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Title Raves : Assigned Reading
These were the books discussed at the October 2009 Title Raves program by panelists Robert R. Brock, Martha Gies, Craig Johnson and Vailey Oehlke. Audience members were invited to share their favorite books and authors.
Panelists' favorites
- Alain-Fournier
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Set in the beautiful French countryside, this coming of age story tells of a young, popular boy troubled by the image of a beautiful woman he strives desperately to recapture. Fournier disappeared on the battlefields near Verdun in northeastern France in September 1914, one year after his only novel was published. (Craig Johnson)
- Anderson, Sherwood
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Using mostly male narrators and often involving initiation rites, these stories give a view of small-town Midwestern life during the first 40 years of the 20th century. Anderson is best remembered for Winesburg, Ohio, the collection of linked stories that depicted small-town America. (Martha Gies)
- Aristotle
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Written in the fourth century B.C., Aristotle's Poetics is the world's first critical book about the laws of literature. Aristotle's discussions — Unity of Plot, Reversal of the Situation, Character — though written in the context of ancient Greek tragedy, comedy and epic poetry, still apply to our modern literary forms. (Martha Gies)
- Carver, Raymond
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In his second collection of stories, Carver's characters are peripheral people — people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. (Martha Gies)
- Chaucer, Geoffrey
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These tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life — from knight to nun, miller to monk — reveal a picture of English life in the 14th century. (Martha Gies)
- Cheever, John
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Originally published in 1978, Cheever's stories chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." (Martha Gies)
- Dickens, Charles
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A young boy encounters an escaped convict in a country graveyard, and years later this chance meeting leads the boy to tragedy, mystery and wealth. (Craig Johnson)
- Faulkner, William
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Most of the stories in this collection are drawn from the greatest period in Faulkner's writing life, the 15 or so years beginning in 1929, when he published The Sound and the Fury. They deal with many of the themes found in the novels and with the subjects and characters of small-town Mississippi life. (Martha Gies)
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott
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Jay Gatsby, a dashing, enigmatic millionaire, is obsessed with the elusive and spoiled Daisy Buchanan. Stylish and engaging, The Great Gatsby is also a portrait of Gatsby's search for meaning in his opulent world. (Vailey Oehlke)
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott
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Inseparably associated with a point in history he claimed to despise, Fitzgerald is both the quintessential Jazz-Age writer and perhaps the era’s harshest critic. These 43 masterpieces range from early stories that capture the fashion of the times to later ones written after the author's fabled crack-up, which are sober reflections on his own youthful excesses. (Martha Gies)
- Flaubert, Gustave
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Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel. (Robert Brock)
- Gide, Andre
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In 1909 Gide helped found the influential literary magazine The New French Review. For more than 60 years he wrote a journal in which he put down his experiences and feelings. (Robert Brock)
- Hemingway, Ernest
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This collection of short stories includes Hemingway's only play The Fifth Column and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, a tragic history of losing and regaining dignity. (Martha Gies)
- James, Henry
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In his novella Daisy Miller, Henry James shows how during the late Victorian era, a newly-affluent moneyed middle class began moving into social territory formerly considered the sole province of aristocracy. (Craig Johnson)
- Joyce, James
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, providing an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. At its center are questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture and race. (Craig Johnson)
- Knowles, John
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The bittersweet rivalry between a lonely, introverted intellectual and a handsome, charismatic, daredevil athlete leads to a tragic accident during the ill-fated summer of '42. (Craig Johnson)
- Lee, Harper
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Harper Lee's coming-of-age classic tells the story of six-year-old Scout Finch, her older brother Jem, and their father, Atticus, a small-town Alabama lawyer assigned to defend Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape. The reaction of the town, the dignity of Robinson and the character of their father affect both children as they navigate the path from childhood innocence to adult understanding. (Vailey Oehlke)
- Maupassant, Guy de
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Ranging from poignant scrutiny of social pretension, to wicked tales of lust and love, to harrowing stories of terror and madness, the genius of Guy de Maupassant, France’s greatest short-story writer, is on full display. (Robert Brock)
- Moore, Lorrie
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Set just after the events of September 2001, Moore's deft, lyrical novel brings readers up against the heart of racism, the shock of war and the carelessness perpetrated against others in the name of love. (Craig Johnson)
- Nabokov, Vladimir
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Awe and exhilaration — along with heartbreak and mordant wit — abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. (Craig Johnson)
- O'Connor, Flannery
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This collection of 31 remarkable stories — poignant, weird, macabre and sublime — set in the South in the1950s was posthumously awarded the National Book Award in 1971. (Martha Gies)
- O'Connor, Flannery
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O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque, and examine her familiar themes of race, faith and death. (Vailey Oehlke)
- Omar Khayyam
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With their concern for the here and now, as opposed to the hereafter, Omar Khayyam's quatrains are as romantic today as they were hundreds of years ago; they are a tribute to the power of one moment's pleasure over a lifetime of sorrow, of desire over the vicissitudes of time. (Robert Brock)
- Proust, Marcel
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Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood — a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the famous taste of a madeleine. (Craig Johnson)
- Salinger, J. D.
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The story of three days and nights spent in New York City by Holden Caulfield, a sensitive, intelligent 16-year-old boy, who confronts the "phony'' values of the adult world. (Vailey Oehlke)
- Salinger, J. D.
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Salinger's stories tap into the ambilivent milieu of America in the 1950's, when the national mood post-war optimism with a sense of entering a turbulent era. These stories deal with genius, spiritual integrity, moral corruption and the ability of innocence to transform our lives. (Martha Gies)
- Simon, Claude
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The Flanders Road describes the French retreat at Meuse, focusing on the death of a French captain through the eyes of three other soldiers. A deeply moving meditation on war, it was written, like much of Simon's work, in the "new novel" style of the 1950's — in fractured sentences entangled with dreams and memories. (Robert Brock)
- Stern, Lawrence
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Ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story, one of the central jokes of the novel is that the main character cannot explain anything simply without making explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that we do not even reach Tristram's own birth until Volume III. Most of the action is concerned with domestic upsets or comic misunderstandings, which find humour in the opposing temperaments.(Craig Johnson)
- Twain, Mark,
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Twain's complex masterpiece is at heart a compelling adventure story. Huck, in flight from his murderous father, and Nigger Jim, in flight from slavery, pilot their raft through treacherous waters, surviving a crash with a steamboat, betrayal by rogues and the final threat from the bourgeoisie. (Craig Johnson)
- Voltaire
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In his day Voltaire was known as France's leading dramatist, poet and historian. Famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade, he was one of several Enlightenment figures whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions. (Robert Brock)
- Wright, Richard
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Eight Men presents eight stories of black men living at violent odds with the white world around them. As they do in his classic novels, the themes here reflect Wright's views on racism and his fascination with what he called "the struggle of the individual in America." (Martha Gies)
Audience favorites
- Avi
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Falsely accused of theft and murder, an orphaned peasant boy in 14th century England flees his village and meets a larger-than-life juggler who holds a dangerous secret. (Sequel: Crispin: At the Edge of the World)
- Dietz, William C.
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Legion of the DamnedIn the future, the terminally ill can prolong life by surrendering their consciousness to a cybernetic life form that is then recruited into the notorious Legion of the Damned, an elite fighting unit charged with protecting humanity. "It is very realistic and fun to read."
- Horowitz, Anthony
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Alex Rider, a 14-year-old British spy, is sent to a mysterious Swiss boarding school to investigate the nefarious plot of its headmaster.
- Ludlum, Robert
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His body riddled with bullets and his face altered by plastic surgery, Jason Bourne is dragged from the ocean, uncertain of his past or his future. Now he is running for his life, the target of assassins.
- Rowling, J. K.
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Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School for Wizards and Witches. "All the Harry Potter books, because they are popular, funny and interesting."
Audience members recommended books written by Sven Hassel ("very descriptive and bold"); Arthur C. Clarke and Ben Bova ("they create great atmosphere, setting and description, they aren't preachy").
Audience members shared how they find their next read: "Sequels of books or random authors" "I look on my home's bookshelf or I look at the library" "My next read finds me".
