5 On My TBR | The Longest on Your TBR

Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I just have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: The Longest on your TBR

As a reader, I have always preferred reading longer books, say about 300 pages and above. This can be observed in the books I have already read; I have read no less than 10 books that are at least a thousand pages. On top of these are hundreds of 500-plus pager books. My to-be-read list is, unsurprisingly, filled with equally lengthy reads. However, for the purposes of this Monday’s update, I will be sharing the longest books I already own. Without more ado, here are the longest books on my TBR that I currently own. Happy Monday everyone!

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

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Title: It
Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Scriber
Publishing Date: January 2016
No. of Pages: 1153

Synopsis: To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry Maine was just their home town: familiar, well-ordered, a good place to live. It was the children who saw – and felt – what made Derry so horribly different. In the stormdrains, in the sewers, It lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each person’s deepest dread. Sometimes It reaches up, seizing, tearing, killing…

The adults, knowing better, knew nothing. Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror of It was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until the grown-up children were called back, once more to confront It as It stirred and called in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.

Frightening, epic, and brilliant, Stephen King’s IT is one of the greatest works of a true storyteller master.

Title: The Far Pavilions
Author: M.M. Kaye
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publishing Date: 1978
No. of Pages: 955

Synopsis: When The Far Pavilions was first published nineteen years ago, it moved the critic Edmund Fuller to write this: “Were Miss Kaye to produce no other book, The Far Pavilions might stand as a lasting accomplishment in a single work comparable to Margaret Mitchell’s achievement in Gone With the Wind.”

From its beginning in the foothills of the towering Himalayas, M.M. Kaye’s masterwork is a vast, rich, and vibrant tapestry of love and war that ranks with the greatest panoramic sagas of modern fiction.

The Far Pavilions is itself a Himalayan achievement, a book we hate to see come to an end. It is a passionate, triumphant story that excites us, fills us with joy, moves us to tears, satisfies us deeply, and helps us remember just what it is we want most from a novel.

Title: The Mists of Avalon
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Publisher: DelRey Books
Publishing Date: November 2000
No. of Pages: 876

Synopsis: In Marion Zimmer Bradley’s brilliant reworking of the powerful Arthurian epic, we see the tumult and adventures of Camelot’s court through the eyes of the women who bolstered the king’s rise and schemed for his fall. There is Morgaine, an intense woman gifted with the Sight, who has sworn to keep the old religion alive against the growing tide of Christianity that threatens her way of life – even if it means fighting a deadly battle against her beloved brother. And the devout Gwenhwyfar, married to Arthur out of a sense of duty, determined to bring Britain into the light of her God.

From their childhoods through the ultimate fulfillment of their destinies, we follow these women and the diverse cast of characters that surrounds them as the great Arthurian epic unfolds stunningly before us. As Morgaine and Gwenhwyfar struggle for control over the fate of Arthur’s kingdom, as the Knights of the Round Table take on their infamous quest, as Merlin and Viviane wield their magics for the future of Old Britain, the Isle of Avalon sips further into the impenetrable mists of memory, until the fissure between old and new worlds – and old and new religions – claims its most famous victim.

Title: 2666
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Translator: Natasha Wimmer
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: September 2009
No. of Pages: 893

Synopsis: Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman – these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundred of women have disappeared.

In the words of The Washington Post, “With 2666, Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their vulture and the novelist’s place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals.

Title: Life and Fate
Author: Vasily Grossman
Translator: Robert Chandler
Publisher: Perennial Library
Publishing Date: 1987
No. of Pages: 871

Synopsis: Life and Fate is fiction on the epic scale: powerful, deeply moving, and devastating in its depiction of a world torn apart by war and ideological tyranny. At the center of the novel, overshadowing the lives off each of its huge cast of characters, stands the battle of Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman presents a startlingly vivid picture of this desperate struggle for a ruined city, and of how the ebb and flow of the fighting affect the lives and destinies of people far from the front line. With Tolstoyan grandeur that finds room for intimate detail, and deploying a multitude of superbly realized characters, Grossman delivers a message of terrifying simplicity: that Stalinism and Nazism are one and the same in their falsehood, cruelty, and inhumanity.