Beloved
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
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Trainspotting
Where Welsh really shines as a writer is that despite the fact that every single character is either a junkie, a criminal, an asshole, or some combination of the three, you can’t help but sort of like most of them.
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The Help
One thing that is pointed out is how susceptible children are to their parents’ attitudes – the white children in the novel grow up adoring their nannies, and yet, as soon as they are old enough to understand their parents’ ridiculous notions about race, start treating these women exactly the way their parents do.
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The Year of Living Biblically
One passage which stuck with me was when he questions why God would need to be praised all of the time – if he is the greatest being in the universe, surely he doesn’t have a self-esteem problem which would require constant reassurance.
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Water for Elephants
This story begins in the mind of ninety (or ninety-three, he can’t remember which) year-old Jacob Jankowski. Not-quite-forgotten in a nursing home, he contents himself with harassing his nurses and complaining about the food. That is, until the circus comes to town.
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Lady Chatterley’s Lover
When Constance Reid marries Lord Clifford Chatterley, she has the somewhat dim view of sexual congress between men and women that the odd affair in college has afforded her.
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Atlas Shrugged
The book is based on the not-too-farfetched premise that all of the producers of the world – producers in the sense that these are the hardworking, brilliant, movers and shakers and people of ideas in the world – get fed up with carrying the metaphorical burden of society. “What if Atlas shrugged?”
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Angelou’s writing lends a poetry to her life that makes the terrible things somehow okay, and the good things even better. Caged Bird is stunning portrait of a young black girl’s place in not only the south, but the greater world beyond it, and is a VERY worthwhile read.
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Love in the Time of Cholera (El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera)
Dr. Urbino eventually passes away and Florentino, having waited sixty-odd years to be near Fermina Daza, re-enters the picture. In their old age, they are able to tentatively explore the romance that she denied them in their youth.
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The World According to Garp
“A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book’s true when you can say, “Yeah! That’s just how damn people behave all the time.” Then you know it’s true,” Jillsy said.
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I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.
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The Graduate
Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me, aren’t you. Aren’t you?
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Naked Lunch
” ‘Well,’ Doc says, ‘there was a feller in here this morning. City feller. Dressed kinda flashy. So he’s got him a RX for a mason jar of morphine….Kinda funny looking prescription writ out on toilet paper….And I told him straight out: “Mister, I suspect you to be a dope fiend.” ‘
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Toru learns one day that an elderly acquaintance of theirs, Mr. Honda, has passed away and left a remembrance for him. Delivering the package from Mr. Honda is a Lieutenant Mamiya, a prisoner of war during WW2 who was tortured by the Soviets. Lieutenant Mamiya tells Toru a fascinating story about how he came to know Mr. Honda, and gives him cryptic advice: When the time comes, go down into the deepest well and stay there.
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