At my own blog, I’ve posted several times about the pleasures of seasonal reading. I love matching a book to the weather outside, and for most of the summer I am content to read slender books like Cathleen Schine’s The Love Letter and Raffaella Barker’s Summertime. But occasionally, when the mercury is just too high and the air is just too sticky, I want to escape from the season altogether, and that’s when I turn to epics. I think I first started reading them in the summer because it was natural to start a thick book at the beginning of the school holiday and demolish it in a few days. Because of that, immersing myself into another world for several hundred pages feels like a vacation. I seldom manage epics these days, but here are a few of my favorite reads from the past:

*Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor. It is probably the only book I would ever call a saucy romp, but read it and you will understand. People either love or hate the title character, but I think she’s fabulous—at a distance of course. The setting is Restoration England and covers such historical events as the plague and the Great Fire.

*Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. How many years has it been since you’ve read this book? I probably haven’t touched it in two decades, and yet Mitchell’s tale of Civil War Georgia is so lush, I still remember details like Rhett Butler’s waistcoat being embroidered with rosebuds.

*Katherine by Anya Seton. I devoured this book the first time I read it. The heroine is Katherine Swynford, the mistress and eventual wife of John of Gaunt. The story spans several decades, from Katherine’s arrival at the English court as a girl to her reign as the Duchess of Lancaster. Katherine is a much more likeable character than Amber or Scarlett, but perhaps I’m biased—I just discovered that Katherine Swynford was my 17^th great-grandmother.

*Anything by Margaret George. She has written astonishing books about astonishing people—Mary Magdalene, Mary, Queen of Scots, Cleopatra—but my absolute favorite is the Autobiography of Henry VIII. It is the only depiction of Henry that shows him as a despot, but one to be pitied. It is an accomplished book, and one that reveals something new every time I read it.

I suppose if I were going to start an epic this year, I would have to choose Wives and Daughters. Elizabeth Gaskell’s book has been staring at me from the to-be-read pile for months now, and at 644 pages, it certainly qualifies as an epic! What about you? What great, sprawling books will you be taking on?

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