Ten books: In for the long haul? Read a "Doorstopper"
Are you ready to commit to a book of 500 pages or so? Challenge yourself! Here are a list of ten book suggestions that are well worth the investment.
Don't forget to fill in an Adult Summer Reading Club entry form for your chance to win an ipad mini with retina display. Entry forms available at all Sutherland Library branches.
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. (832 pages)Winner of the Man Booker prize 2013, this is a breathtaking feat of storytelling where everything is connected but nothing is how it seems...
It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.
The children's book by A.S Byatt (617 pages.)
A tale spanning the end of the Victorian era through WWI.
When children’s book author Olive Wellwood’s oldest
son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of a museum, she
takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful
bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private
books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and
darkness than Philip has ever imagined. The Wellwoods’ personal struggles and
hidden desires unravel against a breathtaking backdrop of the cliff-lined
shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme.
Winner of the Man Booker prize 2009, this is the first of a planned trilogy of three books, with the second, Bring up the bodies winning the 2012 Man Booker Prize. A historical story, it offers a detailed look into the life and times of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII in the 1520s, in particular the events leading up to the King's marriage to Anne Boleyn and the role Cromwell played in those events.
The art of fielding by Chad Harbach (512 pages)
A relatively short read at just over 500 pages! A baseball star at a small college near Lake Michigan launches a routine throw that goes disastrously off course and inadvertently changes the lives of five people, including the college president, a gay teammate, and the president's daughter.
IQ84 by Haruki Murakami
Ok, its three books in one, but once you start this, there's a good chance you won't want to put it down. An ode to George Orwell's "1984" the story is set in Tokyo, in 1984. Told in alternating male and female voices, it relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.
Part of the 1001 books you must read collection, this is the story of an intelligent but zany dysfunctional family is set in a drug-and-alcohol addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy and follows such themes as heartbreak, philosophy, and advertising. Darkly humorous, this is not for the faint hearted, (or faint wristed at a whopping 981 pages).
A fraction of the whole by Steve Toltz (710 pages)After his father's death, Jasper reflects on Martin Dean, the man who had raised him in intellectual captivity and who had spent his entire life analyzing absolutely everything, and describes his unusual boyhood, his colorful family members, his father's failed battle to make a lasting impression on the world, and their many adventures together.
The passage by Justin Cronin (790 pages)An epic story of enraged creatures roaming a post-apocalyptic America, hunting down the few remaining uninfected humans. A military virus experiment goes wrong and spreads across the country at a ferocious pace. The resulting ‘virals’ have the speed and stealth of vampires combined with the merciless hunger of zombies. They hunt at night, travel through the trees and attack from above. The mysterious Amy - a.k.a. ‘the girl who survived’ - may hold the key to the human race’s salvation.
2666 by Roberto Bolāno (898 pages)Published posthumously in Spain in 2004, withe English translation being published four years later, this epic and complex tale is told in five parts. The story is about an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student who interact in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared.
11/22/63 by Stephen King (740 pages)Certainly not the only doorstopper novel by Stephen King...
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? The author's new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination. In this novel that is a tribute to a simpler era, he sweeps readers back in time to another moment, a real life moment, when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history. Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program.
Looking for something shorter to read? Don't forget to check out the Summer Reading book shelf for more reading suggestions!
