The Great American Read

  In case you’ve missed it, and I assume most everyone but a geek like me has, The Great American Read is a thing from PBS. They published a list of 100 books they’ve deemed “best loved.” Not best or greatest or most important books. Best loved.
  They invite us to vote. I couldn’t possibly pick a single book, and they sensibly allow you to vote for as many books as you like.
  You can find the list here.
  Of course there are the usual suspects. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye. The predictable ones.
  Beyond that, the editors have made an effort to make the list pretty inclusive. There are gay books (yay!). There are books by/for various minorities. There are books I’d never heard of. 
  Most surprising to me, though, was to see the books that generally aren’t considered of any particular literary merit, but which have been hugely popular—best loved.
  Is it odd then, even ridiculous, that War and Peace and Moby Dick are there rubbing their rounded shoulders with Stephenie Meyer’s perfectly dreadful Twilight books? Obviously. But it’s also sort of wonderful. Think of the people who don’t read on a daily basis, who hurled themselves into the Harry Potter books. Same is true for Game of Thrones or Shades of Grey (I’ve not read this last one, so I’m not going to bash it).
  The list motivated me to fill some of the gaps in my education, starting with some gay lit classics—and then stretching a bit into unknown genres. Here are some books from the list that I hadn’t read before, but have now:

• Another Country by James Baldwin – Can’t recommend it—really miserable characters, although I loved the picture of a New York long vanished. The prose is often breathtaking.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde – Some brilliant Wilde-isms, but overall a bit of a snore. Sorry, Oscar.
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – I was really surprised how much fun this book was. I’ve always been a fan of boys’ adventure stories from guys like Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. This struck me as a modern version of the genre, and I loved it.
• The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy – I never read suspense, being the snob that I am, but this was terrific. Found myself staying up way too late because ohmygod there are torpedoes in the water, repeat, torpedoes in the water!!! I get why people read this stuff.
• Along Came a Spider by James Patterson – Another genre I generally snub. Again, a real page-turner. About halfway through, Patterson shifted the focus from the awful crime/criminal to a love interest (like so many of the classic detective novels), but alas, I don’t think he writes romance nearly as well as he does homicidal psychopaths. Still, he made the romance pay off before he was done. I have the beginnings of a begrudging respect for this guy that I’ve always considered a hack.
• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving – A truly marvelous book. I liked this one so much, I was actually moved to write a slightly longer review on Goodreads, which you can find here. 

So check out the list, vote for your favorites, and let me know what you think.

​c.t.h.

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