Second of all, this book is the book To Kill a Mockingbird wishes it was. Both written by young Southern women about small towns in the South, Heart has just that quality - heart - that Mockingbird lacks in its heavy-handed attempt to codify Southern paternalistic liberal virtue.
Heart satisfies itself with exploring the inner lives of five characters: a frustrated black doctor, a laconic diner owner, a young girl, a drunk would-be labor organizer and a deaf-mute to whom they all separately feel strangely connected.
McCullers' descriptions of these characters and their struggles to find meaning and connect with others are just breathtaking in their empathetic scope.
I had to start this one about three times before I got hooked, but I'm glad I stuck with it.
5 stars
All
the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
Animal Farm -
George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
A
Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Deliverance - James Dickey
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S.
Lewis
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer
- Walker Percy
1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Power and the Glory -
Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
4
stars
Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara
The Assistant
- Bernard Malamud
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Brideshead
Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Great Gatsby
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R.
Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
On the Road -
Jack Kerouac
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Things
Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Tropic of Cancer - Henry
Miller
3.5 stars
Blood Meridian -
Cormac McCarthy
3 stars
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
A Passage to India -
E.M. Forster
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale
Hurston
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Lord
of the Flies - William Golding
2 stars
Are
You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
To Kill
a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Watchmen - Alan Moore &
Dave Gibbons
1 star
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
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