T5W: Books That Took You The Longest To Finish

Top 5 Wednesday was originally created and run by Lainey aka gingerreadslainey (Youtube channel) but it is now being run by Sam aka Thoughts on tomes (Youtube channel). Each week there is a different topic. You can check out the groups Goodreads page here for any more information and the future topics. This week the topic is all about the books that took you the longest to finish. For my choices, I have picked books that I did enjoy, they just took me some time to read for whatever reason. As always these are in no particular order. Onto the books.

 

• At the Mouth of the River of Bees / Kij Johnson – this is a short story collection, so it took me some time to finish as I dipped in and out of it for just over a month, I think. Although there were some stories I wasn’t a huge fan of, I thought that overall this is a great short story collection.

• War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy – I loved this book, but due to it’s size it took me almost exactly a month to finish. The edition I had (Penguin Clothbound edition) is about 1,400 pages long. If you’ve been putting this off, I would highly recommend reading it.

• Garden of the Moon / Steven Erikson – this is the first book in the very long Malazan Book of the Fallen series. I have quite mixed feelings about this book. Due to its density, it took me quite some time to finish it and it also meant that I never felt fully engaged with the story. I think I will try out book 2 and then see how I feel about continuing the series.

• The Song of Ice and Fire / George R. R. Martin – to be honest, I don’t know why I read this series. I think it was a case of wanting to like it, more than I actually liked it. I enjoyed some of the perspectives (others I skim read, oops), but for the most part I wasn’t a huge fan. For that reason it took me quite a long time to read each book in the series, especially since once I started the series I wanted to finish it. It doesn’t help that the books are pretty big.

• The Lies of Locke Lamora / Scott Lynch – this one took me two goes to read. I initially started it and got about 150 pages in and just wasn’t feeling it, and then a month past without reading any of it. I picked it up again and once I got past 150-200 pages I was hooked.

 

That is it for this weeks T5W topic. I would say that I am generally quite a fast reader, so books don’t tend to take me any longer than a week to read. Anyway I hope you are all having a wonderful day and I will see you next time.

 

Pippa