go read a book...

here, let me help you.

it's summer time. so along with it must come summer reading lists. there will be no tests, quizzes, or 3 page book reports to go along with the following but below are a few of the best books that i have ever read. these are at the top of my list not because they are light superficial stories but rather because they each have some deep underlying theme calling into question the accepted realties of today's world. enjoy.

5. of mice and men by john steinbeck

"we could live offa the fatta the lan'."

"s'pose you didn't have nobody. s'pose you couldn't go into the bunk house and play rummy 'cause you was black. how'd you like that? s'pose you had to sit out here an' read books. sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books. books ain't no good."

"a guy needs somebody - to be near him. a guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. i tell ya, i tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."

4. 1984 by george orwell

"until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

"and the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

3. the catcher and the rye by jd salinger

"it's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes."

"if a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? nobody."

"it's funny. all you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to. "

"don't ever tell anybody anything. if you do, you start missing everybody. "

"when i really worry about something, i don't just fool around. i even have to go to the bathroom when i worry about something. only, i don't go. i'm too worried to go. i don't want to interrupt my worrying to go. "

2. go ask alice

"even now i'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things i've gotten from books."

"well, like oil and water, i can't quite adapt or fit."

"i'm partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. sometimes i think we're all trying to be shadows of each other."

1. a clockwork orange

"what does god want? does god want goodness or the choice of goodness? is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?"

"they don't go into the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old bog or god and is his great pride and radosty. but the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. and is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?"

"the attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of god, to attempt to impose, i say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this i raise my sword-pen."