I love to have that moment in time when I am reading and lose all sense of time. I will try and recall a few books that have done that for me. I wish it happened more often. I think if you are stressed, tired or distracted this phenomenon happens less often.

Okay, don't just me too harshly--The Twilight Series I read it before it was big. I really had a hard time finding something after that. It was consuming. I have not read the last book saving for summer vacation.

In my early 20's Gone With The Wind and in as a kid I loved A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. As a teen and young adult Exodus. (I hope to read Amos Oz's bio A Tale of Love and Darkness.)

Andrea Barrett's Voyage of the Narwhal and Servants of the Map stopped time for me in a cold month of January a couple of years ago.

Hardy's Tess of the D'urbevilles and Jude the Obscure drove me into sheer anxiety!

And I read The Romance Reader twice because I didn't understnd the full impact.

Bee Season I had to put down so depressing but picked it up again when I wasn't so raw myself and same feelings for Map of the World. Both books intense for me.

How about you?

Message edited by its author, Jun 20, 2009, 11:36am.

For me it's the guilty pleasure books that do this the best. Twilight et. all was the easiest book to fall into I think I've ever read. The Harry Potter books coming in a close second. Just last night I picked up Dead Until Dark and didn't come out of it until I'd finished.
The Stand is one I wouldn't call a guilty pleasure, but was also next to impossible not to fall into while reading.

Well, I've answered this a few times on ol' LT. The Master and Margarita and A Confederacy of Dunces are way up there.

Oh, and of course Goodnight Gorilla.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Uhura's Song

Garden Spells

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (although this might be because I just read it on the train while traveling halfway across the continent. I'll let it percolate for awhile to see if the intensity of my reaction is still the same.)

Message edited by its author, Jun 20, 2009, 6:00pm.

>2 Hah! I had to put myself on a Charlaine Harris break! She's my new crack - I did that with Club Dead and Dead to the World on back-to-back days and had to tell myself to stop reserving the books at the library for a while (only a little bit!). I don't know what it is about the books, but they just beg to be read all day. :)

Any of the books in the Song of Ice and Fire saga by George R. R. Martin ..I've never been so entranced by a series before. A Game of Thrones had me hooked from the first page..and I breezed through that one..along with the other 3 in the series. I was sad when I was done, though.

Lud-In-The-Mist by Hope Mirrlees was another one where I started and just couldn't put down. Along with Stardust and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.

The Picture of Dorian Gray was one I couldn't put down.

I just finished Kafka on the Shore in about one day. I usually do that with Murakami though.

I couldn't put down any of the Twilight books.

This weekend I couldn't put down Just checking. It has a stain on the front cover and I didn't want to see it, and I would have if I had put it down, and I couldn't put it upside down as it would have gotten the surface I put it on dirty, and ...

PS. MrA I know where you live, so don't you dare say a word about either of the above subjects p~

Message edited by its author, Jun 22, 2009, 5:44am.

The Seventh Gate by Geraldine Harris.

Planet Narnia by Michael Ward.

Ooh, there've been quite a few, so off the top of my head:

Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane. I read while brushing my teeth with that one.
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. Great book, although the fact that I should have been writing an essay when I read it may have contributed to the 'unputdownable' factor.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Well, once I got into it.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. I became just as obsessed as the narrators.
Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen. I don't usually read chick lit, but this was really nice.

The Harry Potter books and the Twilight books both fall under that catagory for me as well.

I also found it impossible to put down Luck in the Shadows and Stalking Darkness when I discovered the Nightrunner books.

My most recent was Incendiary - stuck to my fingers like superglue until I finally closed the back cover.

Some of the books that sucked me in, where I felt like I was in the story and not even noticing the pages turn were

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers
Armor by John Steakley
Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Slaughterhouse Five be Kurt Vonnegut
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Erasure by Percival Everett
Jubilee by Margaret Walker
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah

I have many of these. Many of them was by David Gemmell. Other recent ones was Jumper (Fun book to read!), Spin and Fight Club.

Lee Child's Jack Reacher books are always can't put downs for me.

Booksloth recommended The Collector to me and I lost hours to it and well worth the time it was too. Impossible to put down.

Irisrose I called in sick for two days at work to sit in my garden in the sunshine and read Gone With The Wind.

MerryMary I just ordered The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane but it's called something else here, I forget what. But I am hearing good things about it on LT and so looking forward to it's arrival.

#19 If I was an employer I'd grant 'reading leave' to anyone who could prove to me they were reading a good enough book. Steinbeck, Faber and de Bernieres fans would only have to come in two mornings a week.

#6: I'm intimidated by the sheer length of A Game of Thrones, good to know it might be worth putting in my TBR pile.

--

Speaker for Dead is the best book I've read this summer in terms of fiction.

Architecture and Disjunction, although somewhat technical at times (a preoccupation with the concept of "space" is somewhat of a prerequisite throughout the first few essays), definitely had me glued.

Booksloth, I'd work for you any day.