Well, there are books that are long, and then there are books that are tediously long. War and Peace and many of Stephen King's books are in this category for the amount of detail the author goes into. Trust me, detail can be a good thing, but when Stephen King is blathering on and on and on about something, it just makes me want to stop reading the book, which I've done at several points. Melville's (forgive me if the spelling is mangled) stuff is relatively the same, though I've only read part of Moby Dick, it's his other stuff I've seen.