie hit the screen. 

I'm a slow reader so Its hard to remember because it seems that every book takes me a month or two to finish unless I am obsessed to the point where all I do is read. ie I took three days off work last summer to read A Dance with Dragons, and even reading for like 15 hours a day I needed another week to finish it.


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## michaelabayomi (Dec 13, 2011)

It took me 4 years to read the Lord of the Rings. But I had already seen the movies before then, so I pretty much knew where the story was going. Most of it was spent on Fellowship, which while I loved the underlying adventure, I found the narrative long-winded and almost tedious at times. 

I had already read The Hobbit, so I can't say I didn't know what to expect from Tolkien. So I would struggle to read LotR for a couple of days, then spend months reading other books and doing other stuff. Eventually I finished Fellowship and started with Two Towers, continuing at the same leisurely pace. But by the time I reached the battle of Helm's Deep, I was positively hooked. I read the remainder of the book in less than a week after that.

Was it worth the trouble? Hell yes. Once I got into the story, it was hard not getting lost in Middle Earth all over again. And while I consider the movies (especially the last one) to be among my three (if not THE) favorites of all time, I have to say that I prefer the book, if only for its pure awesomeness.


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## Backspacing (Aug 9, 2009)

I don't remember the longest it ever took to finish a book, but I do remember the shortest.  That was the Sunday afternoon I read  "No WayTo Treat An Lady" from page one to "The End".  I was in my early twenties and was in the Air Force, stationed in Germany.  That was more than forty years ago, but I impressed myself for having read an entire novel in one afternoon.

I had been a big William Goldman fan since my mid teens when I read and identified with "The Temple of Gold".  Also liked "Soldier In The Rain" because of the military aspect.


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## Zackery Arbela (Jan 31, 2011)

Geoffrey said:


> I was supposed to read _Paradise Lost_ in 1986 for one of my English classes and still haven't finished it .... does that count?


Right there with you...made it 50 pages in and out it aside. One day i;ll finish it...one day.

Also, took me two years to read the bible (KJV) from cover to cover. Course, I was going one chapter a day...


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## qrobles (Mar 1, 2012)

I'm a fast and impatient reader. If I'm not grabbed by a book to continue picking it up by page 50, I simply don't finish it. The number of books that I've simply shrugged off after 30 pages could fill my apartment.


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## Pavel Kravchenko (Mar 2, 2012)

I finish every book I start - probably to compensate for all the writing projects I leave dangling - and the longest in recent memory would have to be Dante's Divine Comedy. 3 months. Felt like false advertising. I found absolutely nothing funny in it


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## Nancy Beck (Jul 1, 2011)

Elmore Hammes said:


> On the incomplete works front, I tried to get through _The Silmarillion_ back in the late 70's, and a couple times since then, but it never captured me like _The Lord of the Rings_.


This.

I tried reading _The Silmarillion _ twice. First time, I got about halfway through before I got bored; second time, maybe a third. _The Hobbit_? Yes! _LOTR_? Yes! Not this one, though.

But my husband's read it all the way through twice and loved it.


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