Book Talks

The purpose of this list is to give you classic and contemporary novels of literary merit.

Main thing you need to do: go to Amazon and read reviews. Beware of spoilers.

Not every book from the list is in one of these categories.

Magical Realism/Latin American Lit.

The House of Spirits

Like Water for Chocolate

100 Years of Solitude

Bless Me Ultima

This genre is often about family relationships and generations and the weirdness within. Love, violence, and war often appear. People often die in these. You don’t always get resolution or happy endings, but that doesn’t mean that good things don’t happen. These blur the line between reality and history and things happen that defy the laws of physics, but they’re not fantasy genre.

Dystopian Societies or Settings w/unique/weird perspectives on life

The Handmaid’s Tale (by Margaret Atwood)

Brave New World

1984

The Fountainhead –Objectivism- rational self-interest, denounces altruism. Characters exist as symbols to prove a point. Egoism is an absolute moral good and therefore anything (people, systems) that blocks individual freedom is evil

Atlas Shrugged –tries to demonstrate what would happen to the world if economic freedom were lost – collapse of production and rise of corruption.

Period Pieces (usually English) that you’d see on Masterpiece Theater. Mostly 19th c. lit. for Anglophiles.

Pretty much all of these involve romance, relationships, and complications therein. Character-driven, but lots of plot. Social class is often an issue, esp. w/people who don’t fit in. All have fascinating, complex characters, lots of imagery, and rich descriptions of people, not all of whom will survive until the end of the book. Laughter and tears.

Period Pieces continued…

Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights

Moll Flanders

Edith Wharton’s stuff- an American Jane Austen, except sadder, class cons. and society

George Eliot’s stuff - rural or small villages in England, v. strong characters, death/love, these tend to be long w/small print.

Thomas Hardy’s stuff stuff will happen in these books, lots of plot.

E. M. Forster’s stuff -English people abroad, love, social class

The English Patient - love triangle/tragedy/betrayal/war/death

Possession – A. S. Byatt

Madame Bovary by Flaubert

 

 

Epic (and usually long) Novels w/casts of 100’s and lots of adventure

Most things by Dickens and Thackery

Count of Monte Cristo, Three Musketeers, Hunchback, Man in the Iron Mask,

Ivanhoe -medieval world, Saxon v. Norman, Xtian Knights v. Jews, Robin Hood, jousting, v. descriptive like you wouldn’t believe. Great book but have patience and take time w/it.

Tom Jones

Last of the Mohicans

Small town/Turn of the Century America and the Issues Therein

Sister Carrie – 18yr old country woman moves to Chicago in 1900 and becomes a kept woman

Babbit, Main Street - Mark Twain-ish, small town life and foibles of the people, Thornton Wilderish

The Jungle, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - tenement life, immigrants struggling against the odds

Asian/American Lit.

The Good Earth - This is the story of the cyclical nature of life, of the passions and desires that motivate a human being, of good and evil, and of the desire to survive and thrive against great odds. It begins with the story of an illiterate, poor, peasant farmer, Wang Lung, who ventures from the rural countryside and goes to town to the great house of Hwang to obtain a bride from those among the rank of slave. There, he is given the slave O-lan as his bride.

Snow Falling on Cedars (also war-related)

(2nd semester you can do Amy Tan and Memoirs of a Geisha)

War, Politics, Fitting into a New Culture

Catch 22

All the King’s Men

All Quiet on the Western Front

The Kite Runner (warning! Limited!)

A Farewell to Arms

The Sun Also Rises

Race, Ethnicity, Religious, Moral Issues

Invisible Man

Cry Beloved Country

Beloved

Bless Me, Ultima

The Kite Runner

Davita’s Harp, The Chosen

The Scarlet Letter

Crime and Punishment

Going to Other Countries, or Journeys Across This One, and Trying to Deal

Out of Africa (not much plot/much imagery and mood)

All the Pretty Horses – he rides his horse down to Mexico. Beautiful story of a young man who falls in love with the daughter of his boss on a Mexican ranch and the stuff that happens on the way and afterwards. Full of mood, imagery, setting stuff, adventure

The Grapes of Wrath

Last of the Mohicans

A Farewell to Arms

The Sun Also Rises