5 *Huge* Novels I Read Last Year
I’m a slow reader, and I read every word. Here are the longest (and some of the best) novels I read in 2023.

I’ve often avoided *huge* novels because I’m a slow reader, and I always read every word. I never skim, and I don’t even want to improve my reading speed. I prefer reading this way.
I tend to read about 25 novels a year, but if I tackle a really large book, finishing it may take me a month or two. If I do finish it, that means it was terrific. There’s no way I’d give one or two stars to a huge novel, because I never would have made it more than 10% of the way before giving up.
In the last few years, I’ve told myself I was missing out by avoiding long novels. So I’ve made it a point to catch up with a few.
Here are the biggest novels I read in 2023, all of which I recommend.
In total, this amounted to 3,744 pages of reading matter in just five novels:
1. THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880; new translation by Michael R. Katz, 2023)
Length: 928 pages
In July of 2023, I chanced upon a piece in Literary Hub, “The Unique Challenges of Translating The Brothers Karamazov Into English”, by Michael R. Katz, the C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. This wonderful article was posted to coincide with the publication of his book, the first new English translation of The Brothers Karamazov in nearly 20 years.
I’d previously read two other novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime & Punishment (trans. David Magarshack) and The Idiot (trans. Constance Garnett). The Brothers Karamazov was already on my TBR bucket list, so when I read Professor Katz’s article, I knew this was the translation for me.
I tried running out and buying it on its publication date. I live in the NYC metropolitan area and checked all the brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble stores— each of whom claimed to have “one copy in stock” according to an online search. I never could find this “one copy” in any of their stores (I went around that day via subway to five of their shops!), even after begging help from their customer service associates. Then I gave up.
I checked the situation at McNally Jackson Books, a great independent bookseller, and lo and behold, their website claimed they had three copies in stock at their store in SoHo. I took the subway down there, exhausted from my day of searching, and found myself staring at the magical three copies.
This was perfect for me, since I prefer my books in hardcover and always want to choose the best possible copy available. I set about inspecting all three copies, making sure the dust jacket was straight and centered, and that there were no dents to the spine and boards. Here’s the one I bought (see picture above the story).
This 2023 hardcover edition, published by Liveright, is 928 pages long. I bought the hardcover for $40. (The trade paperback will be published soon, on May 28, 2024, selling for $20.)
Some prefer to read long books on a Kindle. I usually prefer to read a hardcover book, but honestly, I do both.
I don’t intend to go deeply into the plot. A brief sketch of the situation is good enough to intrigue any committed reader. As the title implies, this is the story of some brothers named Karamazov. It’s also about their father.
The father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, is overbearing, manipulative, arrogant, scheming, untrustworthy, and drinks a lot. His sons, from oldest to youngest, are Dmitri Fyodorovich (diminutive Mitya), Ivan Fyodorovich (Vanya), and Alexei Fyodorovich (Alyosha).
Although the story presents multiple points of view, the primary character is Alyosha, a religious novice living at a local monastery. Alyosha is a spiritual, kind, loving, and somewhat innocent young man who sometimes has ecstatic visions but is the sanest character in the book. He also has a strong and vivid appreciation of the beauty of the world around him.
Mitya, the eldest son, is an extrovert, careless, impetuous, a gambler, but with significant charm. You might say he “lives in the now” but in a self-destructive sense. He never thinks ahead. He is similar to his father Fyodor Pavlovich, which is one of the reason they are constantly at odds.
Vanya, the middle son, is an intellectual, cynic, and atheist. However, one of the most interesting parts of the book is when he has an extended hallucinatory episode in which he engages in a dialogue with the Devil.
There is another character key to the story, Smerdyakov, a servant in the Karamazov household, who may be an illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovich, and thus might be considered the “fourth Karamazov brother”.
The central event of the novel is so well known that it might not be a spoiler to reveal it, but I’d rather not do so here. Find out for yourself.
In Katz’s translation, I found The Brothers Karamazov compelling and masterful, and the 928 pages flew by. I couldn’t wait every day to find some free time to pick it up and find out what happened next. I’d also say I fell in love with Alyosha, who reminded me of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (and despite the brilliance of The Brothers Karamazov, I still feel The Idiot is my favorite of the Dostoevsky novels I’ve read to date).
If you’ve never read The Brothers Karamazov, I can definitely recommend this translation. Michael R. Katz’s English version is exquisite and refined. Read his article at Literary Hub to get a sense of how he approached the project. He has also translated Crime and Punishment, and I assure you that whenever I go back and reread it, his is the translation I’m going to seek out.
This new translation was also named one of the Best Books of 2023 by The New Yorker.
2. TIRANT LO BLANC, by Joanot Martorell & Martí Joan de Galba (1490; translated by David H. Rosenthal, 1984)
Length: 640 pages
Having read Don Quixote in 2021, I thought it might be a good idea to read Tirant lo Blanc, a novel written in Catalan and published in 1490. This was the first book I read in 2023.
This early novel is actually referred to at length in Don Quixote in a way that demonstrates Cervantes’s love for it. That’s a pretty good recommendation, if you ask me. I don’t recall any other work praised like this in Don Quixote.
I first heard of Tirant lo Blanc in 1984, when the English translation I read (trans. David H. Rosenthal) was first published by Schocken Books. My sister received a copy of the hardcover from my parents for Christmas. She was already a prolific reader, a much faster reader than me, and read a lot of fantasy novels as well as stories of King Arthur, and other chivalric tales.
Tirant lo Blanc had been on my mind ever since. But I was too intimidated by its size and complexity to read it. I shouldn’t have been, and neither should you.

The main character is Tirant, a knight from Brittany. It is the character of Tirant that makes the story so compelling. He is human, relatable, down-to-earth, and at the same time larger than life and an admirable hero.
Tirant and his knightly fellows have adventures throughout Europe, and he later helps the Byzantine Empire fight the Ottoman Turks. There’s no point in my relating his adventures here. If you enjoy such stories, you’ll want to find out for yourself.
This edition of Tirant lo Blanc is 640 pages, but in this case I read it on my Kindle. I found David H. Rosenthal’s translation eminently readable, so am happy to recommend it.
3. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, by Boris Pasternak (1957; translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, 2010)
Length: 706 pages.
Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago was written in Russian, over many years, but originally could not be published in the Soviet Union. The story of its publication is too convoluted to recount here (check out the Wikipedia entry; there are also entire books about it). But in a nutshell, the Russian manuscript was smuggled out of the USSR, and its first publication was an Italian translation in 1957. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958.
The first English translation, by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, was published in 1958.
What I read is the second translation into English, published 2010.
I have no ability to comment on the superiority of one translation over another. (There is also a third English translation, by Nicholas Pasternak Slater, which came out in 2019 from The Folio Society.)

Although I’m a big reader of Russian literary works in translation, I had not read Doctor Zhivago all these years. Perhaps that’s because I’d already seen the David Lean film so many times. Or perhaps it’s because growing up, I thought of it as a “romance novel” and this impression carried over.
It is not a romance novel. Yes, a great romance is central to the story, but it would diminish Doctor Zhivago to reduce it to such a simplistic label.
As anyone who’s seen the movie would know, it is the story of a persistent love between the title character and his lover Lara. It is set against the backdrop of Russia before WWI, during WWI, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and afterward. Everything about the story is fascinating.
I thoroughly enjoyed Doctor Zhivago and would recommend it to anyone. This translation comes in at 706 pages, but I read it nonstop.
4. EARTHLY POWERS, by Anthony Burgess (1980)
Length: 606 pages of very small print …
I’ve had Earthly Powers on my bookshelf for many years, begging to be read. I’ve read several other Anthony Burgess novels, but this is his longest.
Anthony Burgess is most famous as the author of the novel A Clockwork Orange, but he was prolific and wrote many other novels, screenplays, and plays. He was also a composer, essayist, translator, and an expert on James Joyce. Just your typical polymath.
Aside from A Clockwork Orange, I’ve also read A Dead Man in Deptford (a novel about Christopher Marlowe), Time for a Tiger (set in Malaya toward the end of British colonial status), The Kingdom of the Wicked (about Ancient Rome), Inside Mr Enderby, and Enderby Outside. All of them terrific.
But most acknowledge Earthly Powers as Burgess’s magnum opus.

The whole novel is told in the first person by its hero, Kenneth Toomey, an aged successful novelist looking back over his long life. Toomey is loosely based on W. Somerset Maugham. Like Maugham, Toomey is a homosexual. However, having read two full-length biographies of Maugham, I can say Toomey is indeed “loosely” based on, or perhaps inspired by, Maugham.
According to an article on Earthly Powers at the website of The International Anthony Burgess Foundation:
Speaking about the connection between Toomey and Maugham, Burgess said: ‘I had to start with a real person.’ He was fascinated by Maugham, a popular novelist who, rising to fame after the Oscar Wilde trial, lived as a gay man but never wrote directly about his sexuality. Burgess was drawn to the idea of the writer as a sexual dissident whose life-story might be used to raise questions about mainstream, hetero-normative culture.
Like Maugham, Toomey was born in the late 19th century and lives well into the 20th. The other most prominent character is Don Carlo Campanati, a Catholic priest who rises to become Pope and a possible future saint. Both of their lives present a counterpoint throughout the story, Toomey living largely as an exile from the United Kingdom owing to laws criminalizing homosexuality at the time, and Don Carlo representing a powerful but evolving establishment (the Vatican).
Also from the article cited above . . .
In a letter to his German translator, Burgess wrote that Earthly Powers was ‘an attempt to show that I could write a novel as long as one of those nineteenth-century blockbusters, although Dickens and Tolstoy were long because they wrote for serial publication — no longer, alas, an available outlet for the novelist.’ He added that the novel ‘is also meant to be funny.’
For me, this was one of the most creative, evocative, wry, funny, erudite, knowledgeable, and simply entertaining novels I’ve ever read. It’s another one I couldn’t wait to get back to whenever I could find free time.
You can order it from Foyles in the UK here (or any other UK book retailer). Or, if you’re in the US, you may choose to buy a used copy online, for example AbeBooks.com. It’s not currently in print from any US publisher.
5. THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, by T. H. White (1958)
Length: 864 pages
I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but these days I’d rather read other things. One exception I made in 2023 was to read The Once and Future King, by T. H. White, for the first time.
This, of course, is the famous retelling of the adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. It is supposed to be a new interpretation of the Arthur legends inspired by Le Morte d’Arthur, by Thomas Malory (1485). But it’s told in a modern vernacular that is easy to understand. It’s also full of deliberate anachronisms which make it wry, funny, and relatable to those of us living in the modern era.
The main reason I wanted to read it is because I knew nothing about King Arthur. Of course I’ve seen various movies (including The Sword in the Stone and Camelot, both of which are based on White’s novel). But movies are not the way in, not where legends and/or history are concerned.
Reading The Once and Future King was my way “in” to learn about King Arthur, his teacher Merlyn, his best mate Lancelot, his wife Guinevere and his other knights.
The Once and Future King is actually five novels in one. Each of these was originally published separately (and the fifth one posthumously):
- The Sword in the Stone
- The Queen of Air and Darkness
- The Ill-Made Knight (my favorite — all about ugly but sexy Lancelot!)
- The Candle in the Wind
- The Book of Merlyn
All five are published as an omnibus in the UK edition. However, in the US, only the first four are available in one book, with The Book of Merlyn published separately. I read the complete UK edition published by HarperCollins (shown below), which clocks in at 864 pages.

Bottom line, this is a fantastic epic demonstrating the compassionate worldview of its author, T. H. White. He was clearly anti-war, and this may be in part why he was drawn to the subject of Arthur.
In White’s hands, Arthur is trying to shift the hearts of men away from conflict and towards mutual help and understanding. That’s why he’s created the Round Table, not only as a symbol for his aspirations but, through his knights, a means of achieving his compassionate aims for all humanity.
Months after reading it, one thing that really stands out in my memory is White’s understanding and depiction of all kinds of animals. He is known to have been an animal lover, and this comes out very strongly in The Once and Future King. For example, he makes the distinct point that while certain species of animals may prey on others, they don’t fight within their own species. Only ants, and men, do that.
What *huge* novels did you read in 2023? Please share in the comments. Happy reading!