Today’s Booking Through Thursday question asks… “What book took you the longest to read, and do you feel it was the content or just the length that made it so?”

Hmm. If we’re talking in terms of when I picked it up for the first time and when I put it down for the last (well, I hope not last ever), I think that would be The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which I started in the spring of 2007 and didn’t finish until the end of December 2009. That was a while. But in that case, I read a few of the short stories when I got it and then just didn’t read it until I was motivated to read it again, at which point I read all the stories in like two weeks. Not very long.

If we go by length of time spent actively reading a book, I’m pretty sure that would be Pillars of the Earth, a thousand-page book that I read a page or two at a time over the course of two months. It was intense, but ultimately worth it, and actually worked much better than that time I listened to the sequel over five weeks. In both of those cases, it was definitely the number of pages (or discs) that made the book take so long, both in that it just takes a long time to read that many words and because after an hour or so with no end in sight I needed a break!