(This page was published by Bob Ames in 2006.)
We are dealing with a literate crowd in these novels. I started this list by noting what our favorite gumshoe was reading but noticed that he was not the only one enriching his mind. I think this is complete but if you notice any omissions please call them to my attention.
- Susan: "The Children of the Dream: Communal Child-Reading and American Education" by Bruno Bettelheim
- Spenser: "Regeneration through Violence" by Richard Slotkin
- Spenser: "A Distant Mirror" by Barbara Tuchman.
- Spenser: "Play of the Double Senses: Spenser's Fairie Queen" by A. Bartlett Giamatti (later President of Yale)
- Spenser: "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
- Spenser: "Sartoris" by William Faulkner.
- Spenser: An unnamed novel by John LeClair
- Spenser: "Legends of the Fall" by Jim Harrison.
Susan: "The Road Less Traveled" by M. Scott Peck.
- Jerry Costigan: A thick book by Karl Von Clausewitz. Probably "On War."
- Spenser: "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam" by Barbara W. Tuchman.
- Spenser: "One Writer's Beginning" by Eudora Welty.
- Spenser: "The Road Less Traveled" by M. Scott Peck.
- Susan: "Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession" by Janet Malcomb.
- Hawk: "Common Ground" by J. Anthony Lucas.
- Spenser: "Season Ticket: A Baseball Companion" by Roger Angell.
- Christopholous: "The Elizabethan World Picture" by E.M.W. Tillyard.
- Hawk: "Race Matters" by Cornel West.
- Leighton: "Mode of Being: The Tactical Personae of Men and Women in the Modern World" by Paul Weiss.
- Hawk: "Remembering Denny" by Calvin Trillin.
- Susan: (my guess) "Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute" by Frederick Crews
- Hawk: (my guess) "Black Lies, White Lies : The Truth According to Tony Brown" by Tony Brown
- Hawk: "History of Britain" by Simon Schama.
- Hawk: "What Evolution Is" by Ernst Mayr
- Hawk: "Einstein's Universe" by Nigel Calder
- Spenser: "Rembrandt's Eyes" by Simon Schama
- Spenser: "Genome" by Matt Ridley
- Hawk: "The Teammates" by David Halberstam
- Spenser: "Longitudes and Attitudes" by Thomas L. Friedman
You can look most of these up on Amazon.com to find out what they are about. I may expand this later but here are a couple of examples:
- "Common Ground." - The 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning novel about racial relations and tensions in Boston during the sixties and *seventies, leading to the infamous troubles over forced bussing.
- "The Road Less Traveled." - The 1978 book by Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. In the era of "I'm OK, You're OK" Peck was courageous enough to suggest that "life is difficult" and personal growth is a "complex, arduous and lifelong task."