Walt's Recommended Books

Below are novels, plays or long verse that I've read and found especially engaging, uplifting, interesting and/or entertaining. These are in no particular order.

• A Prayer For Owen Meany - John Irving - my all-time favorite book. It's about small town America; it's a coming of age story; it's about the loss of innocence of both individuals and a country; most of all though, it's about a tremendous friendship. Funny and tragic.
• A Son of the Circus - John Irving - the story of a man without a country, but with a twist. An interesting investigation of India, especially Bombay.
• Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - another great story of India. Rushdie wraps the whole history of the creation of the Indian nation in one Saleem Sinia.
• The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger - over 40 years after it's release, this book is still the ultimate in cool. The story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who suddenly decides he doesn't want to go there.
• Lord of the Flies - William Golding - an investigation of man's inhumanity. What happens with the constraints of society are removed? And are those constraints enough?
• Ulysses - James Joyce - the epic of the common man. A brilliant work. Joyce encompasses the history of the English language in his style. His story parodies literary history. You know more about Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus than any other character in literature, more than perhaps you know about yourself. The most difficult book I've ever read, but one that proves that truly rewarding experiences take effort.
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce - a great coming of age story. Excellent insight into Catholicism. The middle of the book includes an incredibly lucid description of hell and eternity.
• The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald - a story of how wealth, no matter how much, cannot buy everything, especially that which has been lost. A parable of America.
• A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Dickens great insight into the French Revolution and analogously England 50 years later. More than anything though, a great romantic story that continually surprises and entertains.
• David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - an epic, broad story one man's life, from birth to near death. As I understand it, semi-autobiographical.
• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austin - A nice, entertaining, often funny, look at romance in the 19th century. Just reading about the times is fascinating. Sometimes, from the 20th century perspective, it's hard to tell if Ms. Austin is intentionally being funny or if it just seems funny.
• Lord of the Rings Trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkien - the ultimate escape. The first big story I read. Fantasy stories are usually pretty lame, but this was the first, and the depth of information behind the storytelling makes this one seem real.
• Dune - Frank Herbert - ecology, political intrigue and religion all rolled into a fictional, but sometimes all too real, planet.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - a hilarious parody of the science fiction genre that is also a pretty good science fiction story in its own right.
• Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut - disjointed, it is initially discomforting to try to read. By the time you reach the end, you are discomforted because everything is so perfectly clear.
• Foundation - Isaac Asimov - one the earliest science fictions, one of the best. Nothing happens actually. The action is ignored and all you see are the much more interesting causes and effects.
• 1984 - George Orwell - the classic anti-Utopian society.
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - another anti-Utopia, not quite so dreary, but with major implications as well.
• Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury - what if TV took over everyone's life and no one read books anymore? In many ways, an eerily prescient story.
• The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - a future where feminists and conservatives get what they want.
• The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles - Americans try to escape into North Africa after WWII, but find out, with tragic consequences, that it's harder to fit in than they thought. The Police's 'Tea in the Sahara' is based on part of the story.
• The Razor's Edge - W. Somerset Maugham - mirrors The Sheltering Sky in many ways. About a man fed up with America and its ideas about success.
• The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri - Dante goes to hell and other places in this classic of Italian literature.
• Faust - Goethe - an updated story of Job. The classic of German literature.
• A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
• Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller - Willy Loman is one of the most tragic characters ever written.
• The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde - some great wit and great observations about interactions between men and women.
• A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare - hey, he's Bill. He's the ultimate. Many people nowadays find him difficult and dry to read. But, if you actually pick up one of his plays, you'll see he really isn't. This is representative of his comedies.
• Hamlet - William Shakespeare - my favorite of the tragedies.
• In Cold Blood - Truman Capote - true life story of two men who murdered a wealthy family. Proof that the '50's weren't all rosy. Capote's characterization of the murderers is very discomforting.
• The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer - a more modern 'In Cold Blood' about Gary Gilmore's serial killing spree in Utah. Some good insights into Mormonism, the politics of the death penalty and the media's role in major cases.
• Tess of the D'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy - a great tragic love story. All Hardy's novels are very much like soap operas, but with much more depth and meaning.
• Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy - this book terrifically brings the English heaths to life.
• Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - the longest 90 page book. Vivid descriptions are pages long. Read this book and then see the modern film interpretation, "Apocalypse Now".
• Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostyevski - slow moving, but deliberate psychological analysis of what happens to a criminal that literally gets away with murder.
• Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott - a classic, engrossing medievil tale.
• Walden - Henry David Thoreau - the classic environmental, individualist book.
• Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey - Mr. Abbey spends a summer in Arches National Park before our parks became overly commercialized. He communes with nature, rues modernity and makes fun of the stupid tourists.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne - crazy Captain Nemo and company ride around the world in a submarine.
• Siddhartha - Herman Hesse - a young man in ancient India seeks spiritual fulfillment.
• Beloved - Toni Morrison - a vivid portrayal of slavery and the post-emancipation lives of blacks. Extremely enlightening. A good reason to read fictional history instead of just text books on history.
• The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe - granted the movie version of the book really sucked, but this shouldn't scare you away.
• Lake Wobegon Days - Garrison Keillor - classic Americana, the perfect thing to read while in Europe. Some hilariously funny little stories, especially the one about the kid going off to college orientation, unfortunately with his relatives in tow.
• The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand - Ms. Rand tends to be overly didactic, but this one isn't so bad. And her hero, Harold Roark is fascinating, as is the setting of the story in the world of architecture.
• Different Seasons - Stephen King - mainly for the novella, The Body, an interesting story of four young friends, one of the few where King actually creates characters of real depth.
• Congo - Micheal Crichton - yeah, the movie sucked, but the book was a real page turner. And much more realistic than the movie.
• The Hunt for Red October - Tom Clancy - a great page turner with a tremendously intricate plot. Mr. Clancy can't write characters worth a darn, but this book shows that he has the capability to tell an engaging story.
• The Firm - John Grisham - another author who can't write character, but who can tell a good story. This is a fun book to read.
• How the Mind Works - Steven Pinker - this list is generally devoted to works of fiction, but this book is a worthwhile nonfiction read. It summarizes current scientific ideas on how the human mind evolved and how it functions. After reading it, it's hard not to think about the world in a different way.