Page turners

[holyzombiejesus]

What are your go to page turners? Sometimes I get bored of my boring, middle-brow, well-reviewed-by-the-broadsheets fiction - usually about a man having a regret or a woman having a regret - and just want something a little more base and exciting. Horror often fills this void but I try and save those for the more autumnal months. Was sorting out my shelves earlier and remembered how much I enjoyed Jamaica Inn and Rebecca, and the Sherlock Holmes books. I thought The 39 Steps might be a decent one but was disappointed in it. The Road is another good one. I nabbed what looked like a brand new copy of The Appeal by Janice Hallett in the train station library thing the other day and I might start that tonight unless I get a really good recommendation by the time I've had my bath.

The Guardian did an article that I came across when I was seeing if 'page turners' was hyphenated, but I don't think I'd class some of the recommendations that I've read as page turners. My Name is Lucy Barton is the opposite of a page turner for me.

[FeederFan500]

The 39 Steps is quite a boring novel really.

I don't really re-read anything so I can only go by authors, John Le Carre, Robert Harris or John Grisham are the three authors that I read if I want something undemanding but interesting. Harris did a novel about the election of a pope that I absolutely raced through.

As a whodunnit I really liked The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair which is big in size but doesn't feel it, despite having an unlikeable protagonist.

Joanne Harris as well for thrillers, although I didn't like Chocolat that much which is probably her most famous one and had a Depp film of it.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Something I unexpectedly smashed through some time ago was The Devil in the White City. It alternates chapter-by-chapter telling the story of HH Holmes and Daniel Burnham, the architect behind the 1893 World's Fair taking part in Chicago.

I picked it up for the Holmes stuff but what I got hooked on are all the little details of organising the fair.

[Old Nehamkin]

On a whim I recently picked up a copy of Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian (the first in his series of Napoleonic naval adventure novels that the 2003 film of the same name was adapted from) and I ended up tearing through it in just a few days. It basically hit the sweet spot of what I tend to want from genre fiction: good breezy storytelling and an evocative sense of time and place but also a reasonable depth and richness of characterisation, an underlying sense of fun and playfulness and some genuinely really funny parts. I'm on the third one now and am loving it. The friendship between the two main characters - captain Jack Aubrey and his ship's doctor Stephen Maturin - is obviously the heart of the whole thing and it's a really enjoyable relationship from the off. They are a bit like Wallace and Gromit if they had a boat. There is also a confident lightness of touch about O'Brian's narration (often skipping forward in time quite abruptly and leaving a lot of unstated information for the reader to fill in) that gels with me.

So yeah, that.

[Mr Vegetables]

Those are some very intimidating page turners from the Guardian; I was going to say "Anthony Horowitz"

[Gladys]

Elomore Leonard has a huge list of novels that fit the bill. Joe R. Lansdale too in a similar vein. Those sort of crime novels do the trick for me.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I dunno. Something lofty no doubt

[Shaxberd]

Terry Pratchett, Stephen King and Bill Bryson. Basic stuff but popular for a reason.

The most recent book not by a huge author that completely gripped me was The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton - a standard 1920s country house murder mystery but with the gimmick that the protagonist is forced to relive the same day in the bodies of different people until he can solve the murder.


(Actually, I tell a lie, the real most recent one was The Infinite and The Divine by Robert Rath, but that's a Warhammer 40k book so only for absolute saddos. If you are an absolute saddo though it is a fun romp about two immortal wizards who hate each other, having a centuries long scrap over a magic space mcguffin while civilisations rise and fall on the planet it's stuck on.)

[Inspector Norse]

The Guardian did an article that I came across when I was seeing if 'page turners' was hyphenated, but I don't think I'd class some of the recommendations that I've read as page turners.

Those articles are always ridiculous pseudy bollocks, they ask a load of bourgeois authors what their comforting beach holiay reads are and they all say they're going to be reading Spinoza in the original Latin or the complete works of Knut Hamsun.

[FeederFan500]

I have a vague memory of reading the original article for ideas last summer and giving up because it didn't seem like their idea of a page turner chimed with mine.

[Mr Vegetables]

The most recent book not by a huge author that completely gripped me was The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton - a standard 1920s country house murder mystery but with the gimmick that the protagonist is forced to relive the same day in the bodies of different people until he can solve the murder.

This lost serious points for me when

Spoiler alert

it turned out the protagonist was able to change events towards the end, even though everything up until that point had depended on them not doing that

[close]

[Pranet]

I always seem to whizz through books by Kate Atkinson.

[badaids]

A Song Of Ice and Fire is amazing, and it's nice devouring all those pages that there are literally thousands of them.  It's incredible that what is essentially a stodgy old swords and sorcery book is so full of life and fizz.

[Shaxberd]

This lost serious points for me when

Spoiler alert

it turned out the protagonist was able to change events towards the end, even though everything up until that point had depended on them not doing that

[close]

That's fair - I didn't think much of the ending, but I'll forgive that in a book if I enjoy the rest of the journey.

[AllisonSays]

I like American crime fiction, the classic Chandler/Hammett but also some more contemporary like Lawrence Block (the Scudder ones are pretty consistently great apart from some very dubious stuff when he gets a teenaged black sidekick, which I kind of understand as a mechanism of the project of telling stories about New York but it falls on the cringy side), George Pelacanos (some very embarassing sex scenes though), Walter Mosley. I mostly hate the British variations on this genre for reasons that are not clear to me.

My go-to when on a comedown, badly hungover or seriously depressed used to be PG Wodehouse, but I've sort of lost that habit tbh. He is great though and the world is enjoyably stakes-less and airless, which (when I was in those physical or emotional states) can be soothing. Maybe not page turners exactly but you're pleasantly propelled by the plot like you're reclining in a body-temperature lazy river.

[bgmnts]

Dumas's d'Artagnan romances are proper page turner's for me. Obviously King is a go to as well. Have no idea what any of the stuff on the Guardian was to be fair.

Also, when it's not going on those endless diatribes, Les Miserables is a mega page turner at times, and a good old cat and mouse chase, with quite a lot of excitement in it.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Patrick Hamilton.

[ASFTSN]

Elomore Leonard has a huge list of novels that fit the bill. Joe R. Lansdale too in a similar vein. Those sort of crime novels do the trick for me.

I was gonna say Leonard, very rare to find a stinker and they've always got great premises and characters (even if there's only about three different character voices spread across them for dialogue). Plus it's fun when you read a new one to guess the page number at which someone is first described as wearing a sport coat!

[Doomy Dwyer]

I was recently gifted - and I'd like to apologise for using that word - 'Perfume' by Patrick Suskind which I've always avoided like a bad smell because it's popular with the masses and I'm an aloof prick who thinks he's better than everyone else. It was very good indeed. Evocative and squalid, set in Paris on the cusp of the glorious revolution, rich and fruity, murder and stench. In short: a proper yarn and a right page turner. Despite the floridness of the prose it bustles along at a ferocious lick. It has been criticised for being misogynistic, but then, so have I. Relatively short, too, but then, so am I. 

[lauraxsynthesis]

My book group had "Page turners" as a theme last year and we read Conclave which was my first ever go at a Robert Harris.  I enjoyed it loads and got through it very quickly then wanted it more. I can see why his books are bestsellers if they're all like that. It's about the selection of a new pope so the characters are all cardinals and there's lots of political intrigue.

Spoiler alert

Bit of a silly and unnecessary twist at the end though.

[close]

Also, honestly, I absolutely devoured Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. Huge book but I didn't want to put it down.