The Blah Story

I was looking at an article regarding the longest (published) literary sentence, a record now held by Mathias Enard for his 517-page French novel Zone. At the bottom of the article I saw this:

NOTE: The above list does not include "The Blah Story," by Nigel Tomm, which has a sentence of reportedly 2.4 million words that rambles through Volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19. It was left off because (a) the book is self-published, (b) about a million of those words are "blah" and (c) its literary value is highly questionable. An excerpt: "As no one was blah any blah to blah, and no one blah needed blah, blah quietly blah blah ..."

This struck me as madly unfair, so I trundled down to the local The Blah Story weblog where the truth soon unfolded like a picnic blanket covered in envy:

For now, 23 volumes of The Blah Story are published, they contain 11,338,105 words; 61,745,771 characters (with spaces); 17,868 pages.

Some trivia about The Blah Story: Volume 19 contains the world’s longest word, Volume 10 contains the second world’s longest word, Volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19 contains the world’s longest sentence, Volume 4 contains the second world’s longest sentence, Volume 8 contains the world’s longest poem, Volume 13 contains the world’s longest drama.

For some reason I find this literary elephantitis incredibly compelling. Maybe it's just because I'm a bloke. Still, it seems patently wrong to ignore The Blah Story on the basis that many of its words are 'blah'.