It's never really fit in with the David Foster Wallaces and the Thomas Pynchons and the Joseph Hellers and the other "funny classics" and I think that's in part to how adamant the book is that it's in no way a satire. Everything is written with such a rich passion and love towards its subject matter. One of Toole's strongest suits is managing to make every character of his likable, or at the very least so hateable that you can't help but love them. Every character is so complex and human, it's genuine brilliance at work. What characters do can come across as unreasonable, but at least you always understand why they do it. With the exception of Ignatius, no one ever just does things because they're inherently an excessive character. Whatever this is, it's fantastic. It's like the Joe's Garage of classic literature.

An absolutely wild ride. Maybe one of the craziest books I've ever read. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is just a constant rush of adrenaline, a neverending pulse, a story that lacks a strong overarching plot, but one that quickly takes you into its paranoid anecdotes of breaking the speed limit and huffing Ether on the freeways of western America. For lack of a better word, Fear and Loathing is pure insanity. A book that you seriously should read if you're into any of Thompson's beatnik predecessors.

Grew on me significantly from the last time I read it. The book is pretty good! I used to be against the abrupt shift in tone between the first couple of chapters and the rest of the book, but now I see it actually fits really well with Richard's whole schtick of constantly lying. The story itself is like one of Richard's descriptions of his past- it starts off whimsical, picturesque, beautiful, strange, intriguing, but the more you know, the more the story feels pulled towards the bleakness of everyday life. When writing a decently long book, this is kinda how you wanna go about it. This thing wouldn't be the same if it was only 300 pages, all ~550 are very very necessary especially in terms of setting the mood. Definitely not one of the most difficult reads I've had on this list (although maybe tying with The Fountainhead for most time consuming thus far, lol), but it is certainly one of the bleakest. Definitely has been one of the most claustrophobic and distressing reads on this list so far, but trust me, it is so worth reading. Although it may inherently seem like something that'd be shocking and transgressive for the sake of being shocking and transgressive (the Bret Easton Ellis shoutout in the book's foreword certainly does not help), believe me, it's so much more than that

incredibly rich from a literary perspective, a book primarily centric around identity, all this presented through a Canterbury Tales or Generation X-ian series of stories held together by a framing device. Where the brilliance kicks in though is how despite this all the "short stories" are all still deeply interconnected and most build off of previously gathered information as shown in the story, even the most minute detail remaining very consistent. A book where, yes, technically, in the end, nothing really happens well except in the last chapter lol, but that's, I think, part of why it works: it's a still photo of a couple of families. Sure, the photo itself does stay the same, but after someone explains to you the histories of the people pictured, everything changes.

Another victory for books that have a painting in their cover! Perfume is a book that is like The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Love in the Time of Cholera, in the sense that it takes its parent genre and then thwacks it on the back of the head until it dies like it’s Grenouille when he wants to extract the smell from a puppy. I got this book for my birthday, and my mom said, when she first received the copy, “Hey, we didn’t order this.” She was there when we ordered it off of eBay. I don’t blame her for reacting that way. From the cover (of my particular version), this looks to be a pointlessly provocative and gratuitously violent murder novel bestseller. It is a murder novel, yes, but probably the furthest from what I’d ever expect from the genre. Perfume is… crazy. For a book that on the surface appears to be, well, just a plain-old story about, like, a murderer or something. But it is truly one of the strangest books to ever fit in that genre of writing. It’s, like the aforementioned Love in the Time of Cholera and Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book riddled with philosophical tangents, featuring an odd, free-flowing story. The execution scene as an allegory for how we treat the wealthy/beautiful is pretty effective. Which is all to say, Perfume is a strange, thematically rich book that you should definitely pick up if you’re into thought provoking literary fiction.