essential reads, viciously (pt.2)

"It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous." – Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

As alluded to on one of my earlier posts, I had been catching up on my reading over the past few weeks – a symptom of boredom maybe, but I am very grateful for the spare time in my life, once in a while, for doing this. And so, as befitting my self-anointed role of being kind of a “recessionist mentor” of sorts, I have revised my “Essential Reads” list, now bulked up to include 20 works of useful fiction (*). The picks here (some are bona-fide classic texts, some cult prescriptions, and some leaning more on the side of my personal idiosyncrasies) are customized according to my very own taste, preoccupations and literary pretensions. Have fun reading these, and here goes (in chronological order):

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway (1926)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre (1945)
Jill by Philip Larkin (1946)
The Catcher In the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
Memoirs of Hadrian by Margurite Yourcenar (1951)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (1959)
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
Americana by Don DeLillo (1971)
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1997)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan (2004) *
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)

* The Bob Dylan book is essentially an autobiographical work, but I’m qualifying it as “reads like fiction” (heh heh) here. As for new Dylan music, Together Through Life is not all that great, as it turns out. While I’m a bit disappointed with it, I might well get around to writing about the album, some time later.