I’m an aspiring literature major in my senior year of highschool and I’ve been reading a ton recently in order to “prepare” for the workload I’m gonna be experiencing in college. A lot of the books I read are “classic” pieces of literature like Blood Meridian, Shakespeare and Moby Dick. I tend to read multiple (3-4) books at once but I’m experiencing one major problem as of recent.
All the books I’ve been reading are, of course, VERY complicated. I love being able to pick apart a really complicated book, annotate it and spend sometimes 10 minutes on one single page. It’s great. Rn I’m reading Macbeth, Blood Meridian, Crying of Lot 49 and Pale Fire. All of these books are a joy to read but require a lot of brain power.
Before I picked up Pale Fire I was reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It was long and definitely an amazing classic, but the writing was much simpler compared to the other books I was reading. Most pages would have maybe one or two annotations and for the most part it was a book I would pick up to destress when I needed a break from the rigorous reading, but I knew it was still a productive read that would help me with my major. Now that I’ve finished it, I’ve been a lot less motivated to read as a result of not having a destresser book like East of Eden, so I’m looking for more books like this. Not similar in plot or anything like that, but similar in the sense that it’s not a brainless book, but not a book I’d need a dictionary and 20 google tabs open to make sense of what’s happening. Any recommendations?
Other books I’ve read which I would consider to be in this category are: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Catch-22 (tho it was a bit complicated at times), 1984, really any Steinbeck, Catcher in the Rye.
by Reddithahawholesome