Adventures of Augie March

The writing is excellent. People do live lives of quiet desperation though. Sigh. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

The title of Saul Bellow’s third novel evokes Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and the voice that tells it—like the one Mark Twain created for Huck—is alive with the rhythms and energies of speech. The book’s irrepressible hero grows up in a poor Jewish household during the Great Depression. He ventures out from the family circle to find his way in the world, trying his hand at a motley assortment of jobs and encountering a host of colorful schemers, scammers, dreamers, and lovers. Ever restless, always hungering for experience, Augie roams from Chicago to Mexico and on into postwar Europe—“Look at me, going everywhere!” he taunts himself—where he’s wheeling and dealing at story’s end, still searching “for the right thing to do, for a fate good enough.” The worlds through which he passes and the characters he meets are rendered with a richness and a density that is true to life rather than to art; and Augie’s ardent inner life—fueled by the philosophies, plans, and passions he embraces and discards—plays out in pool rooms, department stores, apartment houses, and conversations, just like our own soulful enthusiasms. For six hundred pages, Bellow wrestles Augie’s buoyant encounters with experience into sentences that are extraordinary in their capacity: “They are like hall closets,” Joan Acocella has written, “you open them and everything falls out.”