I will have to go through this thread and add the page numbers of his memoir on each post to show exactly what I am talking about. Right now I am just writing from memory.
I seem to recall that at one point in this memoir, Patterson writes a list of books he claims are "serious" books. It was difficult to keep awake reading his memoir because I found it so boring. I had to put it down a number of times.
But my eyes opened wide when I saw on his "serious" book list the book title "Confederacy of Dunces" -- which is not a "serious" book, but rather a comic novel. It won a Pulitzer Prize.
I wondered: Patterson's memoir editor, his publisher, his agent -- who is supposed to be reading his memoir, prior to publication? That person is not doing s very good job at all.
From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel by American novelist John Kennedy Toole which reached publication in 1980, eleven years after Toole's death.[2] Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a foreword) and Toole's mother, Thelma, the book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success; it earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, and is now considered a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States.[3]
The book's title refers to an epigram from Jonathan Swift's essay Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Its central character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is an educated but slothful 30-year-old man living with his mother in the Uptown neighborhood of early-1960s New Orleans who, in his quest for employment, has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters....
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There has never been a movie made of this book, though many have tried. I saw a theatrical production of this book's story, but I did not enjoy the play as much as I enjoyed the story by reading the book. I probably would not even go see it as a film. I prefer reading the book. I still laugh out loud whenever I read it.
There are many different book covers, but I think this book cover, below, is the one on the book when I first bought it (I have bought it repeatedly, just because I needed a version in better condition). I have read this book many, many times:
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