The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

by Mark Haddon
240-ish pages
Time to read: about 5 hours, straight through

Christopher, an Autistic 15-year-old who is brilliant at math but horrible at social interaction, finds his neighbor's dog dead and sets out to solve the mystery of who killed it. Along the way, he finds out more about his parents and himself than the dog. A surprisingly funny book (even though there are definitely sad parts) and a really great read.

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

This took me about a week to read, but I started it during finals week. It's long, at about 500 pages.
The novel is fictional but based on the life of a Louisiana governor who started good but became corrupt. It’s told through the eyes of a journalist who first covered his campaign and then became a political handyman. Definitely worth a read- one of the most honest novels about American politics out there. Warren's poetic style, like Faulkner-lite, is a little rough at first but I really started to enjoy it as the book went on. So Southern ;).

Possession by A.S. Byatt

Length: 555 pages
Time to read: about two weeks- it was for a literature class

This novel is the really original story of modern-day scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Roland, a scholar of the poet R.H. Ash, discovers drafts of a passionate letter, scandalous since everyone thought Ash was happily married. He works with Maud, who studies the poet Christabel LaMotte, to establish a link between the poets. They find more letters, and the story takes off as they try to figure out what happens.
The novel, which is a combination of letters, poetry, biography and regular narrative, bills itself as a romance but it's more classical-quest than modern, and really great for it. It's long and the beginning takes awhile to get going, but the end picks up. It reminded me a tiny bit of the DaVinci Code, only it's much more intelligent and it has (gasp!) character development. If you like poetry, you'll love Possession.