67. "The Last Picture Show" by Larry McMurtry

I wanted to read Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show because he alluded to it quite frequently in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. And I wasn't disappointed: It's a sometimes funny, sometimes sad coming-of-age story set in a small Texas town. The three protagonists, teenagers facing the end of high school and the beginning of the rest of their lives, struggle to define who they are and what they want and how to achieve those desires.

As much as I enjoyed this novel--and I did--I don't plan to read the sequels. McMurtry revisited these characters in several subsequent novels, but I think I prefer to keep them eternally teenaged in my mind, on the cusp of an unrealized adulthood.