The journey through literature?

[Trask]

I am just now starting to read literature and I was wondering how I could go from reading Hemingway/Steinbeck as books to reading the much more difficult and dense literature and seeing the deeper meaning in it. Is there a certain path that should be helpful to read through i.e. Heminway -> Steinbeck -> X -> Y -> Z?

[Desolation]

The internet is a powerful tool.

Four years ago, I started by reading Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. Using resources such as Amazon (reviews and recommendations are a great way to find things), Good Reads, Wikipedia (mostly the Influenced/Influenced By sections), and this forum, I've been able to draw out a great map of the kind of literature that appeals to me. Browsing bookshelves at stores has also helped.

If you like Hemingway and Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Faulkner seem like the next logical choices.

[LizzzyBF]

You might like to try this: http://www.literature-map.com/
Put in an author's name, and the names that show up the closest are the ones you're most likely to enjoy. For Hemingway it suggests Haruki Murakami, who I've never heard of, but it's very close.

[OrphanPip]

Hemingway and Murakami are nothing alike though, so you'd have to question how that works. An American modernist characterized by his minimalism is not much like a contemporary Japanese writer of lengthy, heavily plotted and wordy magical realist novels.

[Desolation]

That site lists Murakami as the closest match (or one of the closest) for a lot of writers, including James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Henry Miller, Dostoevsky, Jack Kerouac, and Franz Kafka. It's kind of strange.