My Reading List Page Count: 109 Classic And Best Seller Books ...

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I’m becoming a bit obsessed with looking at my reading list for this project from different angles. I’ve created a bookish timeline to see what period I’m covering, and a world map to look at all the different places I’m travelling, through the magic of the written word. And here’s a peek behind the book blogger curtain for you: I can actually see what searches people use to find Keeping Up With The Penguins, and it would seem that a lot of you are curious about the page counts of classic and best seller books. So today, I’m going to arrange my entire TBR from longest to shortest by page count.

My Reading List Page Count - 109 Classic and Best Seller Books from Shortest to Longest - Text Overlaid on Image of Open Book on Grass and Leaves - Keeping Up With The Penguins

(Note: these are the page lengths of the actual editions I own, so it might differ from what Wikipedia says or the copy you have at home.)

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan: 138 pagesThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark: 150 pagesA Single Man by Christopher Isherwood: 152 pagesMurphy by Samuel Beckett: 158 pagesA Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess: 160 pagesStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: 161 pagesThe Alchemist by Paulo Coelho: 167 pagesMrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: 172 pagesThe Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Dougals Adams: 180 pagesThe Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: 184 pagesAmongst Women by John MaGahern: 184 pagesThe Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame: 192 pagesThe End Of The Affair by Graham Greene: 192 pagesParty Going by Henry Green: 192 pages

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammet: 201 pagesBrave New World by Aldous Huxley: 201 pagesAn Artist Of The Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro: 206 pagesAs I Lay Dying by William Faulkner: 208 pagesLolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner: 222 pagesScoop by Evelyn Waugh: 222 pagesIf I Stay by Gayle Forman: 224 pagesThe Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: 224 pagesThe White Mouse by Nancy Wake: 224 pagesWe Were Liars by E. Lockhart: 227 pagesFahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: 227 pagesThe Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger: 230 pagesThe Happiest Refugee by Anh Do: 232 pagesMy Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin: 232 pagesCold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons: 233 pagesThe Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: 234 pagesA Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking: 241 pagesGentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos: 243 pages (*also contains But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, which I also read.)The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway: 247 pagesLittle Women by Louisa May Alcott: 248 pagesThe Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: 250 pages

The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James: 272 pages (*also contains The Aspen Papers, which I definitely did not read. I’ve had my fill of Henry James.)Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth: 274 pagesLord Of The Flies by William Golding: 285 pagesRobinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: 286 pagesFrankenstein by Mary Shelley: 288 pagesThe Call Of The Wild by Jack London: 288 pages (*also includes White Fang, which I didn’t read. Too much puppy torture!)Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift: 292 pagesStill Alice by Lisa Genova: 293 pagesThe Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham: 296 pagesThe Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton: 301 pagesTo Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee: 309 pagesOn The Road by Jack Kerouac: 310 pagesA Passage To India by E.M. Forster: 312 pagesLady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence: 314 pagesWild by Cheryl Strayed: 315 pagesThe Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins: 316 pages

Kim by Rudyard Kipling: 322 pageWe Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler: 323 pagesYes Please by Amy Poehler: 329 pagesMy Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante: 331 pagesThe Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: 334 pagesPaper Towns by John Green: 336 pagesTropic Of Cancer by Henry Miller: 336 pagesThe Heat Of The Day by Elizabeth Bowen: 336 pagesThe Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion: 336 pagesAlice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: 336 pagesIn Cold Blood by Truman Capote: 343 pagesGirl Online by Zoe Sugg: 344 pagesThe Fault In Our Stars by John Green: 352 pagesWuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: 354 pagesThe Martian by Andy Weir: 369 pagesThe Maze Runner by James Dashner: 371 pagesThe Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan: 373 pagesThe Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: 374 pages

The One-Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson: 384 pagesMoney: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis: 394 pagesPride And Prejudice by Jane Austen: 398 pagesDracula by Bram Stoker: 400 pagesThe Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty: 406 pagesSybil by Benjamin Disraeli: 412 pagesThe Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck: 416 pagesShe Came To Stay by Simone de Beauvoir: 416 pagesThe Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: 416 pages (*also includes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I did read, too)The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge: 432 pagesAmerican Sniper by Chris Kyle: 448 pagesFangirl by Rainbow Rowell: 459 pagesThe Narrow Road To The Deep North by Richard Flanagan: 467 pagesNineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos: 469 pagesEmma by Jane Austen: 474 pagesTrue History Of The Kelly Gang by Peter Carey: 478 pages

Divergent by Veronica Roth: 489 pagesClarissa by Samuel Richardson: 516 pages (*but this is an abridged edition, the full version is literally one of the longest books ever written.)Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: 519 pagesAll The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: 531 pagesThe Adventures Of Augie March by Saul Bellow: 536 pagesThe Golden Bowl by Henry James: 547 pagesThe Colour Of Magic by Terry Pratchett: 569 pagesThe Book Thief by Markus Zusak: 584 pagesThe Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne: 588 pagesJane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: 590 pagesThe Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: 596 pagesThe Lake House by Kate Morton: 608 pagesLife After Life by Kate Atkinson: 622 pagesThe Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri: 656 pagesCrime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: 656 pagesThe Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler: 672 pages (*note: also contains other stories)

All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren: 672 pagesA Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: 687 pagesUlysses by James Joyce: 719 pagesMoby Dick by Herman Melville: 720 pagesA Game Of Thrones by George R.R. Martin: 864 pagesVanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray: 883 pagesDon Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: 1056 pagesDavid Copperfield by Charles Dickens: 1057 pages

The strangest thing I noticed: page length has very little to do with how long a book feels. Mrs Dalloway felt like a much longer read than My Brilliant Friend, and yet the latter is nearly twice as long in page count. It also felt like a much longer read than The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, but in reality they’re about the same length. Weird, eh? Really, you can’t tell much from a book’s page count at all. Some of the classic books, which we all assume will be long and meaty, have the fewest pages, while some of the most-recent best-sellers are doorstops.

So, here’s my total (I know you’re all dying to know): accounting for a few pages of notes skipped here and there and a couple of combination editions where I didn’t read the second book, the Keeping Up With The Penguins project has me reading 40,700 pages. Not bad! And, of course, you can find links to every single review here (I update the list with the new one published each week). If you’re curious about how many pages are in your TBR, you can find page counts for most editions of most books on Goodreads (and you can friend me while you’re there!). How many pages is your current read? Add to the list in the comments below (or join the thread over at KUWTP on Facebook!).