This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's first novel, somewhat comparable to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in portraying the restlessness and isolation of the so-called "lost generation". Amory is an intelligent, selfish, arrogant young man who spends a few blissful years at Princeton, serves in the army during World War 1, returns unscathed, and ultimately finds himself floating through life like a buoy, never knowing what his calling is, never getting over the one girl he ever truly fell for, and never knowing just how to relate with the rest of humanity. I really disliked him for most of this novel -- probably because I saw more of myself in him and his egotism than I wanted to see. Also, I cannot believe how modern this book felt... published in 1920, and yet it lives and breathes immediacy with an unflinching honesty that left me breathless.

"We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with the particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them --"

He paused only to get his breath.

"And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely. I have quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people's heads [...]" (160)

He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate. For the first time in his life he rather longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations. His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion. (184)

A conversation that Amory has with himself as both the questioned and the questioner:

Q. - Do you want a lot of money?
A. - No. I am merely afraid of being poor.
Q. - Very afraid?
A. - Just passively afraid.
Q. - Where are you drifting?
A. - Don't ask me!
Q. - Don't you care?
A. - Rather. I don't want to commit moral suicide.
Q. - Have you no interests left?
A. - None. I've no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. that's what's called ingenuousness.
Q. - An interesting idea.
A. - That's why a "good man gone wrong" attracts people. They stand around and literally warm themselves at the calories of virtue he gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in delight - "How innocent the poor child is!" They're warming themselves at her virtue. But Sarah sees the simper and never makes that remark again. Only she feels a little colder after that.
Q. - All your calories gone?
A. - All of them. I'm beginning to warm myself at other people's virtue.
Q. - Are you corrupt?
A. - I think so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about good and evil at all any more.
Q. - Is that a bad sign in itself?
A. - Not necessarily.
Q. - What would be the test of corruption?
A. - Becoming really insincere -- calling myself "not such a bad fellow," thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood -- she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again." (195)

Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light -- and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . . ." (213)

(1920. New York: Dover Publications, 1996)

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The novels that touch me the deepest are the ones of which I often have the least to say. This one... oh this one is untouchable. It left me bereft in so many places. Reminded me quite a bit of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, just in the way the characters and relationships are so throroughly developed and how quickly and strongly I became attached to them. I picked this unforgettable scene because it is what springs to mind everytime I think about this book:

Then I saw Baba on our roof. He was standing on the edge, pumping both of his fists. hollering and clapping. And that right there was the single greatest moment of my twelve years of life, seeing Baba on that roof, proud of me at last.

But he was doing something now, motioning with his hands in an urgent way. Then I understood. "Hassan, we --- "

"I know," he said, breaking our embrace. "Inshallah, we'll celebrate later. Right now, I'm going to run that blue kite for you," he said. He dropped the spool and took off running, the hem of his green chapan dragging in the snow behind him.

"Hassan!" I called. "Come back with it!"

He was already turning the street corner, his rubber boots kicking up snow. He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. "For you a thousand times over!" he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner. The next time I saw him smile unabashedly like that was twenty-six years later, in a faded Polaroid photograph. (66-67)

(2003. New York: Riverhead Books, 2004)