Recommend a lengthy, enjoyable paperback novel

I’m going to be taking several crosscountry flights in the next couple of weeks, and I’m on the lookout for three or four hefty yet portable (and eminently readable) novels or books of short stories to occupy my time. I definitely gravitate away from the generic bestsellers – not least because I read extremely quickly, and most of the authors typically found in airport bookstores always seem more skimmable than truly absorbing. I’m not above genre novels as long as the writing is interesting enough to be enjoyable; for example, I had a good time with Jeff Long’s The Descent a couple of years ago, and that’s nobody’s idea of great literature, but I hated The Da Vinci Code enough to put it down after the first chapter (not that it’s dense enough for my purposes in this thread). I like wit and humor but not too much silliness, pathos but not sentimentality, thoughtfulness but not interminable philosophical byplay, and oddness and absurdity, but not simply for their own sake. I’m a bit of an Anglophile, but I don’t overdo it. I also tend to like stories of ordinary people in out-of-the-ordinary situations or vice-versa.

Here are some of the books I own and love that would fit my needs exactly, if I hadn’t already read them multiple times. (And in the absence of any compelling alternatives, I might take one or more of them along with me this time.)

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Brothers K by David James Duncan
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
Passage by Connie Willis
New Grub Street by George Gissing
Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier
The Portable Dorothy Parker
The Most of P.G. Wodehouse
The Night Manager by John Le Carre
A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Galveston by Sean Stewart
Last Call by Tim Powers
Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell

You can assume that I’m familiar with all other works by the authors listed above, but that I might not be familiar with similar authors.

So, we’re a literate bunch…who can help me out? :slight_smile:

Also, books/authors that I’ve tried before and not liked (nothing personal to those who do; I just want to present an accurate picture of my preferences and forestall them as suggestions):

J.R.R. Tolkien
Tom Wolfe
The Gormenghast trilogy
Cormac McCarthy
Ian McEwan
Philip Roth

More as I think of them.
(Oh, and I love Kazuo Ishiguro and Jonathan Coe.)

How about something by Larry McMurtry? He and Irving are two of my favorites…

And, even though they have somehow gotten a skeevy reputation, both Stephen King’s The Stand and Gone With the Wind are fabulous stories. The are thick and meaty in terms of dropping through the page into the story.

I’ve never read McMurtry. Would you recommend Lonesome Dove?

And I’ve read The Stand and most of Stephen King’s other stuff. Not Gone With the Wind, though. Might have to flip through that at the bookstore to see if it holds my attention.

(One more: hate Don DeLillo; not crazy about Dave Eggers.)

It is my honor to submit A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole for your approval.

If you’re okay with SF, all the books by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are large and thoughtful. Footfall if you want a single book; Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand if you want two connected stories.

If you didn’t like Tolkein, this might not work, but the Tad Williams series starting with The Dragonbone Chair is large and really good. If you want SF instead of fantasy, the same author’s Otherland series is certainly long and dense. I didn’t find the latter as good as the former, but many did.

I know–too much genre. Ah, well, I am what I am.

Read it and loved it. It’s been a while, though; I may have to read it again.
(Continuing the mapping of my preferences: I really like the David Mitchell that I’ve read – Black Swan Green and Number9Dream – and have never, however much I try, been able to get into Haruki Murakami.)

If you like historical novels and haven’t read Ken Follett’s The Pillars Of The Earth, I’d give it a recommend. There’s quite a bit of soap opera and politics in there, but it’s a good historical novel, and very readable. It’s old enough now (the sequel’s out!) to be available in paper back.

If you’ve avoided Follett (as I had) because he writes “spy stories” this isn’t one of them!

I highly recommend Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and System of the World, with Cryptonomicon taking place many centuries later in the modern world). It’s an amazingly in-depth look at the sprawling lives of two characters, the outlaw Jack Shaftoe and his erstwhile friend/paramour Eliza, which takes place during the baroque era in Europe and America. It’s a series that requires an attentive reader and will not blow away from you in no time. If you need a book series that will take many hours and engross you, while also teaching you a lot about a period of history that most Americans don’t know a lot about, this is definitely a good choice.

I came in to recommend The Dragonbone Chair.

Hammer’s Fall by Larry Niven is also quite good.

Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove is excellent alternative history.

Yes, that would be a good choice.

A couple of years ago, Birdmonster started a similar thread, and my recommendation of Michael Malone’s Handling Sin seems to have gone over well.

You mean Lucifer’s Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle?

If you get an unabridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo, that’s a few thousand pages of kick ass.

Just lost a long post. In brief:

I recently finished Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, which I really enjoyed and which I’ve heard compared to Tad Williams’s stuff, but nothing by Williams has ever really grabbed me in the little I’ve seen of it.

I’ll check out Niven and Pournelle; I read Lucifer’s Hammer a long time ago.

I like Ken Follett, and have a copy of Pillars of the Earth that I keep meaning to read.

Unfortunately, I’ve found The Baroque Cycle altogether too dense and diffuse (simultaneously!) for me, although I appreciate what it tries to do and it seems like I should like it. Cryptonomicon as well.

I love Guns of the South.

I’ll check out Handling Sin; I’ve read something else by Malone before, but I can’t remember what it is.

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions so far!

I’ve read and enjoyed Count of Monte Cristo.

Also, although I certainly appreciate them, I think some of the longer books that have been recommended might be a little ambitious in terms of portability. :slight_smile: 400 or 500 pages is good; 1,500 pages may be stretching it.

Cloud Atlas then – it’s long enough to hold you for awhile, and the structure of the story will keep you from getting bored. Not that Mitchell could ever be boring, but the story never flags.

When someone says “page-turner” I think of Aztec by Gary Jennings and Shogun by James Clavell. You’ll forget you’re on a plane.

I see New Grub Street on your list. I read it just before reading The Forsyte Saga and the books complemented each other nicely. I kept wanting one of the Forsytes to take that poor writer under his wealthy wing and feed him. “Hey! Over there! People are starving!”

Have you read any Emile Zola? Assuming he’s in print and widely available, you might like The Dram Shop, Germinal, and The Earth. Or if you need more soap, Manon of the Springs & Jean deFlorette by Marcel Pagnol – compelling stuff.

Ooh! How about some Leon Uris? Mila 18, Trinity, War and Remembrance, Winds of War? Are they still in print? Big thick books with lots of story.

Righto.

How about The Red and the Black (Stendhal) and Invisible Man (Ellison), then. Both in the 400-500 range, I believe.

George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. Start with A Game of Thrones and then get hooked like the rest of us and read the rest of them as if they’re crack, then join us waiting impatiently for him to publish the next one :slight_smile:

I’m sure there are people out there who don’t like them, but I’ve never personally met anyone who read them and didn’t think they were engrossing and get addicted.

(These books are amazing for their characterization. There are no clear cut good or bad characters, and even the real villains have sympathetic qualities, etc.)

The Secret History by Donna Tartt is my definition of good airplane reading.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowel, non-fiction.

If you favor “elegant trash” as Carl Sagan put it, many of the Doc Savage novellas are back in print.