Publisher: Sales of long classic novels have risen in 2020

Many readers decided to find the silver lining of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns and bump up their book consumption.

For some, that simply meant crossing off more titles; for others, it meant tackling the tomes that had overwhelmed them in the past.

And while Penguin Random House doesn’t, of course, have statistics on how many readers actually finished (or opened) these hefty classics, the publisher tells the Guardian that certain big books have flown off the shelves.

The figures from the UK show the following increases:

• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (1,440 pages): up 69 percent

• Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (1,056 pages): up 53 percent

• Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy (865 pages): up 52 percent 

• Middlemarch, by George Eliot (880 pages): up 40 percent

• Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (720 pages): up 35 percent

Alison Flood shares her own epic-novel adventures during the pandemic, along with a few reflections from other readers, in the Guardian. 

Related posts 

• The Washington Post's analysis of COVID-19 reading trends 

• A tale of two readerships during the coronavirus lockdown