Spaulding wrote:
I hate hate hate the Scarlett letter and great expectations. I loved the catcher in the rye, to kill a mocking bird, and Twain novels.
Elmer Gantry Sinclair Lewis - Lewis won a Pulitzer in 1926 but, like an NHL team not touching the Campbell Cup, declined to accept it b/c he felt he deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature, something no American had ever won. Lewis would go on to be the first American awarded the Nobel Prize a few years later. I think Lewis might've been from the same small Minnesota town as Rose from
Golden Girls.
Orwell's
Animal Farm - this book makes your face look smart when you quote it. Try to get the version with Steadman's Illustrations, an acceptable coffee table book for when your right-wing friends and family visit. Steadman also provided illustrations for Hunter Thompson's
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Catch-22 Joseph Heller - once when being interviewed by an impertinent young journo decades after the publication of
Catch-22, the journalist finished up the interview by asking Heller, "Be honest, nothing you've written since
Catch-22 has been as good" Heller's response "No one has written a book as good as
Catch-22 since
Catch-22" or something along those lines. I like
Picture This better overall, but
Catch-22 is more culturally significant/canonical.
A Good Man Is Hard To Find Flannery O'Connor - sex, violence, family, strangers - like the ID channel set in mid 20th century American South, dripping with Roman Catholic imagery.
All the King's Men Robert Penn Warren - He's got Penn for a freaking name, so he has to be a good writer. Starts off in a large automobile driving too fast on a dark back road in Loozyanna carrying men (and women) with guns and ambition and never takes its foot off the gas--good story, well-told. Someone once observed that all American novels are political novels e.g.,
Moby Dick as allegory for Second Bank of the United States,
Wizard of Oz about the battle between the gold backed dollar and silver backed dollar (Dorothy's slippers are silver, not ruby, in the novel) .
All The King's Men is the best of the bunch
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again David Foster Wallace - if you like Mark Twain you might enjoy Wallace's non-fiction travel writing enough to give
Broom of the System or
IJ a go. Wallace's
college commencement 2005 message to the graduates is worth a re-listen every few years.
Love in the Ruins and
Thanatos Syndrome Walker Percy - it's like Walker Percy time-traveled five decades forward and then returned to document what he saw there--and now we're livin' it.
The Basic Eight Daniel Handler
Lemony Snicket author and accordion player in The Magnetic Fields earlier work
The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer - timeless tales of men behaving badly. recommend listening to audiobooks of these stories while following along with a copy of the text.
Grendel John Gardner - Gardner ran over and killed his brother with
one of these . As penance, Gardner voluntarily taught at the University of Detroit around the same time Dick Vitale coached U of D's men's hoops team.
Beowulf re-told from the POV of the monster.
Homeboy Seth Morgan
The Odyssey Homer and
Paradise Lost Milton - if you wanna go back that far. The most enjoyable/accessible of the epics.
Ethan Frome Edith Wharton - quick read, under 200 pages, that ending tho