One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Because of the enormous cultural influence of the 1975 film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is remembered today mostly for the characters of Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). But it is the novel's engaging first-person narrator — a Native American insane asylum patient who pretends to be deaf and mute in order to isolate himself — that makes the book an especially enjoyable read:

I’m mopping near the ward door when a key hits it form the other side and I know it’s the Big Nurse by the way the lockworks cleave to the key, soft and swift and familiar she been around locks so long. She slides through the door with a gust of cold and locks the door behind her and I see her fingers trail across the polished steel — tip of each finger the same color as her lips. Funny orange. Like the tip of a soldering iron. Color so hot or so cold if she touches you with it you can’t tell which.

Recommended.