Camino Island-Inspired Reading Challenge
Fans of John Grisham’s Camino Island series know how book seller Bruce Cable and novelist Mercer Mann always manage to find trouble in paradise. And while readers come for the thrills, they are delighted by the literary aspect centered around Cable’s popular Bay Books bookstore. We’ve compiled a list of the books mentioned throughout the series to create a Camino-Inspired Reading Challenge fit for amateur sleuths and book nerds alike. And when you’ve finished this reading challenge, be sure to check out our guide to John Grisham’s books.
Are you up for the challenge?
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1
Add to BookshelfCamino Island
by John Grisham
If you haven’t read the Camino series, start with the first novel, Camino Island. A gang of thieves stages a daring heist from a secure vault deep below Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Their loot is priceless, but Princeton has insured it for 25 million dollars. Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in the black market of stolen books and manuscripts. Mercer Mann is a young novelist who is approached by an elegant, mysterious woman with a generous offer of money, convincing Mercer to go undercover and infiltrate Bruce Cable’s circle of literary friends. But eventually Mercer learns far too much, and there’s trouble in paradise as only John Grisham can deliver it.
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2
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Camino Winds
by John Grisham
In the second book in the series, Hurricane Leo veers from its predicted course and heads straight for the island. The hurricane is devastating, and one of the apparent victims is Nelson Kerr, a friend of Bruce’s and an author of thrillers. But the nature of Nelson’s injuries suggests that the storm wasn’t the cause of his death: He has suffered several suspicious blows to the head. Who would want Nelson dead? Bruce begins to wonder if the shady characters in Nelson’s novels might be more real than fictional. And somewhere on Nelson’s computer is the manuscript of his new novel. As Bruce starts to investigate, what he discovers between the lines is more shocking than any of Nelson’s plot twists — and far more dangerous.
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Camino Ghosts
by John Grisham
In the third book, Bruce Cable shares with Mercer Mann that he has stumbled upon an incredible story about Dark Isle, a sliver of a barrier island not far off the North Florida coast. It was settled by freed slaves 300 years ago, and their descendants lived there until 1955. Tidal Breeze, a huge, ruthless corporate developer, wants to build a resort and casino on the island, which Lovely Jackson, the last descendant, knows is rightfully hers. Mercer befriends Lovely, and they plunge into an enormous fight over who owns Dark Isle. But Lovely knows that the island is cursed. The deep secrets of the past are about to collide with the enormous ambitions of the present, and the fate of Dark Isle — and Camino Island, too — hangs in the balance.
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This Side of Paradise
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise recounts the education of young Amory Blaine. As he makes his way among debutantes and Princeton undergraduates, we enter an environment heady with the promise of everything that was new in the vigorous, restless America after World War I. Fitzgerald’s remarkable formal inventiveness couches Amory’s narrative among songs, poems, dramatic dialogue, questions and answers. The novel’s freshness and verve — praised upon publication, now renowned by history — only heighten the sense that the world being described is our own, modern world.
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
For generations of enthralled readers, the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby has come to embody all the glamor and decadence of the Roaring Twenties. The Great Gatsby’s remarkable staying power is owed to the lyrical freshness of its storytelling and to the way it illuminates the hollow core of the glittering American dream.
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The Beautiful and Damned
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Would-be Jazz Age aristocrats Anthony and Gloria Patch embody the corrupt high society of 1920s New York: They are beautiful, shallow, pleasure-seeking, and vain. As presumptive heirs to a large fortune, their days are marked by endless drinking, dancing, luxury, and play. But when the expected inheritance is withheld, their lives become consumed with the pursuit of wealth, and their alliance begins to fall apart. Inspired in part by Fitzgerald’s own tumultuous union with his wife Zelda, these characters evoke a vivid portrait of a lost world: A city steeped in vice, a society without direction, and the rootless and decadent generation that inhabited it.
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War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind his family to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful, young daughter of a nobleman, who intrigues both men.
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Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
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Goodbye, Columbus
by Philip Roth
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion comes “a masterpiece” (Newsweek) that illuminates the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.
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10
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The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron
In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery. The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region. The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat’s life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.
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The Maltese Falcon (Special Edition)
by Dashiell Hammett and Josephine Hammett Marshall
Detective Sam Spade is a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. When his partner is killed during a stakeout, he is drawn into the hunt for a fantastic treasure with a dubious provenance — a golden bird encrusted with jewels. Also on the trail are a perfumed grifter named Joel Cairo, an oversized adventurer named Gutman, and Spade’s new client Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted generations of readers.
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In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
The most famous true crime novel of all time “chills the blood and exercises the intelligence” (The New York Review of Books) — and haunted its author long after he finished writing it. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.
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The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: Beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the man-child Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
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Soldiers’ Pay
by William Faulkner
A wounded veteran’s homecoming is at the center of Faulkner’s first novel. Badly scarred in body and mind, and unable to remember much, Donald Mahon is brought home at the end of the World War I by a fellow soldier and a young war widow they befriend on the train. Mahon’s arrival is a shock to his hometown, however, for he had long since been reported dead. As events unfold, alliances are formed and broken, sacrifices are made, and Faulkner deftly invests his heartbreaking tale with some of the deeper themes that would come to mark his later masterpieces.
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$12.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road: An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West.
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A Spool of Blue Thread
by Anne Tyler
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Clock Dance comes the story of four generations unfolding in and around the lovingly worn house that has always been the Whitshank family’s anchor.
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A Room of One’s Own
by Virginia Woolf
In this influential extended essay, Virginia Woolf outlined what women need in order to fully make use of their abilities. Using powerful images and memorable thought experiments she analyzes the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time. First published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own has been a towering and inspirational statement of feminist principles for nearly a century — and remains relevant now, at a time of growing awareness of the kind of social injustices that she decried.
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Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
Rabbit, Run follows Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a one-time high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six-years-old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty — even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.
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Cup of Gold
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s first novel and sole work of historical fiction — the violent, exciting story of the infamous pirate Henry Morgan. From the mid-1650s through the 1660s, Henry Morgan ravaged the coasts of Cuba and America, striking terror wherever he went. Cup of Gold is a lush, lyrical, swashbuckling pirate fantasy, and sure to add new dimensions to readers’ perceptions of this all-American writer.
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The Cider House Rules
by John Irving
John Irving’s classic novel about a troubled doctor, the conflicted orphan he mentors, and what it means to be of use in the world. First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules explores the nature of love, the complexities of found family, and the unpredictable consequences of our moral choices.
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The World According to Garp
by John Irving
Powerful and political, with unforgettable characters and timeless themes, The World According to Garp is John Irving’s breakout novel. The precursor of Irving’s later protest novels, it is the story of Jenny, an unmarried nurse who becomes a single mom and a feminist leader, beloved but polarizing — and of her son, Garp, less beloved but no less polarizing.
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The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain
A deeply evocative novel of ambition and betrayal that captures the love affair between two unforgettable people, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley — from the author of Love and Ruin and When the Stars Go Dark.
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23
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The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to play mahjong, remember the past, and gossip into the night. United in unspeakable loss and new hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Amy Tan’s modern classic examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters.
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Darker Than Amber
by John D. MacDonald
From a beloved master of crime fiction, Darker Than Amber is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
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The Lonely Silver Rain
by John D. MacDonald
Travis McGee has luck to thank for his reputation as a first-rate salvager of stolen boats. Now Billy Ingraham, a self-made tycoon, is betting that McGee can locate his $700,000 custom cruiser. McGee isn’t so sure. He knows all too well the dangerous link between Florida boatjackings and the drug trade, and he’s vowed never to swim with the sharks — but if he wants to keep his head (aka finances) above water, swim he will …
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