#19 Revolutionary Road Richard Yates

Jacket Copy: From the moment of its publication in 1961, Revolutionary Road was hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs. It's the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.

Similar to: Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Henry James' Daisy Miller, E.M. Forster

My Take:
-- I hardly think a movie version of this book was necessary, since the story comes so vividly to life on the pages, that you can picture it in your head as you read.
--This book is not a light-hearted, uplifting read by any means. It's disturbing and haunts you after you read it.
--This book is about how nothing in life is black and white, there's always gray areas and ambiguity, no matter how much 1950s suburban America tried to pretend like these complications didn't exist and tried to create a much more simple version of reality for people to console themselves with.
--This book is most well-known for its style of prose, its known primarily as a "well-written" novel. But I actually found the writing much less enjoyable than i found the story and the plot itself, and particularly, the well-developed portrait he creates of the characters. He describes them in great detail like Dickens does, but unlike Dickens characters, who are often caricatures or stereotypes, the characters in Yates' novels are real people; they're complex and complicated and not at all easy to pin down.

#18 The Sportswriter Richard Ford

"I hate for things to get finally pinned down, for possibilites to be narrowed by the shabby impingement of facts..."

"In a way, I suppose you could say all of us were and are lost, and know it, and we simply try to settle into our lost-ness as comfortably and with as much good manners and little curiosity as we can"

Jacket Copy: As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people—men, mostly—who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. And in the course of the Easter week in which Richard Ford’s wonderfully eloquent and moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants of his familiar life, though with spirits soaring. With finely honed prose and an eye that captures the beauty and strangeness of our most neglected landscapes, Richard Ford creates a novel whose portrait of heroic decency is guaranteed to linger with us long after we have turned its last page.

Similar to: Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Richard Yates, Nicholson Baker

 Highlights:

-- Explains how its possible to be both an optimist AND a realist at the same time, to recognize that their ugly and cruel parts to life and to the world but to not dwell on them so much that it prevents you from enjoying and appreciating the better parts of life. 

--The title of this book is somewhat misleading, since it isn't really "about" sports or about "writing" so much as its about the isolation and loneliness of modern life. 

#17 Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson

"Be brave enough to dare to be loved."

Jacket Copy: Published in 1919, Winesburg Ohio is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a work in which he achieved the goal to which he believed all true writers should aspire: to see and feel "all of life within." In a perfectly imagined world, an archetypal small American town, he reveals the hidden passions of that turn ordinary lives into unforgettable ones. Unified by the recurring presence of young George Willard, and played out against the backdrop of Winesburg, Anderson's loosely connected chapters, or stories, coalesce into a powerful novel. Anderson's intuitive ability to home in on examples of timeless human conflicts--a working man deciding if he should marry the woman who is to bear his child, an unhappy housewife who seeks love from the town's doctor, an unmarried high school teacher sexually attracted to a pupil--makes this book not only immensely readable but also deeply meaningful. An important influence on Faulkner, Hemingway, and others who were drawn to Anderson's innovative format and psychological insights, Winesburg Ohio deserves a place among the front ranks of our nation's finest literary achievements.

Similar to: Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, D.H. Lawrence

Highlights:
--this is really more a book of connected short stories than it is a "novel." this format in itself makes it kind of cool to read
--this is a book about loneliness and isolation and feeling different from everyone else. Its a book about temptation and about confusion over one's desires and one's own human nature.
--as such, it is infinitely relatable to any human being who reads it--everyone has felt the emotions and been in similar situations to the ones described in this book.
--although the stories in here are very very plot driven, there are still several notable examples of poetic language, that, although perhaps a bit sappy and overly sentimental, I enjoyed because of its romantic tone. Here's my favorite example:

Love is like the wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night.You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses

#16 On the Road Jack Kerouac

"“It’s not my fault! Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don’t you see that? I don’t want it to be and it can’t be and it won’t be”


Jacket Copy: In its time Kerouac's masterpiece was the Bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Now a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald; and it goes racing toward the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy, and autobiographical passion. On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns, and drugs with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. 


Similar to: Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; Don DeLillo's Americana; Nathanael West


Highlights: 
--beautiful, poetic, detailed descriptions of the American West
--the narrator takes a very objective (rather than subjective) approach to telling the story; he doesn't make  a lot of evaluations of people's actions, he simply describes things factually as they happened. This allows the reader to make his or her own judgments
--this books' strengths lie in its descriptions of setting, of time and place, rather than in its plot or characters. There are also some great, profound themes explored throughout the novel related to mortality, insanity, and poverty.
--I've been looking for a long time for a book that is written in the form of poetry, but tells a story with a plot like a novel does. This book really fit that description. 

#15 The Day of the Locust Nathanael West

"I don't like people who won't drink. It isn't sociable. They feel superior and I don't like people who feel superior."

Jacket Copy: The Day of the Locust--considered by many to be the best novel about Hollywood ever written--revolves around Tod Hackett, who hopes for a career in set design only to discover the boredom and emptiness of Hollywood's inhabitants. In the end, only blood will serve. The day of the locust is at hand...

Similar to: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Joan Didion's "Play It As It Lays"

Highlights:
--This book is much more about the symbols contained within it, than about anything to do with the "plot". These symbols are ones that will stick with you long after you finish the book, coloring your thinking about Hollywood and about the American Dream more generally.
--The economy of prose is wonderfully done, much like in Hemingway and Didion's works of sparse prose with lots of white space.
--Urges us to not see things as black and white, particularly in judging people; to acknowledge the ambiguity that exists in trying to determine the moral character of one's fellow man and the fact that we all have the potential to let darkness take over in our lives, given the right circumstance (i.e. boredom and disappointment with how life has turned out).

#14 Play It As It Lays Joan Didion

"One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what 'nothing' means, and keep on playing. 'Why?' BZ would say. 'Why not' i say'".

Jacket Copy: A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It As It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the emptiness and ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose both blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—Play It As It Lays remains, more than three decades after its original publication, a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose. 

Similar to: Bret Easton Ellis, Nathanael West, Hemingway

Highlights:

--The “nothing” in the above quote refers to the concept that there are no longer any moral absolutes, nobody is using the words “right” and “wrong” any more. BZ decides that he can’t live in a world like this, but Maria decides to keep playing, to keep looking for the alternative to this, to try and find a way to get back to these moral absolutes. BZ faces the fact that he doesn’t care about anything anymore by killing himself, but Maria faces it by realizing that she should care, and she needs to keep looking for a way back to a place where she can care.

--Living in a world without moral absolutes, it can be difficult to have any sense of one's own identity. This is a book about trying to find your identity, anywhere that you think you could find it, whether it be through popular culture such as films and art or through romantic relationships or familial relationships. 

--This book doesn't sugar coat any of the tough issues it deals with; it simply lays things out as they happened, without any censorship or embellishment. In that way, Didion owes much stylistically to the works of Hemingway. 

--My affinity for this book is in large part due to its unique style of spare, bitter, dark prose. It's like nothing else I've ever read, beautiful in its own way (despite presenting a picture of the world that is utterly bleak and disturbing).