When We Fell In Love – Greg Olear

Jason Maddox is honored to have been included here, Greg, and I’m certain that Wayne Fencer is likewise honored. Do you think Jason and Wayne would get on?

I think they would, yes. Wayne is ballsy, as we know, and Jason admires ballsy people, and is pretty ballsy himself. Maybe they could start a band and play Havana and Burning Man?

I’d like to hear more about these ‘Hardy’ boys.

I’ve neatly dodged a number of these classics, purely by accident. Some day, you know?

I need to finish The Sun Also Rises. I’m about two thirds of the way through, but I’ve lost my copy of the book…

Man. Can you believe I never read Welcome to the Monkey House. I’m not entirely sure how this is possible. It’s always been on my ever-growing list of books I’ll have to read one day. But reading was a gateway drug that lead me down a seedier, dirtier path: writing. If only there were enough time in the world. Did you ever see the Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith called “Time Enough At Last”?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last

It’s wonderful. you can find it in three parts on Youtube.

And yes! Yes to Encyclopedia Brown!

Simon – My favorite Hardy Boy is Thomas. “Tess” narrowly missed being on this list. Hardy is also one of the authors recommended by Holden Caulfield. “I love that Eustacia Vye,” he says. Who doesn’t?

Jedi – I once read it in college, picking it up only when drunk. It’s one of the few books that gain perspective when read that way.

Gloria – There are, if memory serves, some clunkers in there, but the title story is fantastic.

Encyclopedia Brown sort of sounds like Indiana Jones, no?

Thanks for reading.

Gloria – I don’t think I saw the ep, but I’ve heard of it, or had it told to me. Ah, the cruel irony.

I prefer the one about the guy who bets a finger his lighter won’t light — rewritten beautifully by Tarantino in the final chapter of the otherwise-ho-hum “Four Rooms.”

No Kerouac? You son of a bitch. Were you raised by wolves? J/K

Of course I’m weird. I would have “John Carter of Mars” and “The House of the Seven Gables” on my list.

I came to Kerouac too late to do me any good. For some reason, I never took to the Beats — probably because they were trotted out by certain pretentious pseudo-intellectuals I knew, not because they liked the books, but because they wanted to be seen reading the requisite books while smoking their clove cigarettes. This is not JK’s fault, of course, but I was never able to recover from the taint.

I much prefer Henry Miller, who was doing the same sort of thing, but two decades earlier, and to much greater effect. As I wrote in an early TNB piece: Miller boinked Anais Nin; Kerouac lived with his mother. ‘Nuf said.

Yeah. Miller was the man. Kerouac was too in my mind. But then, I was exposed to him in a really weird way. I was traveling across country in an old hoopty. It broke down at an actual oasis in New Mexico. A traveler I met while sitting outside a dusty bar with dollar bills taped to its ceiling on old Route 66 handed me a copy of “On the Road.” I handed it back. I had no idea what it was, but I was living a similar life of road life. But then I met a professor who wrote the first book on the LA Beats. He was my history mentor. Rest is history… And that’s the really short version. I should go tell it on TNB.

I always hated the pseudo-intellectual clove smokers. Even in Bakersfield, CA, they were a pretentious lot back in the mid 1980s.

That does sound like a good TNB post. And shit, if that dude handed me the new Dan Brown book, I’d read it. How could you not?

You had me at George Orwell. Possibly my favorite “classic” writer, whatever that means. Is it like the original Coke formula? And what about the venerable Chevrolet Caprice Classic? Was that different than the Caprice? (Of course I had to look it up on Wikipedia and it turns out the Caprice became the Caprice Classic in 1973. So in that case the “classic” was the newer model.

And of course Lord of the Flies. We already discussed Paradise Lost. This is a great list. And speaking of Dan Brown, Digital Fortress didn’t make the list?

Thanks, Richard.

Orwell totally holds up, too. It’s fascinating that politicians of every bent have claimed Orwell as one of them…right and left wing, conservative and liberal. That, too, speaks to the power of the book. One thing I didn’t get in sixth grade is the significance of a man named O’Brien wielding so much power in Britain.

Dan Brown is a list unto himself. But to find the list, you have to decipher the code engraved on the stones at Chartes Cathedral. Can anyone help with that?

Lord of the Flies scared the shit out of me. It still does. It was the first time I realized that men are all savages. Except for you, Greg.

Lord of the Flies really scared and affected me too. Such a creepy side of people, the ganging up on the weak. The wolf pack mentality has no honor; just savage and cowardly. It upsets me to be confronted with it in books or in the news.

I always identified with Piggy, because I wear glasses, and it would be awful to be trapped on an island like that and not be able to see.

And yes, the wolf pack…ugh. Mob mentality. Least common denominator stuff. Awful. The entire purpose of civilization is to contain those base emotions.

I also remember the theme, as hammered home by our teacher: the adults save the children…but who will save the adults?

Thanks for reading.

Oh, and Lenore…you flatter me.

How can your ardor for Encyclopedia Brown not have stood the test of time???

I still love the “you” (me? us?) character from the Choose Your Own Adventure series. I especially admired his/her ability to return from the dead and get “do overs” any time something bad happened.

How could I forget Choose Your Own Adventure!

There was one E. Brown where the plot was foiled because the villain didn’t have his girlfriend seated in the proper seat at a pizza place. Girls are supposed to sit in…or was it out? I can’t remember. Some archaic rule from Arthurian times that I had never heard of, and that no one I knew would follow. After that, I lost interest. But I did like the one where the check was dated June 31, so EB knew it was fake.

I’m surprised you don’t list The Crying of Lot 49, Greg. While you might have been having erotic fantasies about reading as a youth, wasn’t Pynchon the one who first touched your Yoyo as an adult? That’s what really leads to love, eh?

Shall I yoyo-deign to expand on your pun?

I didn’t read that until after college (your copy), so I didn’t include it here, although I do mention the perhaps-dearly-departed Pierce Inverarity.

Next time, use W.A.S.T.E.

This gives me some ideas for my re-read list. Haven’t read Sun Also Rises since I had to read it in high school, and my Hemingway consumption has been nil since then.

I’m pretty sure 1984 was the first ‘grown up’ book I read as well. I followed that with ‘Brave New World.’ I was a nerd about dystopias.

My first literary obsession: Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Primary thing I remember from it is that it used the phrase ‘making a tinkle.’ I thought that was the greatest phrase in the history of the English language.

Interestingly, Charles, JC (whose site this is) also just read TSAR:

http://threeguysonebook.com/the-sun-also-rises

I still love that book.

I forgot about Superfudge. Oh, man. And Dribble, the turtle. “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing” is one of the great titles. It really is.

What is it about kids and dystopia?

Thanks for reading.

I would certainly have thought I’d see Great Gatsby in there somewhere…

I’m also a little surprised you didn’t talk about some of the books that stiffed you, maybe making you rethink your desire to be involved. A little Pride & Prejudice prejudice, if you will.

Brady: Ha!

The PPP would have been a much longer list, and many canonized names would be on it. Dickens, Dostoyevski, Austen, Steinbeck, Willa Cather. We read “My Antonia” in high school. It was torture. Maybe I’d feel differently now.

I liked GG okay when I first read it, but it didn’t overwhelm me at the time. It grew on me slowly. Like cancer, but good.

Thanks for reading.