The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)

I pulled this off my shelf recently to give to my older son to read, then started leafing through it myself, and was reminded of just how big and entertaining and heartbreaking and wonderful it is.

(The story, for anyone not already be familiar with it, is about two Jewish cousins in New York during and after World War II—one an artist who escapes Prague in 1939 but leaves his family behind, the other a Brooklyn writer and comic book enthusiast—who then go on to create a superhero comic together, although of course there’s a lot more going on than just that. I was doing more writing myself back when this came out, and was so taken with it that I spent time diagramming out the structure of it, looking at what each chapter was doing as far as developing the plot, characters, and themes, and even manually typed out whole chapters, just trying to get a feel for how the writing worked and what each individual sentence and paragraph was accomplishing.)