Blogagaard Finishes Gigantic Book

I finished Tolstoy's Anna Karenina today and I think my head's going to explode. Seriously, folks, that was one long book. 817 pages. I memorized this number about halfway through the book, sort of like my numerical finish line. It was a great book in many ways, don't get me wrong, but 817 pages is a fucking lot of pages. This book came on the heels of my reading Umberto Echo's Foucault's Pendulum, which itself weighs in at 641 pages. Combined that's 1,458 pages in just two books. What drives an author to such insanity? All six of my novels, added up, are probably around 1,458 pages (if that).

Whenever I read a large, expansive book I remember two things: ancient Chinese literature, and an episode of Mr. Belvedere. Dream of the Red Chamber: Hung Lou Meng is 1,887 pages long and often comes in a three or four volume box set, yet is one long ancient Chinese novel written by Tsao Hseuh-Chin, and regards two families, one of which is rising in society and one which is slowly, oh so slowly, declining. Dream has over 400 characters in it, and I read every page of it during my senior year in high school. What the hell, I thought. Nearly two War & Peace's combined (I only got through the first 500 pages of War & Peace). It was like a never ending soap opera with exotic customs anda endless taels of silver, which was what everyone bought things with. Ten billion gallons of tea must have been consumed by the 400 characters, all of which had at least two or thee different names to remember. ATTN: DO NOT FINISH READING THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU INTEND TO READ THIS WORK!!! Okay, in the end, after all those damn pages, the whole thing turns out to be a dream! Thank you, China!

As for Mr. Belvedere, I recall an episode, glimpsed in my youth, when a knife is chucked right into his heart when he's walking down a dark hallway. Does anyone else remember this episode? Anyway, it was a two parter and in the second part we found out he's not dead, because he had a thick book under his robe, which stopped the knife! Might have been the Bible. Hell yeah!