10 Doorstopper Novels to Get You All the Way Through Thanksgiving Break

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Perfect For: Classy People
Not only is The Goldfinch a wonderful story with a great hook (a young boy loses his mother when a bomb explodes at a museum, and impulsively steals a priceless painting that haunts the rest of his life), it’s got all that Pulitzer Prize fairy dust on it, making you instantly the most interesting adult cousin still seated at the kids table.

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton
Perfect For: Anyone Trying to Make Sense of Things
Catton’s immense novel is surprisingly earthy and funny for a novel self-consciously mimicking a specific style of 19th-century book with a story set during the Gold Rush in New Zealand in the 1860s. With a story and characters based loosely on astrological signs and movements, this is a thoroughly enjoyable book that asks you to ponder what forces are behind the seemingly random events in your life.

My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Perfect For: People with Really Long Travel Itineraries
There was once a time when anyone with a truly remarkable amount of free time they needed to fill with great writing would be directed to Proust, but Knausgaard has created a work so monumental and so personal it’s like bringing a brilliant, cranky, and oversharing acquaintance along with you on your travels. Remembering the “characters” in this work are Knausgaard’s actual relatives and friends makes every dark thought and humiliating revelation all the more powerful.

2666, by Roberto Bolaño
Perfect For: People Who Find the Holidays Depressing
Bracingly grim, Bolaño’s final published novel (which some believe is actually an unedited first draft) ties together hundreds of unsolved murders in Mexico, World War II, and an apocalyptic degeneration of society throughout the world to create the sort of novel you can only read when everything else around you is worse because its soundtrack is holiday music.

City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg
Perfect For: People Living in The Moment
Hallberg’s huge tome made a splash before it was even finished when he sold it for a record-setting advance, and arrived with its edgy literary cachet intact this year. Set in New York City in 1977 and centered on a violent assault that traces the often invisible connections between a disparate cast of characters as the famous blackout looms, the book’s mixture of prose, images, zines, and letters will keep you entertained throughout your entire holiday visit.

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
Perfect For: People In Desperate Need of Distraction
Wallace’s grand epic remains divisive, a long novel with a huge cast of characters set in a future dystopia that contains so little exposition many of its finer points have to be teased out through repeated readings and careful analysis. The labyrinthine footnotes and tangents only add to the complexity, guaranteeing you’ll need to use most of your brain to read this, making it ideal for ignoring post-dinner political discussions.

Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
Perfect For: People Looking for a Clear Through-line
Ken Follett may have surprised everyone when he took a left turn away from the thrillers that made him famous and published a huge novel set in the 12th century filled with a detailed exploration of architecture and politics. For all its size, Follett’s prose is clear and the story is pulpy and classic, meaning you won’t need a Smartphone and a bottle of aspirin to get through it.

The Passage, by Justin Cronin
Perfect For: Horror Fans
This huge book is only the first in a trilogy (The Twelve published in 2012 and The City of Mirrors is scheduled for 2016), and offers a terrifying story that’s sort of a mix between the classic vampire genre and the modern zombie story, telling an epic story of the world’s collapse after a virus turns most people into vampire-like creatures. It’s horror, it’s epic, and it will serve you well on trains, planes, and automobiles this Thanksgiving.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Perfect For: Traditionalists
Why not go back to basics and read the original really, really long novel? Despite being the slang term for a humongous novel since its publication, few people actually tackle the book—but the endless amounts of mind-numbing free time Thanksgiving represents might be the perfect opportunity.

Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson
Perfect For: Sci-fi Fans
You need a tome to distract you, but you want a thrilling science fiction Read? Seveneves has it all: A really long run time, an epic scale, and the moon exploding on page one. Guaranteed to give your holidays a futuristic tone any SFF fan will find comforting.