Overview:

Cat’s Eye is the story of middle-aged Elaine, who returns to her hometown in Canada for the first time as an adult. During her visit Elaine recalls her life, beginning from her childhood in Toronto, and subsequently the power games that transpire between adolescent girls. Cat’s Eye showcases the cruelty that’s assigned to the coming-of-age years. For Elaine, the harshness of getting older was never dulled. This makes Cat’s Eye a story not only of growing up, but of growing wary. It’s a novel not about the loss of innocence, but of the shedding of naivety.

Favorite Quotes:

“I’ve come to enjoy the risk, the sensation of vertigo when I realize that I’ve shot right over the border of the socially acceptable, that I’m walking on thin ice, on empty air.”

“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot or stupid act, somebody frowning.”

“This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”

Overview:

As you can gather from the title, Hell’s Angels is a non-fiction account of Hunter S. Thompson’s time with the bike gang: A group of men who identified with each other because of their joint identity as vagrants motorcycling their way through the outskirts of society. Thompson’s book clears up some misconceptions about the Angels, (specifically how often the act of rape is wrongly associated with the men). However, in doing so the book proves their true identity to be just as hellacious as the rumors that surround them. 

Favorite Quotes:

“But instead of submitting quietly to their collective fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don’t expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose.”

“But in a society with no central motivation…a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular—especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt their supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed.”

“The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others—the living—are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.”

Overview:

Jim Nightshade and Will Holloway: two boys on the cusp of adolescence in a small town, Illinois. The boys are caught in a melee of horror when a traveling fair comes through their town, doling out free rides on carousels that take away a year of your life with every rotation and fun houses full of mirrors that allow you to see the grisly insides of your future as you tack on age. The boys struggle to end the terror of the carnival and convince the adults of the gravity of the situation. The adults have ceased to believe in such things; they have aged into accepting the clarity of logical thinking. Ray Bradbury’s story is a coming of age tale, yes. However, Something Wicked This Way Comes captures what it means to grow up and what aspects of childhood are permanent regardless of age.

Favorite Quotes:

” ‘For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life…Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir in their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. what speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eyes? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat the flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners…Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.’ “

“God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay.”

” ‘…since when did you think being good meant being happy?’ “

Overview:

Two sisters, Iris and Laura Chase, form this story of: war, wisdom, aging, love, betrayal, social politics, twentieth century Canadian history, and the occasional dabble into Science Fiction. The charm in reading Margaret Atwood is her ability to combine so many elements into a thought-provoking and profound piece of literature. Iris, eldest sister, narrates her and younger sister Laura’s lives in an attempt to discover the cause of Laura’s suicide (introduced in the first sentence of the novel: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge”). Through these narrations the reader sees the sisters attempts to wade through wartime life in Canada and stay ahead of the upper societal politics they have been unwillingly thrust into.

Favorite Quotes:

“Inside our heads we carry ourselves perfected—ourselves at the best age, and in the best light as well: never caught awkwardly, one leg out of a car, one still in, or picking our teeth, or slouching, or scratching our noses or bums. If naked, seen gracefully reclining through a gauzy mist…”

“In the beginning was the word, we once believed. Did God know what a flimsy thing the word might be? How tenuous, how casually erased?”

“A paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quality; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used—metaphorically of course—to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?”

Overview:

American Gods is a story of the clash between the half-forgotten ancient gods of old worlds and the new entities of technology and progression that hold power in modern times. Shadow, the novel’s protagonist, is released from prison to learn his life on the outside is no longer existent. Subsequently, Shadow gets involved in the oncoming war between the old gods and modernity. The novel follows Shadow as he gets snared into the politics of the ancient gods and entangled in the clash between the old and the new. American Gods poses questions in a creepy and fantastic fashion about what we value in American culture.

Favorite Quotes:

” ‘Have you thought about what it means to be a god?’

‘It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people’s minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to recreate you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity anymore. Instead, you’re a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.’ “

” ‘I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck.’ “

“If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our own island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stones. We know the shape, and the shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own unique experience.”

Overview:

Paul Kemp, American journalist and vagrant, finds himself working in Puerto Rico for a shit newspaper that threatens to go under daily. The Rum Diary is about his life there, a life that centers around: rum, lust, clashes between native Puerto Ricans and Americans, and unsought mischief. The novel is a story of wanderlust gone awry. Hunter S. Thompson attacks the belief that getting out of your hometown equates to an accomplishment, and through Paul Kemp the reader sees the brutality and beauty in that realization.

Favorite Quotes:

“…their lives were geared to long chances and sudden movement; and they claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.”

“…down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I’d finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn’t feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.”

Overview:

Once you get adjusted to the thick Scottish accent the text is written in, Irvine Welsh’s novel is quickly recognized as a gem. Trainspotting exposes the raw, grim reality of drug use and poverty in Scotland’s biggest cities. Narrated by the heroin-addicted, HIV-infected, alcohol-abusing youth of the country, the stories are grotesque and realistic, simultaneously urging the reader to put the book down and keep reading.

Favorite Quotes:

“He drew the line at touching the sausage, however, as he reckoned that these things were loaded with poison. Thinking of all the junk he had done, he sardonically reflected to himself: You have to watch what you put into your body. He…started sniggering uncontrollably, through nerves, at his own hideous double entendre.”

“Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life.”

Overview:

In this novella H.G. Wells flips the traditional idea of traveling into the future on its head. We assume the future means advanced technology and ideals, and answers to questions that riddle us today. The Time Machine tells a story of a backwards future, one that has receded and caused mankind to evolve away from each other and into two different species: one cannibalistic, one lacking intelligence. This telling of The Time Traveler’s experiences calls into question societal flaws while providing the reader with a unique vision of the future.

Favorite Quotes:

” ‘[A civilized man] can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?’ “

“He…thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heap that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.”

Overview:

Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic is the definition of a tongue-in-cheek Sci-Fi/Fantasy fiction novel. The book has all of the typical fantasy elements: wizards, magic spells, talking animals, etc.

Pratchett adds his quirkiness to the world of Sci-Fi by extending beyond these typical trademarks. For example, one of the main characters of the novel is a luggage chest that walks on hundreds of little legs. Also, Pratchett introduces Death, personified as a main character and in possession of a wily sense of humor. Death also proves to be lazy in action and easy to avoid. These distinctions from other Sci-Fi novels make The Colour of Magic unique, hilarious, and a fast read.

Favorite Quotes:

” ‘Sometimes I think a man could wander across the disc all his life and not see everything there is to see…And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel…well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.’ “

Overview:

When it comes to describing a book in terms of its plot, Aldous Huxley’s novel Eyeless in Gaza makes that task very difficult. The “plot” of this novel is scattered, and jumps not only to different locations each chapter, but to different months and years altogether. The novel centers these leaps around Anthony Beavis, a dictionary example of a member of the bourgeoisie. The novel follows Anthony’s love affairs, journal ramblings, and ultimately his soul-searching in Mexico. Because the plot is so disjoined, the novel becomes less about Anthony’s experiences and turns more into a social commentary; Huxley illuminates ideas about war, more specifically the absurdity of fighting violence with violence. Furthermore, the novel exposes Huxley’s musings on religion: what it means to be religious, what values we should take away from religion, why humanity depends on religion. Huxley chooses to focus less on plot and more on philosophy, and because of this, the novel may cause distaste for some readers. However, it proves beneficial to push aside the absence of action in the book and look instead for the value in the questions Huxley poses.

Favorite Quotes:

“Besides a reason and an animal, man was also a collection of particles subject to the laws of chance.”

“Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.”

“Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.”

” ‘As for prayer…I’ve never really liked it, you know. Not what’s ordinarily meant by prayer, at any rate. All that asking for special favours and guidances and forgivenesses—I’ve always found that it tends to make one egotistical, preoccupied with one’s own ridiculous self-important little personality. When you pray in the ordinary way, you’re merely rubbing yourself into yourself. You return to your own vomit, if you see what I mean. Whereas what we’re all looking for is some way of getting beyond our own vomit.’ “