If Barnes & Noble's picks help make your eyes roll to Rivendell and back (yes, Tolkien has featured on their own list previously), maybe you're ready to consider literary reads that aren't so well-beaten around the commercial path. Browse the following titles for any thought-provoking summer read:
Something Happened, by Joseph Heller
What went down after this author's Catch-22? Something Happened, that is what. Written on the decade following the publication of his runaway bestseller, Heller's second novel tells the unhappy story of Bob Slocum, a middle-class narcissist whose narrative tone enables you to wish to hit him over the head-often. At the heart of the story is a man who does not mature into adulthood. Slocum ignores his wife, plays favorites with his children, chases work promotions, and pursues extramarital affairs-ultimately driving himself so knee-deep in psychological pain he ceases to feel whatsoever.
Stoner, by John Williams
When there have been a vintage campus novel, this is it. Stoner may be the stuff of life-office politics, marital love, illness, death-but using the stoicism of Seneca. The novel follows a typical farmer's boy from rural Missouri who eventually rises through the ranks of university to become Professor Emeritus. This is the novel that everybody should've been reading in college instead of The Great Gatsby (shoutout to Jim Booth!). After the novel, you will be reeling in the sheer poetry of realism-while having your heart broken more than once.
Half of the Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Crafted through the multi-award-winning writer, Half of a Yellow Sun takes you through the Nigerian Civil War in the perspectives of the village boy, a revolutionary professor, along with a British writer. Gender-based privilege, war-profiteering, and questions of national identity feature heavily in this book, together with individual love interests and self-advancement. If you've never heard of the Republic of Biafra, this is actually the book to discover it.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace
No literary list could be complete without David Foster Wallace! And this isn't just for that pretentious, either. Brief Interviews is one of those rare short-story finds that stretches your literary horizons inside the first 10 pages. Is it a series of vignettes, interviews, or flash fiction? None of those, yet it is all of these. Explore complex heterosexual encounters, manic self-reflection, painful insecurities, and the fallacies of perceived economic value. Bring your opinions cap, too-you'll need it.
Can you suggest every other literary pick for summer? Tell us in the comments below!
