Long books to lose yourself in during the holidays

I love a long book — so many characters to get to know, and so much time to relax and enjoy where the story is going to take me — but it can seem hard to get into a behemoth when I’m short on time. Which is most of the year. Luckily, I have a bit more downtime at the end of December, so I’m looking forward to trying a long tome or two this season, wish me luck! Here are some of my recommendations for epic stories to lose yourself in during the holidays, or next time you find yourself itching for something 600+ pages:

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Ailey Pearl Garfield is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women — her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries — that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove as four former, aging Texas Rangers undergo a cattle drive from southern Texas to unsettled Montana in the latter half of the 1800s.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo, and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

On Dec. 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer’s house. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. James deftly chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters — gunmen, drug dealers, one-night stands, CIA agents, even ghosts — over the course of 30 years as they roam the streets of 1970s Kingston, dominate the crack houses of 1980s New York, and ultimately reemerge into the radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. 

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Jean Valjean, a former convict, is released from prison in 19th-century France after serving a long sentence for stealing a loaf of bread. In his subsequent struggle to create a new life, he is relentlessly pursued by the morally rigid police inspector Javert. Valjean encounters Fantine, a struggling single mother, and Marius, a young revolutionary, while trying to protect his adopted daughter, Cosette, from the clutches of the exploitative Thenardiers.

Shōgun by James Clavell

After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen: Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is 17th-century Japan, a land where the line between life and death is razor-thin, Blackthorne must negotiate not only a foreign people, with unknown customs and language, but also his own definitions of morality, truth, and freedom. 

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties — to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that bind the society around her. The love affair of Anna and Vronsky is played out alongside the developing romance of Kitty and Levin, and in the character of Levin, the search for happiness takes on a deeper philosophical significance.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, most people believe magic to have long since disappeared from England, until the reclusive Mr. Norrell reveals his powers and becomes an overnight celebrity. Another practicing magician then emerges: the young and daring Jonathan Strange. He becomes Norrell’s pupil, and the two join forces in the war against France. But Strange is increasingly drawn to the wild, most perilous forms of magic, and he soon risks sacrificing his partnership with Norrell and everything else he holds dear.

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction — but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic. Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Jake Epping, a 35-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away: a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life — like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963 — turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: His storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession — to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, is a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known. Tom is the mason who becomes his architect — a man divided in his soul. The beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena is haunted by a secret shame. The story of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state and brother against brother.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84. Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo becomes so wrapped up with a ghostwriting project and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. As their narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain. Five thousand years later, their progeny — seven distinct races now three billion strong — embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

In a 19th-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change, the proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against this backdrop, the quiet drama of ordinary lives plays out — until the arrival of two outsiders further disrupts the town’s equilibrium.