it may not be exactly what you are looking for, but I adore The Count of Monte Cristo. It's 1300 pages of delightful reading.

Have you read any of James Michener's works? I'm not sure how they've held up over time, but they were absorbing when I originally read them.

I can also recommend Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series.

I've always loved The Once And Future King, tho it's not as long as War And Peace, it's definitely a saga.

Michener's books and the ones by Edward Rutherfurd. And even if you read it years ago, The Grapes of Wrath is stunning.

Marquis de Custine

Empire of the Czar

A journey through eternal Russia

Due to this work, Custine was later dubbed by some historians as "the de Tocqueville of Russia"

more than 600 pages. Meetings with the Czar & Czarina -- insights on every page. It took me months because I kept notes! (1840s)

Are you looking for fiction or non-fiction or both?

I've just finished Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series of three books and quite enjoyed it. It's highly rated on Good Reads.

Did you ever read The Poisonwood Bible? How about The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See?

So many great ideas here! Please add more if you have any in mind. I plan to visit used bookstores for some older titles, such as by James Michener.

Elmer - I am mainly looking for fiction, but would also be interested in a good nonfiction.

Olychick - I have read The Poisonwood Bible and The Island of Sea Women. This last one I really loved - how amazing were those women!

I'm just finishing what must be my third or fourth re-reading of Richard Rhodes' Pulitzer Prize winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Goodreads rating 4.4 from nearly 25K raters. Looking through the comments, they seem disproportionately male so that might mean something, maybe not. The first half of the book presents a lot of detail of the developments in theoretical physics for the 50+ years before the Manhattan Project began. Not at a level too difficult to understand but it isn't for 10-year olds either. Also discussed are the significant personal and geopolitical factors that led up to the vast majority of the ultimately Nobel prize winning physicists of a generation being present in the US at just the right time. Nearly 900 pages, it was a 37 hour audiobook for me. Exquisitely and, some contend, perhaps a bit too exhaustively researched. It never got slow for me, but the number of my re-reads tells how much I like the book.

I think I may have mentioned to you before, and that you've read, CJ Sansom's fabulously engaging 7 book historical fiction series beginning with Dissolution.

Hochschild's non-fiction King Leopold's Ghost - rated 4.2 by 70K raters. An enlightening and shocking chronicle of Belgium's colonial conduct in Africa. Everyone should know about what happened. I, probably like many others, was completely in the dark about the important stories this book tells.

I echo the Michener recommendation, though his stuff is a bit dated now. Some are better than others.

Island at the Center of the World, by Shorto. A non-fiction account of the founding of New York City and its initial decades as part of the Netherlands. Taken from what was one of the very first historical investigations of the Dutch civil records that laid untouched in NY State Archives in Albany for centuries and centuries.

I don't read fiction of the "literature" genre so most of my favorite fiction reading over the years has been books written by three authors of so-called "popular fiction" (with their characters in parens)

Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch, The Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller, and newish character Renée Ballard)

Daniel Silva (Gabriel Allon). I feared these books would get repetitive and stale with a stable main character and his fixed background but I continue to enjoy new ones.

Lee Child, now succeed by his brother Andrew Child (Jack Reacher)

I'm reading Nobody's Girl by Virginia Giuffre. I normally read fiction, but this book is well written, but sad since she committed suicide shortly after it was published.

Following, because I love a long book.

...And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer

Shantaram by Gregory David Robert's

11/22/63 by Stephen King (not his usual horror)

The Kingsbridge series by Ken Follett, although I didn't finish the whole series

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy

If you liked Kristin Lavransdatter, read it again--and make sure you read the translation by Tiina Nunnally, not the older Archer translation, though that is the way I first read it over 60 years ago. I've read KL repeatedly since I was in my teens--I'm 81 now. It gets more and more powerful and insightful the older you get, and there are subtleties that take repeated readings to really appreciate. One of the greatest novels ever written and surely the greatest historical novel.

I recently tried to reread And Ladies of the Club because I had enjoyed it years ago. It was dreadful, leaden, the dialog so bad, that I abandoned it after 50 pages or so.

Not a huge novel, but long and deep enough and magnificently written--Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally--two Australian sisters both nurses during WW I. I suggest that after you read it you google and listen to the song "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda." The most powerful anti war song I've ever heard.

Pillars of the Earth

Sarum

Outlander series

Several years ago my local librarian recommended ”Washington - A Life” by Ron Chernow. Although I wasn't enthusiastic about her recommendation, I checked it out, read it, and it still stands out as one of my all time favorite books. It is over 900 pages of pleasure, knowledge, and admiration for a one of a kind human.

Pillars of the Earth - it was like a well-woven tapestry.

The Stand - horror/fantasy battle of good and evil

Shogun - my favourite of James Clavell's Asian saga

The Orphan Master's Son - not quite as lengthy, but it still stays with me (set in North Korea).

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett is just one book in a series, taken all together, you'll be reading for quite a while.

A Column of Fire

World Without End

The Evening and the Morning

The Armour of Light

I'm thrilled at all these responses and would love to hear more from anyone with ideas. As anyone knows who is a book lover, there is nothing so discouraging as being in a reading slump. I plan to make a list of these titles to refer to for months to come.

Elmer - I had forgotten about the Shardlake series. I really enjoyed it and haven't yet read the last volume.

Laceyvail - I do have the Tina Nunnally translation of Kristen Lavransdatter, fortunately. Also fortunately, I had purchased the book and have it on hand to enjoy again.

Forgot to add All This And Heaven Too by Rachel Field - it's based on the true story of her ancestor, and was made into a Bette Davis movie as well - and contains a murder mystery that's never, AFAIK, been solved. It takes place around the time of the French Revolution, IIRC.

Sister Carrie and other books by Theodore Dreiser were very absorbing - chronicling working Americans' experiences during the Industrial age. Louisa May Alcott's adult fiction is great, IMO, along with her youth novels of course.

I also enjoyed Octavia Butler's Kindred and Parable Of The Sower. Toni Morrison's books are also very immersive, IMO.

Along with fantasy, I like reading older books about what life was like in the past. I appreciate the more complex language of those times.

For those appreciating a long read, another book I loved is The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, another winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Well, My all time favorite book is THE JUNGLE, Upton Sinclair. And its a very long saga. Its the most well written book Ive ever read. Also The Wolfhall series of three. WOLFHALL, BRING UP THE BODIES, THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT, Hilary Mantel. JURASSIC PARK and THE LOST WORLD, Michael Crichton, and dont forget GONE WITH THE WIND.

Ah, @hobbitmom, I was going to recommend the Wolf Hall series. Silly me, I kept hoping at the end that it wouldn't turn out that way, even though historically I knew the it would :-)

I thought I was the only person who had read The Once and Future King and ...And Ladies of the Club LOL

@stacey_mb, there are a couple of Korean TV series on Netflix set on Jeju with hanyeo as main characters. DH and I have enjoyed them very much, though we don't mind subtitles (which I know some people find annoying).

In my earlier post, I didn't mention what I consider the greatest work of the 20th century--The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. I know many think it's "just" a fantasy novel, but it's far, far more than that as it tells a gripping story with great characters while grappling with profound issues of morality, power, fate, free will, mercy, and pity. In addition, the style and depth of world creation is unique because Tolkien brought to his huge writing skills the vast knowledge of language and languages that made him a towering scholar in his field. (His essay, Beowulf, the Monster and the Critics, transformed how scholars understood Beowulf.)If all you know are the movies (which I have deliberately not seen), you know only the barest plot.

Tolkien scholars write serious scholarly analyses of his work, and though you certainly don't need to read these works to appreciate LOTR, they bring you deeper into the subtleties of his work that casual readers miss.

I've read LOTR well over 20 times since I discovered it in the 1960s. Each reading yields more, especially as I have aged.

If you are already a fan, I encourage you to read Pity, Power, and Tokien's Ring by Thomas P. Hillman, retired classics scholar, and The Tower and the Ruin by Michael D.C Drout, Professor of English at Wheaton College.

I have read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, although it was a long time ago. I agree, they are wonderful books and maybe it's time for a re-reading.