Ugh. That book is to eastern philosophy as The Alchemist is to young middle class white girls’ world view.

It’s an alright book if you’ve never read any Buddhist texts. But basically it’s inert and vapid. A good starting off point, I suppose.

Edit: that came off with a lot more heat than I intended. I didn’t mean any offense, just that I found it to be largely in the same category as The Alchemist. If it helps anyone, then it will have done its job.

Seconded. I’m only 2 chapters in and I had to put it away (coincidentally to read nonfiction books for class), and it’s sitting on my shelf and I can’t wait to pick it back up again. I understand almost nothing about the dearth of naval descriptions, but I already adore the prose and the two men.

Stoner by John Williams.

Here is the second paragraph (sorry, I don’t know how to indent text):

“An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”

Off the top of my head, Pulitzers for Hemingway (Old Man and the Sea), Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath), and McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) are some of my very favorites.

John Williams also won a National Book Award for Augustus which admittedly I haven’t read but his Stoner is my favorite book of all time.

In short, I don’t read books because they have awards, but my interest in a book is influenced by them provided I already had an interest in the book.

You know, I may be mistaken in my assumption of the meaning of the term! I first came across it when reading House of Leaves and S. and assumed the term applied those books having stories within stories.

But now that you mention frame stories, well hell. “Let me sit you down and tell you a tale” is exceedingly common in literature and seems to apply to most of my quick list above!

I’ll have to look further into this…

Ergodic literature! One of my favorites.

Someone already mentioned Arabian Nights, but other examples I can think of are:

Pale Fire - Nabokov

House of Leaves - Danielewski

S. - JJ Abrams and Dorst

If on a winters night a traveler - Calvino

The name of the wind - Rothfuss

Hyperion - Simmons