The Best Books You Can Nap To
It’s not the books, it’s tradition!
With the cold weather we usher in a season of time-old traditions. Today, for reasons yet to be explained by science, we pile our plates high with copious amounts of food that took days to prepare. It is comfort food. Delicious, salty, carby, thank-goodness-for-gravy comfort food. Keeping with tradition, after the meal, some may cozy up on the couch to watch football, but you’ve got other plans. Your book is calling you. And you are determined to spend this post-meal time in the pages of that giant book you hauled with you all this way for just that very purpose. But with all that tryptophan in your system, though you hate to admit it, you may nod off before you get through chapter one. Its true, we may have a superhuman love for books, but at the end of the day, we are mere mortals. To honor this mighty effort to fight droopy eyelids, we present to you, the BEST books to nap to on Thanksgiving Day.
Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How The World’s Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom by Jack Weatherford
432 pages
Approximately 8 hours 55 minutes to read
He was known to be quite brutal, however Genghis Khan’s reign also firmly established a writing system, solidified the Silk Road as a trade route, and offered religious freedom to those he ruled over in Northeast Asia. Anthropologist Jack Weatherford expands upon the latter in this new book using his more than 18 years of research on the Mongol empire. Clocking in as the shortest book on our list, you technically could finish this in one day, but only if you fight hard against the carb coma.
Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series by Richard McGuire
584 pages
1 hour and 4 minutes to read
Richard McGuire conceived the idea of “Spot Drawings” for The New Yorker, which premiered the first series in 2005. Scattered throughout the text of the magazine, the deceptively simple illustrations often have narratives of their own. For a nice contrast to your evening meal, this book is easy to digest and way less complicated than conversations with certain family members…
City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg
944 pages
19 hours and 30 minutes to read
Rough and gritty 1970s Manhattan plays its own role in this novel as Hallberg expertly explores a dynamic group of people connected by a shooting in Central Park. We are introduced to musicians, socialists, reporters, punk-rockers, all simultaneously robust without being overwritten, as they search their way through what is true and what is false. One of the biggest novels published this year, City on Fire could make a nice pillow in a pinch.
The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay
592 pages
12 hours and 14 minutes to read
Across three different destinations and eras, The Mirror Thief takes readers on a journey that is part fantasy, part history and part action/adventure. Three men in their respective storylines scheme up dangerous plans, all trying to get away with a larger-than-life secret. Seay weaves his stories together expertly in this debut novel that is anything but “beginner” in quality.
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
864 pages
17 hours and 51 minutes to read
Escape into the past with this beautifully written third book of the Lonesome Dove quartet. An epic novel set in the final era of unsettled American frontier, Lonesome Dove is as dramatic and wild as your nieces and nephews after they’ve had pumpkin pie. Bonus points: you will finally have something to talk to your uncle about!
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, Translated by Robert Chandler
896 pages
18 hours and 31 minutes to read
This book is to World War II what War and Peace is to Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. Though originally released in the Soviet Union in 1959, the context was judged so dangerous that the original manuscript and typewriter ribbons were confiscated by the state. It was not released again in Russia until the 1980s. It makes the fight over who gets the turkey leg seem much less controversial.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
784 pages
15 hours and 56 minutes to read
Theo, a young boy in NYC, becomes enthralled with a small, mysterious painting after his mother is accidentally killed in a museum explosion. In the same vein as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Donna Tartt’s third novel harkens to a newer era of novel, one of disaster and redemption. A similar feeling may overcome you as you survey a post-Thanksgiving dining room disaster, then feel redemption as you recall that you have a dishwasher. Less time in the kitchen, more time to nap…I mean read.
IQ84 by Haruki Murakami
928 pages
24 hours and 28 minutes to read
In 1984 dystopian Tokyo, a girl named Aomame begins to question her world closely. Her pursuits reveal discrepancies in the world she knows and, through these revelations she enters a parallel universe called 1Q84 (“Q” for question mark). Meanwhile, Tengo’s ghostwriting assignment is turning his normally uneventful existence upside-down. Aomame’s and Tengo’s stories intertwine throughout this year of time as their parallel worlds draw closer together. In much the same way, you may find the worlds of sleep and wakefulness drawing closer together on that very cozy, overstuffed armchair in the den.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
1104 pages
22 hours and 48 minutes to read
Ulysses by James Joyce
736 pages
15 hours and 12 minutes to read
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
848 pages
17 hours and 51 minutes to read
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
1344 pages
27 hours and 46 minutes to read
Jerusalem, Alan Moore
1280 pages
26 hours and 27 minutes to read
Reading time based on an average read time of 250 words per minute. http://www.readinglength.com/
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