K, need your suggestions CG'ers
 

3 Summers ago I started a personal tradition of reading a classic novel.

3 Summers ago it was Atlas Shrugged

2 Summers ago it was Les Miserables

Last Summer I read To Kill A Mockingbird and The Stand

I need suggestions and ideas for what this Summers classic should be.

Thanks guys.

Madame Bovary

Uncle Tom's Cabin
The Last of the Mohicans
Huckleberry Finn
Ivanhoe

I've read all of them more than once. Excellent books.

The funniest book ever written.....The Catcher in the Rye.

While Les Mis is perhaps the most beautiful book, and my favorite all time, TCIR is one that really moved me when I read it as a teen. It cracked me up and mad me sad all at the same time.

Holden Caulfield is the greatest protagonist in all of American literature.

The first few paragraphs of Chapter 1. Brilliant, hilarious, and sad.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quitee touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all - I’m not saying that - but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out and take it easy. I mean that’s all I told D.B. about, and he’s my brother and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He’s got a lot of dough, now. He didn’t use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was ‘The Secret Goldfish.’ It was about this little kid that wouldn’t let anybody look at his goldfish because he’d bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.

Where I want to start is the day I left Pencey Prep. Pencey Prep is the school that’s in Agertown, Pennsylvania. You probably heard of it. You’ve probably seen the ads, anyway. They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place. And underneath the guy on the horse’s picture, it always says: ‘Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men’. Strictly for the birds. They don’t do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn’t know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way.

Anyway, it was the Saturday of the football game with Saxon Hall. The game with Saxon Hall was supposed to be a very big deal around Pencey. It was the last game of the year, and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn’t win. I remember around three o’clock that afternoon I was standing way the hell on top of Thomsen Hill, right next to this crazy cannon that was in the Revolutionary War and all. You could see the whole field from there, and you could see the two teams bashing each other all over the place. You couldn’t see the granstand too hot, but you could hear them all yelling, deep and terrific on the Pencey side, because practically the whole school except me was there, and scrawny and faggy on the Saxon Hall side, because the visiting team hardly ever brought many people with them.

Angle of Repose... it won the pulitzer

All quiet on the western front...

Crime and Punishment

Fight Club

some other suggestions

Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Two truly marvelous books full of humor and pathos.

My top 3 suggestions that I can think of right now:

I will third Huck Finn. Great book. Easy to read, fast moving, funny, and, in its way, one of the most powerful books written.

Catch-22: one of the funniest books I've ever read. I often laughed out loud, which I almost never do while reading. Full of great, quirky characters. A little didactic with the anti-war message, but when I first read it, I was far from anti-war, and it didn't bug me.

My Antonia: I drove across I-80 dozens of time in my life and always hated Nebraska. Willa Cather can make it seem like the most magical place on earth. She could write a book where nothing at all happens, and it would still be interesting. My Antonia is a beautiful story, beautifully told.


Honorable Mention:

Anna Kerenina: Bogs down a bit at times, but a great look at family, lust, and integrity.

Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison version, not the one with the guy who wraps bandages around his face. A story of a black man finding his way through, and out of, society in mid-20th century America. Not sensationalistic or preachy, but very powerful.

I'll have to give Catcher another try. When I read it, I thought Holden was an insufferable prick, but that was in High School.

So many from which to choose.

You can't go wrong with Madame Bovary, Pardonnez nos offenses (Forgive Our Sins), Crime and Punishment, Doktor Faustus, Outside Before the Door, Old Man and The Sea, L'Etranger, and so many others.