Kieran Healy

Read any good books lately?

In the next couple of months, I’m going to be making three trips across the Pacific ocean. (Don’t ask.) The big question is therefore, what to read on the plane? It’s 14 hours from L.A. to Sydney. Subtracting all the eating, fitful sleeping and laptop use still leaves lots of empty time. Any suggestions for good long-flight fiction?

My tastes are pretty broad (that’s what everybody in my class position says) but I don’t read enough fiction. When I consider the universe of excellent books I will never, ever read in my lifetime, an awful feeling of vertigo comes over me. I have managed to read some actual literature, but nevertheless my brain is mainly full of pop-culture detritus and enormous chunks of nerd content: answers to trivia questions, the lyrics to bad songs, long sections of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python sketches and scenes from The Simpsons. Appalling.

Looking around I find Kevin Drum asked about books recently and his readers recommended a large amount of SF/Fantasy stuff. Some of it appeals. I’m intrigued by Little, Big, The Quincunx and the Goldbug Variations. Several people endorse Ender’s Game. However, a freshman gave Laurie a copy of this last year and the author’s Preface was enough to make me hurl it across the room. So we can rule that one out, along with Stephen Donaldson, A.S. Byatt and Michael Crichton. Also appearing in Kevin’s comments are Robertson Davies and Patrick O’Brian, who are both suitable for air travel, but I’ve read them already. Midnight’s Children, Underworld, The Sot-Weed Factor and (I’m really, really sorry about this) Anna Karenina count as “Stalled Out After 150 pages.”¹ Other Russians (e.g., Dostoevsky) seem unsuitable for air travel. I am unable to re-read Jane Austen because of my wife’s rabid devotion to her. Maybe I could find some Anthony Burgess (other than A Clockwork Orange) in print over here. I went through a lot of his stuff as a teenager, but the old faker wrote so much, there’s always more.

For complex reasons, the obvious choice of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is not an option. Any other suggestions?

¹ I can’t believe I just admitted that about Anna Karenina. Maybe I should try the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation instead of the Rosemary Edmonds version.

I suspect Kevin got lots of sf recommendations because he’s talked about reading and liking it in the past. None of the books I’ve read lately seem likely except maybe Jane Haddam’s Someone Else’s Music, which is sort of a mystery. It’s also about a geek-made-good going back to the small town that despised her. Otherwise I’ve been reading mostly fantasy because I’m on the committe for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. The only non-fiction I’ve read recently is The Age of the Picts which doesn’t seem likely to appeal. Hey, I know. I haven’t read any but a friend of mine who’s also an Austen fan has been reading and enjoying Trollope. I believe she recommends Phineas Finn to start with.

MKK

Laurie’s read everything by Trollope, too (though this may seem impossible). She says the first 20% of of each of his books is difficult to get into, and then they start to work. Might not be good for a flight.

As you can see, I’m looking for the sophisticated yet accessible high-quality yet readable engaging yet not too demanding literate yet unpretentious timeless classic preferably in several long parts. Is that so much to ask?

Of course not. It’s just that no one else found anything like that either.

Personally, I’m of the firm opinion that when one is stuck in one place, like an airplane seat, for a very long time, good-quality escapist stuff works best. For me, that means mysteries. Depending on your tastes, here are some I find a bit more “literary” (or at least literate) than most:

John Connolly’s “Every Dead Thing” series;
The Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child books (just finished “The Cabinet of Curiosities,” which I thought was well done;
Philip Kerr’s older stuff – especially his “Berlin Noir” trilogy, which I thought was incredible.

Oh, and three authors come to mind that might actually fit ALL of your criteria:

Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” and “Foucault’s Pendulum”;
Iain Pears’s “An Instance of the Fingerpost”;
Anything by Arturo Perez-Reverte, but especially “The Club Dumas” and “The Flanders Panel.”

If I had to pick three authors on my groaning bookshelves that fit all of your preferred categories – well, “dese is dey.”

Happy reading! (And if you try any of them, let me know if you liked/hated ‘em.)

This may be a bit old, but A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe is an excellent travel companion.

My fiction list is pretty sci-fi heavy, and it’s a little out of date—school and all—but here are a few items: The Last Legends of Earth, by A. A. Attanasio, moves between adventerous sci-fi, sort of space opera-ish, and speculative time-travel world-building; I enjoyed Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons; William Gibson’s latest, Pattern Recognition is pretty good (though kind of mopey); in the category of long double-epics David Wingrove’s Middle Kingdon series is good and will keep you busy for a very long time (you could take a volume per flight and still only get halfway through); parts of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves scared the hell out of me, but the rest of it kind of lost me; Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly is a great collection of short sci-fi stories; and, Sewer, Gas, and Electric by Matt Ruff kept me entertained on a long flight from Rome a few years ago.

For a three-hour throwaway read, you could try Bringing Down the House, a very poorly-written but entertaining book about MIT students who won millions counting cards in Vegas. In more literate nonfiction, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams makes pretty good travel reading, as do bits from Edward Abbey or mountaineer-types like Herzog (Annapurna).

For escapism during long flights, if you like dark fantasy, check out Glen Cook’s Black Company series. It’s relatively light (so you can read it even when jetlagged) and there are a total of ten books, so you won’t lack something to read. I’ve actually been rereading the series and finding it easily as good the second time around. Cook is no Zelazny, but he does okay. The darkness of the setting is appealing to me these days, too.

For more hard SF, my favorite is Walter Jon Williams, pretty much any of his stuff. David Brin and Greg Benford are also good. Kiln People is Brin’s latest and is better than his Uplift War books.

Good luck!

Try The Fox and the Hedgehog by Isaiah Berlin followed by War and Peace. IB’s essay is wonderful, and it will make the latter more worthwhile.

Interested in business? Probably not enough to like actual business books. But The End of Marketing as We Know It is quick and worthwhile.

The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Diaz del Castillo is the most amazing adventure story of all time, and (largely) true.

Oranges by John McPhee is nice, light, reading for the amateur biologist in all of us.

I have a soft spot for Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis.

And Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch is wonderful. Inspiring.

-Magik

“American Gods” by Neil Gaiman should keep you busy for quite a while, even if you read fast. His “Adventures in the Dream Trade” is essentially a collection of introductions, but also functions as a “must-read” list.

Also, “Perdido Street Station” and “The Scar” by China Mieville have both actual and literary heft.

“Cyteen” by C.J. Cherryh is one I haven’t gotten to yet, but it looks fairly lengthy on my bookshelf.

Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is good reading, even though it’s ostensibly YA.

J. Gregory Keyes’ “Newton’s Cannon” and 3 follow-ups is interesting if you are at all interested in magical alt history.

Would it be too obvious to suggest the Lord of the Rings?
Octavia Butler – “Kindred”

“Mojo: Conjure Stories” – one of the only short story collections I read in which I liked every single piece

Geez folks, what’s he going to do with a big long list? You have to tell him your recommendation is the best and forget the rest.

So, the book you must read (really!) is The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr. The funniest sad story to never become maudlin. You can’t possibly resist that.

One that you can probably resist but may love is Wittgenstein’s Mistress, by David Markson. Our heroine, the last person on earth, travels and ruminates. One of my favorites.

Bon Voyage!

If you’re going to read a Tom Wolfe, I’d read The Bonfire of the Vanities before A Man In Full—TBotV is by far the better book.

I strongly second China Mieville, especially Perdido Street Station—if you don’t like naval fiction, The Scar may be troublesome.

The best translation of Anna Karenina is by Louise and Aylmer Maude, who were contemporaries and friends of Tolstoy. I’ve read both that and the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, and while I think (not speaking Russian) the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation is probably more technically accomplished, the Maude translation is far more resonant. Unfortunately, I think the only edition of it available in the US is Everyman’s Library.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson if by some slim chance you haven’t read it.

Most stuff by William Gibson but especially Idoru. His new one, Pattern Recognition, is not bad, but some people have said they find it pretentious.

The Name of the Rose (but god, not Foucault’s Pendulum – I’ve rarely ever read a more impenetrable book)
Infinite Jest
Any of the Barchester books by Trollope, especially the Warden, Barchester Towers and the Last Chronicle
One of the Dalziel-Pascoe mysteries by Reginald Hill
Whichever John McPhee book is about something that interests you

KJH,

Read Thomas Pynchon’s “V.”. It’s the bomb, seriously worth the investment. Or, for something very different, read anything by Kinky Friedman.

(We are watching you. Also, felicitations.)

GOH

I see others have beat me to recommending China Mieville; I’ll just say “me too”.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez might be a good choice. You can really wade into One Hundred Years Of Solitude or Love In The Time Of Cholera and splash around for a while and come out with cool stories and wonderful imagery.

Michael Connelly’s series of mysteries about LAPD detective Harry Bosch are excellent. Excerpts at http://www.michaelconnelly.com/ give some sense of the vividness of his prose. He’s got Chandler’s eye for close observation and great stories and characters.

Dan Simmons’ four-volume Hyperion Cantos (Hyperion, The Fall Of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise Of Endymion) is epic space opera with a gripping dark moral center. Marvelous entertainment.

I loved Hilary Mantel’s “A Place of Greater Safety”, a novel of the French Revolution, or Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptocomincom”(sic?). These are both big books in every sense of the word, but joyful reading. I also second Michael Connelly,the best police procedurals you’ll find.

The best nonfiction book I’ve read in the past year is Rick Perlstein’s “Before the Storm”, a history of the origins of modern conservatism in the early 60s. It’s about the managers of the movement, not it’s thinkers. And a very close look at Goldwater’s campaign.

Enjoy your flight!

I’ll second Bonfire of the Vanities. I read it from Central Montana to Southern Wisconsin (24 hours) on a train.

I’d also recommend Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and/or Ravelstein. Both killed off long layovers and transcontinental flights.

I heartily endorse the suggestions of Eco (including Foucault’s Pendulum), Perez-Reverte (Club Dumas and Flanders Panel), and Richard Powers (not just Goldbug Variations -try Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance). As an academic, you must read Straight Man by Richard Russo – you’ll be laughing out loud. Neal Stephenson is obvious – instead of the great Snow Crash and Cryptomonicon, why not try The Diamond Age?

In the SF&F category, let me endorse pretty much anything by Gene Wolfe. It’s not light reading, really, insofar as it demands your attention, but it is rewarding.

The Book Of the New Sun is the place to start if you’re going to read any of his multi-volumn works.

Regarding Ender’s Game, I feel compelled to note that the book itself is excellent, but the author can be something of a crank, and any supplementary material he writes should be avoided at all costs. (He’s also a victim of the Brain Eater, which also afflicts Dan Simmons—the last two books in the Hyperion series are garbage).

I would definitely second the recommendation of Straight Man by Richard Russo. I’m also rather fond of The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes, which starts in the same basic vein of academic satire and runs off into the realm of horror with it. It’s very good.

I’d second Pynchon, but not on an airplane—you want plenty of room to pace when you read him. I recently read Chandler’s “The Little Sister”, on the train back and forth to work, and loved it—and found that it worked well in that situation—soothing reading for travel. Garcia Marquez I think is a very good idea too, and maybe Faulkner—have you read “The Hamlet”?.

The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Boston Adventure by Jean Stafford
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
And, since you’re going across the Pacific . . .

Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima

You’re going to Australia? Try:

The Tax Collector or Jack Maggs, both by Peter Carey, both really great.

Maybe some of these are too girlie for you. These are some of my favorites. Also, not mentioned by anyone, John LeCarre books, which my favorites would be “A Perfect Spy” or “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

Except for “The God . . .” these should all be long and involved enough for a Pacific flight. Also, no experimental literature thrown in there. Something about being on a plane that makes experimentation unsuitable for enjoyment.

“As you can see, I’m looking for the sophisticated yet accessible high-quality yet readable engaging yet not too demanding literate yet unpretentious timeless classic preferably in several long parts. Is that so much to ask?”

That’s a lot to ask, but I think I have the answer: Penelope Fitzgerald. Offshore, The Blue Flower, Innocence, At Freddie’s…These are wonderful novels, literary and intelligent but refreshingly unpretentious, and characterized by a rare combination of irony plus compassion. And they are most of them on the short side in terms of length (ideal for plane trips), though packed with wry humor and insight.

I’m with Chad on Ender’s Game, throw out the preface, read Ender’s Game, don’t read any of the sequels. Except maybe Ender’s Shadow.

Ender’s Game is a good read although not the masterpiece some people claim it is. (I expect that the people who think it’s great art got picked on a lot in school and entertain unserious thoughts of violent revenge, which the book gratifies in various ways. That having been said, the book is readable and reasonably interesting.)

I would like to endorse Sturgeon’s Law: “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Sadly, I have come to believe that as much as I enjoy sci-fi, it is disproportionately cruddy.

Case in point: I picked up Chasm City by Alistair Reynolds, based on the jacket copy and the fact that it won the British sci-fi association award for best novel of 2001. Good lord. The dialogue on the page made my eyes bleed. I threw it away after 15 pages. If this was the best sci-fi novel of 2001 I am going to have to raise the bar to only reading sci-fi which has been awarded “novel of the decade” or something along those lines. (The fact that numerous reviews which can be found online rate this book very highly make me wonder what kind of crap these reviewers are regularly poisoning themselves with.)

Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh is the best novel i’ve read for a long time. it’s quite witty.

Consider Jonathan Carroll. The ones which are more mystery and less fantasy tend to fail in inverse proportion to the amount of fantasy in them, but they’re good books.

third for straight man. it has a goose in it! how can you go wrong with geese.

everything said here about ender’s game is pretty spot on. the first sequel is passable but at all costs avoid the rest. it’s probably too short for your present purposes though.

for pynchon i never really got into v but heartily recommend gravity’s rainbow as long as you have some concentration & time to spare.

sophisticated yet accessible high-quality yet readable engaging yet not too demanding literate yet unpretentious timeless classic preferably in several long parts…

You’re looking for The Corrections. The first ten pages are a bit sticky. The rest are gold. The characters are infuriating and stuck in their ways, but the author’s in sympathy with each and every one of them. Funny and sad and about Family (all literature is about Family) and academia and love and the dotcom boom and New York and not being in New York and medicine and happiness and, surprisingly, Lithuania. And everything else too.

If you’ve never read Crime and Punishment, it’s definitely worth a shot. As well as being Great Literature it just gallops along, more so than any other Dostoyevsky, and it has the best detective character in all literature (I state without evidence).

And I definitely endorse Little, Big. Among other things, it has the confidence to quietly open one chapter with “Thirty-five years passed.” I think A Hundred Years Of Solitude does more or less the same thing at one point, and is worth a recommendation for that and many, many other reasons.

I’m afraid I’d have to weigh in in favor of Alastair Reynolds. If you’re an SF reader, you’re generally willing to sacrifice dialogue in favor of interesting ideas, which Chasm City surely has.

Anyway, on the SF front and remembering that my bias is for ideas:
Iain Banks (The Player of Games is the canonical intro but all the Culture Novels are good)
Ken MacLeod (try the Star Fraction). MacLeod is notable for taking seriously both the possibility of anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism.
Vernor Vinge (True Names is what’s most famous, but the best for my money is Deepness in the Sky)
Frank Morgan (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels)
Greg Egan (a little weak on characterization but willing to take seriously a lot of the implications of believing that minds are essentially software, which basically noone else is. Try Quarantine and Axiomatic).

Wow, what a Commonwealth-heavy list. The only American is Vinge.

Most everything by these authors is pretty good, so there’s a lot of material there, which is good for plane trips.

Also, you should consider David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Opinions vary, but it’s incredibly long so if you like it you’re going to get a lot of value.

I’m with everyone who recommends “Ender’s Game” and “Ender’s Shadow.”

I also very much second Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, which are the best thing I think I’ve read in years.

In the realm of the seriously girlie (and also the sort of thing people in your class position are allowed to dismiss out of hand), the second Bridget Jones book is something I kind of think men should read. Pay attention to the character Rebecca.

Jonathan Lethem’s “Motherless Brooklyn” is good in a “my mother read the reviews and gave it to my dad, who liked it well enough to recommend to me” kind of way.

Your wife’s rabid devotion to Jane Austen … you have no idea! Try watching a TV adaptation in my house with every wrong detail corrected!

There’s a lot of Philip Roth that’s planeable, ditto Kurt Vonnegut. On the thriller side I’d suggest Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation and his Berlin Noir trilogy. William McIllvanney’s Laidlaw books are worth a look (Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Vetch).

On the academic novel front I enjoyed James Hynes, The Lecturer’s Tale (and I think Henry Farrell blogged about it too).

I liked Michael Frayn’s Headlong a lot too.

I saw someone recommended David Brin’s Kiln People above. I would actually recommend Brin’s The Postman even more. It’s a story about the power of symbols. It was also made into a terrible movie, but I don’t think that’s the book’s fault.
Like many others, I would recommend reading Ender’s Game, in spite of the author, and possibly Ender’s Shadow, but whatever you do, don’t read any more of Card’s books.
Another great book that I don’t see recommended nearly enough is Alex Haley’s Roots. It’s excellent, long enough for a trans-Pacific flight, and a real downer.

Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita – perhaps you already read this in high school as well (we had to), it’s one of my all time favorites (I should probably reread it sometime to see if that still stands).

I also like Coelho’s The Alchemist a lot and it’s a good time to read when you’re travelling and embarking on something new.

You might enjoy Tibor Fischer’s novel The Thought Gang, which is about a philosopher who turns to a life of crime.

Let me second (third) Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Sort of Milton meets quantum mechanics meets Tolkien (but definitely not CS Lewis).

If you want something from the 19th Century that turns pages like a moden pot-boiler, I’d suggest Woman in White or the Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.

I’ve read Pullman. I thought the first one was superb, the second very good and the third one just lost control of the plot altogether.

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. The new Penguin Classics translation. Enthralling, exciting, loads of adventure and romance, it’s the best tale of revenge.

Someone already recommended Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir. That was a great flight read for me, too. Also Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Older stuff of his may be better (my vote: The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent) but it reads too fast for a long flight…

Also have you taken a look at Hollander’s recent translation of the “Inferno”? It’s superb, a pleasure almost equal, albeit different in nature, to the original Italian.

Stanley Elkin is a great and accessible writer. Most of his novels are out of print, but Dalkey, bless them, just rereleased George Mills, which is about a succession of men named George Mills, each cursed to suffer at the low-end of the world.

Then again, if you didn’t like the Sot-weed factor, you may not like Elkin.

Then again, if you didn’t like the Sot-weed factor, you may not like Elkin.

Funny, I bought The Sot-weed Factor and Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show at the same time three or four years ago. I finished the latter, but it didn’t make much of an impression on me.

Have you read Zadie Smith’s White Teeth? I don’t read much fiction these days, but it was a terrific book and would seem to meet most of your “sophisticated yet accessible high-quality yet readable engaging yet not too demanding literate yet unpretentious timeless classic preferably in several long parts” requirements.

You might also try to find a copy of Iain Banks’ The Crow Road. It’s quite possibly the most upbeat thing Banks has ever written, and as long as you don’t have a low tolerance for mopey, sometimes-annoying narrators, it’s excellent.

Oh, and this suddenly occurs to me—you should absolutely read the collected stories of Flannery O’Connor if you have not already.

Caucasia by Danzy Senna. I blew through it in 2 days, perfect plane fodder. It’s about two biracial sisters who appear to be of different races to everyone else; how they are split up and forced to live with the parent whose race they appear to be; and what happens to them as they cope. An eloquent commentary on race in the U.S. And also a great read.

(1) anything by Ian McEwan (sp) (Atonement is his latest I think) and (2) anything by Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance is gripping). I also recently read A Secret History by Donna Tartt it was pretty good.

Let me second the endorsement of Flannery O’Connor; there is no better writer of short fiction, IMHO.

Someone mentioned Ian Pears above. I’ve just started his second book The Dream of Scipio, and it seems great so far. Sort of a historical mystery / novel of ideas in the Eco vein.

“I’m looking for the sophisticated yet accessible high-quality yet readable engaging yet not too demanding literate yet unpretentious timeless classic preferably in several long parts.”

Ah, so you want Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors. I don’t know what else you could possibly be describing.

Technically, these books are fantasy, but only because Kay wants just a bit of wiggle room with respect to the real world—otherwise, his books are immense and passionate historical fiction, in this case, of Byzantium in the time of Justinian. Brilliant stuff.

Not to go too meta… but are you planning to read these in paper, or electronic? I mean, Infinite Jest is a brilliant festival of prose style (although I sure didn’t understand the plot) but it weighs like 12 lb. It’s such a cinderblock that if you guess wrong about it, you probably won’t have had room for a lot of other books—so to me, that would be an unacceptably large risk.

Try Dante’s Inferno, Ciardi, Pinsky or Hollander translations. I’m serious. This is airplane reading.

On poetry, try Billy Collins or Heaney’s Beowulf.

On sci/fi, my vote’s for Iain Banks or George Martin’s Song of Ice & Fire. If you haven’t read Jack Vance or Michael Shea, give ‘em a shot also.

Jonathan Kellerman is what I’d consider airplane fodder, but for “sophisticated yet accessible” and “high-quality yet readable”, not to mention “engaging yet not too demanding”, I’d recommend anything by Alison Lurie. “Imaginary Friends” might appeal to the sociologist in you, although it’s not her best book. (Hey, it’s even got UFOs, so I will cheat it into the sci-fi category.) “The Museum of Unconditional Surrender” by Dubravka Ugresic is a beautiful book, and easy to read thanks to its fragmentary nature (useful for when you get interrupted by the trolley dolleys). I’d pack it for a plane, anyway.

1. If you want to try a classic, you might try The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal, which is fast moving, very witty, and is both light hearted and serious. It takes place largely in northern Italy, first under the domination of Napoleon (which the viewpoint characters in the book feel to be liberating) and then of the post-Congress of Vienna Austrian repression. The plot largely involves love, politics, and social relationships in the court of the Duke of a minor city state. I am also a fan of a lesser-known Stendhal work, Lucien Lieuwen, but this is an odder taste. (I might note, however, that the second half of Lucien Lieuwen deals, in part, with the effect of communications technology on politics c. 1825.) The well known The Red and the Black is a good book but less of a good airplane read.

Another oddball classic which really engrossed me is Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott, which is about a small rebellion against the English in Scotland around 1680, with the Presbyterians in the role of radical Islamists and the English Army in role of the Gestapo. (This sort of perspective on British history may be more familiar to you than it was to me, and therefore less fascinating.) You have to put up with a certain amount of early romantic literature silliness (which I mostly enjoyed)and Scottish dialect but the book works as an adventure story while also having interesting historical and moral overtones. For a modern reader the book is faster moving and generally more readable than most, if not all, of Scott’s other works.

2. If you have any taste for spy thrillers I highly recommend the works of Alan Furst dealing with Europe in the 1930s and 40s, and Charles McCarry’s books about a CIA man he calls Paul Christopher. Of the McCarrys, The Last Supper is the longest, and maybe the best airplane read. It is a (New England WASP and Prussian Junker) family saga as well as a spy story. Other McCarrys that are very good are The Secret Lovers and The Tears of Autumn. I like the earlier of Furst’s Europe-in-the-Facist-era books, such as Night Soldiers and Dark Star, better than the later ones, but they are all good.

These books are objectively at least as good as John LeCarre’s and I like them better. Furst is especially strong on scene setting and historic atmosphere. McCarry is especially strong on writing style and characterization. Many of Furst’s books are in print as trade paperbacks. McCarry’s Paul Christopher books seem to be out of print, but are readily available at my public library (in Washington, D.C.; I don’t know about where you are).

McCarry’s more recent political thrillers can be amusing but are not as good as his Paul Christopher books. (They also contain a lot of potentially annoying right-wing pontificating, but it’s sort of like right-wing pontificating on LSD so it’s OK. For example, Lucky Bastard re-imagines the life of (a thinly veiled stand-in for) William Jefferson Clinton on the assumption that, while on his Rhodes Scholarship, Clinton was blackmailed by a sexy female member of the Bader-Meinhoff gang into becomming a Soviet sleeper agent, with Hillary as his KGB handler. Despite my centrist-Democrat politics, and the so-so literary quality of the book, this is too good an idea to pass up.)

3. Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, though non-fiction (actually, its fictionalized a bit), is an amazing and very personal book. However, it is slightly heavy going and, at 1400 pages, it may be more than you want even for the Pacific. (I found that I enjoyed reading a couple of hundred pages and then wanted to set the book aside for a while. I don’t know if this fits your flight plans.) The book is nominally a travelogue of Yugoslavia in the late 1930s, with extensive political and historical background. (West doesn’t hesitate to spend a hundred or two-hundred pages on things like the Battle of Kosovo (the one in the 1300s) or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. However, many other themes are integrated into the book, for example, sex roles in society, Orthodox Christianity, Scottish values as exemplified in scones and engineering, and all kinds of interesting or annonying personal prejudices of the author. On top of this, the entire book is a meditation on the historical and moral fate of Europe from the point of view of England facing Nazism alone in 1940-41, and, more generally, on humans’ relationship to good and evil.

4. With regard to Anna Karenina, Samuel Johnson is reported to have said to an aquaintance something like, “You mean you read books all the way through?!” (I don’t have the exact quote in front of me.)

5. You will presumably present book reports on any commenter-recommended books that you read.

Read Anna Karenina. You will weep.

If you haven’t, read Middlemarch. Best for long periods abroad, but that may be true of your flights anyway.

Some people say that about Underworld, but I don’t get it.

If you haven’t, read Pat Barker’s World War One trilogy, starting with Regeneration. Superb.

For sociological/literary interest, most of Richard Powers. You mentioned The Goldbug Variations, I’d add Gain and his first, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. If you’re interested in the theory of relativity, classical music, and race relations in the UNited States, and let’s face it, who isn’t, The Time of our Singing. After a few of those, Galatea 2.2.

For a hilarious observation of U.S. University life in the hinterlands, Moo by Jane Smiley.

For the Princetonian in you, a novel half set there, Making History by Stephen Fry (also a good sci fi choice, and yes, the author did play Jeeves on the TV series).

To get in touch with your students’ generation,
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

Zuckerman Bound (a short trilogy), and then The Counterlife by Phillip Roth. And/Or American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain by the same author.

Second Russo’s Straight Man as well. Especially for traveling. (always fun to laugh out loud on airplanes.)

Some people love it, some people hate it: The Lord of the Rings. If you’re the right kind of
person, it will be one of the most enjoyable books you’ll ever read. The beginning can be slow
going; but it you make it to the Inn at Bree, you’re in for the duration.

Page-turning mysteries: any of the Elvis Cole novels, by Robert Crais. Also the Prey novels by
John Sandford.

Get some of Isaac Asimov’s science essay compilations from a used bookstore—say, Science, Numbers, and I. The science (some of it, anyway) is probably dated, but all of them are both entertaining and informative.

I join with those who recommend Ender’s Game.

If you like history: McNeill, The Rise of the West. Absolutely terrific.

If you have some philosophy background, Wittgenstein’s Poker. A 10-minute exchange between Karl Popper and L.W. in the late ‘40’s or early ‘50’s, and its reverberations down the decades.

D’Arcy Thompson: “On Growth and Form”
Alain Robbe-Grillet: “Jealousy”
G. W. F. Hegel: “Phenomenology of the Spirit” (it’s better in the original German).

As a follow-up to my recommendation of Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, I thought I’d post this link I just came across now:
http://www.bookslut.com/features/100books/master.htm

Will you share with us in the end what you read on the flights?:)

If you’re going to Australia, you’ve gotta read “Gould’s Book of Fish” by Richard Flanagan. It’s about as close as you can come to a Great Australian Novel. It’s a really fun book about a British convict in Tasmania.

This is to clarify a few points in my (no doubt already excessively long) set of suggestions a few comments ago.

1. If you or anyone else tries to read Old Mortality, especially on an airplane, you should skip Scott’s several layers of boring introductions and framing stories about old codgers who told him the tale, and go straight to the beginning of the main story. If you get interested, you can read the introductory stuff later.

2. In describing Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, I think I obscured the fact that it really is a good read as well as a Great (if eccentric) Book. While I felt a need to catch my breath every few hundred pages, I always eagerly returned to the book in a day or two.

Ye gods, you should turn this thread into a series of guest posts.

In the sci-fi field: the Honor Harrington series by David Weber (first nine available in paperback, 10th in hardback). [actually, the first 2 books are available for free on line at baen free library, if you want to sample]. Great trashy space opera. And I finally figured out this morning in the shower that HH bears the same initials as another great captain, Horatio Hornblower. (so i’m slow sometimes). Also Ursula Le Guin, especially The Dispossessed. Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous w/ Rama and 2001.

As an alternative to O’brien, try C.S. Forester.

Lempriere’s Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk. HIGHLY recommended, especially for the over-educated among us.

I’d second the recommendations of Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds as good, escapist sci-fi—both authors are adept at spinning plausible, intriguing universes with interesting characters and all sorts of cool sci-fi gadgets. On an unrelated note, The Master and Margarita is also very good, though a denser read than most.

As for an author no one here’s recommended yet, why not some C.S. Lewis? I’ve recently been plodding through his Space Trilogy, and the first two are amazing (third in progress.)

It would not be overstating things to say that Perdido Street Station and the Scar are the best thing to happen in fantasy since Tolkien.

Actully I’ll often take books I’m having trouble getting into on planes because there I am and there’s nothing else to do and so I have to stick to it.

Reading other peoples’ posts has stimulated my brain. I recommend Kage Baker’s books. Start with The Garden of Iden and go on from there. I think there are 4 or 5. The premise is a bit difficult to explain, but anyone whoever grew up feeling an outsider will get into them. And didn’t everybody?

I second the recommendation for John McPhee. I loved Oranges, but I’ve really only disliked one of his books, the one about the merchant seamen. He writes some of the best nonfiction around. My favorite nonfiction of all time is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and the book pretty much weighs as much as an atomic bomb so it ought to keep you busy for a while. He starts way back in the young adulthood, or even childhood, of many of the people involved and works forward. I fell completely in love with Nils Bohr, but I’m a physics grouple. (My husband has degrees in physics and astrophysics.)

And I will certainly give a resounding, “Oh yes, you betcha” to the suggestion of Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors.

If you liked short stories try Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others. The man just twists my mind like a pretzel, but I consider that a good thing. For a good collection try Starlight 3 edited by the blogverse’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Okay, shutting up now.

MKK

Three long flights and the desire for light, yet literate; one word:

Dumas

The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Count of Monte Cristo and you’re set.

Cheers to William Denton!

Unfortunately, and far exceeding my one word, I feel compelled to comment upon some comments.

My friends, Mr Healy is a reasonably well-adjusted, newly-married, quite well-educated man in his mid-thirties. Ender’s Game is wholly inappropriate for a man of his station and development of intellect. In other words: if he hasn’t read it yet, he won’t enjoy it if he happens to read it now.

I must concur in a general way with those who have recommended Iain Banks: he is a good and serious writer and not, as one commenter called him, “escapist”. However, Banks’ seriousness often manifests itself as depression about the fact that the universe is going to end in a few billion years, so what ever is the point? And I say this as a person who has been known to declare Banks “the finest living prose stylist in English” (in my cups I’m liable to hold far, far stronger and stranger opinions about art than when sober). I cannot in conscience recommend any of Banks’ excellent work for airplane consumption.

Richard Powers, who probably is the finest living prose stylist in English, is an excellent recommendation and I heartily endorse him.

Speaking for myself, on my last trans-Pacific jaunt, I carried with me Moby-Dick and Critique of Pure Reason – the latter to put me out and the former to rev me up. It worked like a charm on my jet-lag.

I recommend “Forging a Rebel” by Arturo Barea. It’s the memoir of a man who grew up in Spain and participated in the Spanish Civil War. One of the most vivid books I’ve ever read, and it’s 700 pages long..perfect for a transoceanic flight. There’s a review at my blog.

If you like your literature strange, and exceedingly imaginative while at the same time utterly readable (rather than dense and/or obtuse), two must-reads:

The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks

This is one of his non sci-fi stories, and it pretty much defies categorization. Dark, snarky, and disturbing.

One sentence teaser: A straw, a baby with an exposed brain, a couple of murders, lots of creatively killed insects, and a jar full of something.

(yeah, so that’s not quite a sentence)

Et tu Babe by Mark Leyner

One of the oddest novels you’ll ever read. Laugh out loud funny and completely manic. Plus, you’ll learn 4 new words on nearly every page without being annoyed.

One sentence teaser: Breaking into FBI headquarters to obtain a vialed sample of Abraham’s Lincoln’s morning breath for it’s hallucinagenic properties leads to an odd governmental intrusion.

p.s. I’ll add myself onto the pile of people suggesting you go ahead and read Enders Game. Just ignore the preface, and pretty much anything else Card says.

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen! Oh, God, what a book! I just test-read it on a train ride from Vermont to DC, it’s the perfect length for a trans-Pacific flight.

An Instance of the Fingerpost, recommended above, is the perfect book for the flight back.

Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon. It is utterly riveting and had me completely sucked in to its world. The writing is robust and hearty weighing in at or about 900 pages.

Snow Crash, by the same author, is also good. Its more pop sci-fi, but a very satisfying read.

“The Ruined Map” by Kobo Abe (or possibly Abe Kobo). It’s sort of a mysterious detective story set in seedy parts of 1960s Tokyo, where nothing much happens but the descriptions are great. Contains one of modern literature’s best mysterious lonely women.

If you couldn’t get through “The Sot-Weed Factor”, try “The Floating Opera”. It’s shorter, consistently entertaining and thoughtful, a good period piece (1936), and isn’t full of the offhand sex babble that makes a lot of Barth’s stuff unreadable to me.

It was on a flight across the Pacific that I began reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. The slow pace of the story fit the long flight perfectly, and I proceeded to read the other three.

I would think that you and your wife both would enjoy these stories (if you’ve not already read them).

Russ Wood

John McPhee.

Wallace Stegner.

Connie Willis.

David Brin.

Tad Williams.

Seconds on Perez-Reverte, et al.

Elizabeth Peters.

Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman,
by Richard Feynman.

Trust me on this. This guy writes wonderfully, and has a lot of very funny and fascinating stories to tell. Feyman was a Nobel-winning physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and spent most of his time trying to get over on someone. Think of it if Charles Bukowski was a sober, brilliant scientist, you’d have something like this book.

It’s the kind of thing you could really enjoy on a plane because it’s engrossing, but the sections are short so you can frequently nap, too.

In light of recent events, I’m currently rereading Catch-22.

Given your list of pop culture references filling the brain, the perfect recommendation is the ‘Discworld’ series from Terry Pratchett.
It’ll satisfy: there are about 20 books in the series (a couple are clinkers, but what are you going to do), light enough to read jet lagged, satirical fantasy that is truly funny, and enough cultural references to spawn fans to collect the obvious as well as the obscure (http://www.ie.lspace.org/books/apf/index.html).

Within the series there are related books that explore different themes:
The witches (Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, Maskerade) who manage to frustrate the pompus by means of headology, basic black wardrodes, and highly efficient bull sh*t detectors. This group of books is worth it just for the idea of ‘narratvive causality’ (i.e. narratives are alive and feed on events, and so warp events to their needs). Trust me, you’ll never read a newspaper the same way again.

The City Watch (Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, The Truth) which focus on the basic design flaw of humanity: they’ll bend their knee to anything that has the appearence of a prince.

Death (Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music, Hogfather) about the meaning of life. It turns out that it is not the absence of death; death’s absence is just a mess.

Several of the free standing ones are excellent: Eric, Small Gods.

And to whet your appetite, a footnote:
The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy,
according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you
can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap
between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to
the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some
elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job,
but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an
anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to
send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to
modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the
bar closed.—(Terry Pratchett, Mort)

Many of the things I would have suggested are already on the list. I would add:

Science fiction/fantasy:
1632, Eric Flint. Alternate history, but with a twist. The hero is a UMWA labor organizer, the crucial technology is basic civics, and the transforming institution is a regional high school. Simplistic in places, over-written in places, but suprisingly powerful and he takes the discipline of history seriously.

Dhalgren, Samuel Delany. An older book, strange and surreal, but I find that it is the Delany I am most likely to re-read.

Mind candy: I like to read easy books on airplanes. I have been reading Robert Tanenbaum’s Butch Karp novels when I fly. Prosecutorial procedurals set in the NYC homocide department.

Literature: If you like Robertson Davies, you might want to dig into 20th-century classics. I find that Hemingway and Steinbeck travel well, so does Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men.

Non-fiction. As long as we are talking Southern stuff, Pat Conroy’s My Losing Season was gripping, frustrating, flawed, and a great read.

Kieran,

If you haven’t read it, you must read “A Confederacy of Dunces” by the late John Kennedy Toole. This is probably too short for 14 hour flight, though.

Someone earlier mentioned “Cryptonomicon,” which I read on a plane to Manila. It’s fairly light and a quick read, but about the right length

However, for a superior book that will keep you going the entire trip try “The War of the End of the World” by Mario Vargas Llosa; not SF, more historical fiction, but excellent. E-mail me and I will send you a used copy (of a decent translation).

[And while we’re in the vein of modern authors worth reading, let me also recommend “Tent of Miracles” by Jorge Amado – very enjoyable. Since you are a recently married scholar, consider “Auto Da Fe” by Elias Cannetti. And, perhaps, you should try “Sotweed Factor” again. The “excerpts” of Capt. John Smith’s diary are priceless. As a Virginian and iconoclast, it always enjoyable to see a cultural icon trashed.

i admit, i only skimmed through this list, so i apologize for any repeats.

first, ted barlow, about a year ago, carried out this same exercise, so you might ask him for his list.

Mysteries: if you’ve never read Raymond Chandler, a long airplane trip is a good time to start. The Long Goodbye is the best, but just pick up the Library of America two-volume set and enjoy.

Henning Mankell is a Swedish writer whose books about a small-town policeman have begun appearing in English translation over the last year or two. As a sociologist, you may well enjoy the snapshots of modern Swedish life.

Richard Stark is the pen name of Donald Westlake when he writes the Parker series (also being reissued). Parker is the coldest and baddest of the bad guys, and Stark is just fantastically gripping.

And as a classic, Dorothy Sayers’ The NIne Tailors, the best of the Peter Wimsey series.

Spy: I notice that someone up above recommended Charles McCrary and Alan Furst, so i’ll just add Len Deighton’s Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain, all from the early-mid ‘60s, all wonderfully evocative of swinging London and the Brits coming to terms with their new, subsidiary role in the world.

Sports: If you have any feel for baseball, Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season and Pennant Race, based, respectively, on the ‘59 and ‘61 seasons, were the first “season diary” books by a player (he was a relief pitcher), and he actually wrote them himself. (In those days, a baseball player needed an offseason income, and Brosnan wrote ad copy, so he knew how to write).

Classics: Someone up above mentioned Moby Dick. Second! Lolita, if you’ve never read it. Collected stories of Kafka. Madame Bovary. Bleak House.

Reportage: Norman Mailer’s The ARmies of the NIght (relive the ‘67 march on the Pentagon). The Library of America on the classic Civil Rights era.

Contemporary fiction: Second on Ian McEwan. The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (very Mcewan-like). The Hours (better as a novel than as a movie, although I liked the movie).

Miscellaneous non-fiction: Genome – must reading for the well-informed citizen. The Anatomy of Desire – the universe in a grain of sand.

Enough people have mentioned Stephenson that I hope you will believe them. Snowcrash changed the world of computing now and in the future, but the gigantic Cryptonomicon is the masterpiece, not only a great novel, but one dealing with themes that will engulf us in the decades ahead. It’s also laugh-aloud funny, fairly sexy, and full of amazingly detailed history and sharp observation.
His eco novel, Zodiac, is also fun, but you need to know the other two. They’re important.
As for nonfiction, James Gleick’s Chaos is the clear winner. It’s a series of astounding stories and major revelations about a set of transformative scientific insights and it is told with brilliant prose that grabs you and practically demands that you read it aloud so that others can join you in savoring the perfectly controlled explosion of form and content, of ideas and their crystal clear expression.
Or, of course, anything by Terry Pratchett, of which Good Omens, written with Neil Gaiman, is one book guaranteed to last. Hysterically funny, profoundly insightful, and written with nerves of steel right up to the edge of Apocalypse and straight on till morning.

Great website, interesting read. Thanks!

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