Entertaining Works of Literary Merit

Lolita by Nabokov- It's one of the richest novels ever written. You might need a dictionary, but it's not dark and difficult like Conrad's Heart of Darkness for instance. It's like watching Federer and Nadal play tennis. Baffling and brilliant.

The Stranger by Albert Camus- one of the great works of applied philosophy, which means you get the meaning without the drivel. Camus wrote incredibly simple sentences, exactly the opposite of Nabokov. It's very accessible, but still enjoyable in the sense of having important content. I also just read his novel The Fall, which is also great, but unlike The Stranger has an articulate narrator that is a pleasure to listen to.

Anything by John Steinbeck will be emotionally gripping. He is one of the strongest at producing empathy from his readers so you will easily be invested in his characters within a short time.

I would also recommend the short stories of Anton Chekhov, a fantastic story teller that used plain, simple language to convey complex emotions and characters. Very enjoyable without being a task. 10 pages and you can be left with enough material for an evening of enjoyment.

I would advise you to stay away from the following writers if you're not too interested in difficult novels:

James Joyce- I love his Portrait of the Artist, but need an annotated guide to help fill in the pieces with. It's saturated with Irish dialect and contemporary issues of the time that American readers have a very hard time noticing.

Thomas Pynchon- Just outrageously complex; multiple readings required.

William Faulkner- Very cerebral like Joyce, with his use of 'stream of consciousness.' He's technically brilliant, which has much to do with his acclaim, so if you overlook his very subtle wordplay, you won't enjoy his works so much.

I would also take a strong look at Cormac McCarthy. Normally I read classic Dead White Men, but McCarthy is still alive and is producing incredible novels in the same way as Steinbeck. He deals with struggle within humanity and tension between horror and beauty. The Road is outstanding, as is his trilogy (can't remember the exact name), but it begins with All the Pretty Horses. His writing is a bit quirky in that he uses no quotation marks which I'm assuming he does to remove the formality of writing and reduce it to a pure and raw translation of content. It's simple to follow along with after a couple pages and you will find it refreshing and honest.

If all the pretty horses is indeed one of his novels,... it's terrible.

I would also suggest avoiding Toni Morrison. She uses this vague impressionist "jazzthetic" method of writing and storytelling based off jazz and other African American oral traditions that can (and is sometimes supposed to) be utterly confusing and ambiguous.

+1 on McCarthy.

The Man Who Was Thursday by Chesterton.

The run-on sentences are an...acquired taste, maybe? There are some very rich descriptions of the Southwest though.

The name of the trilogy is the "Border Trilogy." The Crossing is nowhere near as good as All The Pretty Horses.

All of these books are approx. 200 pages or less, and (in my opinion) easy to read:

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. I love this book.

Shane by Jack Schaefer. This is often categorized as a "young adult" novel, but I think it's an incredibly mature study of good and evil in the Old West. Pretty damn entertaining, too.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. In my opinion, the most "literary" of all crime fiction novels. Very short, very brutal, very real.

Prose: Kafka's Metamorphosis Ellison's Invisible Man Voltaire's Candide Plays: Sartre's No Exit Angels in America (I forget the author's name) These touch on existence, race, and homosexuality.

have read No Exit numerous times and seen 8 to 10 productions of it at various levels. still love it.

Awesome, I get to be the snob that says No Exit (aka Huis Clos) is much better in the original french.

Maybe

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews if you like short stories: Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver The Pugilist at Rest: Stories by Thom Jones Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson

Iain Banks: Walking on Glass and The Wasp Factory
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Strange Pilgrims

Someone should put you out of your misery.