Hello. I am planning to give a book for my father who in January, will be going outside our home country for work. This will be his first time working in a distant place and I am slightly worrying that he will feel homesick of leaving us after so many decades (he is almost middle-aged now). He does not read much but I would like to give him a great book to both remind him of us and have something to do while working there.
Notes of my father: He is quite a religious Catholic so a good religious story can be a good thing for him. He also watches a lot of police procedurals/mystery shows whenever he has the chance. He is, in a way, the typical everyman who sacrifices his own pleasure for the sake of our family.
To be honest, I am planning to give him a copy of Steinbeck's East of Eden because that's my favorite book and he could find the religious parallelism in the book to be good, but the novel is more than 500 pages so I don't know if I can recommend it to him as a novice reader. And yet a long novel can entertain him for months if he reads it slowly, and Steinbeck's prose is quite simple to understand (at least for me). I am also planning to give him some of the classical detective novels such as the Holmes and Poirot ones so that he can satiate that mystery thrill without television.
In the end, I am finding books that are pretty moderate in dark stuff and will not stress him out entirely. I am heavily leaning on East of Eden right now but I wonder if you can give me more ideas.
by FlameCorre