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Houston Montrose Great Books - Ballot for Apr 3, 2008 (most descriptions below of titles are excerpted from wikipedia)
Plan is to vote on and select 6 titles (or maybe 5 titles if we do the Books on the Bayou selection in October) out of those submitted. Each attendee will have six votes. You can use all your votes on one choice if you want.
Anyone attending may vote whether they have attended before or not.
Suggested by Alice
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS by J.M. Coetzee (publ 1980) 156 pages
Author is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
Story is set in a small frontier town of a nameless empire. The Nobel Prize committee called this book "a political thriller in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, in which the idealist’s naivete opens the gates to horror". "Early in the novel, it's apparent who the barbarians really are, that's no surprise. What is a surprise, however, is the compassion Coetzee shows his victims and villains alike." Possible discussion questions HERE
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA by Gaston Leroux (Dover Thrift Version - 225 pages) translated into English in 1911
A Gothic novel set in 19th century Paris, combining romance, horror, mystery and tragedy, based on a true story.
Features the "ghost" of the famed Paris Opera House.
Suggested by Cassie
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers (356 pages) publ 1940
One of the top one hundred works of twentienth century fiction chosen by the Modern Library.
A haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated. Tells an unforgettable story of moral isolation in a small Georgia mill town in the 1930s where a deaf man encounters a young girl, a labor agitator, a restaurateur, and an idealistic African-American doctor. Possible questions for discussion available HERE
WISE BLOOD by Flannery O'Connor ( 238 pages) publ 1952
O'Connor was a devout Catholic whose small but impressive body of fiction presents the soul's struggle with what she called the "stinking mad shadow of Jesus."
WISE BLOOD portrays a series of unforgettably grotesque individuals in haunting, disturbing scenes showing that even grotesque individuals can be human in their religious hungers and their cravings for love and recognition. An intense and searching study of the problem of redemption in the modern world.
suggested by Carol
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh (publ 1934) 308 pages
Included in Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels.
Story focused on the breakdown of a marriage. Waugh's own marriage was disintegrating when he wrote this, and his unhappiness led him into wider realms of feeling—pathos, rage— than any you find in his earlier triumphs. If this is Waugh at his bleakest it's also Waugh at his deepest, most poisonously funny as described HERE
TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald (publ 1934) 320 pages
It is ranked #28 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century.
Fitzgerald's classic story of psychological disintegration was after his death recognized as a powerful and moving depiction of the human frailties that affect privileged and ordinary people alike. Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, a tragic affair of a young actress and a brilliant young psychiatrist who is married to a woman whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own.
Suggested by Susan
TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller (publ 1934) 318 pages
The Modern Library named it the 50th greatest book of the 20th century. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards permitted its publication.
Famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the life and sexual adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s.
THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy (publ 2006) 256 pages
Pulitzer Prize winner, an Oprah Book Club Selection.
A post-apocalyptic tale describing a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and, seemingly, most life on earth. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearting, a cart of scavenged food — and each other. Possible discussion questions HERE
Suggested by Wendy
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER by D.H. Lawrence (publ 1928) 400 pages
Publication caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including previously banned four-letter words, and perhaps because the lovers were a working-class male and an aristocratic female. Some argue that the main subject of Lady Chatterley's Lover is not the sexual passages that were the subject of such debate, but the search for integrity and wholeness.
CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller (publ 1961) 464 pages
The novel, set during the later stages of World War II from 1943 onwards, is frequently cited as one of the great literary works of the Twentieth century. Classic novel of wartime madness. Story is a general critique of bureaucratic operation and reasoning, among other things. Joseph Heller's brilliance lies in his ability to exaggerate an issue, idea or element of society so perfectly that we see it for just how foolish it is.
