Books you've stayed up late to finish reading

There have been some books over the years that I simply can’t put down at night until I’m finished with them, even if that means I stay up way past my bedtime and wind up being a zombie at work or school the next day. It seems to happen less often these days than it did when I was younger, possibly because I read less fiction than I used to.

Embarrassingly enough, the most recent example for me is the Sookie Stackhouse “Southern Vampire” novels by Charlaine Harris. They are like popcorn for my brain, but it’s popcorn that I can’t stop eating until it’s gone.

Anyone else? I need some gripping reading material. So to speak.

Humiliatingly, Twilight. Couldn’t put that piece of shit down. Just couldn’t help it.

Oddly, Brideshead Revisited, and Gaudy Night, neither of which are the kind of thing you think of as unputdownable - I was up till the wee hours with both, though.

ETA - and, uh, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books. Those are good, though, not crap.

J Robert Lennon’s, Mailman. I was up till 5:30am.

I didn’t quite follow the ending so either I was so tired or else, but the book was absoutely wonderful. Kind of a dark humour.

He has a similar book called The Funnies about people behind a comic strip that superficially reminds the reader of the “Family Circus”

Various books I’ve done it with:

The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)*, Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein), The Stand (Stephen King), Pretty much every one of the Myth Adventures books (Robert Asprin), Green Lantern: The Hero’s Quest (Dennis O’Neil), Superman: The Never Ending Battle (Roger Stern) (both text novels). Each of them had multiple ‘just one more chapter’ nights in the first reading, which usually ended up pushing my bedtime back 2 or 3 hours.

But the absolute KING of it…

The Time Machine (H G Wells). Picked it up in the evening, didn’t put it down until it was finished.

Granted, it’s a short book (the edition I was reading was about 120 pages), but still…

  • Sidenote, if anyone’s read the sequels are they worth the effort of checking out?

Salem’s Lot. I was so scared I had to finish it so I could sleep.

StG

Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier. I remember getting to the “twist” part and having to stay up to finish it. So good!

Embarrassingly, Battlefield Earth, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Watership Down. Disclaimer: This is probably my favorite book of all time, so there may be some bias.

Other than that, the most recent one I can clearly remember would be Triplanetary. My “bedtime” at the time was 4 am or so–I stayed up until 5:30 or 6 reading it.

Probably Lonesome Dove.
Loved that book.

Lord of the Flies. It was an assigned book in 9th grade English. Started reading it between classes the day we got it, finished it before I went to sleep that night. It scared the bejeesus out of me.

There are lots of books where I stay up way too late reading, but I can’t remember any I read all in one go like that. One I remember reading every waking minute was a now-obscure tome called The HAB Theory. It was the rage amongst my circle in high school and it warped my view of the world a little. LOL

Terry Pratchett and Lois Bujold are the worst for me. If I get a new book by either of them, I’ve learned not to start reading it until Friday evening, otherwise I’m going to be useless at work the next day.

Replay. I think I carried on reading that through the night and to the next day.
And Discworld usually has that effect on me.

Salem’s Lot by Stephen King.

I started it at bedtime (idiot) and read through the night, finishing as teh sun came up. Engrossed and scared!
*
Angela’s Ashes*. I started it in the car on a trip from my parents-in-law’s place and holed up in the bathroom in our motel room with the light all night on bawling my eyes out.

The Lord of the Rings – many times.

But I do this all the time, as long as my life lets me, so I’m probably not the best example.

As a kid I tried making it through LotR many times, and never could get out of the shire. Finally in 8th grade I made it out of the Shire, and the books picked right the hell up.

I stayed up one night reading The Two Towers. It was pushing midnight, but I was almost done with it.

And then it ended. If you’ve read it (not seen the movie), you know where it ended.

Dammit! I couldn’t leave it there! So I picked up Return of the King, figuring I’d read just the first chapter till I found out what had happened.

Turns out you don’t find out what happened until the second half of the book. By then it was nearly five in the morning.

I wasn’t much good the next day.

Oh, I forgot that one! Yeah, I think it was probably 4 AM for me when they were on their way to London and there was no way in hell I was putting that down.

Hogg by Samuel Delany. I read it all in one shot, beginning at around 3 PM out by the pool and continuing all the way up until about 5 or 6 AM. I had to find out what the last word of the novel was (since it said on the back cover, and on reviews I read elsewhere, that the protagonist and narrator only says one word in the whole book, the last word of the narrative.)

Its a short one, but, “Jonathon Livingston Seagull” by Robert Bach…i think thats the only book i read straight through with no breaks.

Let me see, Sunday night, well, Monday morning rather, I finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets at 4:30 AM. I finished Prisoner of Azkaban at 7:30 AM Tuesday morning. I have put off starting Goblet of Fire for a couple of days, since I really want to get up in the morning rather then going to bed the. :stuck_out_tongue: Besides, I don’t own a copy of Order of the Phoenix and can’t find my library card. :frowning:

And I will probably not be going to bed soon anyway, I received my copy of Absolute DC: The New Frontier today unexpectedly (I didn’t remember ordering it.) and I am going to have to read the entire thing soon.

I just finished **The Sex Lives of Cannibals **by Maarten Troost around 1:30 last night, and I enjoyed it. His next book is Getting Stoned With Savages.