So Many Books... You Know the Rest: More from Practical Classics

So many books, so many interesting perspectives on them from Practical Classics.

Sure, we all knew Bartleby was about a guy who preferred not to do his job, but how about Farenheit 451? Everyone knows The Joy Luck Club is about family, but that's not usually how we read or remember To Kill a Mockingbird (a good dad story) or Metamorphosis (a story about how not to handle the disability of a family member).

Everyone I know has heard, or heard of, or at least quoted without knowing they were doing so ("global village," anyone?), Marshall McLuhan, but I didn't know I owed the concept of "camp" to Susan Sontag or the phrase "art in the age of mechanical reproduction" to Walter Benjamin. Smokler provides such thorough crib sheets for all three that I am now saved the trouble of reading the originals!

So now I am talked into attempting Maus, for its portrait of a difficult dad, and The Crying of Lot 49, not only because it looks interesting but because I've always wanted to read Thomas Pynchon and always not wanted to dedicate 6 months to Gravity's Rainbow. I'm even more excited about A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again now that I know that it's about how we relax or whether we even can any more. Just the summary, at least while read on a beach that it took me 8 hours and hundreds of dollars to get to, gave me something to think about, and the fact that everything else David Foster Wallace has written seems to be a thousand pages long is a bonus. I'm even intrigued, if terrified, by Bastard out of Carolina for its promise of forgiveness in the middle of horror.

Below are links to the books I'm adding to my wish list. As always, you can explore without buying.