Catcher In The Rye, because it was probably the first book I had to read for school that I genuinely wanted to read. I think it may have been the book that started it all for me.

One of my all time favorite books and I’m truly blown away by how many people missed the point completely.

And I say that as someone who doesn’t particularly like Bret Easton Ellis: every now and then he writes something brilliant like American Psycho but he also wrote Rules of Attraction which was such a chore to get through.

To me the movie did not accurately capture the theme nearly as well as the book. Christian Bale was amazing in it but the movie stripped a bit too much out of what made the book really work.

John Fante

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Charles Bukowski

(Can you tell I have a type?)

There’s only two types of books I own:

1. the ones I love
2. the ones I impulse bought in a zombie like trance.

I won’t attack you stranger. (And War and Peace is on my shelf waiting to be read. It’s…big and heavy and I’m frightened.)

White Noise.

The son in that book was so annoying.

Probably any Irvine Welsh novel. I like Irvine Welsh — and Filth in particular is a great novel — but more often than not the way he writes phonetically in heavy Scottish accents can take a lot out of my American public school educated brain.

I read that book years ago and it felt to me like “what if David Lynch was a horror novelist.” Overall I quite liked it, and it was a quick read.

I heard it became a movie but reviews on this subreddit were not kind to it.

Crime and Punishment. It was 3 books ago and I’m still thinking about it.

Nathan Hill. Loved the Nix and his new book is in my queue.

I was also big into Junot Diaz because I thought Oscar Wao was tremendous, but sadly he was MeToo’d a few years ago.

Master and Margarita.

Just finished it this week after it was on my shelf for the longest time.

Overall I loved it (I find Koroviev and Behemoth to be exceptionally charming) but I do admit I love the way it was written and how Bulgakov uses words more than the story itself, which I suppose is to be expected because it’s hard for an American in 2023 to truly relate to the stark criticism of Russia at the time.

But I recommend it nonetheless.

It’s up to you. Let’s look at both scenarios:

1. If you leave it unfinished: Reading is a personal activity. No one will know if you stop reading something and that time can be spent reading something you love.
2. If you choose to finish it: well, you still might not like it, but at least you have read the whole thing and can judge the entire work instead of where you stopped.

For what it’s worth: I took 2 years of false starts and stops to read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and I finally finished it this year and truly ended up loving it. So you never know!