On reading big books.

I have loved reading long novels ever since I was a kid.  Stephen King's The Stand is the first one that I ever read that was over 1,000 pages and I remember the conflicting joys of finishing it.  The book was such a trek to accomplish that I was at once proud of having gotten through it and a little sad at it being over.  This was also one of the first books that I spent a lot of time thinking about after I had finished it.  I haven't ever made my way back to re-read it, but I still might.
My later reading habits also followed this pattern.  I enjoyed the implicit challenge of a thick book.  They were almost daring me not to finish them, to pack them in after a few hundred pages.  And there have been a lot of times when, after a few weeks of reading, I realized that my bookmark was still in the first third or quarter of its thickness and was tempted to let them go.  But most times I kept going and there is generally reward in the experience beyond just the narrative itself.  Long books are journeys (he writes, tritely), and they do require a certain perspective to approach them.  One of my favorite critics, Northrop Frye, writes that reading is actually a two-part act; there is first the act of reading and then the thought about what one has read.  Some long books extend this and force us to rethink attitudes toward the book as we go.  The Stand challenged me because there were parts that I disliked and found boring.  The same was true when I read The Lord of the Rings books and ran across pages of elvish song.  There is a certain amount of boredom and drudgery that accompanies reading many large books that is a part of the pleasure of reading them because it becomes possible to inhabit the book in that time.  I can assign whole tracts of my life to the time I was reading one book or another.  The first time I read Infinite Jest, it took me nearly a year to get through it, but I always remember that I picked it up the summer after I completed my MA and moved back to Ohio and spent a good chunk of the time I was in Daytona grading AP lit exams for the first time reading it.  Likewise, the first time I attempted to read Gravity's Rainbow was when I was n undergrad and a professor happened to mention it.  I bought a copy at a second hand store that defeated me that first time.  I read Pynchon's Slow Learner collection instead because it was more digestible.
Long novels leave room for imperfection that is important to the make up of the narrative.  They seem to become less controlled as they go, which puts the reader back into the position of renegotiating their relationship to the narrative.   I like this, too, because the difficulty of a text, whether it be due to length or imperfections in the novel, is engaging.  Most long novels are necessarily complex and these complexities can reveal contradiction in a perceived world that make it more real.  Many of these novels leave loose threads or may lack resolution, but this makes them all the more reflective of our own lives.  We live each day in a mire of incomplete narrative threads.