I am leaving Thursday night on a 10-hour train ride to meet my girlfriend in Arizona. I am not expecting to be able to sleep, so I need a good book to pass the time. I would like a book that is long enough to keep me reading for the full 10 hours (or close to it). My interests are Sci-Fi fantasy (and yes I have read lord or the rings AND a song of ice and fire) and general modern fiction though I would not rule out a mystery or non-fiction book as long as they turned out to be a page-turner. I read Shogun on a plane flight to Australia and that was great. Mostly I am looking for a nice fluffy page-turner that is also LONG, 4 or 5 hundred pages might be the minimum page count, something in the eight hundreds would be preferred. My only problem would be that while I want something light, I also want it to be good. No DaVincie code type books. I am also not generally a fan of police procedurals, but other crime fiction is A-OK.
So what do you guys think, you got a good quality page-turner that will last me 10 hours?
I have a question about Cryptonomicon. I haven’t read and Neal Stephenson because William Gibson did a fairly good job of turning me off to cyberpunk, I liked Nuromancer, but everything else bored me to tears. I haven’t really tried any other cyberpunk though.
I think my problem is that I am not a huge tech or math person. How critical is it that I understand the math in Cryptonomicon? It is a book that I have been thinking about reading for a while (along with Snow Crash) but haven’t pulled the trigger on because everyone talks about how math heavy his books are, cryptonomicon in particular. What do you think, would I be able to follow and enjoy the story even though my geekiness doesn’t have that techo bent?
Thanks to everyone who has tossed in a suggestion so far, keep them coming please. I will probably bring along my copy of Dune as a back up in case the main book doesn’t pan out, (great suggestion Only Mostly Dead) but I would love to find a new something as a plan A. (I have read most of the other suggestions, except for Atlas Shrugged and the Thomas Covenant books. I just finished the Fountainhead though and don’t feel I need any more Rand in my life at the moment, and Donaldson’s writing style doesn’t seem to lend itself to a single sitting, plow through it, reading session.)
This is going to be weird coming from me as I am a big fan of sci fi and fantasy, but I recommend Gone with the Wind.
Why? It is a really good book, even if it’s not up your alley. It’s the kind of book that, if you’re not a fan of the genre, you only want to read once. But most of all, it’s a book you want to finish all at once; you can’t put it down until it’s done.
I read it overnight once…never picked it up again but it was enormously entertaining.
I like long books by Michener (Hawaii was an especially good one) and Rutherfurd (my favorite of his is Sarum, which is about southern England). They both write books about a particular place, and the story covers many years & generations of people living in that place. Lots of good history & description of the places.
You might try Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It may take you longer than ten hours to read, but if you enjoy it as much as I did, you’ll find that a plus.
Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is, in my opinion, a very underappreciated fantasy series. And it’s long. The individual books are The Dragonbone Chair, The Stone of Farewell, and To Green Angel Tower.
For non-fiction, The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th Century Physics by Crease and Mann is a great book. It’s a very indepth description of everything that happened in particle physics and quantum theory from the years before Planck up to the awarding of the 1978 Nobel Prize. However, it is quite biographical and historical in its story, concentrating on the actual people who did things and how one discovery leads to another, so you don’t have to be a physics freak to follow the book.
Wow, that books sounds great! I am not sure if it is single sitting reading or not, the reviews on amazon call it alternatly “slow and tedious but rewarding” and “lightweight reading without real substance”. So I am not sure which it actually is. Do you think it is the type of book that can be read for hours on end? I will pick up a copy either way though. Nice recommendation, thanks.
Keep the recomendations comming, I am putting together a list of candidates to take with me to Barnes and Noble after work today. I figure I should have 4 or 5 solid options in case they don’t have one in stock.
