The 25 Longest Classic Books: Word Counts and Reading Times

The longest book on this shelf is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon: 1,603,000 words, which is roughly 89 hours of reading at the 300 words a minute used across this site. The twenty-five titles below are the heaviest in the catalogue, and together they hold 10,049,933 words — about 31% of everything here, in 25 books out of 281.

For scale: the median book on this shelf runs 82,000 words, so nothing on this list is less than 3.0 times the typical book. The gap inside the list is just as wide — the top entry is 6.5 times the twenty-fifth. Long books are not one phenomenon: some are one plot told slowly, some are several books bound together, and some are catalogues of everything their author knew.

Longest first

Every title on the shelf over 247,000 words, with the word count of the edition we offer and the reading time at 300 words a minute.

#	Title	Author	Year	Words	Reading time
1	The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	Edward Gibbon	1776	1,603,000	89 h
2	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	1869	562,000	31 h
3	Les Misérables	Victor Hugo	1862	551,000	31 h
4	The Essays of Michel de Montaigne	Michel de Montaigne	1580	517,000	29 h
5	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	1844	466,000	26 h
6	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra	1605	423,624	24 h
7	The Wealth of Nations	Adam Smith	1776	389,724	22 h
8	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	1850	357,000	20 h
9	Bleak House	Charles Dickens	1853	351,226	20 h
10	Le Morte d’Arthur	Thomas Malory	1934	350,000	19 h
11	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	1878	349,000	19 h
12	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1880	349,000	19 h
13	The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling	Henry Fielding	1749	338,946	19 h
14	Our Mutual Friend	Charles Dickens	1865	324,000	18 h
15	Middlemarch	George Eliot	1871	316,280	18 h
16	The Pickwick Papers	Charles Dickens	1837	301,000	17 h
17	Vanity Fair	William Makepeace Thackeray	1848	301,000	17 h
18	On War	Carl von Clausewitz	1832	296,700	16 h
19	The Decameron	Giovanni Boccaccio	1886	292,000	16 h
20	The Mysteries of Udolpho	Ann Radcliffe	1794	290,000	16 h
21	Household Tales	Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm	1812	283,000	16 h
22	The Faerie Queene	Edmund Spenser	1590	280,000	16 h
23	Ulysses	James Joyce	1922	261,433	15 h
24	The History of the Peloponnesian War	Thucydides	1874	250,000	14 h
25	The Woman in White	Wilkie Collins	1860	247,000	14 h

How this list was made

Word counts come from each book page, which records the count for the EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files offered there. They are counts of the English text of that edition, not of every historical printing, so a title with several translations can differ slightly from counts quoted elsewhere.

Reading time is a pure division: words ÷ 18,000, rounded to the nearest hour, a minimum of one. It is a pacing estimate, not a promise. A dialogue-heavy novel moves faster than its word count suggests and a dense philosophical one much slower.

Questions readers ask

What is the longest book on editions.ink?

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, at 1,603,000 words in the edition offered here — about 89 hours.

How long does it take to read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?

About 89 hours at 300 words a minute. At 200 words a minute it is closer to 134 hours.

Are these counts for the whole work or one volume?

The whole work as published in the file on the site. Multi-volume novels are counted complete, which is why several of them sit at the top of this list.

Part of the complete catalogue. Nearby: the shortest classics · the most filmed classics · the fifteen longest novels · long classics over 300,000 words · themed reading lists · word counts and reading times.