Gateway books. Gateway to what? Maybe gateway to serious work like Finnegans Wake, the subject of a book club discussion in Venice, California starting in 1995 and ending in October 2023 after 28 years of analyzing literary allusions, word play, and obscure references only to find find – surprise! – that the book itself doesn’t actually end but loops back to the beginning, heralding an endless cycle (click: Finnegans Wake Book Club). Note to self: devote the next decade of MMs to discussing Ulysses.
Okay, that’s not fair. Our focus piece (click: Gateway Books) by an English professor is very approachable as it centers on the 38 responses to a tweet survey asking the same questions we might discuss about how we may have been shaped by such books in our earlier years: when and how we were exposed to these authors; whether and how they may have shaped our identity; when and why we stopped reading reading them; and how reading these authors at a fairly early age shaped our subsequent intellectual development.
The term gateway would appear to be speaking as much to the sensitivities of the respondents as it does to the underlying works. With a predominant male sampling, the inclusion on the list of Catcher In The Rye with its theme of adolescent alienation is unsurprising as are the other works tapping into the “white middlebrow canon” depicting the anti-war movement and cynicism in general like Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Just reading these titles is a walk down memory lane in the way they once served to bind “us” (meaning all those other otherwise-alienated youths)…
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