Book Suggestions for LONG Flight
Posted by Deneise on Jul 14, 2009 · Member since Mar 2009 · 33 posts
Hi Everyone,
I'm going to Hawaii on Monday for 10 days (so excited! ;D) and will need something to read on the plane. My flight from DC to Honolulu, with layover will be almost 13 hours and I don't sleep well at all when traveling, no matter how tired I am, so I will probably be awake the entire time. I need some ideas for good, engaging reads, books that make the time fly by!
Can you guys make some suggestions? I read a lot, I read fast, so something over 500 would be ideal, but not necessary. So far, someone has suggested I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (I read the ones prior) and Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.
Thanks!
Well, without a genre to narrow it down, i have a hard time knowing what kind of stuff you like to read.
the author who popped into my head is wally lamb (she's come undone or i know this much is true) cuz he will keep you turning pages. sometimes it can get a little heavy (you might want a couple tissues (but extremely well-written)
Zadie Smith's On Beauty is another great novel that'll keep you turning pages. Excellent writer.
Great for me (since i only have short bursts of time to read) are short stories, and my new favorite author there is Jhumpa Lahiri. Check out Interpreter of Maladies and .... I can't remember the other name. Public library should have both.
Are those applicable or not really your style?
Will Tuttle's "The World Peace Diet"
*Tee hee hee* I think that is about the 20th time I have recommended this book on this site *lol* Will should start paying me as his promoter :)
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
I recently read this (thanks lubi!) and loved it. Nice perspective, fairly easy read and very hard to put down.
Moonkeymam, I don't really have a particular genre in mind. I read a little bit of everything, but just want something thats going to keep me occupied. Those are great suggestions, I actually read the Wally Lamb novels, I LOVED "She's Come Undone", my copy of the book is disinegrating and I bought "I Know This Much is True" the day it came out :) Can't say I'd want to do short stories since I'll such a large block of time, but I'll look in Zadie Smith.
Capture, I actually have "The World Peace Diet" but it's not in my possession right now, I'll see if I can get it back before I leave.
secondbase, I will look into this one too!
Thanks!
Scarlett Thomas - 'The End of Mr. Y' or 'PopCo'. She's an amazing author, very witty, more than a little cynical and she draws in all kinds of esoteric knowledge into these slightly surreal, intense stories.
Scarlett Thomas - 'The End of Mr. Y' or 'PopCo'. She's an amazing author, very witty, more than a little cynical and she draws in all kinds of esoteric knowledge into these slightly surreal, intense stories.
wow. now I'm going to have to read her. what a review! thanks for the new suggestion!
I too buy books "by the pound" when faced with a long flight! One of the few times I read historical fiction. I might suggest Stendahl's "The Red and the Black" or War and Peace or something like that, after all you will have peace to get into it. Or take the Tolkein Trilogy with you (LOTR).
I might personally take my copy of "Pepys: The Essential Self" and see if I can finally read it all the way through...because I keep getting sidetracked from it. But I'm odd that way.
wow. now I'm going to have to read her. what a review! thanks for the new suggestion!
Well worth checking out both those books! I remember reading an interview with her a while ago where she says it's like a game for her to get all of her new interests and obsessions into each book she writes without the plot falling apart. Here it is:
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_03_010799.php
She's also vegetarian I think.
If you've read all but the last Harry Potter book, then definitely Deathly Halows.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (512 pages)
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (288 pages)
The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists (288 pages)
The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 (224 pages)
The Lady and the Unicorn (256 pages)
I really like Carl Hiaasen for a good 'entertaining read'. He has a great sense of humor and uses his home of the southern Florida peninsula with extraordinary detail. My fav of his is Sick Puppy, that got me through the bed rest of my first knee surgery. (avg 400pp)
For more 'historical/scientific (note: NOT 'scifi'!) fiction, any of James A. Michner. (avg 900pp)
Purely Historical fiction/fantasy: Definitely Marion Zimmer Bradley!
Other good writers are John Irving, or Ann Rice.
If you can find the anthology (I've seen it all bound into one book) I think The Chronicles of Narnia would be good for a 'light/entertaining' read.
Then there are the classics like Ayn Rand and John Steinbeck....It really just depends on your mood/taste!
Buy the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy in one book.
I am an avid Stephen King fan so I would suggest something like The Stand or The Dark Tower series.
Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. I love this book. Oh, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake was awesome, especially if you're a distopia type.
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini was pretty good. I liked it better than Kite Runner, and it's also pretty long I think..
The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star (432 pages)
In one of the most unique memoirs of addiction ever published, Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx shares mesmerizing diary entries from the year he spiraled out of control in a haze of heroin and cocaine, presented alongside riveting commentary from people who were there at the time, and from Nikki himself.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (288 pages) - by Bill Bryson, love him!
Bill Bryson is erudite, irreverent, funny and exuberant, making the temptation to quote endlessly from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoirhard to resist. Bryson interweaves childhood reminiscences seamlessly with observations about 1950s America, evoking a zeitgeist that will be familiar to almost everyone past middle age. Though his memories are for the most part pleasurable, he doesn't evade the darker side of the times…
Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne (608 pages)
People told her she wasn't "colored enough." (Ethel Waters, among others, despised her.) They said she had no sense of rhythm, couldn't sing the blues. But Lena Horne's patrician beauty dazzled white audiences, and in the 1940s, her sexy, stylish cabaret and film performances made her a star. James Gavin's Stormy Weather (Atria) tells how this elegant icon—polite to a fault, quietly enraged by Hollywood racism—spent decades getting comfortable in her skin.
The Tender Bar (432 pages)
J.R. Moehringer didn't have a father growing up; he had a bar. His old man, who got into a fistfight at his own wedding, threatened to slice up Moehringer's mother's face with a straight razor when the boy was 7 months old, and later left them altogether. As a kid, the author and his mom lived at his grandfather's derelict house in Manhasset, N.Y., 142 steps away from Dickens, the watering hole (later renamed Publicans) that serves as the focal point for Moehringer's outstanding memoir, The Tender Bar.
Memoirs of a Geisha kept me going for hours, the language is so colorful that it took a long time to read, yet I wasn't bored at all.
My travel go to is Clive Cussler books. His main caracter is like James Bond meets Indiana Jones with some Jaques Custeau thrown in. If you saw the lame Mathew Maconohey (sp) version of Sahara please note that the movie was so not like the book it is hardly worth mentioning. The books are great, very action packed with lots of twists.
I am an avid Stephen King fan so I would suggest something like The Stand or The Dark Tower series.
oh yes, this. Well, to be fair, I haven't read any Dark Tower books yet, but The Stand, well, 1400 pages should keep you going for a fair few hours.
On a related note, NRKevo did you know there is a five-hour long movie of The Stand? That could also take up a substantial amount of plane time : )
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
HH, just wanted you to know that I picked this up upon your recommendation and I'll probably finish it before I get on the airplane. Fascinating, horrifying. Excellent. And it will give me something to talk about with my very conservative, but inexplicably so, family this Christmas. Thanks!
Sweet! It's interesting, huh?
I posted a second list of books that were closer to 500 pages for the purpose of this thread, although I haven't read any of them; I've just heard about them. I like the 250-300 page range. They're a bit more focused and the newer (in the last 50 years) non-fiction writing style reads easily like fiction.
If you liked Harry Potter, they The Name Of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.
It's long, but flies by.
And it's awesome. A bit of Potter, a bit LOTR and a great hook.
I can't recommend it enough.