what is the required reading in your town?

This might be more suited to people who don't live in huge metropolitan areas, but I'm not sure.

I'm from Knoxville, TN and EVERYONE has read Suttree and A Death in the Family. What books are a source of local pride where you are from?

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Brighton Rock is the one compulsory one, then there's a few other things like Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square (as well as some of his later, less well-known works) and maybe Peter James's crime novels (which I guess I should have got round to by now).

God, I dunno... Howard's End was set in the Stevenage area. A few references to Hitchin and Letchworth in Hitchhiker's Guide. On the whole though, I can't think of one.

Robert Parker
Dennis Lehane
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
Black Mass: something or other something or other
The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft

(boston, obv)

note: i have only read the last two of these books.

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Paul Auster? Jonathan Lethem? Tao Lin? I'm completely out of the loop, I would have to do some field research.

Anything by Beverly Cleary, f'rinstance:

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Paul Auster? Jonathan Lethem? Tao Lin? I'm completely out of the loop, I would have to do some field research.

― alimosina, Friday, January 21, 2011 11:49 AM (3 hours ago)

Yeah I was gonna say Jonathan Lethem

this question can work for people in big cities if you think books from your borough, books from your neighborhood

for me it's Richard Hugo's The Real West Marginal Way

Lethem would actually qualify for my neighborhood.

i loved suttree. did you like it roxy? so hilarious when his little friend keeps nearly killing himself. bit of an unnecessarily prolonged & essentially meaningless ending

i've always imagined that leonard cohen is a bigger deal here than elsewhere, but not that many people read his stuff. almost everyone has read at least one mordecai richler book. i read duddy kravitz when i was going to a high school on the same block that his family lives on & was friends with some nefarious jewish kids at the time too, def the most immersive local reading experience ever

This book is required reading in my hometown! Because the author and his family dock down the street and are apparently awesome and nice.

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Aimless, I wanted to live in Oregon when I was a kid bcz of those books! I was just thinking about them the other day, when Beezus asks the lady at the beauty school for a Dorothy Hammil wedge and it turns out terrible.

Beverly Cleary was actually living on the Monterey Peninsula when I was a kid and read those books. My girl scout troop had tea with her at my grandparents' house.

Wilson Rawls, author of Where the Red Fern Grows and Summer of the Monkeys was from my hometown. Or lived there for a while, or something. One of my projects in student government in 9th grade was helping raise funds for this monument outside the library:

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Books of Las Curces:

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Cricket in the Web, a book about a 1949 murder in LC...

If you go to the "Brooklyn" section at Book Court, every other book has an intro by Jonathan Lethem, further confirming my theory that he's the one.

Including L.J. Davis's "A Meaningful Life" which I guess is sort of essential in that it's a biting account of an oblivious gentrifier moving to a run-down brooklyn mansion in a sorry attempt to bring interest to his dull life, written by an actual brownstone-rehabbing brooklyn gentrifier who I guess thought he avoided the pitfalls of his character I don't know?

Haha. Very true. There is a Paula Fox variation on that theme that Lethem wrote an intro for as well, as well as every other book in Book Court, as you said.

Hadn't realized that you lived in Brownstone Brooklyn, alimosina.

Brownstones are a little outside my range -- I worked my way up from an illegal converted basement studio next to the oil furnace in W'burg. Don't know if that world has found its writer.

If you go to the "Brooklyn" section at Book Court, every other book has an intro by Jonathan Lethem, further confirming my theory that he's the one.

My residence just before my current one was squarely on Letham's turf (a block from Atlantic).

This book cover says you're wrong Ken

http://images.bookbyte.com/isbn.aspx?isbn=9780393318944

BTW should I read?

The thing with the guy being an attorney sounds like it might be too close to home.

Ha. It was another Paula Fox book with the Lethem intro, one that took place in Manhattan. Yeah, read it, I don't think there is too much about his work in there to stress you out.

Wow, Franzen AND Lethem intros. Is there such a thing as a difecta?

bifecta?

exacta or perfecta, or maybe quinella

rachel carson went to my high school. we didn't have to read silent spring, but we did have to attend a ceremony when her stamp was released

Man, I wish I wasn't from a hick town now (Adelaide, Australia)--can't think of ANYTHING!

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Big Phil

'required reading' in London is JK Rowling or something, presumably not for local reasons

do people in London read London writing? maybe things about London's Secret River, Lost Underground Stations, etc

I don't think people in SE London read SE London writing, though if they did then bits of Graham Swift might work; or Blake Morrison (probably not great); and the bombers' target in The Secret Agent is 20 minutes from me.

i saw someone very conspicuously reading lethem on the L a few weeks back

my hometown is largely literature-free though i do think someone in a hardy or forster book or something at one point goes "luton? THAT dreary place?"

also a lot of people i know have read sarfraz manzoor's greetings from bury park, or heard of it and are refusing to read it on principle

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For Cambridge. My parents in law bought it for me, the mum is related to Raverat.

tbf, Portland has a very broad, although not remarkably deep, authorial culture. We've got lots of minor lights, such as that Fight Club guy, Chuck P, whose last name I can't spell, and some old, respected names like Ursula LeGuin. I chose Bev Cleary above them all, because you cannot grow up in Portland and not read her books; if you are able to read anything at all, it's an impossibility to avoid her.

i thought perfecta meant 4? maybe that's superfecta?

to answer the question far above i love suttree and think it is mccarthy's best and most hilarious stuff.

In Texas, it's all about McMurtry and McCarthy. I'm in Austin, and there are a bunch of authors that live or have lived here. Michener. O'Henry.
If I had to pick one, I would say Molly Ivins. She represents the "liberal oasis" aspect of Austin quite well.

Iain Sinclair is kinda London writing but I haven't read his novels in a long time.

to answer the question far above i love suttree and think it is mccarthy's best and most hilarious stuff.

― dark link (roxymuzak), Saturday, 22 January 2011 23:17 (Yesterday) Bookmark

totally