EpicJosh.com

When I read some books, I can't shake them off. Sometimes it's a word, a paragraph or a dialogue that just grabs me. These kinds of books stick with me forever. Here is my list of sticky books—books that I've grown to love for their depth, their profoundness, or the way they made me laugh or cry.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

"Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"

In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury combines themes of political correctedness, religion, censorship and technological evolution—themes that grabs me both as a Communications/Political Studies student and as an individual.

"In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction." — Bradbury

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

"I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one."

Published 70 years ago, Rebecca has been turned into a movie that I've never seen and probably won't ever want to. The book is acclaimed, starring an overtly timid young heroine who falls in love with a wealthy widow. But wealthy men who are rich enough to hide secrets always have a darker side; this secret involves the death of his first wife. Love and potentially murder, what more could you want? All in all, a twisted epic of love.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

"Every day, men ease themselves into the nest of death like setting hens."

Steinbeck wrote East of Eden back in 1952, and it's considered the Nobel Prize-winner's most ambitious work, with the author himself saying that "I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this." It's a retelling of sibling rivalry; a remake of Cain and Abel as they both try to earn their father's love. It involves murder, adultery, and infant death: A classic that's complex in its morbid tragedy.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

"Oh, I dunno. Hardly none of the guys ever travel together. I hardly never seen two guys travel together. Never seem to give a damn about nobody. It jus' seems kinda funny a cuckoo like him and a smart little guy like you travelin' together."

As one critic said, "this beautiful, timeless novel speaks of the love that men can feel for each other--one inarticulate, dumb, sometimes violent in his need; the other clever, hopeful, and tied to a responsibility he thinks he doesn't want."