I’m an occasional guest teacher at a small community/liberal arts college. They learn to be radio D.J.s and have a great deal of verbal talent. Unfortunately, their command of the written language is not so good, which might not show in radio, but still…
Also, very few of them actually read books. So the school asked me to put together a list of great books, but not heavy literature. We decided to avoid genre books as much as possible, so no SciFi or fantasy( but I slipped in The Stand anyway - sue me). The idea is to make them read what is fun’n’easy but at the same time important. I’ve compiled the following list, but will happily accept more suggestions.
Norman Mailer – The naked and the dead
John Irving – The world according to Garp
Graham Greene – Brighton Rock
Joseph Heller – Catch 22
John Kennedy Toole – A confederacy of dunces
Stephen King – The Stand
Jack Kerouac – On the road
Robert M. Pirsig – Zen and the art of…
J.D. Salinger – Catcher in the rye
John Steinbeck – Grapes of Wrath
Raymond Chandler – The lady in the lake
Patrik Süsskind – The perfume
John Le Carré – The spy who came in…
Mark Twain – Tom Sawyers
Zadie Smith – White teeth
Nick Hornby – High Fidelity
Luke Rhinehart – Dice man
Erica Jong – Fear of flying
Brett Easton Ellis – American psycho
Douglas Coupland – Generation X
Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita
Salman Rushdie – The satanic Verses
The World According to Garp is a great choice, but I found that I enjoyed Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire even more. Make’em read both
1984 by Orwell would be a good choice, as well. It is both thoroughly engrossing and surprisingly modern despite its age. Most people I know who have been “forced” to read it have liked it a lot more than most of their other for-English-class books.
Bah. I reject the idea that “genre” books aren’t real “literature” and should be ghettoed off from other novels. After all, how could a list of great literature be complete without George Orwell’s 1984 or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five?Or Harlan Ellison’s Mefisto in Onyx or O.S. Card’s P.K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle or Ender’s Game or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun or G.R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice or Dan Simmon’s…
Moving away from that little rant, how about the brilliant novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey or perhaps Herman Hess’s Siddhartha. Also, if you want to consider some nonfiction I would suggest Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.
I’d go with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Huxley’s Brave New World as part of it.
Perhaps toss in some Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) and even potentially John Gardner’s Grendel and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Some of these are traditionally “required” high school reading and might be avoided because of that, but if they are read just for the story, they are good stories. If they’re going to have to do any required analysis of them, I’d skip Grendel in particular.
I gotta say I agree with joshmaker, and frankly if you’re looking to slip in one “genre” book that’s important - or at least really, really good - yet easy to read, there are much better choices than The Stand, especially considering that the book’s length may be daunting to those who don’t regularly read books or usually don’t read them at all.
joshmake brought up some good ones. A few others that spring to mind (all personal faves of mine, books I found fun and easy to read as I’m not much for heavy literature myself): Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, and just about any of the major works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.
A Day no Pigs Would Die
To Kill a Mockingbird
Pride and Prejudice
No Sci-Fi or Fantasy? BLAH! I wanted to throw in Dune, Childhood’s End and The Shining! Talking about great books but leaving out Sci Fi and Fantasy is like trying to listen to an orchestra with no wind instruments. But of you could sneak in ANY one for the sake of a classic, I’d have to go with The Time Machine by HG Wells.
If non-fiction is OK try the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and the afore-mentioned Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. On a slightly different note Winston Churchill’s memoirs about his childhood and youth (IIRC it’s called My Early Life) is beautifully written and highly entertaining.
Gah. I just knew I had forgotten some obvious books and of course my fellow dopers came up with them.
Re: The Stand and genre books.
I would love to have more of them. In fact, I think that the best I could come up with would be a select 10 books by Pratchett, however, I have a strong feeling that it wouldn’t go down well with the school. There are books which are SciFi but not judged to be that for some reason: radbury, Orwell, Vonnegut. They’re in of course.
The Stand is there because SK is the most popular writer in the world during the last ¼ century and The Stand is regarded by many as his best book. It’s not my choice, but even people who don’t enjoy SK seem to like that one.
Well, Gaspode, I think you and I must have varying tastes in literature because I would not have picked half of the titles you listed (Norman Mailer is, IMHO, neither fun nor important). Moreover, avoiding genre books means eliminating some of the most important and influential books in English literature. I mean who has been more read and more inspired the literary imagination of the 20th century, Salman Rushdie or Ray Bradbury?
Some suggestions
Vanity Fair, W. M. Thackeray. Despite its length, Vanity Fair is a comic masterpiece and its prose reads remarkably easily for modern readers, including non-native speakers.
The Flashman novels by G. M. Fraser (Flash for Freedom would be my pick). This series mixes bawdy adventure with lessons on 19th century history as it follows the life of its hero, Harry Flashman, bully, cad, lecher, and coward.
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. One of the best novels of the 20th century and very easy to read.
The top 10 in that list were: 1984, Orwell To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee Animal Farm, Orwell Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck Catcher In The Rye, Salinger Lord of the Rings, Tolkien Catch-22, Heller On The Road, Kerouac Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig Brave New World, Huxley Diary of Anne Frank, Frank In Cold Blood, Capote Night, Weisel Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut
There are a couple newer novels that I really enjoyed, but haven’t yet stood the test of time to be ranked (and certainly would never appear on a list of “important” books)… The Da Vinci Code, Brown The Vanished Man, Deaver
The Satanic Verses is a great book, but one that terrifies even literature graduates. I’m really not sure it should be there. Most of the authors are good choices though for accessible yet literate writing: Greene, Coupland, Sallinger, Twain would all be on my lists. Although I’d put Girlfriend in a Coma or Microserfs ahead of Generation X for Coupland.
Since the list is a bit white and male, I’d suggest:
The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
and without that justification:
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray.
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev.
The Trial by Franz Kafka.
Ironweed, by William Kennedy. It was made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson and whatshername…DAMN! Why can’t I remember her name?! Anyhoo, the movie was good, but the book was great. He’s written other stuff that was really good, but this is his best in my opinion.
American Psycho! That gave me nightmares rather than joy!
I know a few people have already mentioned Steinbeck but I have seen anyone mention East of Eden which is the book which first popped into my head when I read the OP.
Also Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Beautifully written (IMHO of course) and funny.
Oh and Memoirs of Geisha by Arthur Golden. Easy to read and captivating.
I think a lot of the books that you listed are not the kind that are likely to appeal to non-readers. So many of them are hard to follow, hard to get into, etc. They are great choices for people who are already into reading, but for your non-readers, I’d go with the most accessible books that you can find.
If you’re looking to get non-readers into reading, I’d take a look at some of the more sophisticated of the “young adult” books. They’re easy to read and engrossing, while providing plenty of literary value.
Three choices in order of preference: The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene Dubois. It’s about a group of people who built their own society from scratch. And it talks a lot about what’s important in life. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. This is one seriously whacked book. It’s totally twisted and funny as hell. And then you could move them to Dahl’s very witty and sexy adult short stories. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. This is probably my favorite book, and it is all about the joys of intellectual curiosity.
Another tack would be to start them on short stories. Short stories don’t tend to have a lot of complicated and confusing elements, so non-readers are less likely to get bored and frustrated. I know that the school asked for “books,” but so many short stories are considered “great literature,” and so many of them are just so much fun. “A Rose for Miss Emily” by Faulkner? Eek! My latest favorite short story is “Autopsy Room #4” by Stephen King (in Everything’s Eventual) I don’t know if it’s “great literature,” but it sure is fun!
I like the Dopers’ list that Algernon posted. I’ve read 11.5 of the 14, and I’d say they’re all “great books” and they’re all good choices for getting people into reading.
Philip K. Dick - Valis, A Scanner Darkly, Confessions of a Crap-Artist (not sci-fi)