Here are some of the best we've ever read!
[Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres || Remembering Babylon by David Malouf || The Perez Family by Christine Bell || Mama Day by Gloria Naylor || In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien || The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood || Staggerford by Jon Hassler || Cloudstreet by Tim Winton || A Frozen Woman by Annie Ernaux || In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez || The Progress of Love by Alice Munro || Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow]
[Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston || A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley || Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko || Beloved by Toni Morrison || To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee]
[My Antonia by Willa Cather || Middlemarch by George Eliot || The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck || Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte || Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf]
[One Writer's Beginning Eudora Welty || Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick || Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman || Black Boy by Richard Wright || In My Mother's House by Kim Chernin]
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Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
Pantheon Books, 1994
Novel, 436 pagesCorelli's Mandolin, a book not to be missed, tells of the Italian invasion and occupation of Greece during World War II, specifically of events on the island of Cephallonia, "plaything of the great, the powerful, the plutocratic, and the odious," and "plundered in perpetuity." Through a variety of narrators-one fascinating chapter gives us the egomaniacal ravings of Il Duce-we see the way in which the vagaries of war create both monster and hero, and how much is sacrificed to ego, ineptness, stupidity, greed, and simple indifference.
The central plot concerns Greek islanders Dr. Iannis and his daughter Pelagia, who are forced to share their home with the Italian army's Captain Corelli. Under orders but hardly sympathetic to Italy's nationalistic goals, the expansive Correlli's good humor and mandolin-playing soon win the favor of his "hosts." Full of humor and pathos-I laughed out loud many times while reading, and wept as well-Corelli's Mandolin is a sprawling, epic novel. It is Greek history, world history, a love story and a look at the madness of war. Books like this are the reason we read. C.W.
Excerpt
"If you want to be a musician this is the last place to be. You would have to go home, or to America. And I don't think that Pelagia could live in Italy. She is a Greek. She would die like a flower deprived of light.
"I know you have not thought about it. Italians always act without thinking, it's the glory and the downfall of your civilization. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanishwell, God knows. Anyway, Pelagia is Greek, that's my point. So can it work? Even disregarding the obvious impracticalities?"
Remembering Babylon by David Malouf
Pantheon Books, 1993
Novel, 200 pagesGemmy Fairley, barely alive, washed up onto an Australian shore after a mid-19th-century shipwreck. He was rescued by native people and lived with them for sixteen years, learning their aboriginal ways. As the novel opens he suddenly appears in a newly-founded English settlement on the edge of the Queensland frontier. He is barely recognizable as human and has forgotten all but a few words of English. The presence of Gemmy, a man whose identity floats suspended between two cultures, challenges the settlers' precarious sense of who they are. It sets the stage to study the nature of identity and how it affects the interpretation of events. With stunning insight into human behavior and the way it shapes history, David Malouf demonstrates the irrationality and consequences of fear of the unknown as well as the power of trust in "the process and mystery of things." This book is beautifully written and highly readable. C.W.
Excerpt
Thwarted by their failure, most of the time, to grasp what the codger was after, and suspecting that his giggling and sidling and hopping about on one foot was meant to make a fool of them, some men would grow hot under the collar and begin to push him about; to the point at times where they had to be restrained. Even those who felt sorry for the man found themselves dismayed by what they called his 'antics.' They felt an urge, when he went into one of his jerking and stammering fits, to look hard at the horizon, and when that yielded no satisfaction, to give grave attention to the dust between their boots. He was a parody of a white man. If you gave him a word for a thing, he could, after a good deal of huffing and blowing, repeat it, but the next time round you had to teach it to him all over again. He was imitation gone wrong, and the mere sight of it put you wrong too, made the whole business somehow foolish and open to doubt.
The Perez Family by Christine Bell
W.W. Norton & Company, 1990
Novel, 256 pagesAfter twenty years in a Cuban prison, Juan Raul Perez finds himself heading for Florida in the 1980 Mariel boat lift. His dream of being reunited with his wife Carmela, who waits for him in Miami, is about to come true. But, like a man waking up after a long sleep, he has trouble getting his bearings. He passively allows himself to be taken under the wing of Dottie Perez, fellow traveler and no relation. Given that families enjoy a preferred status and that Dottie and Juan Raul have the same last name, they pose as husband and wife. A series of mistaken identities leads to a comedy of errors. Author Christine Bell adds a touch of magical realism in the form of San Lazaro, a somewhat inept and weary patron saint who does his best to comfort his earthly charges. Bell treats her wonderfully human characters with the greatest tenderness, and she treats her readers to a delicious story with an unexpected but most satisfying ending. C.W.
Excerpt
So many of them! San Lazaro thought as he watched Juan Raul Perez running towards Luz Paz. Who would have thought so many of them would come undone? Their resurrections burdened them more surely than the grave. San Lazaro barely had time to hear all their petitions, let alone answer so many prayers. Yet he had spent all morning telling Luz Paz that her daughter had not suffered. Her grief made her deaf to his words. Perhaps he needed to get someone else to tell her. He liked her very much. Everyone else brought San Lazaro water, it was traditional, but she brought him cafe cubano, and in times like these, with so many of them to take care of, he needed the caffeine.
Mama Day by Gloria Naylor
Ticknor & Fields, 1988
Novel, 312 pagesLike the island in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Willow Springs is a mystical island. It differs, however, from Shakespeare's island in that a bridge connects it to the world of reality. Founded in 1823, it is sustained by the legend of Sapphira Wade, a slave woman who married and killed her master after obtaining from him the deed to the island. Miranda "Mama" Day is a descendant of Sapphirra Wade and matriarch of the island. She possesses the powers of a deep connection to place, nature and her own psyche. When her niece Cocoa crosses the bridge and marries George, a northerner shaped by reason and technology, the struggle between worlds begins.
Mama Day is a fascinating, sometimes frightening, exploration of two colliding views of the world. Can we reconcile technology with nature? Naylor is not optimistic about the possibility. N.P.
Excerpt
We're sitting here in Willow Springs, and you're God-knows-where. It's August 1999-ain't by a slim chance it's the same season where you are. Uh, huh, listen. Really listen this time: the only voice is your own. But you done just heard about the legend of Sapphira Wade, though nobody here breathes her name. You done heard it the way we know it, sitting on our porches and shelling June peas, quieting the midnight cough of a baby, taking apart the engine of a car-you done heard without a single living soul really saying a word. Pity, though, Reema's boy couldn't listen, like you, to Cocoa and George down by them oaks-or he woulda left here with quite a story.
In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien
Houghton Mifflin, 1994
Fiction, 306 pagesAfter suffering a bruising electoral defeat, John and Kathy Wade head for a cabin in northern Minnesota. They hope to get some perspective back in their lives but something goes horribly wrong: Kathy vanishes. As the investigation into her disappearance twists and turns into terrifying possibilities, we learn the terrible secret John carries with him from the past. It is a secret so shocking the only way to live with it has been to suppress it, yet the keeping of it has poisoned his marriage. Once nicknamed "The Sorcerer" for his seemingly magical ability to escape reality, John can no longer work his magic to undo what has happened to him, try as he might to blur the lines between what is real and what is conjured.
Nothing less than a masterpiece, this powerful, haunting and tragic novel sets the vast landscape of the Lake of the Woods alongside the landscape of the human psyche and the human heart. The beauty and precision of the language squeezes the heart, even as it leaves the reader breathless in sheer wonder at O'Brien's word sorcery. Don't miss the opportunity to fall under the spell of this great American writer. N.P.
Excerpt
The wilderness was massive. It was a place, Wade came to understand, where lost was a rule of thumb. The water here was the water there. Nothing in particular, all in general. Forests folded into forests, sky swallowed sky. The solitude bent back on itself. Everywhere was nowhere. It was perfect unity, perfect oneness, the flat mirroring waters giving off exact copies of other copies, everything in multiples, everything hypnotic and blue and meaningless, always the same. Here, Wade decided, was where the vanished things go. The dropped nickels. The needles in haystacks.
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
Doubleday, 1993
Novel, 466 pagesThe Robber Bride, inspired by the Grimm fairy tale "The Robber Bridegroom," explores female villainy and the way in which evil requires complicity from its victims. As the novel opens the three friends, Roz, Charis, and Tony, each having been ruthlessly exploited by the amoral Zenia, must come to grips with the fact that the presumed-dead Zenia is very much alive. The bulk of the novel consists of flashbacks in which author Margaret Atwood fleshes out these quirky and complicated characters and shows how Zenia insinuated herself into their lives and changed them forever. Part social satire, part gripping mystery, this modern story of women in relationship with each other and with men, is also a chilling account of wickedness. It is wonderfully entertaining as well. R.T.
Excerpt
The truth is that at certain times-early mornings, the middle of the night-she finds it hard to believe that Zenia is really dead. Despite herself, despite the rational part of herself, Tony keeps expecting her to turn up, stroll in through some unlocked door, climb through a window carelessly left open. It seems improbable that she would simply have evaporated, with nothing left over. There was too much of her: all that malign vitality must have gone somewhere.
Staggerford by Jon Hassler
Ballantine Books, 1974
Novel, 294 pagesIn this novel, Jon Hassler introduces the small town world of Staggerford, Minnesota and one of his most memorable characters, Miss Agatha McGee. Equally engaging is Miles Pruitt, a high school teacher who rooms at Miss McGee's. During the week in Pruitt's life which comprises the novel, we learn-through his musings, journal entries, and interactions with his students and fellow teachers-of his failed hopes and expectations. Through his own cautiousness and inaction he lost the love of his life to his rival, now principal of the high school. The irony of his life is not lost on Miles; he tells his story with the wry humor and compassion that has become the hallmark of Jon Hassler's fiction. J.G.
Excerpt
"So what I was thinking, Miles, was that maybe there is a similar process going on in human affairs. If you let sunshine stand for the goodness in the world and you let rain stand for evil, do goodness and evil mingle like sun and rain to produce something? To bring something to maturity, like those ferns? Does God permit sin because it's an ingredient in something he's concocting and we human beings aren't aware of what it is? Is there sprouting up somewhere a beautiful fern, as it were, composed of goodness and sin?"
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Graywolf Press, 1992
Novel, 426 pagesCloudstreet follows the fortunes of two families who share a large and unusual house in the city of Perth in southwest Australia. One family allows Luck-"the shifty shadow of God"-the upper hand in their lives; the other believes in industry and thrift. Neither industry nor Luck, however, inoculates either family against trouble and tragedy. Tim Winton has drawn his totally original characters with affection and compassion; they are quirky yet familiar, flawed-some seriously-yet lovable. The colorful Australian working-class vernacular infuses this exuberant novel with an almost bawdy quality. Both funny and sad, it celebrates life as lived by human beings, their enormous capacity for self-defeating behavior notwithstanding-and the door always remains at least slightly open to the possibility of grace. C.W.
Excerpt
I've pulled a kid out of the river before, Rose. When I was eleven years old. My own brother. I know how it feels. I know how that poor bastard feels. And I got thinkin about my childhood, my life. I did a lot of feelin sorry for myself, those years. I used to see the saddest things, think about the saddest, saddest things. And those things put dents in me, you know. I could've turned out angry and cold like him. I can see how that evil little bugger might've just turned, like a pot of milk.
A Frozen Woman by Annie Ernaux
Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995
Novel, 192 pagesThe unnamed narrator of A Frozen Woman finds herself living a life she never planned. In an effort to understand how she went from an adventure-loving, intelligent, ambitious girl to a constrained, often-bored, always-exhausted housewife, she puts every stage of her life under the microscope. The result is the anatomy of a seduction: one step at a time she surrenders her dreams in favor of a relationship with a man, willfully ignoring any signal that the promise of marriage could never match the reality. Once married, she tries to challenge convention but is repeatedly defeated by a confluence of social forces, finally ending up "a well-broken little horsey." I can't recommend this book highly enough. But beware: Annie Ernaux, with stunning clarity, dredges up and articulates much that many women prefer not to see. Read at your own risk. C.W.
Excerpt
Organization, the watchword of women everywhere, magazines overflowing with advice, save time, do this, that, and the other, like my mother-in-law, but it's really a method of sticking yourself with the most work possible in the least amount of time without pain or suffering because that would bother those around you. I fall for it all, too-the memo pads for shopping lists and the reserves stockpiled in the cupboard, the frozen rabbit for unexpected visitors, the bottle of vinaigrette made in advance, the breakfast bowls set out on the table the night before. A system that relentlessly devours the present: you keep moving forward, the way you do in school, but without ever seeing the end of anything. Speed is my motto. Forget the sprightly dance, the loving touch of the dustrag, tomatoes carved into roses; I go full tilt, stampeding through the housework trying to free up an hour in the morning, which often turns out to be a mirage, but most of all I keep my eyes on the great prize of the day, that personal time regained at last but constantly threatened: my son's afternoon nap.
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Algonquin Books, 1994
Novel, 324 pagesOn November 25, 1960, Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal were murdered by the Dominican Republic's repressive Trujillo regime for their efforts to overthrow the hated dictator. Dubbed "the butterflies," the three sisters have since become enshrined as mythic figures in the liberation of the Caribbean island. Fascinated by these larger-than-life Dominican heroes, Julia Alvarez undertook to learn more about the real Mirabal sisters. Her efforts resulted in this novel in which she imagines the sisters as ordinary women, who, once politicized, each in her own way, took extraordinary risks because integrity and the times required it. The reader sees that, their hero status notwithstanding, the risks these women took were not any easier for them than they would be for anyone. Indeed, Alvarez's flesh-and-blood characters inspire us into believing we all might be capable of heroism. C.W.
Excerpt
"Hail Mary," Maria Teresa began, "full of grace"
I turned around and saw the packed pews, hundreds of weary, upturned faces, and it was as if I'd been facing the wrong way all my life. My faith stirred. It kicked and somersaulted in my belly, coming alive. I turned back and touched my hand to the dirty glass.
"Holy Mary, Mother of God," I joined in.
I stared at her pale, pretty face and challenged her. Here I am, Virgencita. Where are you?
And I heard her answer me with the coughs and cries and whispers of the crowd: Here, Patria Mercedes, I'm here, all around you. I've already more than appeared.
The Progress of Love by Alice Munro
Penguin Books, 1986
Short stories, 411 pagesIn this collection of eleven stories, Alice Munro creates characters whose experiences of love are both common and powerful: a daughter's memories of her mother, a wife's deception, a friend's betrayal, an old man's claim on his past. Munro captures the moment easily overlooked, the mundane encounter that, in hindsight, marks a turning point in a relationship. With razor sharp clarity, Munro illuminates the ambiguities involved in the progress of love. L.R.
Excerpt
When my father was very old, I figured out that he didn't mind people doing new sorts of things -for instance my getting divorced-as much as he minded them having new sorts of reasons for doing them.
Thank God he never had to know about the commune.
"The Lord never intended," he used to say. Sitting around with the other old men in the Home, in the long, dim porch behind the spirea bushes, he talked about how the Lord never intended for people to tear around the country on motorbikes and snowmobiles. And how the Lord never intended for nurses' uniforms to be pants. The nurses didn't mind at all. They called him "Handsome," and told me he was a real old sweetheart, a real old religious gentleman. They marveled at his thick black hair, which he kept until he died. They washed and combed it beautifully, wet-waved it with their fingers.
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Random House, 1975
Novel, 240 pagesIn Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow recreates an America on the brink of entering the modern era-a time when the United States begins to shed its Victorian values to accommodate and recognize its multi-ethnic diversity. Two families-one "Yankee," the other Jewish immigrant-provide the contrast that reveals this emerging America.
In an intriguing blend of fact and fantasy, the lives of these family members intertwine with some of the leading figures of the time, including J.P. Morgan, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, and Harry Houdini. In words simple and spare, Ragtime portrays a mythical America confronting its reality. N.P.
Excerpt
The following Sunday, Coalhouse Walker did not appear for his visit. Sarah returned to her room. It was now clear to Father that the situation was deteriorating. He said it was ridiculous to allow a motorcar to take over everyone's life as it now had. He decided to go the next day and talk to the Emerald Isle contingent, especially to Chief Conklin. What will you do, Mother said. I will make them see they are dealing with a property owner of this city, Father said. If that doesn't work I will quite simply bribe them to repair the car and return it to my door. I will pay them money. I will buy them off. Mr. Walker would not like that, Mother said. Nevertheless, said Father, that's what I'm going to do. We will worry about explanations later. They are the town dregs and will respect money.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Harper and Row, 1990 (Originally published 1937)
Novel, 184 pagesZora Neale Hurston, one of America's greatest (and until recently, forgotten) writers, often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, has created a powerful and moving story of adventure, love and a woman's search for her own identity. Set in the all black town of Eatonville early in the century, Janie travels through life armed with strength and belief in herself. By the end of her quest, Janie has learned many important lessons, not the least of which is that "you got tuh go there tuh know there." Hurston used authentic dialect and wrote about the culture she knew, but this is a story for all times and all people. R.T.
Excerpt
It's uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.
Contemporary Classics
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Fawcett Columbine, 1991
Novel, 371 pagesJane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of an Iowa farm family is a rich, multi-layered parable of the destructive power of patriarchy, as well as a modern, American version of King Lear. In Smiley's retelling the reader witnesses a family's demise through the eyes of eldest daughter Ginny. As in Lear, this daughter is still quite capable of treachery, but in Smiley's version, she and her sister Rose appear in a sympathetic light.
The fertile Iowa farmland and the family's thousand acres attain near-mythic proportions as Smiley explores the self-destructive nature of the urge to master the land and dominate women. As in Shakespeare's classic, this novel can only end in tragedy, but Smiley leaves the door open to the possibility of healing and forgiveness. J.G.
Excerpt
It was easy, sitting there and looking at him, to see it his way. What did we deserve, after all? I squirmed, remembering my ungrateful thoughts, the deliciousness I had felt putting him in his place. When he talked, he had this effect on me. Of course it was silly to talk about "my point of view." When my father asserted his point of view, mine vanished. Not even I could remember it.
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Viking Penguin Inc., 1977
Novel, 262 pagesIf Native American people adopt the values of a white culture that views them as less than human, they learn to despise themselves. In Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko clearly exposes this double bind sociologists call internalized oppression. She also points the way out.
Tayo has returned to the Laguna Pueblo reservation after World War II, having been held by the Japanese as a prisoner of war. His sense of alienation from the white culture as well as from his native world is all but complete, and despair ravages his body and soul. Ceremony is the story of his healing. Like the cattle specially bred by his Uncle Josiah and reclaimed by Tayo as part of his healing ceremony, Tayo is a survivor. He learns there are ways to adapt to changing realities that honor the values and the ancient stories of his people, that allow him to remain true to himself. There is much in this book that is wise and hopeful. Parts of it read like prayer. It is a book to be read again and again. C.W.
Excerpt
"Indians wake up every morning of their lives to see the land which was stolen, still there, within reach, its theft being flaunted. And the desire is strong to make things right, to take back what was stolen and to stop them from destroying what they have taken. But you see, Tayo, we have done as much fighting as we can with the destroyers and the thieves: as much as we could do and survive."
Tayo walked over and knelt in front of the ribs roasting over the white coals of the fire.
"Look," Betonie said, pointing east to Mount Taylor towering dark blue with the last twilight. "They only fool themselves when they think it is theirs. The deeds and papers don't mean anything. It is the people who belong to the mountain."
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Alfred A Knopf, 1987
Novel, 338 pages"Beloved" is the word written on the tombstone of Sethe's baby daughter, and Beloved is the name of a young woman without a history who appears at Sethe's door in post-Civil War Ohio. Toni Morrison reveals the painful story of slavery and its aftereffects through the voices and memories of Sethe and others who fled the South for freedom. Her narrative style recreates memory in jagged, crystalline pieces that finally yield an intensely personal yet universal picture of abuse, cruelty, and survival. Morrison was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, and Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. J.G.
Excerpt
Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe. Stooping to shake the damper, or snapping sticks for kindling, Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved's eyes. Like a familiar, she hovered, never leaving the room Sethe was in unless required and told to. She rose early in the dark to be there, waiting, in the kitchen when Sethe came down to make fast bread before she left for work. In lamplight, and over the flames of the cooking stove, their two shadows clashed and crossed on the ceiling like black swords.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Warner Books, 1960
Novel, 281 pagesIn this brilliantly written American novel set in the South of the 1930s, Atticus Finch, one of the most decent and heroic characters in literature, defends a black man accused of raping a white woman. As a result his children, Scout and Jem, bear the burden of their father's breaking the community's racial code. Narrated by Scout, in language that is humorous, original, and completely without guile, To Kill a Mockingbird unveils the evil of racism in both its subtle and unmistakable forms, and shows the effects of scapegoating and ostracizing those in our midst. As the story unfolds, Scout loses her innocence, and learns important lessons about honor and decency. Based on her own childhood experience, Lee's lone novel continues to delight and challenge readers. If you've already read it, it is well worth reading again. If you haven't, it belongs at the top of your "must read" list. R.T.
Excerpt
Atticus placed his fork beside his knife and pushed his plate aside. "Mr. Cunningham's basically a good man." he said, "he just has his blind spots along with the rest of us."
Jem spoke. "Don't call that a blind spot. He'da killed you last night when he first went there."
"He might have hurt me a little," Atticus conceded, "but son, you'll understand folks a little better when you're older. A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every Southern town is always made up of people you know-doesn't say much for them, does it?"
Classics
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Houghton Mifflin, 1988 (Originally published 1918)
Novel, 238 pagesConsidered one of the outstanding American novels, My Antonia was first published in 1918, but retains a truth of rural life. Willa Cather tells her story through the eyes of a boy, Jimmy, who after the death of his parents leaves Virginia for his grandfather's farm in the midland plains of Nebraska. It is the story of a childhood spent in little towns of the prairies "buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes in climate." Antonia is a Bohemian girl, a new neighbor, who fascinates Jimmy, embodying "the country, the conditions, the whole adventure" of that childhood, as well as the indomitable immigrant spirit that so captivated Cather. L.H.
Excerpt
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping.
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Originally published serially, 1871-72
Novel, 823 pages
If you found you couldn't miss a single episode of Masterpiece Theater's recent six-part version of Middlemarch, you will want to read (or reread as I did) George Eliot's masterpiece of Victorian provincial life. Watching the television version brings memorable characters vividly to life, but missing is Eliot's wry narrative voice as she describes, for example, the beautiful and egotistical Rosamond: "Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide."
Middlemarch sets the stage for exploration of the marriage drama-in particular the difficulties posed by matches that defy convention-against the mores of small town life. Except for the exquisite Victorian language they use, the characters seem contemporary, and certainly, their struggles are timeless. J.G.
Excerpt
How was it that in the weeks since her marriage Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight-that, in fact you are exploring an enclosed basin.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Viking, 1986 (Originally published 1939)
Novel, 581 pagesThe Joad family, like thousands of uprooted families in the 1930's, leave the barren land of Oklahoma, just ahead of the gigantic tractors of Corporate America. "The bank- the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die." The Joads head for California, land of promise for food, clothing, and the self-respect of making a living. "I'm just tryin' to get along without shovin' nobody around."
It is courage and a hope for something better that gets them to the New Land. But California uses them up, pitting man against man. The job-and the lowest wages-go to the most desperate. This is a story of survival and the affirmation of human dignity as events conspire to destroy and degrade. It's never too late to read this American classic. If you've already read it, it's well worth reading again. J.M.
Excerpt
And gradually the greatest terror of all came along. They ain't gonna be no kinda work for three months. In the barns, the people sat huddled together; and the terror came over them, and their faces were gray with terror. The children cried with hunger, and there was no food.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
First published in 1847
Novel, 452 pagesJane Eyre is a powerful novel of a woman making her way alone. She is an orphan both literally and in the sense that women are orphans in the world of men. This classic is more than a Gothic romance. Read it for the first time -- or reread it as a novel in which what the character says and does can lift the spirit and nourish the souls of women everywhere. N.P.
Excerpt
I am not an angel and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself, Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me-for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not anticipate.
Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938
Essay, 220 pages"How in your opinion are we to prevent war?" With a sense of irony that an educated man should ask a woman-until recently not even considered equal to the task of voting-for her opinion on such a weighty matter, Virginia Woolf considers this question in her brilliant book-length essay, Three Guineas. Through astute and meticulously reasoned arguments, she demonstrates how war is systemically entwined with patriarchy and capitalism. A sense of righteous indignation and, at times moral outrage, pulse beneath the surface of her words; her emotions, though, never distract, having been harnessed in service to utterly civil discourse. Woolf's formula for solving the problem of war requires big social and economic changes, and many will dismiss it as impractical. In any serious effort to create lasting peace, however, her arguments simply cannot go unheeded. C.W.
Excerpt
For if you agree to these terms then you can join the professions and yet remain uncontaminated by them; you can rid them of their possessiveness, their jealousy, their pugnacity, their greed. You can use them to have a mind of your own and a will of your own. And you can use that mind and will to abolish the inhumanity, the beastliness, the horror, the folly of war. Take this guinea then and use it, not to burn the house down, but to make its windows blaze. And let the daughters of uneducated women dance round the new house, the poor house, the house that stands in a narrow street where omnibuses pass and the street hawkers cry their wares, and let them sing, "We have done with war! We have done with tyranny!" And their mothers will laugh from their graves, "It was for this that we suffered obloquy and contempt! Light up the windows of the new house, daughters! Let them blaze!"
Autobiogrphy
One Writer's Beginning by Eudora Welty
Warner Books, 1984
Autobiography 114 pagesEudora Welty treats words with respect nearing idolatry. Her study of Latin taught her love of grammar, the "alliance with word." As she listened to her family's stories, she became a privileged observer and learned to write as a listener. Sitting back and absorbing words, however, was hardly a passive activity for, as Welty says, "movement must be at the very heart of listening." Her story of a writer's beginning is a story of wisdom and humor, not how it is to be a writer, but how it is to be a lover of life. J.M.
Excerpt
At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word "moon" came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word.
Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987
Memoir, 204 pagesIn Fierce Attachments Vivian Gornick looks back on her life and the women who gave it shape to "understand how much of them I understood." Her memories of growing up in a largely Jewish tenement in the Bronx go a long way to explain the ambivalent feelings a woman can have toward her mother-from animosity, hurt and disgust to compassion, respect, and love. Interspersed among the memories are present-day conversations, by turns combative and healing, between mother and adult daughter as they walk the streets of Manhattan. Lively and intense, these conversations entertain as they further dissect the mother-daughter bond. Gornick's look at human behavior (including her own) is candid and unflinching, her insights piercing and astute. While this book may be of particular interest to women who wish to understand the influence of childhood experience on adult choices, it has much to say about the human condition and is highly recommended to all readers. C.W.
Excerpt
I hardly remember the men at all. They were everywhere, of course-husbands, fathers, brothers-but I remember only the women. And I remember them all crude like Mrs. Drucker or fierce like my mother. They never spoke as though they knew who they were, understood the bargain they had struck with life, but they often acted as though they knew. Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And I-the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image-I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.
Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman
Penguin Books, 1989
Memoir, 280 pagesAs a 13-year-old girl, Eva Hoffman emigrates with her family from Poland to Vancouver, British Columbia. In Lost in Translation she reflects on the significance of this move in her life, with particular emphasis on the way language relates to experience and contributes to the immigrant's sense of alienation. As a gifted child acutely sensitive to language, Hoffman notes how words tie her to everything she knows. To her, it is the Polish word for "river" that signifies riverness and all her experience of riverness; the English word for river seems removed from what she thinks of as a river. This detachment from English and the inadequacy of her beloved Polish in the new culture leave the young Hoffman feeling untethered to experience. As she masters English--for her a long and ever-conscious process--she comes to understand the American character, and observes it in English that is as fine and precise as language can be. C.W.
Excerpt
Loss is a magical preservative. Time stops at the point of severance, and no subsequent impressions muddy the picture you have in mind. The house, the garden, the country you have lost remain forever as you remember them. Nostalgia-that most lyrical of feelings-crystallizes around these images like amber. Arrested within it, the house, the past, is clear, vivid, made more beautiful by the medium in which it is held and by its stillness.
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Originally published 1937
Autobiography, 285 pagesBlack Boy is an autobiographical account of Richard Wright's childhood and early adulthood in the South of the 1910s and 20s. First abandoned by his father, then virtually orphaned when illness made an invalid of his mother, Richard was repeatedly uprooted and always accompanied by poverty, hunger, and cruelty. We see signs of the writer he would become as he discovers and puzzles over questions of racial identity; as he learns to fear and then hate white people; as he articulates his experience of religion as tyrannical and manipulative. Against all odds, Wright recognized and maintained his sense of personal integrity and entitlement at the core of his being, refusing to accept a status that would prevent him from tasting the full range of human experience. C.W.
Excerpt
I was in my fifteenth year; in terms of schooling I was far behind the average youth of the nation, but I did not know that. In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air.
In My Mother's House by Kim Chernin
Ticknor & Fields, 1983
Autobiography, 307 pages
In My Mother's House is a "tale of transformation and development-the female reversal of that patriarchal story in which the power of the family's founder is lost and dissipated as the inheriting generations decline and fall to ruin." It is the story of four generations of women: Perle, who immigrates from Russia and is never able to adjust to life in America; Perle's daughter, Rose, who joins the Communist Party in the 1920s and rises to prominence as a passionate and effective organizer as well as a party secretary; Kim, Rose's daughter, whose disillusionment with communism and desire to become a poet are seen as betrayals by her mother; and Kim's daughter, Larissa, whose life is made possible by the sacrifices and strivings of her foremothers. Many of the stories are narrated in Rose's voice, but Kim also reflects on her own experience growing up as the daughter of such a remarkable woman. Interspersed among the tales of family history is the story of growing intimacy and reconciliation between Kim and her mother, a healing made possible through stories, as mother and daughter each tell the truth about their own lives. C.W.
Excerpt
"Daughter," she will say, in a voice that is stern and admonishing, "always a woman must be stronger than the most terrible circumstance. You know what my mother used to say? Through us, the women of the world, only through us can everything survive." An image comes to me. I see generations of women bearing a flame. It is hidden, buried deep within, yet they are handing it down from one to another, burning. It is a gift of fire, transported from a world far off and far away, but never extinguished. And now, in this very moment, my mother imparts the care of it to me. I must keep it alive, I must manage not to be consumed by it, I must hand it on when the time comes to my daughter.
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