Don’t you hate it when, on a winter evening, you yawn and stretch, wondering if you’ve stayed up way past your bedtime because it’s been dark forever, but the clock tells you it’s only 6:30? What to do with all of those long hours of darkness? The obvious answer is to lose yourself in a good story. Quick, breezy reads are for summer. Now is the season to crack open those deep, rich novels that span several hundred pages. Below are some long reads I have enjoyed.
At 846 pages, “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” can carry you through a few evenings. In this tale of rival magicians working to bring the old magic back to 19th century Britain, Susannah Clarke built a world I didn’t want to leave. What happens when men of ordinary character come to possess extraordinary powers? They get in over their heads, for one thing. I was mesmerized by Clarke’s descriptive prose and her vivid imaginings of how magic might manifest.
“Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson is another novel I happily
could have kept reading, despite its length of 549 pages. I wanted to stay on in the life — or I should say lives — of protagonist Ursula Todd for a little longer. I found the characters and storytelling compelling. What if you got to start your life over, changing some things here and there? What difference might that make? Beginning with Ursula’s birth in 1910, again and again, we get to see the differences. I look forward to reading the sequel, “A God in Ruins.”
Zadie Smith’s “Swing Time” is the shortest book on this list, a mere 453 pages. This is a novel about identity, and also about how money and power shape our lives. An unnamed narrator examines her complicated childhood friendship with Tracey, a girl who shared her love of dance. As the girls grew up, their lives diverged. The main character spends years working as an assistant to a rock megastar, traveling the world. But still, decisions and events in her life are examined under the light of what Tracey would have made of it. Smith beautifully captures human dynamics. “…devoting all time and energy to somebody else’s existence, to somebody else’s desires and needs and requirements. It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you.”
So that’s three British authors. I’ll finish with an American.
Richard Powers won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for “The Overstory,” a multi-faceted 502-page novel about trees and humans sharing the same planet. Powers provides the individual narratives of the lives of nine different people, each one influenced in some way by trees. Their paths converge as they all come to see, in their own ways, what is being lost to the world. Powers includes a fair amount of science and philosophy without sacrificing story. Though trees get a starring role, a major theme is the interconnectedness of all beings.
Remember, the cure to the darkness blues is a good reading lamp plus a good book.
