Sorted after counting, never before
Longest books
Ranked by total word count, measured from the full text. Topped by The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete at 1,275,777 words.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·50 of 683 measured texts ranked·REVIEWED JUL 2026
The first fifty, measured
| # | Book | Author | books | Reading time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete | Pepys, Samuel | 1,275,777 words | 85h 03m |
| 2 | The Complete Works of William Shakespeare | Shakespeare, William | 964,355 words | 64h 17m |
| 3 | The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Jane Austen | Austen, Jane | 779,163 words | 51h 57m |
| 4 | The Roll of Honour, Volume 1 | Ruvigny et Raineval, Melville Henry Massue, marquis de | 769,749 words | 51h 19m |
| 5 | Plutarch | Plutarch | 740,381 words | 49h 22m |
| 6 | The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 | Lewis, Meriwether | 650,247 words | 43h 21m |
| 7 | Celebrated Crimes (Complete) | Dumas, Alexandre | 622,787 words | 41h 31m |
| 8 | Modern English biography, volume 2 (of 4), I-Q | Boase, Frederic | 599,199 words | 39h 57m |
| 9 | War and Peace | Tolstoy, Leo, graf | 575,072 words | 38h 20m |
| 10 | Les Misérables | Hugo, Victor | 567,924 words | 37h 52m |
| 11 | Modern English biography, volume 1 (of 4), A-H | Boase, Frederic | 561,352 words | 37h 25m |
| 12 | Antiquities of the Jews | Josephus, Flavius | 541,368 words | 36h 05m |
| 13 | Main currents in American thought | Parrington, Vernon Louis | 540,577 words | 36h 02m |
| 14 | Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete | Montaigne, Michel de | 525,619 words | 35h 02m |
| 15 | Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete | Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de | 489,307 words | 32h 37m |
| 16 | The Count of Monte Cristo | Dumas, Alexandre | 464,889 words | 31h 00m |
| 17 | The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur) | Babur, Emperor of Hindustan | 455,201 words | 30h 21m |
| 18 | The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition | Poe, Edgar Allan | 448,628 words | 29h 55m |
| 19 | The String of Pearls | Prest, Thomas Peckett | 437,085 words | 29h 08m |
| 20 | The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete | Forster, John | 433,583 words | 28h 54m |
| 21 | Don Quixote | Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de | 429,052 words | 28h 36m |
| 22 | The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4 | Reynolds, George W. M. (George William MacArthur) | 428,889 words | 28h 36m |
| 23 | Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete | Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de | 423,474 words | 28h 14m |
| 24 | A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive | Mill, John Stuart | 409,314 words | 27h 17m |
| 25 | The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse | Valmiki | 405,855 words | 27h 03m |
| 26 | Children's Literature | Curry, Charles Madison | 379,501 words | 25h 18m |
| 27 | An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations | Smith, Adam | 378,512 words | 25h 14m |
| 28 | The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 | Polo, Marco | 363,924 words | 24h 16m |
| 29 | David Copperfield | Dickens, Charles | 355,107 words | 23h 40m |
| 30 | The Brothers Karamazov | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor | 351,444 words | 23h 26m |
| 31 | History of Tom Jones, a Foundling | Fielding, Henry | 351,255 words | 23h 25m |
| 32 | Anna Karenina | Tolstoy, Leo, graf | 350,390 words | 23h 22m |
| 33 | Fifty years in Wall Street | Clews, Henry | 348,892 words | 23h 16m |
| 34 | The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia | Sidney, Philip | 344,285 words | 22h 57m |
| 35 | Nicholas Nickleby | Dickens, Charles | 322,429 words | 21h 30m |
| 36 | The Journal of Sir Walter Scott | Scott, Walter | 320,917 words | 21h 24m |
| 37 | Gargantua and Pantagruel | Rabelais, François | 319,921 words | 21h 20m |
| 38 | Middlemarch | Eliot, George | 318,545 words | 21h 14m |
| 39 | Eloisa | Rousseau, Jean-Jacques | 317,583 words | 21h 10m |
| 40 | The Crown of Wild Olive | Ruskin, John | 312,029 words | 20h 48m |
| 41 | The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio | Boccaccio, Giovanni | 307,672 words | 20h 31m |
| 42 | Vanity Fair | Thackeray, William Makepeace | 302,568 words | 20h 10m |
| 43 | The Pickwick Papers | Dickens, Charles | 300,355 words | 20h 01m |
| 44 | Jesus the Christ | Talmage, James E. (James Edward) | 296,323 words | 19h 45m |
| 45 | The Mysteries of Udolpho | Radcliffe, Ann Ward | 292,066 words | 19h 28m |
| 46 | Boston | Sinclair, Upton | 291,658 words | 19h 27m |
| 47 | Robert Elsmere | Ward, Humphry, Mrs. | 286,630 words | 19h 07m |
| 48 | The Governments of Europe | Ogg, Frederic Austin | 284,146 words | 18h 57m |
| 49 | The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) | Gillespie, George | 283,323 words | 18h 53m |
| 50 | Fifty Years In The Northwest | Folsom, William H. C. (William Henry Carman) | 282,104 words | 18h 48m |
Ranked over the 683 texts measured here, not over everything ever printed — a ranking is only as wide as its shelf. The whole shelf, A to Z.
