For fiction, I’ll second
The Road. McCarthy is an amazing writer. His writing flows. The setting (post-apocalyptic) is engaging and the theme (a parent’s love for his child and his willingness to sacrifice) is powerful.
I love his word choice. Here is part of the end. At first it may not seem to fit with the story, but if you think about it afterwards, it does.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
His
No Country for Old Men is a good read. His Border Trilogy:
All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and
Cities of the Plain are some of the most well written and engaging books I’ve ever read.
When I first read Horses I read the line that goes something like, “He stood with his hat in his hands like a supplicant to the darkness that overshadows us all.” I read the page over a few times and the connotations were amazing. The end of Cities of the Plain was almost inevitable and I never saw it coming. They are books that have so much in them, and they aren’t heavy-handed at all, that I needed to read them over to just try and process.
I liked
The Great Gatsby and the short
Winter Dreams, also by Fitzgerald. I also really enjoy some Bradbury. His short
R is for Rocket has some astronauts floating in space to their deaths. They talk to each about their lives and what matters. For a sci-fi short story, it is very well done.
I loved Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451. In the novel people spend their time watching huge TV sets and become less and less involved with each other, and ultimately, unhappy. There are parallels with our society’s involvement in social media (Facebook, et al.) and many peoples’ inability to interact with real people and have real relationships. It’s not just his theme that is good, like McCarthy, I love his choice of words and the impact they create for me.
One of my all-time favorites is Bradbury’s
Something Wicked This Way Comes. In the story a carnival comes to town, granting people’s wishes. Later, the people pay a really bad price. The protagonist, Charles Halloway (A bit obvious of a name for the good guy!) needs to decide if he wants to be young again. It makes for a good read. The screenplay for the movie adaptation was written by Bradbury and is also really good. Jason Robards is the good guy and Jonathon Pryce is a great bad guy. If you want to spend four minutes, here’s Pryce:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK02PA0IVK4I also love the short story
Gods, by Vladimir Nabokov. The imagery he creates is unreal.
“Here is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night, narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance. The water runs down the drainpipes from steeply sloping roofs.”
“Under the snake’s-mouth of each pipe stands a green-hooped bucket. Rows of buckets line the black walls on either side of the street. I watch as they fill with cold mercury. The pluvial mercury swells and overflows. The bareheaded lamps float in the distance, their rays standing on end in the rainy murk. The water in the buckets is overflowing.”
“Thus I gain entry to your overcast eyes, to a narrow alley of black glimmer where the nocturnal rain gurgles and rustles. Give me a smile. Why do you look at me so balefully and darkly? It’s morning. All night the stars shrieked with infant voices and, on the roof, someone lacerated and caressed a violin with a sharp bow. Look, the sun slowly crossed the wall like a blazing sail. You emanate an enveloping smoky haze. Dust starts swirling in your eyes, millions of golden worlds. You smiled!”
It didn’t click for me what was going on in the story until the end. Then I had to re-read it and try not to choke-up.
Hemingway, and yes he was a misogynist who battled alcohol abuse and emotional problems throughout his life, is, in some of his works, literally transcendent. He takes his art to a level that can leave me stunned.
An End to Something and
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber are two of my favorite short stories.
For Whom the Bells Toll is truly great. I know many people read
The Old Man and the Sea in school and it’s just a story about a guy catching a big fish, but it’s really about the masculine ideal and suffering to prove ourselves and so much more. It’s another one I’ve read several times and really enjoy.
For just fun reading, I read all 20 Jack Reacher novels within the last year. I guess I shouldn't call violence fun, I just mean as easy to read page turners, they are good.
I’m typed out, but as someone wrote above, I appreciate these threads, too. From one of these threads a few years ago I read
River of No Return (Roosevelt in South America.) and
The Heart of the Sea, and some other really good ones. I also really liked
Endurance. (Those are non-fiction, and I wasn’t going to get started on another category of books!)
Oh, I like the Nick Jans essay collections. And I like…all right, I’m stopping now.
