The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004). Nick Guest is a young gay man desperate for love, the son of a modest antiques dealer who wants to climb the social ladder. In gorgeous, closely observed prose reminiscent of Henry James, much of this Booker Prize–winning novel chronicles Nick’s amorous and social ascents in the drug-and sex-fueled world of 1980s England.
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953). Chandler’s sardonic and chivalric gumshoe Philip Marlowe winds up in jail when he refuses to betray a client to the Los Angeles police investigating the murder of a wealthy woman.
The Lorax by Dr. Seuss (1971). This picture book is a poignant environmental fable about a beautiful forest of Truffula trees destroyed for the sake of the mass production of curious garments called Thneeds. Long after the forest has been destroyed, the Once-ler who destroyed it comes out of his “Lerkim on top of his store” to tell this cautionary tale to children.
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954–56). An Oxford medievalist, Tolkien drew on his vast knowledge of mythology, theology, and linguistics to imagine this epic trilogy. The books chronicle the hobbit Frodo’s attempt to destroy the magical ring of Sauron, Lord of Darkness.
The Loser by Thomas Bernhard (1983). Our narrator had studied the piano with his friend Wertheimer and the virtuoso Glenn Gould. Gould’s unapproachable brilliance compelled them to give up music. While this abandonment leads to their ruin, Gould’s career does not bring him happiness.
The Lost Father by Mona Simpson (1992). Featuring the heroine from Anywhere but Here, the novel tracks Mayan Atassi’s search across two continents and to the point of madness for the man who has become her God—the father who abandoned her.
Total Points: 3 (ALK 3)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot (1915). Eliot’s first major poem is a dramatic monologue in the voice of a spiritually exhausted, emotionally sterile Everyman.
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh (1948). Dennis Barlow is an English poet working at a Hollywood pet cemetery. Arranging a friend’s funeral, he falls for a cosmetician at the posh Whispering Glades, a paradise for the human deceased, or Loved Ones.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras (1984). This Prix Goncourt–winning work might now be considered an early “fictional memoir.” Drawn from Duras’s life in prewar Indochina, it tells the story of the ill-fated love between a young girl and her Chinese lover.
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924). Hans Castorp visits his cousin at a sanatorium in the mountains of Switzerland. Soon he too becomes ill (maybe) and checks into the hospital—for seven years. In this sanctuary, Hans and the sanatorium’s denizens endlessly debate questions of morality, politics, and culture, as the “real world” moves inexorably toward the horror of World War I.