Dan Mancini

 This weekend, I grabbed a budget paperback of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and began reading. I’m righting a wrong, filling an omission. Despite the fact that I have a post-graduate degree in English literature, I’ve never read Lee’s novel. It’s the sort of classic that one usually reads in high school (though it’s truly better appreciated as an adult), but somehow it never showed up on any of my class syllibi. And for a couple decades it simply fell through the cracks. I’ve seen the movie more times than I can count (it would hold an unshakeable place on my list of Top 10 Movies of All Time, if I had such a list, which I do not). But seeing the movie is no replacement for reading the book, and so now, finally, I am reading the book.

Atticus Finch: The Baddest Man in the Whole Damn Town

This exercise (which is really less an exercise than an act of pleasure) got me thinking about other gaps in my adventures as a reader. So I’ve decided to declare 2010 the Year of Filling the Gaps (20th Century American Edition). For the remainder of the year, I plan to plow through American literary classics of the 20th century (mostly novels) that I’ve somehow, inexplicably, never gotten around to before.
 
The list, in no particular order:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
I have to admit I’m not much of a fan of the Beat Generation. Generally speaking, they come across like the whiny, snot-nosed younger siblings of the far more interesting Lost Generation. Still, I’ve read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, so I really have no excuse for not finishing out the trifecta of Beat classics with Kerouac’s seminal work. I should’ve read it when I was a teen, when it would have seemed more vibrant and relevant, but it’s too late now.

It tolls for thee, punk!

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
This is the only of Hemingway’s major works that I’ve never read. Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t tell you. It may have something to do with the fact that I enjoy Hemingway’s short stories more than his novels (though The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are brilliant long-form works). I have a tattered copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway that I’ve read through multiple times, but I’ve never tackled For Whom the Bell Tolls. I mean to rectify that.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
This novel is to Steinbeck what For Whom the Bell Tolls is to Hemingway: the one major entry in the author’s oeuvre that I’ve neglected. I’ve read The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, Travels with Charley, and The Pearl. Heck, I’ve even read The Red Pony, Tortilla Flat, The Winter of Our Discontent, and many of Steinbeck’s other minor works. But I’ve never worked my way through East of Eden.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
I’ve seen the movie countless times and have heard great things about the novel, but I’ve never been huge on detective fiction. That said, I can’t imagine that a couple hundred pages with Sam Spade could be anything but a blast.

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
I’ve read a ton of American literature. I’ve read a ton of World War II history. Somehow, though, I’ve never gotten around to Mailer’s classic war novel. Shame on me.

Nice lid, Slappy.

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
I love pre-war writers from the American South (you’ll notice there isn’t any Faulkner on this list; that’s because there isn’t a single of his major works I haven’t read). Their prose tends to be lush, their view of the world complex, and their stories melancholy, haunting, and sometimes gothic. What’s not to love?

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
My interaction with O’Connor’s work is woefully spotty considering my professed appreciation for Southern writers. Her ruminations on the nature of religious faith in a messed up world place her squarely in my literary wheelhouse as well. This collection of stories (a few of which I have actually read) should begin to set things right.

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
My knowledge of African-American literature doesn’t extend much beyond Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I may have read a short story or two by Baldwin, but that’s it.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Like Mailer’s, Capote’s talent was swamped and capsized by his love of fame and all of its trappings. In Cold Blood is a book that I’ve been meaning to read for years, but always found something else to sit down with instead. Not this year.

800% better than that crappy Rush tune

The U.S.A Trilogy by John Dos Passos
I’ve plowed through most of the great sprawling, experimental novels of the 20th century — Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Delillo’s Underworld, and even Dow Mossman’s lost treasure, The Stones of Summer — but I’ve never read Dos Passos’ rich and complex trilogy, which consists of The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money (not “Dixie,” “All My Trials,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which make up Elvis Presley’s ”An American Trilogy”…in case you were confused).

Anyway, that list is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure I’ll think of more stuff as the year progresses, which will result in this little experiment extending into 2011 and possible beyond. Fun awaits.

What great books have you neglected?