Twenty-five Books That Shaped America: How White Whales, Green Lights, And Restless Spirits Forged Our National Identity (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
As someone who loves to read but never studied literature, this book is an nice synopsis into the major writing styles or movements that have influenced the American canon. While not a definitive list, it places each book in a historical context amid the contemporary social influences of the time. It also presents evidence as to why certain books are regarded as great literature and have not been forgotten. Of the 25 works included in the book, there were the expected ones, like Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huck Finn, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Walt Whitman's The Leaves of Grass, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, The Maltese Falcon, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Frost, the unexpected but known (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Cat in the Hat, Kerouac's On the Road), and several that I had never before heard before (Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine). I noticed one common theme in the choice selection, maybe something that wasn't really there, but one that I seemed to pick up on, is that the author, Foster, prefers the loose, plot-less books & short story collections which he prefers to call novels.The most entertaining reads were the chapters on The Cat in the Hat and To Kill a Mockingbird. I also found, with some exceptions, that the chapters that contained books I had read were easier and or more enjoyable reads than those chapters about works I had never heard of before. As mentioned, there are exceptions.
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I love Thomas C. Foster. He could write a book about watching paint dry and I would read it.
—LishiaaROqksx
