May I put in a few plugs? Things Fall Apart and Their Eyes Were Watching God are great books with powerful narrative steam engines; I think you'd know pretty early in each of them whether you wanted to keep reading. And Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty have a couple of the liveliest voices in English literature.

I wonder what "George Bergeron" is supposed to be. "Harrison Beregron," maybe, but that's a short story, unless it's also the title of a collection (British?) that I don't know about.