6 Long, Absorbing Books to Get You Through Your Vacation

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/books/long-books-vacation.html

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Escape can be a slippery concept. You buy a ticket or fill your tank, enlist a friend to feed your cats and exit everyday life with great fanfare. “See you in 2020,” you say to co-workers, bus drivers and the neighbor you passed over for cat-sitting because he snoops.

But, as we all know, holidays can be stressful. Thirty-six hours after you arrive at your destination, dread shows up like a stalker you can’t shake. You remember the pileup of obligations awaiting your return to ordinary time. You worry you’re not enjoying your getaway as much as you should. You already feel nostalgic for this time, yet you’re still in the middle of it. Your family starts to push your buttons and vice versa.

What you need is a good novel to distract you. As a professional reader, I’m qualified to prescribe these quick-relief, long-lasting and addictive books. Warning: They may cause daydreaming and are not meant to be enjoyed while operating a motor vehicle (except on audio).

“The Goldfinch” is the gold standard of vacation reading — propulsive, thought-provoking, sweeping and full of such texture, you’ll still remember the name of a minor canine character six years after reading it. (He is Popper, a portly Maltese.) I used it as a life raft during a family vacation in a sweltering beach house with five toddlers. (Against all odds, I survived.) As for the plot, our critic summed it up perfectly: “‘The Goldfinch’ is at once a thriller involving the theft and disappearance of [a] painting, a panoramic portrait of New York (and, for that matter, America) in the post-Sept. 11 era, and, most especially, an old-fashioned Bildungsroman, complete with a ‘Great Expectations’-like plot involving an orphan, his moral and sentimental education and his mysterious benefactor.” (771 pages)

If you love books about groups of friends (“The Group,” “The Interestings,” “Commencement”), you will love “A Little Life.” Yanagihara follows Jude, Willem, Malcolm and J.B., college friends who move to New York City at an unspecified time. We see them grow up, navigate the city, establish careers (some with more success than others), fall in love (ditto) and attempt to distance themselves from their own histories (ditto again — especially for one member of the group, who has endured horrific abuse). Our critic wrote, “It’s a big, emotional, trauma-packed read with a voluptuous prose style that wavers between the exquisite and the overdone.” “A Little Life” should come with a warning: Bring tissues. There’s loss in here, and lots of it; this might not be your cup of tea. (832 pages)

When we meet Ifemelu, the Nigerian-born star of Adichie’s eye-opening, continent-straddling novel “Americanah,” she’s working on a fellowship at Princeton and writing a blog about racial issues in her adopted country. The story traces the arc of Ifemelu’s adjustment to the United States — where she has to travel for an hour just to get her hair braided — and her longing for home, which goes hand in hand with her love for Obinze, her old flame in Nigeria. Our critic wrote, “Though ‘Americanah’ takes the shape of a long, star-crossed love story between Ifemelu and Obinze, it is most memorable for its fine-tuned, scathing observations about worldly Nigerians and the ways they create new identities out of pretension and aspiration.” If you have time after finishing this one, don’t miss Adichie’s slim but wisdom-packed “We Should All Be Feminists.” (588 pages)

The best way to read “Almanac of the Dead” is to let it wash over you like a wave. It’s brisk and gorgeous (but never frothy), and it will sweep you off your feet. Our reviewer had this to say: “The plot follows a far-flung conspiracy of displaced tribal people to retake North America toward the millennium’s end. … There is genius in the sheer, tireless variousness of the novel’s interconnecting tales. … ‘Almanac of the Dead’ burns at an apocalyptic pitch — passionate indictment, defiant augury, bravura storytelling.” (768 pages)

Our reviewer posed this question: “What is longer than ‘Moby-Dick,’ ‘War and Peace’ or ‘Ulysses’? If you guessed the Bible or the Manhattan telephone book, you would not be wrong (though there are small-print Bibles that are under a thousand pages). There are, of course, other longer books, but not many are novels and few of those have been able to sustain a hold on the popular imagination. ‘The Stand’ … may prove the exception.” The plot is your basic nightmare: An accident happens in an Army lab. A virus breaks through an isolation barrier and kills everyone except one person. “The Stand” is the story of what happens next. Our reviewer wrote, “From Texas to Maine, Los Angeles to New York, in a gruesome variation on the refrain of ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ the superflu spreads, causing its victims at first merely to sniffle and sneeze but soon after to expire in paroxysms of pain and burning fever.” (1,200 pages)

“The Bonfire of the Vanities” is a thick squatter on the bookshelf of anyone who was alive and literate in the 1980s. Along with neon, leg warmers and big hair, it’s a touchstone of that decade, remaining relevant long after its contemporaries have been relegated to theme parties and time capsules. The “bitterly satirical” story begins when Sherman McCoy, a “$1 million-a-year high WASP Wall Street bond salesman with a 14-room apartment on Park Avenue, takes a wrong turn while driving his mistress home from Kennedy International Airport,” our reviewer wrote. What happens next changes the Big Apple to the core in a way that’s as impossible to look away from as it is thought-provoking, even now. (704 pages)

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