Top Five Saturday is a meme hosted by Devouring Books to discover and share books that all have a common theme. Previously, the focus has included witches, werewolves, thrillers, faeries, fairy tale re-tellings, high fantasy and many more.
This week, we are looking at book in excess of 500 pages. So many to choose from… probably. Page length is perhaps the last thing I look for when choosing a book to read.
1. The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon
A well realised and expansive fantasy world teeming with dragons, cockatrices and magic, steeped in its own mythologies and featuring a compelling female-female love between a kickass magic wielding warrior and a Queen. Personally, I think it should have been expanded into a trilogy to flesh out things a bit more because even at 846 pages some aspects were a little vague.
2. The Heart’s Invisible Furies, John Boyne
575 pages chronicling the live of Cyril Avery – not a real Avery, adopted – from his traumatic birth to Catherine Goggin, unmarried and fleeing her home town in Ireland to Dublin, and into his old age, at seven year intervals. Full of love, sex, frustration, anger, tragedy and comedy in equal measures, the novel explores the changing attitudes to homosexuality in Ireland over a generation. It is an astounding and tear jerking read.
3. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
A classic – an absurd, sprawling, Shakespearean tragic comic epic…. a beautiful powerful mess of a book! Ahab, nailing the gold coin to the mast, the infernal industrial boiling of the blubber; Starbuck, Stubb. Oh Queequeg! It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but for me it is just wonderful
4. The Name of The Rose, Umberto Eco
Medieval monks, Holmes-like deductions, murders, intellectual explorations. And a deeply humane experience.
Also, memories of an A-Level ski trip on which I read it. Amongst other distractions. 536 pages.
5. The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak
Holocaust. Books. Jews. Death as a narrator. Synaesthetoc beautiful descriptions… just stunning in every way. 564 pages.
And, just to cheat, some honourable mentions! And so so many more! I’m going to be honest, I’ve not gone back and double checked their length but I’m fairly confident that these meet that 500+ page length.
The Book Lovers' Sanctuary 
The book thief is one of my all time favorite books 😍
And I just received the Priority of the Orange tree (HUGE book) 😂😂
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I liked Priory as a different fantasy style and a step away from Game of Thrones – and a world with general acceptance of the characters sexuality without it becoming a THING was refreshing.
And it had dragons! Good dragons and demon dragons!
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WoW !! sounds really interesting AND DRAGONS ! ❤ ❤ gonna start reading it after completing my current read 🙂 Thank you ❤
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A great selection!
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Thanks!
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Umberto gave me some great pleasure😉
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