The Great Gatsby

1. The Great Gatsby Our narrator, Nick Carraway, begins the book by giving us some advice of his father’s about not criticizing others. Through Nick’s eyes, we meet his second cousin, Daisy Buchanan, her aggressive husband, Tom, and Jordan Baker, who quickly becomes a romantic interest for our narrator. We are soon fascinated by a certain Mr. Jay Gatsby, a wealthy and mysterious man who owns a huge mansion next door to Nick and spends a good chunk of his evenings standing on his lawn and looking at an equally mysterious green light across the bay. The Great Gatsby is a delightful concoction of MTV Cribs, VH1’s The Fabulous Life Of…, and HBO’s Sopranos. Shake over ice, add a twist of jazz, a spirits of adultery, and the little pink umbrella that completes this Long Island iced tea (YES it takes place on Long Island, in the 20’s by the way) and you’ve got yourself a 5 o’clock beverage that, given the 1920’s setting, you wouldn’t be allowed to drink. There’s more to the Gatsby cocktail than sex, lies, and organized crime. Although those are there, too, which, as far as reading the book goes, is kind of a motivation in itself.

2. The Things They Carried The Things They Carried is a string of short stories about American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. Each tale portrays the warfront with sensitivity to the physical and emotional realities of battle. Tim O'Brien stated that, "90% or more of the material is invented." Still, one can't help but sense that O'Brien, who served as a foot soldier in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, wrote this series of short stories in order to come to grips with some of his own personal memories of war.

3. The Catcher in the Rye The Catcher in the Rye begins with seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield jumping right in – with a lot of attitude and dated profanity – to tell us about "this madman stuff" that happened to him "around last Christmas." His story begins on a December Saturday at Pencey Prep School in Pennsylvania, where he's just been given the ax (read: kicked out) for failing all his classes except English. Turns out, getting the ax is a recurring theme in Holden's past. He visits a friendly teacher of his, Mr. Spencer, who lectures him about the "future." Narrated by main character and hero Holden Caulfield, is the story of Holden's life in the few days after being expelled from his Pennsylvania prep school. The Catcher in the Rye has been banned more times than you want to count by zealous parents and educators. Not that anybody's surprised by this because of the profanity, sex, alcohol abuse, prostitution – need we go on? The Catcher in the Rye ended up as an emblem of counterculture in the 1950s and 60s – a symbol of alienation and isolation for the disillusioned and restless post-war generation.

4. On The Road On the Road features Sal Paradise, a young writer fascinated by the questionable "hero" that is Dean Moriarty. The novel involves, as you might expect, several road trips, sometimes with cars, and sometimes without. The first trip starts in New York (home base, effectively) and runs to Chicago (lots of jazz), then Denver (with Dean searching for his missing father, and hanging out with poet Carlo Marx), and to San Francisco to visit Remi Boncoeur. This trip, as all subsequent trips, features sex, drugs, alcohol, and music. This is Jack Kerouac’s poster-novel for the Beat Generation, a group of writers in the 1950s and 60s who began as a counter-culture artistic movement. The Beat Generation is known for its artistic freedom, drug use, alcohol abuse, and sex. The book is a whirlwind tour through beat American nights of jazz and drinking, in a novel that, written in a frenzy of a few weeks, defied classic plot and narrative traditions.

5. The Joy Luck Club The novel opens after the death of Suyuan Woo, an elderly Chinese woman and the founding member of the Joy Luck Club. Suyuan has died without fulfilling her "long-cherished wish": to be reunited with her twin daughters who were lost in China. Suyuan’s American-born daughter, Jing-mei (June) Woo, is asked to replace her mother at the Joy Luck Club’s meetings. What does a story that so beautifully treats the Chinese-American experience have to do with you? Answer the following questions to find out: • Have you been, or will you ever be, a confused teenager? • •Do you have a mother? Do you totally not understand her, ever? Do you love her? Do you sometimes hate her? • •Do you feel like you’re always falling short of your parents’ expectations? If you answered "yes" to any one of the above questions, you’ve got everything in common with the women of The Joy Luck Club. At its heart of hearts, The Joy Luck Club is about understanding the people who have an interest in our lives, our parents. • If you’re still doubtful that you’re going to see any part of your own life reflected in The Joy Luck Club, you might want to read it just because it’s a good story. Off the top of our head, The Joy Luck Club has: extra-marital love affairs, food, laughter, blood and gore, war, faith and fate, twins, chess, superstition, abandoned children, elopement, and much, much more. It’s drama, it’s people.

6. Native Son In 1955 Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American teen, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. He was taken out of his uncle’s house in the middle of the night, beaten, shot in the head, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River with barbed wire wrapped around his neck. His murderers, the husband of the white woman and his half-brother, were acquitted of their crime but later openly confessed to the murder. If a black man were to be seen with a white woman (let alone discovered in a white woman’s bedroom) in the United States in Bigger Thomas’s time (around 1940), he faced violent racism. He might be subject to a horrific end similar to that which Emmett Till endured several years later. The big question is: are unjust societies responsible for creating the criminals that come out of them? The novel opens as Bigger Thomas, the protagonist, faces down and fights a huge rat that has invaded the Thomas’ one-room apartment. We are instantly assailed with the family’s poverty and lack of options.During the day, as Bigger waits to see a wealthy white man for a job as chauffeur, he considers robbing a white-owned business with his buddies. All of them are afraid to rob a white man, though nobody says so. Finally, Bigger threatens one of his friends in order to escape doing it. That afternoon, he goes to the Daltons’ house and gets the chauffeuring job. His initial encounter with Mary Dalton, the rebellious daughter, makes him uncomfortable and worried that he’ll lose his job because she keeps talking to him about "unions." What ensues is a journey into societal pressures, murder, rape, racism and a search for redemption.

7. Things Fall Apart Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. The son of a charming ne'er-do-well, he has worked all his life to overcome his father's weakness and has arrived, finally, at great prosperity and even greater reputation among his fellows in the village of Umuofia. He is fond of his eldest daughter, and also of Ikemefuna, a young boy sent from another village as compensation for the wrongful death of a young woman from Umuofia. He even begins to feel pride in his eldest son, in whom he has too often seen his own father. Unfortunately, a series of tragic events tests the mettle of this strong man, and it is his fear of weakness that ultimately undoes him. Why Should I Care? Do you mean to tell us that you’ve never been afraid of becoming like one of your parents? Even an eensy bit scared? One of the most fascinating parts of Things Fall Apart comes from watching Okonkwo's ongoing battle against being like his father. Okonkwo doesn’t respect anything about his father, which is a bit extreme. It’s common for people to fear being like their parents, and overcompensate by behaving in the completely opposite way. Okonkwo, however, is an example of what happens to a person who concerns himself more with avoiding his father's traits than with living his own, independent life.

8. A Clockwork Orange • A Clockwork Orange unfolds in the dark and chilly streets of a futuristic city. Alex, the 15-year-old leader of a violent teenage gang, narrates to us in an odd slang (nadsat, it is called) which takes some learning in the beginning.Alex introduces his entourage of criminals – Peter, Georgie, and Dim – and proceeds to take us on an eye-opening journey of ultra-violent crimes inflicted upon helpless innocent people. After boozing up at two local bars, the intoxicated Alex and Co. go on a rampage involving: mugging an old professor, a convenience store robbery, a rival gang fight, grand theft auto, a gang rape, vandalism, and arson.   • It is shocking. It is thrilling. It is innovative, and fashionable. What's more, this book addresses subculture, rebellion, music, teenage gangs, violence, rape, and slang – topics all still very relevant today, on the streets and in high schools alike. It really is the grand-daddy of edgy.

9. The Color Purple Celie is abused and raped by her Pa, who takes away her children after they’re born. Eventually, Pa marries Celie off to a man who is just as abusive as Pa. Celie’s new husband, Mr.__ simply marries Celie to take care of his four children, look after of his house, and work in his fields. The story follows an uneducated black woman during thirty years of life, through her suffering and attempts to find love and happiness in life. It graphically depicts the violence and sexual subjugation that many black women endured during the 20th century and, as a result, has been banned multiple times. It ranks high on the American Library Association’s list of most banned books. Why Should I Care? In The Color Purple, Celie tells Shug that she’s so preoccupied with chasing the image of God as a Dumbledore-look-alike out of her mind that she forgets to enjoy things like the color purple. Shug in turn encourages Celie to re-imagine her god as a being with which she can more closely connect, and, thus, to begin to take ownership over her life and enjoy the mysteries it yields. Shug gets us thinking: can we create our own identity? Are we in charge? Or is identity pre-made and pre-packaged for us by our family, our home, our friends, our community?

10. Catch-22 Yossarian says, "You're talking about winning the war, and I am talking about winning the war and keeping alive." "Exactly," Clevinger snapped smugly. "And which do you think is more important?" "To whom?" Yossarian shot back. "It doesn't make a damn bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead." "I can't think of another attitude that could be depended upon to give greater comfort to the enemy." "The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on." Catch-22 is about an Air Force captain's exploits and experiences trying to stay alive during World War II. The novel introduced the public to a form of circular reasoning called "Catch-22," associated in the book with the madness and horror of war experienced by the protagonist, Yossarian. It's an utterly serious and sad, but damn funny book. Joseph Heller's novel, Catch-22 has become a catchphrase for any double-bind in which you seem to have choices but are, in fact, doomed from the start. He may be talking about the specific case of out-of-control military bureaucracy, but the logic he describes will be familiar to anyone who's dealt with powerful bad guys. To paraphrase Heller himself, Catch-22 is what gives bullies (either bureaucratic or freelance) the right to do what we can't stop them from doing anyway.

11. Jubilee Here is the classic--and true--story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, a Southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O'Hara. Vyry bears witness to the South's prewar opulence and its brutality, to its wartime ruin and the subsequent promise of Reconstruction. It is a story that Margaret Walker heard as a child from her grandmother, the real Vyry's daughter. The author spent thirty years researching the novel so that the world might know the intelligent, strong, and brave black woman called Vyry. The phenomenal acclaim this best-selling book has achieved from readers black and white, young and old, attests to her success.

12. Reservation Blues In the 111-year life of the Spokane Indian reservation, not one person has arrived by accident-until the day the black stranger appears with nothing more than the suit he wears and the guitar slung over his back. The man happens to be the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, in flight from the devil and presumed long dead. And when he passes his enchanted instrument to young Thomas-Builds-the-Fire-storyteller, misfit, and musician-a magical odyssey begins. From reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan, Thomas and his Coyote Springs bandmates careen through ancestral nightmares and rock-and-roll dreams, sounding chords of celebration and survival as timeless as their tribe.

13. Bless Me Ultima Anaya drew from his experiences growing up in New Mexico during World War II to create the story of a young boy who must reconcile the many conflicting influences of his family, religion, and community. In the two years spanned by the novel, Antonio (Tony) Marez, who is six years old when the story begins, comes of age when he learns to recognize evil in the world and to navigate family expectations and religious ambiguity. Critic Ray Gonzalez, in a review in Nation, states that "Bless Me, Ultima is our Latin American classic because of its dual impact—it clearly defines Chicano culture as founded on family, tradition and the power of myth. Through Antonio and Ultima, we learn how to identify these values in the midst of the dark clouds of change and maturity."

14. The Color of Water The novel tells the remarkable story of Ruth McBride Jordan, the two good men she married, and the 12 good children she raised. Jordan, born Rachel Shilsky, a Polish Jew, immigrated to America soon after birth; as an adult she moved to New York City, leaving her family and faith behind in Virginia. Jordan met and married a black man, making her isolation even more profound. The book is a success story, a testament to one woman's true heart, solid values, and indomitable will. Ruth Jordan battled not only racism but also poverty to raise her children and, despite being sorely tested, never wavered. In telling her story--along with her son's-- addresses racial identity with compassion, insight, and realism. It is, in a word, inspiring, and you will finish it with unalloyed admiration for a flawed but remarkable individual. And, perhaps, a little more faith in us all.

15. In Cold Blood "Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks.