5 un-put-down-able books to distract you from the election

Election, election, election. Only one day left, and the news is everywhere. Last-minute polls! Maps of the states colored red and blue! Final tours through swing states! Candidates, pundits, more polls! It's enough to make you want to make like an ostrich and bury your head in the sand until it's all over.

Or, better yet, bury your nose in a book.

Not all books are good: Short-story collections, even humor collections by a great like David Sedaris, have too many blank spaces between the stories. You don't want your brain to wander back to the hyper-election-aware news cycle. Magazines, no matter how absorbing, let you come up for air. That just won't do. To drag your attention away from those THIS-IS-IT! screaming e-mails and headlines you need total absorption.

Hence, our five un-put-down-able books -- we recommend picking one up tonight. You deserve a full-fledged fictional flight of fancy, a real humdinger of a read-in-one-sitting, attention-grabbing, deliciously satisfying novel.

• "The Dead Zone" by Stephen King
• "Devil in a Blue Dress" by Walter Mosley
• "God Emperor Dune" by Frank Herbert
• "The Keep" by Jennifer Egan
• "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold

Explanations of our list after the jump.

"The Dead Zone" by Stephen King. I imagine any Stephen King novel sucks you into its world, but when I read "The Dead Zone" -- which is about a man who wakes up from a coma with psychic abilities he doesn't want -- I became positively negligent. I was a babysitter that summer, and when I took the kids to the playground, I'd break out the book and pretty much fail to pay any attention to them at all. Luckily, the kids I was "watching" survived. A caveat: The psychic is destined to intersect with a corrupt politician, which might bring back thoughts of the election.

"Devil in a Blue Dress" by Walter Mosley. Even though I saw the film when it came out, I was entranced by the book "Devil in a Blue Dress" (seeing the film does imprint the image of Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins, which I think is a plus). Mosley's midcentury African American Los Angeles comes alive; the detective story spins with as many twists and turns as any good noir film; but most important, Easy is a character so vibrant that it seems like he's sitting across a table from you. He's complex and moral but puzzling too, and when he loses his near-ubiquitous cool, you're surprised and afraid and dismayed and kind of wish he'll do it again. When he's gone, you really, really want him back -- so if you read fast, pick up the next in the series, "A Red Death."

"God Emperor Dune" by Frank Herbert. Nick Owchar explains his pick: How better to forget the current election than to immerse yourself in the story of a tyrannical leader, Leto II, in a galaxy far, far away? Leto's musings on the nature of power are fascinating, and the fact that I hadn't read the previous three "Dune" books -- "Dune," "Dune Messiah" and "Children of Dune" -- didn't hinder understanding the story. Herbert gives many glosses to the previous works to help new readers along. Did I forget to mention that Leto is transforming into a sand worm? He hopes to one day plunge into the sands of the planet Arrakis/Dune and create spice again. Feeling overwhelmed by round-the-clock election coverage in the media, I've sometimes wished I could nose-dive into a sand dune too.

"The Keep" by Jennifer Egan. This starts out like a typical kind of gothic story -- dissolute New Yorker winds up broke and at the mercy of a distant relative at a castle in Eastern Europe -- but then it unfolds in the most fascinating directions. There are stories within stories, and Egan has the gift of being able to write cliffhangers, so each one that's abandoned heaps on more longing and suspense. I ignored graduate school reading -- for which I was getting graded -- to indulge myself in "The Keep." And I'd do it again. 

"The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold. I can't tell you exactly when I started crying while reading "The Lovely Bones"; cry I did, a lot. But the book's sadness, which comes from its point of view -- it's told by the ghost of a 14-year-old who has been raped and murdered -- is offset by a tremendous, generous hope. When I closed the book, I was surprised to find it was past 3 a.m. I don't think it's a perfect book, but I do think it grabs your heart and demands that it be read. And it doesn't let go.

Tonight we read, for tomorrow we may be glued to CNN, PBS, MSNBC. . . .

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Ostrich photo by Nagyman via Flickr

Comments

[gooeycenter]

My favorite one-sitting novel is Shella, by Andrew Vachss. It's a suspense-thriller, and the reader simply doesn't want to surface until it's done. Actually, Vachss' novel Down in the Zero has the same effect as well, but I really like the spareness of language in Shella. Oh, and Joe Lansdale's Bad Chili is another fine page-turner!

[Christian]

I would suggest anything by Michael Connelly. He's the best crime writer in the business, and he rises above the typical, "potboiler" authors out there. Try The Lincoln Lawyer or Echo Park.

And since I just finished it, A Confederacy of Dunces. Hilarious novel that you'll plow through in a few hours. Guaranteed.