A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a list of 8 rules for writing short stories. He ended the list by saying that Flannery O'Connor broke all of them except the first ("Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.").
He clearly meant this as a compliment, and he was right on. How she wrote the stories in this collection and made them as good as they are just doesn't add up. Another rule on Vonnegut's list is to "give the reader at least one character he or she can root for," and it is the one she most consistently breaks. The characters with whom one identifies (other than a child or two) are usually just the least despicable.
All the same, Vonnegut was right to say that she never breaks the first rule. Every story in this collection is stunning, haunting, and impossible to ignore. The title story might be one of my favorites ever. In fact, The River might be another.
One thing O'Connor does is introduce you to a character who is ruminating on his or her (usually her) annoyance with another character, suggesting to the reader that the object of the rumination likely has a deeper, more justified, and more profound resentment or even hatred for the one ruminating. This is an interesting motif, but it hardly accounts for the excellence of these stories in the face of such unlikable characters. But the excellence is undeniable.
So then: what is it that makes these stories so great? Honestly, I couldn't say.

Independence Day by Richard Ford

A successful practice of my middle life, a time I think of as the Existence Period, has been to ignore much of what I don’t like or that seems worrisome and embroiling, and then usually see it go away.

Frank Bascombe certainly deserves a place among the best characters in literary history. The simpler he tries to make life by idling his time from one insignificant moment to the next, the more complex it becomes. However, this book being written in the first-person, it became a very tough read for me. Not really in the sense that the passages were too intense and beyond grasping; on the contrary, Ford’s style is straightforward and strays far from the abstract. But each chapter seemed more mundane than the last. I realize that this is the whole idea for the book and its relation to reality, but the execution was incredibly boring and, at times, insufferable…

My host family wants to play cards now so I guess that’s about it.

Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

This book of one novella, the title’s namesake, and five short stories, was Roth’s first; published when he was only 26. And you can tell. The smooth, extremely lucid and comfortable prose that I found in The Plot Against America and American Pastoral was absent and the story was begging for a point. At multiple points, it seemed like Roth would drone into useless scenes and rely on wit to pull him through, suggesting that he did not know exactly where to take the novella next (perhaps this is why it is a novella instead of a novel). At the end of each paragraph it seemed that Roth was gasping for air. For young, aspiring writers, I think this, along with trying to be excessively witty and eloquent, is a result of trying to imitate the authors who inspired them to write in the first place. What happens though is very unnatural and ungainly and I’d say a great laugh to the author many years later when they have so much more control of the page. However, that being said, the main problem may be that this book is about Jewish identity—particularly at the stage in life where your identity is most confusing—and I’m simply a goy.

I do want to point out though that the surface-level parallels between this novella and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh are striking. Both main characters are in their early twenties, both are socially awkward, they both work at the library at their college, both meet and begin sexual relations with girls during the course of the book, and both have unusual family lives. Both books take place during the summer and were the first projects for both of the now famous authors.

The short stories that followed Goodbye Columbus were a huge pickup. I think one was terrible, the rest were really good and one—Defender of the Faith—was incredible. If you can find it on the internet (it appeared initially in The New Yorker) then I highly recommend reading it. My overall suggestion, though, is to start with another Roth book.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Just finished re-reading this--I'm going for it--masterpiece. Even better this time. Some parts I didn't remember that are amazing:

-The man shooting someone with a flare gun.
-The man's memory about his father and his father's friends unearthing a writhing mass of snakes and setting them on fire.

That's all I have. What a book.

(Movie coming out Nov. 25, but unfortunately not until March in New Zealand)