By Angie-Carlson Hurst

>With all the textbooks and classics and syllabi you’ve no doubt been stuffing into your heads, you may be thinking you just don’t have time for ‘fun’ reading- or if you DO have time, you’re not sure which titles are worth the time and which are just wastes of perfectly good beer money. The following is a list of five fine fall reads- can’t-fail choices that will make you laugh, make you cry, make you afraid of the dark again, and maybe even make you think about something other than your GPA.

*From a Buick 8- Stephen King

First and foremost, we must discuss the King. Oh, yes, folks, Stephen’s back. “From a Buick 8” will be published this month, and if you’ve been a little disappointed with his more recent offerings, your faith will be renewed. It’s creepy, it’s crawly- it’s classic King. It IS about a car, but it’s no ‘Christine’- this car swallows state troopers and punk kids and births giant fish and beetles of genus and species unknown.

* Lullaby- Chuck Palahniuk

This man is responsible for “Fight Club” and “Choke”- just go buy his new book already. This strange but not completely outlandish story of a deadly children’s song will draw you into the unpredictable world of Carl Streator. He’s a reporter doing research for a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, only to find that every case of crib-death seems to be tied to an African lullaby in a collection of international poems and rhymes.

*Middlesex- Jeffrey Eugenides

Eugenides most popular work is ” The Virgin Suicides.” Well, that was sex and suicide- Middlesex is hermaphroditism and self-discovery. However, Eugenides’ gift for spinning a complex yet forthright tale remains intact. The novel opens with Cal Stephanides (who used to be Calliope) at about fourteen years of age, learning that he (formerly ‘she’) was born a hermaphrodite, owing to a genetic mutation his family has carried for generations.

*The Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold

This is another story based on a pivotal moment in a fourteen-year-old girl’s life (this one stays a girl, though- albeit a dead one), and once again featuring the startlingly effective new favorite literary device of the up-and-coming author, where the climactic action appears at the beginning of the story. “The Lovely Bones” is being praised to the skies by everyone from television show book clubs to Jonathan Franzen (“The Corrections”), whose dislike of TV book clubs has been well-documented. Susie Salmon is fourteen when her next-door-neighbor rapes and murders her, then dismembers and dumps her body in the local landfill, and she narrates the rest of the story from Heaven over the next ten years or so. Susie’s descriptions of Heaven are so vivid and powerful that they alone would make this book worth reading.

*Jump the Shark- Jon Hein

If you’ve really gone over the top and read all the titles on the list so far, you are in desperate, desperate need of some humor. For that purpose, here is the humble offer of… the Fonz. In case you aren’t familiar with the phrase ‘jumping the shark,’ it originated with an episode of “Happy Days” in which Fonzie, for some reason, straps on some water skis and jumps a tank of sharks. It is widely believed that this was the beginning of the end for the Fonz, Richie, and the rest of the “Happy Days” gang. Current slang has the good fortune of being augmented with this term- and boy, it’s more applicable than you think. This collection of notorious “shark-jumping” moments is bound to get at least a chuckle or two out of you in undeniable recognition of the turning points for your favorite television shows, celebrities, athletes and many others.