Eclectic Course of Must Reads

The Little Prince, Most Dashing in his Traveling Scarf!
A few years back, several people all at once, each unbeknownst to the other, asked me what titles I would recommend to a reader who was starting at "Go." I mulled it over some, thinking about syllabi and reading lists. More importantly, however, I went with my heart and in an hour or so of brainstorming came up with the following list of "Must Reads."

Undoubtedly, you have only to glance down the page before a thousand omissions become apparent. No Shakespeare, for example...but maybe I wouldn't recommend Shakespeare at the starting line; better to run a couple of laps first. Not necessarily thematic or consistent or even rational, this list represents the titles that came to mind that day when I asked myself "What books are you really glad that you have read?"

I hope you will enjoy at least some of these suggestions:

VERY OLD FAVORITES FROM WAY BACK
These were the soul - searchers:

The Fantasticks
by Tom Jones & Harvey Schmidt

Our Town
by Thornton Wilder

The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint Exupery

I Heard the Owl Call My Name
by Margaret Craven

Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak

The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee

Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein

The Water is Wide
by Pat Conroy


MYSTERIES
If you’re in the mood for a thriller,
I think these are all above average:

The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey

Summer’s Lease
by John Mortimer

The 7th of July
by Jill McCorkle

Fatal Inversion
by Ruth Rendell

The Secret History
by Donna Tartt

Turtle Moon
and
Second Nature
both by Alice Hoffman

The Erasers
by Alain Robbe-Grillet


TRAVEL
As mentioned awhile back,
you should read everything by Bill Bryson;
also these American travelogues:

Blue Highways
and PrairyErth
both by William Least Heat Moon

Mama Makes Up Her Mind
and Sleeping At the Starlite Motel
both by Bailey White


WORLD WAR II
Loss, sadness, and European history:

Badenheim 1939
by Aron Appelfeld

The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass

War Time Memories
by Louis Begley

The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro

How German Is It
by Walter Abish

Hiroshima
by John Hersey

Slaughterhouse Five
by Kurt Vonnegut

The White Hotel
by D. M. Thomas


MISC. WORLD LIT
Nearly all from my classes with
Professor Leonard Orr:

The Metamorphosis
and The Trial
by Franz Kafka

The Wanderer
by Henri Alain-Fournier

Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann

The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov

Out of Africa
and "Babette's Feast"
both by Isak Dinesen

Kitchen
by Banana Yoshimoto

If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino


AMERICAN STANDARDS
Don't worry, I'm leaving out Moby Dick:

Bartleby, the Scrivener
by Herman Melville

My Antonia
by Willa Cather

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson

The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner

In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway

"Appointment in Samara"
by John O’Hara

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams

Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger


MORE RECENT AMERICAN NOVELS
Modern and post-modern despair:

Dangling Man
by Saul Bellow

Miss Lonelyhearts
by Nathanael West

The Universal Baseball Association
by Robert Coover

Edwin Mullhouse
by Steven Millhauser

84 Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff

Still Life With Woodpecker
by Tom Robbins

Breakfast of Champions
Cat's Cradle
Slapstick
and Jailbird
all by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Ragtime
by E. L. Doctorow

Bright Lights, Big City
and Brightness Falls
both by Jay McInerney

Moo
by Jane Smiley


A FEW PICKS FROM MY GRAD SCHOOL READING LIST
Modern British and Irish fiction:

Far From the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy

Sons and Lovers
The Man Who Died
The Captain’s Doll
all by D. H. Lawrence

Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
by Angus Wilson

Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis

Hurry On Down
by James Wain

My Strange Quest for Mensonge
by Malcolm Bradbury

Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

Keep the Aspidistra Flying
by George Orwell

The Ice Age
by Margaret Drabble

Dubliners
and Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
by James Joyce

The Third Policeman
by Flann O’Brien

My Left Foot
by Christy Brown

Murder in the Cathedral
by T. S. Eliot

A Man for All Seasons
by Robert Bolt

The Importance of Being Ernest
by Oscar Wilde


SOME SLIGHTLY EARLIER BRITISH LIT
You can substitute other Dickens' titles if you want,
but I preferred these to David Copperfield or Oliver Twist:

A Tale of Two Cities
and Great Expectations
both by Charles Dickens

Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley

Favorites From 2010

Cover Illustration & Design by Roz Chast

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books
and The People Who Read Them
Elif Batuman's amazing memoir of her years
as a graduate student in Russian Literature.
See also "Holy Connection and Coincidence Batman"
"I don't know if I ended up siding with the academics because I happened to be in graduate school, or if I ended up in graduate school because I already secretly sided with the academics. In any case, I stopped believing that 'theory' had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?" (22, emphasis added)

"If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them." (290)

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And here is a related thought by Steve Almond
from his article about the tragedy of 9 / 11:
"The Decade of Magical Thinking"
"One of the duties of the artist – not the only duty, but a central one – is to impel people to imagine the complexity of thought and feeling inside another person. Art complicates moral action, because we have to accept that other people matter, that their hardship and suffering, even their rage and sorrow, are, to some extent, our responsibility."

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Desperadoes
Ron Hansen's historical novel about the
notorious, ill-fated Dalton Gang

For more commentary:
"Dalton Gang"
"End of Summer Sounds"

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"Barber ~ Shop ~ W. W. Lindsey"
One of my Great - Uncle Wayne's Barbershops

Wish I could name the little cousins, but alas I cannot!
Nor do I know the exact location of the shop but know
that Wayne had shops in Chautauqua, Elgin, Havana, Peru,
~ all in Southeast Kansas ~
and that in one of them, he shaved Emmett Dalton!