Expository Reading/Writing Novel Guide

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Expository Reading/Writing Novel Guide

• Supplemental Reading List

Click on the Author name on each slide for
biographical information.
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One Flew Over the Cukoos 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)
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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)
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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
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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• Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished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
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Shoeless Joeby W.P. Kinsella
Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria
--- anyone who can use those four words in one
sentence will never have to do manual labor.

• 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"

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Anthem by Ayn Rand
The question isn't who is going to let me it's
who is going to stop me.

• 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.

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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.
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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
  Almightyand 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 wasnt ready to put the people
down, so I thought Id 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 depressionhow 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
dont even want to handle it, and then taking a
radical step with your lifetrying to commit
suicideand failing at that, coming back to the
world and having to act normal when, in fact,
you have been forever changed.