I actually got through this one pretty quickly just cause the book itself is pretty small and also pretty short. Like, if you wanted, you could probably read it in two sittings, it's only 150 or so pages. Don't let its length fool you, though, this book is really great. It's the tale of a man searching for meaning and is, while a little out of line with what I typically enjoy reading, very very good. The philosophical tangents and paragraphs upon paragraphs of reflection are a clear highlight of this. Really really worth a read if you're into Milan Kundera or you want a not depressing and brutally long version of The Book of Disquiet. It's a little here and there from time to time with a lot of the story being Siddhartha going from place to place to try a different means of answering a question of his, but also, it's only 150 pages so it's not really that big of a deal

It’s V.’s brother in essence. The main difference I can think of is just that V. doesn’t even have a plot. One could maybe even draw a line of comparison between this and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Heller’s Catch-22 is a fantastic novel with arguably the most recognizable and also best book cover of all time, riddled with geeky Kafkaesque satire and a cast of characters that is both expansive but also incredibly endearing. I’ve heard a good book is one that makes you laugh one page and cry the next and Catch-22 might be the embodiment of such a phenomenon. The book’s been hailed as a masterpiece by everyone and their grandma but usually their grandma as kind of the crown jewel of post-wwii (funny given the fact the book takes place during World War Two) American fiction you don’t read in high school. The fact you might need to look up a timeline to understand this book on a chronological level isn’t super devastating to its quality, although I’m not even gonna pretend I don’t think I owe it more rereads in the future. Snark is probably my favorite character despite how little he shows up, Orr probably being a close second. The interaction between Cathcart and Milo towards the end is really really funny. Point being, for a ~450 book, it doesn’t feel exhausting or boring at any point. Deserves its status, I’d say.

Brighton Rock is a shockingly difficult read; at 250 pages it almost feels obtuse. incredibly fast pacing, many twists and turns, and just generally an old-fashioned writing style (unsurprisingly) are all factors behind this. I had fears going in this would be written in that same “grandpa telling a story” wry narrator’s voice as Jack Black in You Can’t Win, which was the book that led me here. Maybe this book just struck it rich thematically: what book about British gangs isn’t interesting? I will say that the British-ness of it all does make it harder to read, but from a literary perspective, it’s definitely a treasure. I will say, this book is not very well suited for fast readers, as you’ll constantly find yourself flipping back pages and asking yourself what did you even read at the start of the paragraph. Point is, knocking through, say, twenty pages can be an actively challenging task when you, someone who I will assume is like me, someone who despite having virtually no issues relating to attention span, can hardly muster up the attention span to be able to give a summary of a page of this book because it’s so… just… easy to get lost in. Fortunately, it IS a good book. But I will say, getting through it is a bit of a gauntlet.

Are the same idiots calling this a "dystopian" the same ones who reluctantly read it in school against their will? Okay maybe I'm starting off this review a little too aggressively. This book changed my life when I first read it in eighth grade, and honestly, it changed my brain chemistry. I absolutely LOVED it. So much so that a friend and I wrote an entire chapter-by-chapter parody of it where countless more littluns are given very absurd and pointless deaths. But even beyond it just being my first exposure to a book with a downer ending as well as being incredibly entertaining and violent in a realistic way, it spoke to me as a person; I'd been to enough scout camps to understand that this story isn't even a heavily fictionalized exaggeration of what would happen if a bunch of thirteen year olds were all left on an island. In each of those situations, I'd seen myself as the Ralph of the bunch. Each had had their own Piggies, Jacks, Samnerics, Rogers, etc. And what makes this book so brilliant (and equally disturbing!) is that it IS believable. And beyond that, it's a great commentary and allegory for society as a whole. Fear is used to control and the most unreasonable tend to get their way. This is one of the finest books ever written. It was the book that encouraged me to love reading.

I read this book primarily because there's a Coin Locker Kid song (my favorite coin locker kid song, too) named after a line in it. Honestly, that probably says a thing or two about me. Point is, it's a really good one, but definitely a challenging one. Almost all of it is dialogue, mind you, dialogue that half the time to me, as an American, makes almost no sense. And because of this heavy focus on dialogue, it can be moderately hard to tell what's going on. Honestly, as interesting as the John Turner story is, I much prefer the Sal and Ian plotline, as I found their dialogue more interesting and fun to read. Anyway, moral is, don't take your mentally ill friend to a tombstone they're obsessed with, and don't blame paganism for giving your wife pneumonia.