by Aldous Huxley In the future, everybody’s happy except Bernard Marx. Despite the selective breeding and the constant conditioning throughout his entire life, he doesn’t seem to fit in. (He prefers solitude to company, and he’s hardly promiscuous, so he’s quite a weirdo in this “ideal” society. People gossip that his problems stem from alcohol…
Read more
by Charles Bukowski There’s something almost inexplicable about Bukowski’s writing that hits you when you read it. It’s probably something to do with how natural his prose is, but I think there’s more to it than that. Bukowski knew things, man. He did things that I’d probably work hard to excise from my own writing,…
Read more
by L. M. Montgomery Well, this one’s been a long time coming, which shouldn’t be entirely surprising. I––like, I suspect, most people who enjoy reading a lot––have accumulated a large stack of books over the years. I mean, I’m slowly getting through it, I think, though it’s hard to tell if I’m actually making any…
Read more
by Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass is another poetry collection for which, like Ezra Pound’s Cathay, I can easily appreciate its importance to the history of Western literature. Wanting to create modern poetry for the New World, Whitman eschewed antique forms and themes, minimizing focus on structured rhymes, instead expressing more of the mundane and…
Read more
by Ezra Pound Cathay is a collection of old poems––mainly Chinese works from the 8th century––translated by Pound, but it’s a bit more complicated and interesting than that. Pound, who at that time knew little to no Chinese, worked from the notes of the Harvard educated scholar, Ernest Fenollosa, a transcript of which is included…
Read more
by Allen Ginsberg While I’ve spent a great deal of time sampling the likes of great Beat prose, I hadn’t really encountered any of the poetry, unless you want to count tiny snippets included in The Dharma Bums. As such, I figured Howl and Other Poems was probably the place to start; I was most…
Read more
by Hunter S. Thompson This was actually my third time reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in its entirety. When I first made my way through it, I thought it was one of the funniest things I’d ever read, so it’s become one of those things I revisit from time to time, for a…
Read more
by Franz Kafka The inclusion of quite a few posthumously published works in Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories fills me with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, given that Kafka requested that his unpublished stories be destroyed after his death, I feel as though I have no right to look upon them. As a…
Read more
by William Faulkner The more I read, the more I seem to catch while reading. It wasn’t until my second read-through of Naked Lunch that I really feel I began to appreciate it, and even the recent rereading of Animal Farm really made me feel that at least some of my study of literature is…
Read more
by George Orwell It’s been a while since I picked up Animal Farm, last in tenth grade, when they forced my class to read it. While I recall enjoying the story, I forgot about most of the finer details, so it seemed appropriate to revisit it. I hoped that, given my increased exposure to literature…
Read more