The best books to make you forget (temporarily) you’re depressed

Quite a few people, including me, think this is the greatest work of science fiction ever written. It tells the story of the first human settlement on Mars, stretching over three generations. Usually, science fiction, when it’s good, is good at action, at a character, or at technical detail, but not all three (and rarely even two). Amazingly, Robinson is very good at all three. The central conflict stretching through the volumes is whether the settlers should adapt to Mars’s harsh, austerely beautiful environment or, with the aid of tremendous energy inputs, turn it into a version of Earth.

There are no villains; Robinson gives both sides good arguments. And his understanding of the biology and technology of the other planets and of space travel (on display in several of his other books as well) is awesome.

Some people think spy novels are literature; most people don’t. But if there’s one spy novel that nearly everyone in the English-speaking world would agree is a great work of art, it’s John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy. It is (like most of Le Carre) about a middle-aged denizen of the English intelligence service. He seems a model spy, but a few small doubts arise about his loyalties. It turns out that he does have divided loyalties, but not in the usual, expected way. This main thread of the story is gripping enough, but interwoven with it is the story of the spy’s father, closely modeled on Le Carre’s father, one of the most unforgettable rogues you will ever meet.

I can’t pick just one, and they’re really all the same. The burly, idiosyncratic title character, an Army veteran, is like a knight-errant, stumbling into colossal evildoings and coolly saving America, the Army, or (occasionally) a pretty woman. The books are popcorn, potato chips, cotton candy – once you pick them up, you’ll rarely read less than a hundred pages. Is it art? Most definitely not. But will it get you through a very bad afternoon? Quite possibly.

All good novels try to explain us to one another and open our hearts to one another. This, one of the greatest of all novels, does these things superlatively well. Set in a quiet town in 19th-century England, it’s as eventful as The Iliad or War and Peace. Most of its characters go about their lives with a heartbreaking lack of self-knowledge, which the author imparts to them (and to us) without ever preaching or condescending. Some readers will be impatient with its slow pace and oblique humor, but those who are drawn in will find the hours flying away.

I like the Harry Potter books, but compared to them, The Lord of the Rings is as Shakespeare to … well, the Jack Reacher books I recommended above. The story of the One Ring has an architectural complexity, a symbolic resonance, a metaphoric richness, and a stylistic beauty one wouldn’t expect to find in fantasy literature – maybe because it sits on the boundary of fantasy and epic. 

This is the book among the five recommended here that the reader is most likely to have encountered. But unless you’ve read it in the last 6-8 years or so, I predict you’ll soon be recaptured by it, as I’ve been several times.