When I wrote the first in this series, I was tired and didn’t feel like getting up to dig around in closets, and pulling book titles from thin air is not easy for me.

During my time earning an English degree, I was handed syllabi with a wide variety of literature — some old, some new. Some sucked, some blew. I’m really, really sorry I just wrote that, but not sorry enough to delete it.

It’s a shame how many great works I read but had ruined for me by the repeated picking apart of everything my professors and my classmates inferred. Still, some of those works shine through.

After college, assigned reading behind me and no longer taking up all my spare time, I determined that I was going to read whatever felt good. As a result I read lots of entertaining but forgettable fare. I have read several books each by Michael Crichton, John Grisham, and Patricia Cornwell. All were fairly good at developing characters and could spin a good yarn, but they didn’t usually reveal anything about people or the human condition that made me mark the pages.

Before college, and a little bit after, there was Stephen King. I still consider him one of the best at creating believable and interesting characters. His novella The Body, the story for the film Stand by Me spoke to many levels of my male brain. Other standouts were The Green Mile, the medieval fantasy tale The Eyes of the Dragon, and The Stand. His early work as Richard Bachman, refreshingly devoid of the supernatural, features searing looks into society’s problems and where they might lead us. I heard he pulled Rage off the shelves after the Columbine High School incident and other school shootings made it hit a little too close to home. The Long Walk is chilling, too.

Unlike the other writers mentioned above, I never get the feeling King is writing to the movie. I hope everyone understands what I mean by that.

Having said all that, the manner in which I’m writing my latest online stories smacks of movie-style storytelling. That comes from publishing as it’s written, with very little if any thought given to the direction of the story before sitting down to type the next chapter. Maybe it’s also because I don’t have anything particularly deep or meaningful to convey to readers, or am just too chicken to put it out there.

My former Cornwell habit shows in a book I wrote during National Novel Writing Month 2002. Parts of that influence, and my love for cops and lawyer shows, come through in my online novelette, Wall. If you are inclined to click that link, please read the short story “Talk with a Killer” first (it holds a special place in my heart and establishes a major character).

Now, here are a few more books that stand out as good reads.

Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
The only Vonnegut novel I’ve read, it made me realize why he’s a big name in modern literature. I enjoyed this book so much that I’m completely bewildered as to why I didn’t pick up more of his work. Hilarious, moving, thought-provoking.

The Planets by James Finney Boylan
I picked up the hardcover of this book, which is not a science fiction tale, in a $1 bin at a Burlington Coat Factory store. Compared to Vonnegut by some, Boylan tells a funny, touching tale set in Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a mine fire that shut down the town’s industry has been burning since 1962. On another note, Boylan has had a sex change and now writes under the name Jennifer Finney Boylan.

Shoot the Moon by Billie Letts
I would like to read more of Letts’ work. She creates an air of mystery and deceipt in this #1 New York Times bestseller, wrapped up in characters of small town Oklahoma. A man returns to the place of his birth and uncovers a riveting story that unfortunately entangles him within hours of his arrival.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Known later by its film name, Blade Runner, this book showed up in my “Film in American Literature” class, wherein we read a book and then watched the movie, and then picked apart both. The title alone gets points from me, but the story and the ideas build it up even more.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
I still find it hard to believe that a man wrote this book. I have not seen the movie, and Golden’s writing left me perfectly happy with that. Although criticized by some as not being exactly accurate, this is a poignant tale of one girl’s survival after being sold by her father to a Geisha house.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
The inspiration for countless private eye books and movies, this novel was Chandler’s last in his Detective Philip Marlowe series and of his career. Real literature meets hard-boiled private investigation. This one was assigned by my “American Postmodernism” professor.

Montana : 1948 by Larry Watson
I started this book while staying on North Padre Island with family. The house owner encouraged us to take paperbacks home. The short, serious novel is an intense peek into one family’s brush with death and racism. From the point of view of a 12-year-old boy the reader gets a vivid image of the violence and hatred that we can only hope could never be so easily swept under the rug today.

Space by James Michener
The only Michener I’ve read, this tome covers the American space program, following the fictional leads from their days fighting in World War II to leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and helping establish the space shuttle program. He seems historically accurate on the space program itself, right down to how America got pivotal scientist Werner Von Braun from the Nazis. Although it came after Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, it still stands on its own.