Books

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“Mr X” by Peter Straub

‘Stupid me — I fell right into the old pattern and spent a week pretending I was a moving target. All along, a part of me knew that I was hitching toward southern Illinois because my mother was passing. When your mother’s checking out, you get yourself back home. She had been living in East Cicero with two elderly brothers above their club, the Panorama. On weekends she sang two nightly sets with the house trio. She was doing what she had always done, living without worrying about consequences, which tends to make the consequences come harder and faster than they do for other people. When she could no longer ignore her sense of fatality, my mother kissed the old brothers goodbye and went back to the only place I’d be able to find her’………more

“Vernon God Little” by DBC Pierre

When sixteen kids are shot on high school grounds, everyone looks for someone to blame. Meet Vernon Little, under arrest at the sheriff’s office, a teenager wearing nothing but yesterday’s underwear and his prized logo sneakers. Moments after the shooter, his best buddy, turns the gun on himself, Vernon is pinned as an accomplice. Out for revenge are the townspeople, the cable news networks, and Deputy Vaine Gurie, a woman whose zeal for the Pritikin diet is eclipsed only by her appetite for barbecued ribs from the Bar-B-Chew Barn. So Vernon does what any red-blooded American teenager would do; he takes off for Mexico.

“The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita (Russian: Ма́стер и Маргари́та) is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.

“Lanark, A life in 4 Books” by Alasdair Gray

Lanark, subtitled A Life in Four Books, was the first novel of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, and is still his best known. Written over a period of almost thirty years, it combines realist and dystopian fantasy depictions of his home city of Glasgow. Its publication in 1981 prompted Anthony Burgess to call Gray “the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott”. The book has since won the Saltire Society Book of the Year and David Niven awards, and has become a cult classic. In 2006, The Guardian heralded Lanark as “one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction.”

“Iron John” by Robert Bly

Iron John: A Book About Men is a book by American Poet Robert Bly published in 1990. It analyzes Iron John, a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, in Joseph Campbell fashion to find lessons especially meaningful to men. Bly believes that this fairy tale contains lessons from the past of great importance to modern men. It builds upon material in “What Do Men Really Want?: A New Age Interview With Robert Bly” by Keith Thompson, New Age Journal, May 1982 and first appeared as a series of pamphlets. Comparable to Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s book Women Who Run With the Wolves.

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