Oh, and Zoe Oldenbourg's book on the Crusades, it was quite a study and rather gripping.

you read ellman's joyce? dude that's one of my favorite books. what did you think of it?

I recall that I thought it was very good, however I read it in my pretentious youth when I liked intellectual stuff of the sort I try to avoid nowadays.

Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s

986 pages, edited by Isaac Asimov.

Fantastic Sci-fi, before science spoilt the genre.

I've read it cover to cover twice now, the first time when I was fourteen.

what an ironically pretentious comment

I read a 20 page manual for one of my classes.. does that count?

Most pages, most words, or thickest in inches?

Due to heavy paper, double-spacing, and printing on one side only, my dissertation is thicker than Stephen King's The Stand, which I've read twice. Of course, I have read what I wrote.

Is The Stand thicker than Shogun, The Brothers K (the American, not the Russian novel), Swann's Way, The Poems of Carl Sandburg, or The Complete Sherlock Holmes? All of these texts had richer, more complex stories than King's dystopia.

I excluded Lord of the Rings from my list because it was three volumes when I read it in the mid-1970s. I read The Hobbit prior to the trilogy. The Dune trilogy came in the late 1970s, but again each volume was normal size.

If you want to count a series of books, how about Faulkner's series set in Yoknapatawpha County?

I read the stand as well which i enjoyed till the ending which i didn't care for. When i asked the original question i had in mind the number of pages which is alot easier to figure out then the number of words but i would say that if another thick book had a larger impact on you I would mention both books.

Several blockbusters by James Michener and James Clavell, Ulysses by James Joyce, Bleak House by Dickens, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky etc etc. I'm too lazy to go back and look up the # of pages and words in these books, or to measure their thickness with a ruler.

 Most pages, most words, or thickest in inches? Ziryab makes a good point: what is everyone's idea of a "thick book?"

Thin books have had a far larger impact on me than thick. The thickest book that I have read that I would recommend to others is David James Duncan, The Brothers K. That book is THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL!

Nope.  I believe you're thinking of Huck Finn.

1141 pages, The Stand: Expanded Edition (By Steven King). It took forever but I loved it.

maybe Anna Karenina. a great historical novel, but you really gotta like reading. Or Moby Dick. If I ever finish War and Peace, that will be the thickest. or maybe An American Tragedy. 

I've read that a couple of times. It was the great American novel of the nineteenth century. The Brothers K is for our era.

Moby-Dick should be required reading. It offers more insight into the 2012 election than most of what you'll find in the newspapers, and everything that you'll find on television.

After you read the beginning of An American Tragedy, you know the story. Reading the rest of the novel, you see it repeated two dozen more times. When you are finished with An American Tragedy, you can read the story again as Native Son by Richard Wright.

That's not saying much.

Moby-Dick offers insight into many of the main currents of American history from the date of its publication until today. That's far better than Nostradamus. Moby-Dick explores the nature of men, Nostradamus offered vague and cryptic poetry open to interpretation. Ahab was funded by ... [I almost forgot that politics are forbidden here].

I leave a white and turbid wake, pale waters, paler cheeks where'er I sail.

Again, your comparative is not exactly superlative.

Both "Executioner's Song" and "Harlot's Ghost" were pretty hefty, the latter 1200+ pages. They were good reads at the time but I wouldn't say they made a big impact. A glance at my bookself got me thinking that "The Coming Plague" was thick too (and that one was pretty memorable) but it's actually only 600 or so after you ignore the appendices and reference notes.