During the 4thmarking period you will be writing a research paper on a book you choose from the following list. Please consider the list carefully and select your top 2 choices. You must choose a book that at least one other person in the class is reading.
Write out your choices in order of preference. Due: ______
Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghostsby Maxine Hong Kingston (1976)
A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.
Steeped in Cantonese legend and folklore, filled with unfamiliar phrases and untranslatable expressions, it won rapturous, if occasionally baffled, praise from mainstream critics; theWashington Post,speaking for many, called it "strange, sometimes savagely terrifying, and, in the literal sense, wonderful."Three decades later, it has become a contemporary classic, taught in thousands of high school and college classes every year. When I query my first-year college students about books most of them have read,The Woman Warriorfalls somewhere betweenBeloved, Romeo and Juliet,andThe Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Yet the most remarkable, and often overlooked, quality ofThe Woman Warrioris that it is a book without a genre. At various times it has been described as a memoir, an autobiography, a novel, a manifesto; yet anyone who spends 10 minutes with it understands that none of these labels really apply. Not because Kingston sets out to exaggerate the "facts" of her own experience, à la James Frey, but because she deliberately acknowledges that to write autobiography is to stand at the borderline between memory and invention. Like the "ghosts" in its subtitle (the word refers to the white Americans around whom Kingston grew up in Sacramento),The Woman Warriorstubbornly refuses to be either entirely fictive or entirely real. Perhaps the second most remarkable thing about the book is that in its wake, the American literary world still seems to regard the tissue-thin boundary between memoir and fiction as absolute and inviolable.
(Jess Row)
Passing by Nella Larsen (1929)
Irene Redfield, the novel's protagonist, is a woman with an enviable life. She and her husband, Brian, a prominent physician, share a comfortable Harlem town house with their sons. Her work arranging charity balls that gather Harlem's elite creates a sense of purpose and respectability for Irene. But her hold on this world begins to slip the day she encounters Clare Kendry, a childhood friend with whom she had lost touch. Clare—light-skinned, beautiful, and charming—tells Irene how, after her father's death, she left behind the black neighborhood of her adolescence and began passing for white, hiding her true identity from everyone, including her racist husband. As Clare begins inserting herself into Irene's life, Irene is thrown into a panic, terrified of the consequences of Clare's dangerous behavior. And when Clare witnesses the vibrancy and energy of the community she left behind, her burning desire to come back threatens to shatter her careful deception.
Brilliantly plotted and elegantly written, Passing offers a gripping psychological portrait of emotional extremity. The New York Times Book Review called Larsen "adroit at tracing the involved processes of a mind divided against itself, that fights between the dictates of reason and desire."
(goodreads)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer 2005
Jonathan Safran Foer, a young talented New Yorker author tells in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close the story of the extraordinary nine year old Oskar Schell, who lives with his mother and her new boyfriend in a flat in Manhattan.
What is so special about Oskar is his ability to invent all kinds of stuff, his incredible imagination and his unquenchable thirst for knowledge. He describes himself as an inventor, pacifist, atheist, scientist and adventurer and, besides, speaks French with passion, plays the tambourine and designs and creates jewelry. At first he seems to be a very happy young man, but the truth is that he is incredibly sad and very unhappy. He misses his father, Thomas Schell, who died in the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.
A year after this tragedy Oskar discovers a mysterious key in an envelope in his father’s clothes closet upon which is inscribed the word “Black”. He supposes now that this is a clue to a riddle. Because before Oskar`s father died, he sometimes played the game “Reconnaissance Expedition” with his son on Sundays. The father gave Oskar a task and some clues and he had to find a solution. But the last riddle never ended, the father died before Oskar could solve it.
Oskar’s Mission now is to find a lock that fits to the key.
(
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
During World War II, at the age of 23, Kurt Vonnegut was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden. He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance.
Kurt Vonnegut knows all the tricks of the writing game. So he has not even tried to describe the bombing. Instead he has written around it in a highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic story. The story is sandwiched between an autobiographical introduction and epilogue.
Billy Pilgrim attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in World War II. He served with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was in Dresden when it was firebombed.
Billy is "unstuck in time" and "has no control over where he is going next." "He is in a constant state of stage fright...because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next."
This problem of Billy's enables Mr. Vonnegut to tell his story fluidly, jumping forward and backward in time, free from the strictures of chronology. And this problem of Billy's is related to the second thing, which is that Billy says that on his daughter's wedding night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore, flown there through a time warp, and exhibited with a movie star named Montana Wildhack.
(New York Times Book Review)
Sulaby Toni Morrison(1973)
The heroine, Sula, grows up in a household pulsing with larger-than-life people and activity, presided over by her powerful and probably sorcerous grandmother. Her gentle mother is devoted almost wholly to the practice and pleasures of sensuality. But her cherished friend Nel, the local goody-goody, plays perfect counterpoint to Sula's intense, life-grabbing insistence that eventually gets read as recklessness, and Sula becomes a threat as her life unfolds against the rest of the black community's daily life of hardship, humiliation and scrabbling for survival.
It's out of this that Sula emerges; she leaves the Bottom and returns 10 years later, after college and city life that we never see here, to be perceived as a sinister force, man-stealing, death-dealing, a figure of darkness and betrayal. Having dared to smash the taboos that are her neighbors' poor guarantees of simply surviving, she's scorned, despised, abandoned by the people she grew out of -- to their immense loss.
Her extravagantly beautiful, doomed characters are locked in a world where hope for the future is a foreign commodity, yet they are enormously, achingly alive. And this book about them -- and about how their beauty is drained back and frozen -- is a howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter.
(Sara Blackburn NY Times)
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
As I Lay Dyingis Faulkner's harrowing account of the Bundren family's odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Told in turns by each of the family members—including Addie herself—the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos.
The novel is narrated chapter by chapter by different family members and also outsiders. The narrators are at times believable but at times also unreliable. The reader must decide what is real.
As the novel begins, Addie Bundren lays dying in her bedroom while her son Cash builds her coffin. Addie's ineffectual husband, Anse, is arranging to have her buried in Jefferson, a town forty miles away, because Addie has requested this last wish. Anse's motivating reason to go to Jefferson, however, is to get fitted for new teeth and, if possible, find a new wife.
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (1988)
Taylor Greer is the daughter of a woman who works as a cleaning lady in the finer homes of Pittman, Ky., and is herself a "nutter" - one of those teen-agers who work picking up the walnut crop, and so must go to school bearing the marks of the lower caste, their hands blackened from the stain in the husks. Taylor's father ran off when her mother, against his wishes, got pregnant. But the mother says it was the best trade she ever made; she thinks Taylor hung the moon "and plugged in all the stars." Raised on such esteem, Taylor is not about to settle for what Pittman has to offer. After high school, she works some five years in a clinic until she gets a stake for a car; then a glimpse of the cruel, stupid family life of a high school acquaintance propels her away.
This busy story also eventually involves a pair of Guatemalan refugees, Estevan and Esperanza. Back home, Estevan taught English; now he will teach Taylor to see her own words from the viewpoint of an outsider, and thus show her how subtly language is linked to political reality. Another of the major subplots of the book, also associated with language, is the gradual development of a child called Turtle, for whom Taylor becomes responsible. Turtle has been brutalized and does not, for a long time, talk. When she does begin, her first words are the names of vegetables, including, most prominently, beans. There is a stark fine poetry in this talking by naming, and when Ms. Kingsolver ties it in with the book's name and the fate of Turtle's mother, the echoes are sonorous indeed. (Jack Butler NY Times book review)
In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien (1994)
In summary, Tim O'Brien's new novel, In the Lake of the Woods, sounds like a fast-paced thriller, the sort of book that might easily be made into a movie starring, say, Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. The story, on the surface, is simple: John Wade, a rising political star, decides to run for the Senate; in the course of the campaign, serious allegations are made about Wade's past, and he loses in a landslide; several days later, he and his beautiful wife, Kathy, take a vacation in the remote Minnesota back country; after an argument, Kathy disappears and when an extensive search fails to turn up her body, the police begin to focus their suspicions on Wade.
As related by Mr. O'Brien, however, there is nothing simple or straightforward about this story. Rather, he tries to turn this thrillerlike premise into a philosophical mystery, a Conradian journey into the heart of darkness and the nature of evil.
(NY Times Book Review Michiko Kakutani)