Expository Reading/Writing Novel Guide Supplemental Reading List Click on the Author name on each slide for biographical information.

Expository Reading/Writing

Novel GuideSupplemental Reading List

Click on the Author name on each slide for biographical information.

One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nestby Ken Kesey

“I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph. “

"This guy's scamp who knows he's irresistible to women and, in reality, he expects Nurse Ratched to be seduced by him... This is his tragic flaw. This is why he ultimately fails. I discussed this with Louise - I discussed it only with her. That's what I felt was actually happening with that character. It was one long, unsuccessful seduction which the guy was so pathologically sure of." (Jack Nicholson about McMurphy in Jack Nicholson, the Unauthorised Biography by Barbara & Scott Siegel, 1990)

A Raisin in the Sunby Lorraine Hansbury

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think. “

"... in order for a person to bear his life, he needs a valid re-creation of that life, which is why, as Ray Charles might put it, blacks chose to sing the blues. This is why Raisin in the Sun meant so much to black people - on the stage: the film is another matter. In the theater, a current flowed back and forth between the audience and the actors, flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood - as we say, testifying... The root argument of the play is really far more subtle than either its detractors or the bulk of its admirers were able to see." (James Baldwin in The Devil Finds Work, 1976)

The Color Purpleby Alice Walker

“Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself. “

The Color Purple is foremost the story of Celie, a poor, barely literate Southern black woman who struggles to escape the brutality and degradation of her treatment by men. The tale is told primarily through her own letters, which, out of isolation and despair, she initially addresses to God. . . . during the course of the novel, which begins in the early 1900's and ends in the mid-1940's, Celie frees herself from her husband's repressive control. The New York Times

The Bell Jarby Sylvia Plath

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

Esther, an A-student from Boston who has won a guest editorship on a national magazine, finds a bewildering new world at her feet. Her New York life is crowded with possibilities, so that the choice of future is overwhelming, but she can no longer retreat into the safety of her past. Deciding she wants to be a writer above all else, Esther is also struggling with the perennial problems of morality, behaviour and identity. In this compelling autobiographical novel, a milestone in contemporary literature, Sylvia Plath chronicles her teenage years - her disappointments, anger, depression and eventual breakdown and treatment - with stunning wit and devastating honesty. --Penguin Books

Shoeless Joeby W.P. Kinsella

“The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come." James Earl Jones as Terence Mann, in the movie "Field of Dreams"

“Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria --- anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor.”

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Mankind has entered a new dark age as a result of the evils of irrationality and collectivism and the weaknesses of socialistic thinking and economics. Individuality and ambition have become sins. Technological advancement is now carefully planned (when it is allowed to occur at all). Here is the story of one man willing to risk everything to rebel against a society that refuses to believe in the power or rights of the individual.

“The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.”

Brave New World by Aldus Huxley

“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie. “

“Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist's faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers.”

Saturday Review of Literature.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

"I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles“Teenagers today are more free

to be themselves and to accept themselves.”

This celebrated novel is about the relationship between two boys at a boarding school during World War II. Gene is a brilliant student; Finney is a great athlete. Jealousy between them builds until Gene's internal battle for identity and security leads to a tragedy that changes both of their lives forever.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel"In my youth, it was my good luck to

have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match."

The New Yorker An impassioned defense of zoos, a death-defying trans-Pacific sea adventure à la Kon-Tiki, and a hilarious shaggy-dog story starring a four-hundred-and-fifty-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker this audacious novel manages to be all of these as it tells the improbable survivor's tale of Pi Patel, a young Indian fellow named for a swimming pool (his full first name is Piscine) who endures seven months in a lifeboat with only a hungry, outsized feline for company. This breezily aphoristic, unapologetically twee saga of man and cat is a convincing hands-on, how-to guide for dealing with what Pi calls, with typically understated brio, major lifeboat pests.

Ordinary Peopleby Judith Guest“Some people with awful cards

can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they're handed, and that seems courageous to me. “

My first novel. I started writing it as a short story and just wasn’t ready to put the people down, so I thought I’d work on what happened before the story started, and then what happened after it, and before I knew it I was about 200 pages in. I wrote it because I wanted to explore the anatomy of depression—how it works and why it happens to people; how you can go from being down but able to handle it, to being so down that you don’t even want to handle it, and then taking a radical step with your life—trying to commit suicide—and failing at that, coming back to the world and having to ‘act normal’ when, in fact, you have been forever changed.