Books that have taught me courage

Prose writes about reading for courage. She dismisses the idea that books have to have characters that the reader can identify with. She blames the fact that book publishing is becoming more like Hollywood. She says what's important is that we are interested in the characters. Edward St. Aubyn's book Some Hope: A Triology is jaw-dropping. A lot of the books that she recommends have this effect on me. Some Hope is about monsters in hell, but it is not a horror book filled with stupidity and obvious props. I see monsters when I look at the world. But there are no un-exaggerated monsters on the best seller lists. A good example of how Hollywood has taken a good book and made it into a movie with obvious monsters is the movie they made of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. The book was turned into a terrible movie. I think that they made it because of the Mad Men TV show and it's also set in the 1950's. They did something that I found hard to believe: they made a more violent movie that is also less dark than Yates' book. Which is a devastating book.) Almost none of the books there took any courage to write, I imagine. All the guts have been taken out of the books so that everyone can go to sleep. Without being misanthropic, what do I see? What must be said?Margaret Atwood said that literature is a little shock for the future.

As I plow through this list of books, a woman at work says to me: "I can't read Flannery O'Connor; she's too depressing." But the alternative is much worse and that's to never have literary art touch your life because you want only happy, upbeat characters or one-dimensional monsters.