the 50 longest books

It's July 1, Canada, and we are halfway through Globe & Mail's 2008-long revelation of their 50 Greatest Books list, one title per week appearing in the Saturday books section. The latest, and possibly most questionable, choice yet, #25, is Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, which comes recommended as deathbed reading for television's most pompous fictional character. At 802 pages in the Penguin edition, it is not a quick read.

In fact, it was obvious almost from the start (book #2: the 3000+ page In Search of Lost Time) that keeping up on a weekly basis was not going to be a possibility. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I had to quantify the problem. Using standard unabridged English editions of the books, and—not counting notes and other editorial additions to the texts—the first 25 of the Globe and Mail's 50 Greatest Books are each, on average, 702 pages.

In other words, to read through the Globe & Mail's canon at the pace at which the list is being published, you would have to read 100 pages a day, without fail.

I am truly curious to know whether there is anyone at the Globe & Mail that has actually read all 50 on the list.

The 25 selected so far break down this way for me: 15 that I've never read, 3 that I've read for the first time this year (The Iliad & The Odyssey, On the Origin of Species, and Ulysses), 4 that I've read previously in my adult years (Augustine's Confessions, The Great Gatsby, King Lear, and The Qur'an), and 3 that I read as a child and haven't read since (Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels).

Of the unread 15, for at least 10 or 11 I would frankly confess to guilt at never having cracked their venerated spines.

I'd like to mock the sheer impracticality of the list, but for whatever reason, I've bought in.

But at the rate that I'm reading, my present extrapolation/calculation is that it will take me almost exactly 6 years to make my way through.