BootsnAll Travel Community

I'm interested in great book suggestions- the kind that make a 14 hour flight across the ocean fly by. I'm planning to back pack for three months around Europe, taking ryanair a couple of times and of course trains, so I'll need a couple of really good, paperback books to take along.

Any suggestions?

Certainly! Start here.

That forum seems to be mostly books about traveling, and some of them you can finish in an hour or two! On planes I like well written novels that I can completely immerse myself in, and books that are long enough that I won't finish them before I land. If a country has a "national epic" then I'll usually pick that (so, Maguib's Palace Walk for Egypt, or Toer's This Earth of Mankind for Indonesia, and if I ever go to Iceland I'll reread Independent People for sure, etc.

Some recent classics that I think would be great for planes:
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Suite Française, Irene Némirovsky

happyhiker, given that I know you so well.... .... I am certain that this book is the one you need to bring.

Once you get over the Chabon's "I'm going to impress you with my writing skills...." schtick, it's impossible to put down. And it's poperly thick.

Thanks, Michael C.- Great choices! I saw Suite Francaise in the bookstore the other day and almost bought it. Now I think I'll save it for the plane ride to Europe. I should have clarified that I was talking about just general fiction/non-fiction books and not travel books.

Not the First Travis: Your suggestion made me laugh! After reading a review on Amazon for it, I'm intrigued and might pick it up.

Some of my suggestions for books I could not put down:
1. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral by Kingsolver
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Atwood
3. The Great Train Robbery by Crichton
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez

I read really fast. So long plane rides...I need something really long.

Ones I'd recommend

Of Human Bondage -- Maughm
Don Quixote -- Cervantes
War and Peace -- Tolstoy
Lady Chatterly's Lover; The Rainbow -- Lawrence

Future travel plans include reading Les Mis and Rebecca West's travelogue of Eastern Europe!

ayn rand 'atlas shrugged' .. super long! it took me two round trip flights to get through half of it.. still not done.

I'm reading Nicholas Nickelby as my ttravel book- an oldy but goody bought to you by the same guy who wrote a christmas carol

Personally I'd like to choose some interesting story books, or some comic books.

The Stand, Stephen King.--One of his earlier books but is not gory. Some of the best character development I have ever read. And this book is thick!
Welcome to Temptation, Jennifer Crusie-- Funny. Sexy. She makes me laugh out loud
The 'In Death' Series by JD Robb: Naked in Death is the first. Glory In Death is the second. Goes from there
The Princess Bride, William Goldman --Book is better than the movie.

Herodotus 'The Histories'

Not everyone's scene.. but one of the ultimate travel reads.

I just read a book recently that I think I can recommend for this particular situation.

jPod by Douglas Coupland

Its the kind of book that I would classify as an easy read and does not take the mental capacity I often find lacking after 7 hours on the plane.

It's light hearted and pretty funny for the most part. Sometime a bit morbid but still enjoyable.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. One of, if not THE, best book I've ever read. It's 930+ pages, and there is not a boring or slow moving part. Its semi-autobiographical, and the city of Bombay is (in my mind) the best "character" in the entire book. I read it at home, but wished that I would have saved it for my RTW. Fantastic book.

At 400 some odd pages, Tex and Molly in the Afterlife is not as much of a doorstop as some, but could take up a good amount of time. This is the only one of Richard Grant's books that I actually liked, mostly because it is really Tom Robbins lite. The story involves hippies, spirit animals and Maine, along with evil developers and mischievous sprites -- eyerolling in some brief parts though mostly entertaining.

Bigger, at 1300+ pages, is The Count of Monte Cristo. While it would be easy to buy an abridged version of this with poorly rendered black and white sketches that barely illustrate anything, read the version translated by Buss, who updates some of the language and makes the novel more accessible.

If you want something truly epic, something that will take you more than a year to read, try The Diary of Samuel Pepys. With multiple volumes and several thousand pages, Pepys covers the years 1660 - 1669. While this may sound somewhat boring, he actually lived through The Plague and The Great Fire. He was a philandering charmer, who decided to discuss all of his great conquests by creating a code language made up of a mish-mash of words from Latin and French/Spanish/Romance Languages.

The best years to read are 1665 (for Plague fans) and 1667-1668 (when he falls for a household maid) though there are some good bits to be found in 1666. This series could easily take you around the world for about 3 years. The key, though, is to read the version edited by Latham. Everything else is just Barnes and Noble picture books for smarty-pants voyeuristic teens.

A great long book to travel with -- and dip into for short stretches from time to time -- is Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson LLD. I started with an abridged edition but went on to read the whole thing shortly afterwards. What a strange and amazing guy! And I don't think I've read a better biography written since then.

^^
Yep. I recently had to do a tortured book purge....I kept Boswell's Biography of Johnson.

Might only be worthwhile for old nerds though.

So, I'm an old nerd.