On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 00:35, Caliann the Elf wrote: > > > Rion Bergquist <carpovita at earthlink.net> wrote: > Then you should avoid George R. R. Martin as well. GREAT stuff, HUGE books, > not done yet > > > > > I actually adore huge books. Let me know when that series is finished. > > You could try Erikson: his huge books are in a series, but each one is a self-contained plot, so it's manageable to read them as they come out. Or there's _Ash_, the ultimate great heavy brick of a book. A recent parody from Victor Gollancz had a set of plot summaries/parodies of other novels, including the following: FLASH by Merry Gentile In this epic, 4,700-page retelling of the Flash Gordon story (the single largest one-volume novel booksellers have been prepared to unpack from their boxes and lug upstairs to the shop shelves)* award-winning author Merry Gentile has created something unique. Her 'Flash' grows up a discarded waif on a military camp of the army of Myng the Non-Merci. A girl in a man's world, she disguises herself as 'Gor Don', a honed fighting machine (with a university education), to survive. Accordingly she rises through the ranks until she is able to lead an army against the thankless Myng; and yet -- her tragedy -- she cannot wholly purge her masculine persona of feminine attributes. Her followers start to suspect that her various camp mannerisms, the gaudy decorations she prefers, the extremely clean spaceships she insists upon and her general attention to detail are incompatible with the rough, crude, belly-scratching world of men fighting wars with other men in a manly way. And so the book moves, not hurriedly, towards its tragic climax. 'I started reading this novel in 2001, and I have found it impossible to put down. I am absorbed in it every night before I go to sleep, I keep a copy in the toilet, take it on the train with me, and spend my weekends immersed in it. I hope to finish it by 2007.' _Martin Amis. [Footnote] * There was a Peter Hamilton novel that ran to 5,150 pages, but the booksellers refused to handle it without heavy-lifting equipment and so it never made the shelves.