Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (33 page)

13. Discuss the tension between urban values and rural values Hall points out. Does this same conflict exist in other books you’ve read lately? Is this part of what some describe as the “Two Americas”?

14. Four of the twelve novels Hall discusses are written by women. How do these novels portray a different vision than the ones written by men? In particular, are women more richly characterized by the female writers, or do men sometimes achieve the same level of dimensionality?

15. When we read books like
Jaws
or
The Godfather
or
The Exorcist
, do you think what we are learning about human nature or the way the world works is different from when we read Khaled Hosseini’s
The Kite Runner
or Jonathan Franzen’s
The Corrections
? Or do we gain similar insights, regardless of the type of fiction we read?

16. Should students of literature be required to study popular novels as well as the literary classics? Should schools include
Valley of the Dolls
,
Jaws
, or
The Godfather
in their English curriculum or only books like
To Kill a Mockingbird
? How do you think this would help, or hurt, our understanding of literature?

17. Which of the novels on this list of twelve bestsellers do you think people will be reading a hundred years from now and which won’t last? Why?

J
AMES
W. H
ALL
is the author of seventeen novels, four books of poetry, two short-story collections, and a book of essays. He’s also the winner of the Edgar and Shamus awards.