I’ve written here before about the quality of “I-want-to-read-it-osity” that some books have, a hard to define but easy to see quality which I am going to refer to as “grabbyness.” There are books you can pick up and put down and happily pick up again, and then there are books that seem to glue themselves to your brain, that utterly absorb you. There are books that are great when you’re halfway through them but that take work to get into. Right now, the kind you can put down and the kind that are hard to get into don’t cut it, because they’re hard to focus on while fretting. For me, grabbyness is a quality entirely orthogonal to actual quality. There are grabby books that are only OK and great books that are not grabby. It also has nothing to do with how ostensibly exciting they are, nor how comforting they are. There are just books that are grabby and books that are not. What I’m talking about is the power to bring you right into the story so that all you want to do is read more, and you forget entirely about the real world around you.
So here are some suggestions for books that grab you, for you to read in these difficult times. I’m trying to suggest a wide range of things, so that there might be some you haven’t read before—sometimes we want to re-read and comfort read, but sometimes we want new things that are sure to hold our attention.
Children’s Books and YA
First, for those of you with kids wanting distracting books and those of you who, like me, happily read books for all ages just the way I did as a kid:
• Gary D. Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars and the sequel, Okay for Now. These are not genre, they’re historical novels about kids in the US in the 1950s going to school and growing up. The first one has great stuff about Shakespeare, and the second about Audubon. They’re just great. Huge thanks to Suzanna Hersey, whose tastes are incredibly congruent with mine, for recommending these to me.
• Ella Minnow Pea, a fascinating Ruritanian dystopian comedy by Mark Dunn. This is about an imaginary island off the coast of the US which reveres Nevin Nollop, the man who wrote the sentence “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog,” and when letters start falling off the memorial, they decide to do without the letters. This book is very funny and very clever too. Thanks to Gretchen McCulloch for reading this aloud to me on Discord, which was a great feat of pronunciation!
• Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, and after that, the rest of Rainbow Rowell. Eleanor & Park is about two geeky teenagers getting to know each other, and their differently difficult families, and it’s just perfect, and it has that “can’t put it down” quality. All her books are like that.
• Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, a book about women pilots and spies in WW2 that does some incredibly clever POV stuff and is very powerful, but which also once caused me to miss my stop on the bus because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was.
Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind. (You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?) It’s fantasy, and it really does have a very compelling voice. I once picked it up to look up something for the re-read I was doing and accidentally read four chapters. And it has the advantage of being long and having a sequel, so once you are head-down into it, it will last you a long time.
• Nina Kiriki Hoffman—almost everything she has written, but start with A Red Heart of Memories because it’s especially grabby right up front. She’s writing Zenna Henderson-esque novels set in the real US but with families who have magic, which isn’t a genre that I often like, but she really makes it work.
• Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil, and again, pretty much all of Ira Levin. His work has that compelling quality. The Boys From Brazil is about cloning Hitler, and it’s really a compulsive read.
• Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series. This may not be grabby for everyone because of the style, which really works for me but not universally. If you try the sample chapters and you’re not grabbed, wait to read it another time. But if you are, these books are incredibly absorbing and all-consuming in addition to being great, and I highly recommend them.
• Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire: Get past the first intro chapter and you will get so completely sucked in to the problems of these worlds that you’ll forget all about the real one. This is one of the very few books we’ve done for book club that absolutely everyone loved. No wonder it’s nominated for all the awards.
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the book that could always reliably take me to Middle-earth until I’d memorized the whole thing—so that if you start a sentence, I can finish it. I can now only read it slowly. But if you haven’t already read it to death, this is the perfect time to read or re-read it.
• C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur books, beginning with Pride of Chanur—do not read out of order. Aliens and space stations par excellence, and again, utterly all-consuming.
• Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Warrior’s Apprentice and all the subsequent books in the Vorkosigan series. If you haven’t read them, this is your lucky day. They may look like MilSF, and they are, but they are also so much more: they are about family and home and integrity and reproduction. I’ve written about them a lot, they’ve won a ton of awards, they are very good, and also very, very, very readable.
• John Barnes’s A Million Open Doors and indeed, lots of Barnes. He does not write happy feel-good books, though AMOD is the closest he comes, but he has that spellbinding voice that means you want to keep on reading. I once re-read this on a very, very bad day, and it absolutely succeeded in removing me from myself. Not a comfort read, but it definitely worked.
• Rosemary Kirstein The Steerswoman and sequels—available inexpensively as ebooks. I’ve written about these, too, they’re about people trying to understand the world they live in using scientific methods, and they’re wonderful friendship-centered, science-centered, and grabby.
• Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark (and indeed most of her fiction, but I’d avoid the Parable books right now). Excellent SF, though somewhat pessimistic, impossible to put down.
My husband Emmet suggested Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker books. I first encountered them as radio plays, and while I certainly find the books delightfully readable, I’ve never thought of them as must-read grabby. But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe they are and I never noticed because they’re so short I’d have read them in one sitting anyway.
He also suggested Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Ethshar books, starting with With a Single Spell, which almost made it into my “books where nothing bad happens” piece except that bad things happen on page one. Light, light fantasy, clever, and very readable in that good way. His Dragon Weather series also has that same thing.
Mainstream and Other Genres
• Jennifer Crusie writes genre romance, and she has that gift of the grab—I’d recommend starting with Welcome to Temptation, which connects to Faking It, which is my favourite of her books. But you can feel safe with anything of hers to suck you in and pull you along.
• Nevil Shute. Unfortunately I have no unread Nevil Shute, it’s all re-reads for me. But there’s something about his prose and his way of telling a story that really pulls me into it. If you haven’t read any, start with A Town Like Alice or Pied Piper. If you have read some, find the ones you’re lucky enough not to have read yet. Shute wrote some borderline SF, too.
• Donna Leon’s Brunetti series—start with the second one, Death in a Strange Country, because that’s where they start to be really great. I have the latest one unread and I am saving it.
• Peter Dickinson also wrote mysteries, and they’re all grabby in just the right way. Probably the best one to start with is A Perfect Gallows about an actor and a play being put on during WW2, or Hindsight, which also is about a wartime crime being investigated a long time afterwards.
• Noel Streatfeild—did you know her adult backlist are available very inexpensively as ebooks? I bought and read them all last year and I thought I was doing really well reading only one a month, but now I wish I’d saved one. However, they are there for others, and definitely things I read in one bite.
• Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and the sequel, Claudius the God: written in first person, utterly absorbing accounts of shenanigans in Ancient Rome.
• Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy and also everything else she ever wrote, but especially this one. Historical novels about Ancient Greece; this one is about Alexander the Great and it’s set in Persia.
Autobiographies
• The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini—I’ve written about this, too, I couldn’t put it down.
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: engaging in exactly the way I mean when I say grabby.
• Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry, which I idly started reading one day, couldn’t stop, and bought the second volume the second I’d finished it.
Non-fiction
So people don’t often talk about unputdownable non-fiction… I don’t know why, because there is some, and non-fiction can sometimes work when stories do not.
• Don Kulik’s A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea is one I read recently that I absolutely could not stop reading. Incredibly absorbing. I bought it because I was mildly interested and then found myself riveted.
• Kate Harris’s Lands of Lost Borders: This is a travel memoir about cycling the Silk Road, but it’s so well written and so full of thoughts and places, and so open and honest, that I couldn’t put this down either.
• Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts is another travel book, this one about a trip young Paddy made in 1933, walking to Constantinople. It’s funny and charming and full of incident, and an absolute joy to read.
Graphic Novels
Not my thing, but Ada Palmer recommends Kurt Busiek’s Astro City for its unputdownability. Grace Seybold says she devoured Ryan North’s Squirrel Girl as soon as it came out. Vicki Rosenzweig and a bunch of other friends all recommend Ursula Vernon’s Digger as not only very readable and also gentle and fun.
And I’d welcome more suggestions!
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two collections of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections, a short story collection and thirteen novels, including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Among Others. Her fourteenth novel, Lent, was published by Tor in May 2019. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She plans to live to be 99 and write a book every year.
Jerry Pournelle has always grabbed me. He was a disagreeable man and I found his politics reprehensible. But boy could he write a gripping adventure tale.
Neat concept! I find grabbiness and immersiveness in a few favourite genres and topics:
• This one is pretty broad, but pretty much any kind of story where a main character turns out not to have the origins they thought they did and then have to do some real digging to figure it out (for any reason – adoption, abduction, conspiracy, mix-up, DNA enigmas, missing people, SFF changeling/AI/extraterrestrial stuff, whatever).
• Mysteries/thrillers that incorporate a lot of invented documents – pretend websites, medical reports, birth certificates, newspaper clippings, etc., especially if lightly/ambiguously SFF (Marisha Pessl’s Night Film; Sean Stewart, Jordan Weisman, and Cathy Brigg’s Cathy’s Book).
• Graphic-novel memoirs, especially ones that capture bittersweetness/ambivalence well (Jonathan Ames’s The Alcoholic, Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This, Tillie Walden’s Spinning, etc.).
• Memoirs/biographies of notable experiences tied to unusual events in neuroscience (Jason Padgett’s Struck by Genius, Suzanne O’Sullivan’s Brainstorm, most of Oliver Sacks, etc.). Also covers fiction if done well (Mark Salzman’s Lying Awake, Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Square).
• Novels about young adults going to an interesting boarding school or college, particularly if either a) the stakes are way higher than they thought for pretty much any reason (SFF or not), and/or b) the story goes all the way to graduation and possibly beyond. I sprinted through Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (trying to hold off on watching the show until I’ve completed the trilogy), Caroline Stevermer’s A College of Magics, Alison Goodman’s Singing the Dogstar Blues, and Harry Potter.
• Biographies of mathematicians for the general market (okay, I understand how subjective this one is, but I’m one of those starry-eyed nerds who finds mathematics to be intellectually exhilarating) (oh, and scientists often count too, especially if they were underappreciated and/or had unlikely paths to success).
• Cryptography, and/or decipherment of ancient written languages (I recently read Andrew J. Robinson’s The Man Who Deciphered Linear B, which was riveting).
Cherryh’s Foreigner books always filled this niche for me. Whenever I had a long (transcontinental or intercontinental) flight coming up, I would put off starting the latest book in the Foreigner series that I had, so I could lose myself in it for five hours on the plane.
I just started rereading The Deed of Paksennarion — the omnibus version of the trilogy — for the umpteenth time. It has been several years since I last read it, so it’s a good time for grabby immersive comfort reading.
Though it’s going to have to go on a short hiatus, because it turned out that The Wednesday Wars was available from the library as an ebook, so I need to read that first.
As for other books, I find everything by Pamela Dean to be grabby, and also Robert Heinlein — two names one is normally unlikely to see in the same sentence.
Speaking of Ira Levin – This Perfect Day is indeed a real grabber!
Rocket men, the story of Apollo 8, the first crew to leave earth orbit, travel to the moon, and orbit the moon, and returned home safely. I don’t read much nonfiction but this was really good.
For me one of the #1 unputdownables is Sarah Monette’s Melusine, which I still owe you for introducing me to.
I still see/remember opening it to the first page in the library, which was Mildmay in his colloquial lower-class cant telling this piece of folk history about a hocus (wizard) doing something really nasty just because she can, and I was immediately hooked both by his voice and by everything the story implied about the setting. I know if I picked it up to look at that passage I’d be halfway through the book before I could stop again. I can imagine many readers being equally put off by it, and if so, the story probably isn’t for them.
Some other compelling non-fiction:
Peter Matthiesen’s The Snow Leopard which is a travelogue of his travels in the Himalayas hoping to see a snow leopard in the wild, only it’s really not about that, it’s more of a personal journal, only it’s really more obliquely about his search for enlightenment in Zen, only it’s not really that either. It takes a good writer to make something like that work, and Matthiesen is a very good writer.
In the Heart of the Sea, about the real-life whaling disaster that inspired Moby Dick and the seamen’s struggle to survive and reach land.
I haven’t read A Time of Gifts, but I found the earlier volume of Fermor’s travels through Europe Between the Woods and the Water to be very soothing reading, as I suggested for your “books where nothing bad happens.”
Douglas Adams’ other great book, Last Chance to See, a bittersweet book about traveling the world to visit with some of the most endangered animals and the people struggling to keep those creatures and species alive.
Graphic novels:
Ursula Vernon’s Digger is great and I wholly recommend it; so is Jeff Smith’s Bone, in much the same way.
Of course the Sandman series was that way for me and for a lot of people. Although the first few issues were a bit uneven in pacing and tone, I was lucky enough to pick up reading it with the 2nd collected volume The Doll’s House, where the story-telling really hit its stride, and after that I went back and caught up and then tracked along with it as the new issues came out.
For what it’s worth, I read Butler’s Parable books for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I found the little notes of grace and mutual aid throughout the post-apocalyptic hellscape oddly comforting, but that may be a peculiarity of my own psyche.
YOUNGER READERS:
CHARLIE HERNANDEZ & THE LEAGUE OF SHADOWS, Ryan Calejo. Middle school contemporary fantasy. Middle-schooler Charlie Hernandez’s parents disappear, and his house burns down. Soon, however, he develops horns which disappear, then feathers grow on his chest and arms. What is going on, and what do all the myths and folk tales of his culture have to do with it? Violet, mystery solver extraoridinarie, joins him in finding out the truth. Lots of monsters and running around ensue. The use of Hispanic/Spanish culture will certainly interest kids, and Charlie and Violet are worthy heroes.
Any series by Rick Riordan is definitely a must for younger and adult readers. Any series by Diane Duane, Eoin Colfer’s “Artemis Fowl” series. It’s much better than the movies.
Elizabeth Moon falls into this category for me – as Carbonel says.
Also Ilona Andrews for Urban Fantasy;
From Sci-Fi & Fantasy – some Mercedes Lackey books – most of Anne McCaffrey (Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern is good plague book!); L E Modesitt jr; early David Weber’s – the later ones I find hard to get into, they don’t grab me usually until the second half of the book; David Eddings – Polgara the Sorcessress drags me in every time, as does Belgareth the Sorcessor and my favourite is the Redemption of Althalus.
Crime – Dorothy L Sayers pulls me in every time, also Ellis Peters (Cadfael)
Star Trek continuations – anything by Christopher Bennett (I know he lurks around here) – especially the DTI books (love those – need another!); David Mack is another always-buy and always engrossing; from the older ones who aren’t publishing as much – Kieth Decandido has currently grabbed me with the Klingon Art of War.
Oh and mustn’t forget Nalini Singh’s Guildhunter/Archangel and Psi-Changling series – if you can ignore the romance based blurbs, they’re cracking sci-fi reads!
So many great recommendations:)
Speaking of Patrick Rothfuss, @bluejo, is there any chance you’ll finish your deep analysis of The Slow Regard of Silent Things? There’s a lot going on in that book, and I’m not confident that I caught all of it.
I liked The Boys From Brazil too. It’s also a fairly short book which can be refreshing sometimes.
But for the love of god, please delete the last sentence in the original article or put a huge spoiler warning in front of it. You’re ruining all the fun for those who aren’t familiar what the book’s about! Not cool.
Looking back over the last ten years, here are the books I couldn’t put down. Not perhaps a very original list (and on the pulpy side) but here it goes –
It. Stephen King. This is a huge, digressive book that somehow manages to be consistently terrifying throughout.
The Chronicles of Amber. Roger Zelazney. Specifically the first series. Reading it reminded me of what it was like to be a teenager again, reading the latest Moorcock, Lieber et al.
The Secret History. Donna Tartt. Picked this at random from a bookshelf one week-end and couldn’t put it down. Don’t be put off by its ‘literary’ tag. The plot is pure Stephen King, albeit with a lot of literary window-dressing. The latter leaves no aftertaste. The only character I still remember is Bunny.
Heroes Die. Mathew Stover. Not sure why this book doesn’t get the love it clearly deserves, as it’s a classic of its kind.
Barry Hughart’s Master Li and Number Ten Ox trilogy is very ‘grabby’. I don’t know how many times I’ve picked one of them up to re-read a favorite passage and suddenly realized I’ve gone through multiple chapters. The first book, Bridge of Birds, is the best, but they’re all great.
In the mystery/thriller genre, you can’t go wrong with anything from Joe R. Lansdale…. His historical fiction ‘The Big Blow’ about Galveston during a devastating hurricane is also amazingly involving.
I have a huge problem with the Donna Leon novels, since I speak fluent Italian and I know the culture quite well: why all the Italian words and interjections in the middle of the English text? In that context English here is supposed to represent Italian!
Nonfiction /biography
Crazy is my Super Power by AJ Lee
A female wrestler
Tom@10: Since you mention Ellis Peters . . . have you read The Heaven Tree Trilogy?
robertstadler@12: I second the appeal.
Anything and everything you can find by John M. Ford. He never wrote a word that wasn’t a moment of genius.
ETA: I remembered this just the other day due to the most recent horse collumn: Vernor Vinge’s “True Names”. One of the greatest cyberpunk books of them all.
My all time grabber of a book is “Sleeping Planet” by William Burkett. Originally serialized in Analog back when I was nine. Aliens develop a sleep gas, use it on Earth, and hold everyone on the planet hostage. Only a handful of humans are immune, and it is up to them to liberate the planet. Which involves not only fighting, but also a very effective con game. I’ve re-read it more than any other book over the years, even more than Lord of the Rings or my favorite Heinlein books.
Grabbiness is of course extremely subjective — for me (and for other people I’ve encountered online) Cherryh’s prose is the exact opposite of grabby, reading it is like slogging through mud. And I enjoyed A Memory Called Empire but it just didn’t grab me in that way. On the other hand, I’m right there with you on Bujold and Watt-Evans.
I find Diane Duane’s books to be good immersive reads, especially the Young Wizards series.
You mention Ursula Vernon’s Digger, which is wonderful, but it’s not clear you know that Vernon has a great deal of prose work, both under her own name and as “T. Kingfisher”. I really think you’d like her work a lot. Her Hugo-winning novelette “The Tomato Thief” can be read for free online here, and I’d suggest also Swordheart and Summer in Orcus as good places to start.
I assume you’re too modest to mention your own work, so I’ll do it for you: all of your books are good grabby reading, but I’ll especially mention Among Others, Farthing, and The Just City.
Comics:
Two thumbs up, jumping up and down on Ada Palmer’s recommendation of Astro City. It’s one of my absolute favorites and in a just world it would have made Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson rich men. Busiek’s The Autumnlands is also a lot of fun, although it is unfortunately unfinished.
Likewise I’m with CliftonR on Sandman, which is justifiably regarded as a modern classic — and not the “dull but worthy” kind, either!
I want to close by mentioning Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie (et al.)’s The Wicked and the Divine, just finished last year.
The Aubrey/Maturin books.
Digger most definitely, specifically page 5 where the protagonist surfaces in a temple, right in front of a Ganesh statue. That one grabbed me hard.
Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody books: Egyptology, murder mystery and romance yum.
Good to find another fan of Ethshar. Highly recommended.
@18 – yes indeed! In fact the first one is in my lockdown reading pile – I got it for Christmas and was saving it for a special occasion!
I absolutely love books that lead me to other books. The Overstory by Richard Powers was an unputdownable book for me and one of my favorite novels from last year. But the nonfiction book that inspired it, The Hidden Life of Trees: What they feel, how they communicate by Peter Wohlleben was just as compelling. I will never look at forests in the same way again.
@22 I love those books also. You should check out Julian Stockwin’s Thomas Kydd books, if you haven’t already discovered them.
@26 – definitely; another useful tack is when an author you currently like has co-authored with another – what do their co-author’s books read like by themselves. From Anne McCaffrey I fell into Jody Lyn Nye, SM Stirling, Mercedes Lackey, and from them into Andre Norton… it’s almost like 6 degrees of separation!
Books that have grabbed me are Zelazny’s Amber and Lord of Light. I always immediately read Steven Brust’s Jhereg series. Jo Walton’s Among Others and My Real Children. Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider and Jim Butcher’s Dresden books. Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota books are grabby for me, also.
As Jo says, grabbiness has to do with pulling you in. The most grabby books sink you right in from page one.
I actually just finished rereading LotR (I had started a Tolkien reread before everything started falling apart) and it’s still very, very grabby for me.
As for graphic novels, I’d put in plugs for Jeff Smith’s Bone (gorgeous B&W art; starts very funny, then turns into something deep and rich and magical) and John Allison’s Giant Days (no fantastical elements as such; the travails of a group of college-age young women trying to get through life; often very, very funny).
Many many of the above. Also Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee series – a Chinese “Sherlock Holmes” based on a real historic character and his recorded cases. Around 13 separate books so dive in. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were writing Scandi Noir long before the term had been coined. And White’s Sector General series has been mentioned in posts elsewhere but is well worth a reread. Oh and has anybody out there not read M R James’s Collected Ghost Stories?
I’m in that apparently tiny minority that found Name of the Wind unpleasant. I’ll white out the spoiler reason.
I hate protagonists who spend a huge amount of effort, with their eyes wide open, digging a giant hole, then expect me to feel sympathy for them because they’re in a giant hole.
Really? I would say Orbital Resonance is both cheerier and grabbier. It’s in a depressing setting, certainly.
AMOD does star a character apparently modeled on Steve Brust, though. That counts for something.
Also, Dragon Weather is “light, light fantasy”? Um, more spoilers below in white-on-white.
A story in which the protagonist’s family is horribly killed before his eyes, and he is then enslaved and literally forced to labor in darkness in an underground mine for years, and that’s the intro — that’s “light”?
I really like Dragon Weather, but light it is not.
Second the grabbiness of Bujold.
Later Terry Pratchett, after he mastered his craft, is incredibly grabby for me.
I strongly recommend Gaiman’s short graphic novel The Books of Magic. If you can get over the surface resemblance of protagonist Tim Hunter to Harry Potter (actually Tim arrived on the scene before Harry), you get a rollercoaster slam-bang introduction to all the magical players in the DC Comics Universe. Before you know it, the graphic novel is over. Great stuff!
Everything by Kate Atkinson and Ann Leckie has this effect on me. Jane Eyre. Doris Betts’s Heading West, which practically nobody has ever heard of and which seems to divide opinions strongly among those who have, oh well.
In nonfiction: John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, which got me definitively hooked on military history.
Bujold’s Chalion series. Jo Walton’s Among Others. Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver (unputdownable every time i re-read; I’ve also ripped through 8 of her Temeraire books since stay-at-home started.) Dan Simmons’s Hyperion series (especially the first two books), and the Illium/Olympus books. N K Jemisin’s How Long Til Black Future Month? (I kept telling myself “Just one one!” but read all the stories in one sitting.)
For non-fiction, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Doug Stanton’s In Harm’s Way were books I completely fell into (though Stanton’s book, about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis might not be a stress-free read for most folks).
Finally, I have to recommend Samantha Irby’s books, especially We Are Never Reading in Real Life. I cannot remember the last time I laughed this hard or had so many Ah-ha moments about race. (Caveat: her matter-of-fact discussions of her childhood are stilettos to the heart.) The woman is a fricking triple-threat.
Modesty Blaise series by Peter O’Donnell
Laundry series by Charles Stross
Most stuff by David Brin
Serrano series by Elizabeth Moon
Terry Pratchett!
Spider Robinson
I’m not sure I’d agree with Hitchhikers guide as being grabby, certainly not the sequels. The series starts out well and goes downhill. I found the Dirk Gently books far easier to read and reread.
All of Dorothy Dunnett’s historical fiction. Astounding world-revealing. Her research is immaculate and deep
I would like to recommend Jodi Taylor’s chronicles of St Mary’s, the first book is: Just One Damned Thing After Another. It’s about time travelling historians who get into all manor of mischief and adventures.
The stories sweep you up quickly and before you know it you’re five books into a series of 11. And that’s not an exaggeration, I bought the first 5 books one day after another and regretted nothing.
I came to Nina Kiriki Hoffman by way of The Thread That Binds the Bones, a wonderful concoction of urban-adjacent fantasy, family (blood and found) drama, and white knuckle horror. I was drawn in first by the whimsical early 90s AvoNova paperback cover.
For sheer grabiness, nothing catches me like Ender’s Game. Can’t explain it without having a couple of hours to sit and talk about i .
@33 Not just Gaiman’s The Books of Magic, but any of his Sandman series. I have no idea how many times I’ve read the first 30 issues, and every time I start, I have to finish the story line.
Freyalyn Close-Hainsworth, yes, yes, yes to Dorothy Dunnett – particularly the Lymond Chronicles, which I discovered at the age of 13, didn’t understand the half of it then, but I’ve read and re-read all my life.
Pam Adams – yes, yes, yes, to the Aubrey Maturin novels. Years ago, I suffered a traumatic relationship break up, and embarked on the series to console and distract me from my love-rat ex-boyfriend. A week later, I came out the other side, cured.
Carbonel – have you read the books? Totally grabbed me as a child. I was given a black kitten when I was eight, and called him Carbonel. Unfortunately, he never spoke.
Graphic novels – I love those by Posy Simmonds, especially her modern reworkings of classics from Dickens, Zola and Hardy. And Mezolith and Mezolith 2, by Ben Haggarty and Adam Brockbank, brings the ancient past to life.
Sci fi and fantasy – Ursula Le Guin, Tolkien of course, C J Cherryh, Elizabeth Moon, Naomi Novik, and the lovely trilogy by Katherine Arden which begins with The Bear and the Nightingale. And the historical fantasies of Guy Gavriel Kay, beautifully written – Tigana is one of my all-time favourite novels in any genre.
Crime – I like the classics, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham, Tey, but more modern series like the Rebus novels of Ian Rankin too, the archaeological mysteries of Elly Griffiths, and Lindsey Davis’s Falco novels set in ancient Rome. Great fun.
I’ll add a series in the YA/Mystery genres – The Flavia de Luce series by Alan Bradley. Starring a chemistry savant 11 year old and set in post-WWII England, these are as grabby as books get. You’ll know within a few pages of The Sweet at the Bottom of the Pie if Flavia’s first-person voice works for you, and if it does, there are several more books in the series to wolf down.
I’ll also jump on the Aubrey/Maturin, Vorkosigan and Amber bandwagons.
I binged the last series of The Americans finally and went idly looking for something contemporary in the spy genre to read. I found Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon books and found them so grabby that I’ve just finished the series with #19!
There was a bit of predictability going on at one stage with plot points but not enough to throw me off. At least the waiting game for his next publication ought not to be as long as a couple I could mention.
In the meantime, I’ll be starting at least one recommendations here.
Currently reading the Hyperion Cantos for the first time and finding it extremely engrossing. The kind of book where I stay up until 3am because I have to find out what’s going to happen to these characters.
Also pretty much anything by Brandon Sanderson grabs my attention and I have trouble removing myself from the worlds he creates.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Megan Whalen’s Queen’s Thief series. The first one is The Thief, followed by The Queen of Attollia (and then by 3 more with the last one, #6 The Return of the Thief, coming out in October) Next to LotR, these have become my absolute favorite books.
Oops, that should have been Megan Whalen Turner…!
Thanks for the inclusion/shout out to the romance genre, Ms. Walton. Jennifer Crusie’s books are addictive, especially when one is in the mood for gentle comedic romances. There are tons of established romance series that have been published over the last 20 years, and which readers tend to devour one book after another, and then reread. In the romance + fantasy subgenres, I immediately think of JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood books or Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark series, and in romance + space opera subgenre, Linnea Sinclair’s Dock Five Universe books or CJ Barry’s Unforgettable titles. In romance + historical, Julia Quinn’s long running Bridgertons series is highly addictive (and soon-to-be television series), along with Lisa Kleypas’ Wallflower books, and Alyssa Cole’s Loyal League titles, among many, many others. In contemporary romance, Christina Lauren’s Wild Seasons and Beautiful Series titles are widely adored. Frankly, there are far too many beloved contemporary authors/titles/series to name here, but some authors with popular series include Joanna Wylde, Jill Shalvis, Julie James and Sophie Jordan. It’s not by chance that readers of this genre consume stories voraciously.
This is probably obvious, but anything by Heinlein. My husband and I have both had the experience of wanting to read something an hour before bedtime, so we start a book we’ve already read, so we’ll be able to put it down an hour from now. We’ve learned NOT to start Heinlein an hour before bedtime, because he’s so difficult to disengage from, even the books we’ve read half a dozen times already.
Science Fiction:
Dune,… not mentioned – hiss! Read it before the movie is out.
Blood Music – Greg Bear
Starfish – Peter Watts
Diaspora – Greg Egan
Non-fiction:
The Galleys at Lepanto – Jack Beeching. Reads like a novel but it’s history. Super grabber! Why isn’t this a movie?
Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series.
I’ll check the shelves again in the morning, but here are the ones I’ll recommend from memory that haven’t been mentioned:
– My Family and Other Animals is a essentially a young-adult memoir. Gerald Durrell writes of part of his boyhood spent in Greece with his very eccentric family and an amazing collection of local characters. There are some lovely naturalist digressions, but it’s really about the wonderfully mad adventures the family had. It is very hard to put down.
– Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. An engaging narrator, friction and friendship, outstanding writing, and another set of characters that will turn into friends. I’ve read them all multiple times, and it doesn’t matter that I know who did it; just getting to read it again is worth the journey.
– James Gleick’s Chaos: The Making of a New Science is somewhat older, but still a great and very readable intro to the topic.
– Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors is possibly her best mystery, though the Harriet Vane mysteries (Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon) are also hard to beat. Sayers is a consummate stylist and a pleasure to read. The Nine Tailors is one of my go-to pleasure reads.
– Jack Vance’s The Pnume is the last novel in the Planet of Adventure series. The others are perfectly fine pulp novels, but The Pnume is extra special. A great adventure, with the protagonist needing to be both tough and smart to succeed, and of course written in Vance’s lavish yet readable style.
– John M. Ford’s How Much for Just the Planet? is the Star Trek movie I wish we had gotten. So incredibly funny, dense with references and guest stars. I have a hard time stopping when I pick it up.
More in the morning when I can scan the bookshelves.
Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles are quite grabby.
Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London can be too.
I guess what they have in common is to be short, exciting, very humorous.
The web comic Check Please! is a non-genre suggestion. It has just finished so it is a complete story and it is just lovely.
I cannot second David’s recommendations at @21 strongly enough – Vernon, as T. Kingfisher is an absolute joy. I only discovered her earlier this year, and her novels are infinitely grabby, and filled with richly-fleshed out characters who are a complete delight.
My only issue with her is that she is not popping out 5 novels a year – the world *needs* them.
Here a few that do this for me:
Fiction:
Everything Brandon Sanderson has ever written ever.
The Humans by Matt Haig
The Road by McCarthy
The Gates by John Connolly
All of Zafon’s Cemetary of Forgottoen Books Series
Wool, Shift, & Dust by Hugh Howey
Non-Fiction
Reasons to Stay Alive by Haig
Notes on a Nervous Planet by Haig
Everything by GK Chesterton or Thomas Merton
A Mix of Old and New Favorites:
The Dalziel & Pascoe series by Reginald Hill (I’m rereading Pictures of Perfection right now, one of my favorite comfort reads)
Everything by Russell Hoban
Diana Wynne Jones
The already mentioned Dunnett, O’ Brian and Bujold
Astreiant series by Melissa Scott
The Sandman
More recent series:
The Maradaine Sequence by Marshall Ryan Maresca
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
Warlock Holmes by G.S. Denning
Johannes Cabal by Jonathan Howard
Society of Gentlemen by KJ Charles
Zemindar by Valerie Fitzgerald, “a great novel of the Indian Mutiny.” Historical with a touch of romance. Almost 800 pages in Corgi Book paperback in 1981.
Terry Brooks’ Shannara series sucked me in for the long haul..Possibly fortunately, I read “Wishsong of Shannara” first…without realizing that the first in the trilogy had almost no interesting female characters in it, and the second, only two. I saw a mention of C.J. Cherryh there, and I agree that it’s hard to put down her “Foregner” books, but I found an earlier trilogy of hers to be equally difficult to leave be…Her Faded Sun Trilogy…It explores many of the ideas that would later find their ways into the Foreigner series as well. Anne Mccaffrey’s Brainships series did the same…For that matter, MOST of the series she wrote managed to be bleeping near unputdownable!
For middle grade readers or literally anyone who needs a laugh, “Three Times Lucky” by Sheila Turnage and its sequels are sooooo grabby. Side splittingly funny, with great characters and relationships and a really solid mystery in each one, even if you’re not actually 12 you’ll probably love them.
Glad to see additional enthusiasm for some of my mentions, some others I already love and should have mentioned, and lots of other suggestions I should try.
Multiple yeses to the Amber books, especially for the first, Nine Princes in Amber, where it starts out like a noir detective story, and then abruptly it’s something quite different.
@22: Absolute yes, to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series. I have a complete set and I’m waiting to embark on a re-read of the entire thing.
@31: Yes again to all Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries! I acquired the taste from my mother, and after her death I claimed the full set from her collection, as my brother and sister weren’t interested. I’m plotting a full reread of those too.
….
Here’s one of my favorite grabby authors who nobody has mentioned yet:
M. A. Foster, particularly his novels The Gameplayers of Zan, and The Morphodite, each of which begins a series, and Waves which is a standalone novel. An underrated writer, and not known nearly well enough. All his books are weird and quirky, in the nobody-else-could-have-written-this way, and very good IMHO, or at the very least perfectly suited to my tastes.
The Gameplayers of Zan begins with an absolutely bravura chapter in the viewpoint of a not-quite-human (Ler) dumped into a sensory isolation tank for interrogation by secret police, reviewing her memories and deciding what to do. I’ve never been able to put it down after starting the first chapter. It’s a brilliant book from start to finish and really a stand-alone story in itself; the other two books in that Ler series are connected via the same universe/history setting, what Jo calls a “loose series.”
The Morphodite is about someone who’s been created by an oppressive totalitarian system as a “perfect assassin”, trained to rediscover a kind of mystical calculus to fracture entire movements or societies by finding the one weak point to remove, and then to change their own gender and age so they can escape without trace – but it’s actually all plots within plots, and nothing is as anybody thought it was.
Waves is about ocean waves and signal processing and immortality drugs and decadence and esoteric mysticism and it’s just weird. I’ve suggested it to some people who loved it, and to some who read it and shrugged and said “What was the point of all that.” This book has the same unusual combination of minor themes which reappear across many of his books, such as martial arts and information analysis and minor choices that change your life unexpectedly, probably coming from the author’s background in an intelligence agency.
The Ler books and the Morphodite books are available in giant omnibus editions The Book of the Ler and The Transformer Trilogy as ebooks, and the latter possibly still as print. [Edit: I should note the reprint editions were probably rescanned and copy-edited in haste, with unfortunately many typos remaining. I hope this doesn’t deter anyone from trying them.] Sadly, it looks like Waves and the short story collection Owl Time are entirely out of print.
(Don’t get the author mixed up with, apparently, a different M. A. Foster who writes steamy romance series.)
Martha Wells and Tanya Huff. And another vote for Lois McMaster Bujold.
Graphic Novels: for political angst release, try Transmetropolitan series or Bitch Planet. For engrossing sciencey fiction, try the Planetary Series. For good fantasy fun, I like the Fables series and of course the masterful Sandman. Just off the top of my head!
For graphic novels, you can’t do better than Joe Hill’s Locke & Key series. His horror novels are pretty good too.
I landed on The Warrior’s Apprentice as the one to pick up next, but when I went to check it out in more detail I saw it was book 4. Should I start there?
@64 rccampbe
The Warrior’s Apprentice is the first book. The numbering for Bujold’s Vorkosigan books is very odd because she wrote some of them out of order. I believe there are two prequels and a novel set in the same world that come before Warrior’s Apprentice, which is why it showed up as book 4 when you looked it up. I started way in the middle with A Civil Campaign and it never did me any harm, but I would suggest beginning with Warrior’s Apprentice.
Here’s Bujold’s take on the internal reading order. The rest of this post is quoted from the Author’s Note at end of Penric’s Progress—which is set in an different series than the Vorkosiverse.
The Vorkosigan Stories
Many pixels have been expended debating the ‘best’ order in which to read what have come to be known as the Vorkosigan Books (or Saga), the Vorkosiverse, the Miles books, and other names. The debate mainly revolves around publication order versus internal-chronological order. I favor internal chronological, with a few adjustments.
Shards of Honor and Barrayar. The first two books in the series proper, they detail the adventures of Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony and Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar. Shards was my very first novel ever; Barrayar was actually my eighth, but continues the tale the next day after the end of Shards. For readers who want to be sure of beginning at the beginning, or who are very spoiler-sensitive, start with these two.
The Warrior’s Apprentice and The Vor Game (with, perhaps, the novella “The Mountains of Mourning” tucked in between.) The Warrior’s Apprentice introduces the character who became the series’ linchpin, Miles Vorkosigan; the first book tells how he created a space mercenary fleet by accident; the second how he fixed his mistakes from the first round. Space opera and military-esque adventure (and a number of other things one can best discover for oneself), The Warrior’s Apprentice makes another good place to jump into the series for readers who prefer a young male protagonist.
After that: Brothers in Arms should be read before Mirror Dance, and both, ideally, before Memory.
Komarr makes another alternate entry point for the series, picking up Miles’s second career at its start. It should be read before A Civil Campaign.
Borders of Infinity, a collection of three of the five currently extant novellas, makes a good Miles Vorkosigan early-adventure sampler platter, I always thought, for readers who don’t want to commit themselves to length. (But it may make more sense if read after The Warrior’s Apprentice.) Take care not to confuse the collection-as-a-whole with its title story, “The Borders of Infinity”.
Falling Free takes place 200 years earlier in the timeline and does not share settings or characters with the main body of the series. Most readers recommend picking up this story later. It should likely be read before Diplomatic Immunity, however, which revisits the “quaddies”, a bioengineered race of free-fall dwellers, in Miles’s time.
The novels in the internal-chronological list below appear in italics; the novellas (officially defined as a story between 17,500 words and 45,000 words) in quote marks.
Falling Free
Shards of Honor
Barrayar
The Warrior’s Apprentice
“The Mountains of Mourning”
“Weatherman”
The Vor Game
Cetaganda
Ethan of Athos
Borders of Infinity
“Labyrinth”
“The Borders of Infinity”
Brothers in Arms
Mirror Dance
Memory
Komarr
A Civil Campaign
“Winterfair Gifts”
Diplomatic Immunity
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance
“The Flowers of Vashnoi”
CryoBurn
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen
@42 Pam Thomas
Yes, I’ve read the Carbonel books and that is where my handle comes from,. I enjoyed them, though I came to them as an adult and they didn’t hook me the way they did for some people.
Cathrynne Valente’s Palimpset is one of the most un-put-downable books I’ve ever read.
Memoirs I have read multiple times:
Born Naked by Farley Mowat
Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey
Too many to remember, I seem to be easily grabbed
Some not mentions above: C. S. Foresters two crime novels, Payment Deferred and especially Plain Murder. These are not mysteries, no detective is ever involved, and the reader sees the crime committed early in the story. The focus is on what having become a criminal does to the criminal. In some ways a bit like Donald Westlake’s The Axe.
Speaking of Westlake, I find his Parker novels (written as by Richard Stark) quite hard to put dowen
The “Share” Books, Quarter Share, Half Share, Full Share, Double Share, Captin’s Share, and Owner’s Share by Nathen Lowell. A sort of SFnal Two Years before the Mast, they start with a young many of about 18 newly sigens on as an entry-level merchant spacer, because he had no choice, and finds himself building a life. No0 space battels, indeed little conflict in the first few books, the trade is real trade. Worth a try.
Jean Merril’s The Pushcart War.
Jack Vance’s Showboat World.
@32. Carl
.Do note that Dragon Weather at least starts as a fantasy version of the Count of Monte Christo. I would agree it isn’t light (as most of the Ethshar books are) but I found ir and the others in the series quite grabby.
Others mentioned above:
I quite agree with Bujold and Sayers, and some but not all of Moon. Yes indeed to Modesty Blaise. Much but not all of Rex Stout. (Death of a Dude and Please Pass the Guilt are sub-par, and Prisoner’s Base has an idiot plot.)
Aubrey/Maturin and Judge Dee, absolutely!
John Ford’s How Much for Just the Planet? is wonderful, but I found The Final Reflection much more grabby and enjoyable, and worth more rereads.
Nice tips on C. J. Cherryh (love her Alliance-Union universe, starting with the amazing Downbelow Station) and Octavia Butler (loved her beautiful and thoughtful Xenogenesis books).
Great concept that I had, but lacked a word for.
The grabbiest things I ever read:
Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson books.
Gene Wolfe Book of the New Sun.
However, contingent factors could add to or detract from grabbiness; if I read any of those at a different time of my life, maybe they wouldn’t have been so grabby…
The Mercy Thompson series, urban fantasy by Patricia Briggs, grabbed me and pulled me into her world. Closely related is the Alpha and Omega series. The first book about Mercy, who’s a coyote shapeshifter, is Moon Called.
Wendy and Richard Pini’s ElfQuest series of comics/graphic novels is pretty incredible. I was totally hooked after reading the first few issues. The Original Quest began in 1978, and this isn’t a series to start midstream. Dark Horse is their current publisher and they’ve been reprinting the earlier books. The entire series is also available online at elfquest.com, for free. It begins with a tribe of elves burned out of their forest home (they are hunter-gatherers) who must cross a burning desert where they find more elves – and one of them develops an immediate rivalry with our hero, Cutter, Chief of the Wolfriders,over the beautiful Leetah the Healer. Told with humor and incredible art, along with gut-wrenching pain, I’ve been a fan since the early 1980s.