AP Reading List: More Modern Selections

Annotated Bibliography and Summary

Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1983.

Summary: On the surface, Allende¡¯s novel is the story of Esteban Trueba, his wife, his children, and his granddaughter. But The House of the Spirits is also the story of political corruption, patriarchal authority, feminine oppression, and the movement from the old world into the new. The action in the novel spans four generations and covers more than fifty years of history. During those fifty years, the country changes, first through technology and modern communications, and later through the desire to find a better life. Nivea and Clara become suffragettes, and Jaime works to improve people¡¯s lives, while Alba becomes involved in a protest movement that will ultimately ask great sacrifices of her. The House of the Spirits is filled with violence and corruption, but it is also filled with love and magic.

Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Dutton,1993.

Summary: This novel is a coming of age narrative, written from the perspective of Bone, the out-of-wedlock (hence, bastard) young daughter of one of the fiercely proud, dirt-poor Boatwrights of Greenville County, South Carolina. The story moves from Bone's very young recollections of life with her waitress mother Anne and her numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins; through her mother's brief marriage and quick widowhood; to her volatile, painful marriage to Daddy Glenn, whose jealousy of Bone, combined with his own destructive evilness, leads the story to a heinous climax of sexual abuse.

Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies.  Chapel Hill, N. C.: Algonquin Books, 1994.

Summary: When people think of the Dominican Republic in the twentieth century, two words most often come to mind: Rafael Trujillo. He ruled the island nation from 1930 to 1961. His dictatorship was defined by greed, a rigid control over the Dominican people, and unspeakable brutality. But many would also have people remember another history of the Dominican Republic, a history of brave resistance and immense sacrifice. Two different words come to mind when thinking of this history: Las Mariposas, or The Butterflies. These were the code names of Minerva, Mar¨ªa Teresa, and Patria Mirabal, three sisters who were key members in an underground movement to overthrow Trujillo. On November 25, 1960, the dictator's men ambushed their car and the sisters were beaten to death. Since that time, they have become symbols of courage, dignity, and strength in their country.

Anaya, Rudolfo A. Bless me, Ultimo. New York: Warner Books, 1994.

Summary: Ultima, an old curandera or healer, comes to live with the family of a young New Mexican boy who learns from her about the healing powers of the natural environment and the human spirit. Antonio's family respects her wisdom and legendary power, though some in the community believe she is a witch. Antonio finds himself drawn to her and under her tutelage develops an awareness of the primal energies of earth and sky that affect human lives and fate.

Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963.

Summary: In this collection, one of the great classics of science fiction, Asimov set out the principles of robot behavior that we know as the Three Laws of Robotics. Here are stories of robots gone mad, mind-reading robots, robots with a sense of humor, robot politicians, and robots who secretly run the world, all told with Asimov's trademark dramatic blend of science fact and science fiction.

Atwood, Margaret Eleanor. The Handmaid¡¯s Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.

Summary: The novel focuses on one handmaid, Offred (she is given the name of the man whose children she is expected to bear--she is of Fred). Offred became a handmaid after an attempt to escape with her daughter and husband from Gilead. They fail; her daughter is given away to a needy woman in the upper circles, and Offred does not know whether her husband is alive or dead, whether he escaped or was captured. Offred is in the service of the General and his wife, Serena Joy. Serena Joy hates that she is unable to bear children and hates Offred for taking her husband seed. If Offred does not become pregnant promptly, Serena Joy will undoubtedly take revenge by sending her away, possibly to the toxic colonies.

Atwood, Margaret Eleanor. The Blind Assassin. New York: N. A. Talese, 2000.

Eighty-two-year-old Iris Chase reflects on her far from exemplary life and her perilous times, in particular on the events surrounding the suicide of her younger sister Laura. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura notoriety and a cult following. Sexually explicit for its time and place, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent 1930s between a wealthy young woman and a left-leaning man on the run. As that story twists and turns through love and jealousy, self-sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one, while events in both move closer to war and catastrophe.

Atwood, Margaret Eleanor. The Edible Woman. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969.

Summary: Set in Canada in the late 1960s, the women's role in life is slowly trying to break free from the 50s television version of the housewife that vacuums in pearls and heels. Marian, a recent college graduate, considers herself a pretty independent woman. Even her relationship with her boyfriend, Peter, doesn't get in the way of her independence. She lives on her own with her roommate and best friend, Ainsley, and she makes her own living as copywriter for a survey service. But when, out of the blue, Peter proposes marriage, strange things start happening. Marian begins to feel consumed with making plans, quitting her job, moving in with Peter, and settling down for her role as housewife. All of a sudden she can't eat certain things and she has strange panic attacks that come from nowhere. Her freedom is being threatened, but Marian sees no way out. Or is there?

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1970.

Summary: In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."

Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1982.

Summary: When Morgan le Fay (Morgaine) has to sacrifice her virginity during fertility rites, the man who impregnates her is her younger brother Arthur, whom she turns against when she thinks he has betrayed the old religion of Avalon.

Burns, Olive Ann. Cold Sassy Tree. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984.

Summary: Modern times come to a conservative Southern town in 1906 when the proprietor of the general store elopes with a woman half his age, and worse yet, a Yankee.

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower.  New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.

Summary: The protagonist is Lauren Olamina, an African American girl who is fifteen years old when the novel begins. She lives in Robledo, about twenty miles from Los Angeles, which has become a walled enclave only partially protected from the rampant lawlessness and desperate poverty that exists beyond the walls of the neighborhood. When the enclave is completely destroyed by bands of arsonists and thieves, Lauren is one of the few survivors. She heads north, on foot, with a couple of companions in a perilous search for a better life.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Summary: First published in the United States in 1962, Silent Spring surveys mounting evidence that widespread pesticide use endangers both wildlife and humans. Along the way, Rachel Carson criticizes an irresponsible chemical industry, which continues to claim that pesticides are safe, and imprudent public officials, who accept without question this disinformation. As an alternative to the ¡®¡®scorched earth" logic underlying accepted pest-control practices, the author outlines the "biotic" approach¡ª cheaper, safer, longer acting, natural solutions to pest problems (for example, controlling the Japanese beetle by introducing a fungus that causes a fatal disease in this insect).

Chevalier, Tracy. Girl With a Pearl Earring. New York: Dutton, 1999.

Summary: A maid becomes a model for the 17th century Dutch painter, Vermeer. The woman, an artisan's daughter with a strong power of observation, describes his manner of work, his household and life of the day, including the rigid class system and religious bigotry.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Summary: The story is told by Esperanza, and begins when she first moves to Mango Street, a poor, Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Esperanza says that she has lived in many different places. She implies that she is close to her family, and describes their interactions and even their hair. She tells us she does not like her name, because it is too long and because it was her grandmother¡¯s name. Her grandmother did not want to get married, but was forced to by Esperanza¡¯s grandfather. Slowly, Esperanza begins to meet people in the neighborhood. She meets Cathy, a stuck-up girl, and Lucy and Rachel, who live across the street. Sisters, these two will become Esperanza¡¯s best friends on Mango Street. They are loud and sassy, just the opposite of Esperanza, but this is what she likes about them.

Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist. [San Francisco] : HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

Summary: The Alchemist is an enlightening story about a shepherd's quest to "find his treasure". Along the way, he encounters helpful guides as well as seemingly insurmountable obstacles. As he nears the end of his journey, he finds, in an ironic twist, that it isn't what or where he thought is was. This is recommended reaing for all the seekers of the world.

Conroy, Pat. The Great Santini. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.

Summary: Colonel Bull Meecham is a legendary Marine fighter pilot whose military successes are almost as many as his personal excesses. Lillian Meecham is a Southern gentlewoman with a love of literature. After moving from base to base each year, the Meecham's finally settle down in fictional Ravenel, SC (Beaufort in real life).  The Colonel rules his fighter squadron and his family with an iron first. While this technique is successful in motivating his pilots, it has disastrous effects on his wife and children. His cruelty (both mental and physical) is enough to crush even the strongest soul. While he chides Ben for being a sissy, he suppresses Ben's attempts to act like a man. Yet, the Colonel can do endearing things, like when he gives Ben his original flight jacket on his 18th birthday. No wonder Ben has a love-hate relationship with his old man.

Conroy, Pat.The Lords of Discipline. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

Summary: Will McLean does not belong to the social circle of young men who usually attend the Carolina Military Institute. He is an outsider, a young man wounded by his relationship with his father, and something of a rebel. Will is also a survivor, and he carefully makes his way at the Institute in the early 1960s, bonding with three other cadets amid the brutal hazing and almost threatening camaraderie that are part of life at the school. Particularly disturbing are the activities of a secret group of privileged cadets known only as "The Ten." When he is ordered to look out for the Institute's first black cadet, Will can no longer ignore the corruption and violence around him, a stand that will bring him face-to-face with the force of the Institute's fierce pride and brutalizing tradition.

Conroy, Pat. The Prince of Tides.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.

Summary: This is the story of Tom Wingo, his twin sister, Savannah, and the dark and violent past of the family into which they were born. Set in New York City and the low country of South Carolina, the novel opens when Tom, a high school football coach whose marriage and career are crumbling, flies from South Carolina to New York after learning of his twin sister's suicide attempt....

Cormier, Robert. The Chocolate War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.

Summary: Does Jerry Renault dare to disturb the universe? You wouldn't think that his refusal to sell chocolates during his school's fundraiser would create such a stir, but it does; it's as if the whole school comes apart at the seams. To some, Jerry is a hero, but to others, he becomes a scapegoat--a target for their pent-up hatred. And Jerry? He's just trying to stand up for what he believes, but perhaps there is no way for him to escape becoming a pawn in this game of control; students are pitted against other students, fighting for honor--or are they fighting for their lives?

Courtenay, Bryce, The Power of One. New York: Delacorte Press, 2005.

Summary: The Power of One will take its readers on a journey during the time of apartheid in South Africa. Peekay, a precocious British boy, faces many challenges and learns how to deal with the South African culture and the many adversities that come his way. Throughout his childhood, Peekay meets several people that impact his life deeply. On the train to Barberton, he meets Hoppie, a boxing champion who works with the railways. Hoppie introduces Peekay to boxing, forever changing his life. From then on, Peekay has the ambition to dominate the world of boxing. Before meeting Hoppie, though, Peekay was sent to boarding school, where he was tortured and bullied on to no end. Boxing helped Peekay physically and mentally to overcome his fears and to defend himself. This is a book that teaches the values of friendship, and the importance of confidence and determination, the power of one.

Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Summary: The story of Dinah, a tragic character from the Bible whose great love, a prince, is killed by her brother, leaving her alone and pregnant. The novel traces her life from childhood to death, in the process examining sexual and religious practices of the day, and what it meant to be a woman. New York : Harper & Row

Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood.  New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

Summary: Annie Dillard remembers. She remembers the exhilaration of whipping a snowball at a car and having it hit straight on. She remembers playing with the skin on her mother's knuckles, which "didn't snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge." She remembers the compulsion to spend a whole afternoon (or many whole afternoons) endlessly pitching a ball at a target. In this intoxicating account of her childhood, Dillard climbs back inside her 5-, 10-, and 15-year-old selves with apparent effortlessness. The voracious young Dillard embraces headlong one fascination after another--from drawing to rocks and bugs to the French symbolists. "Everywhere, things snagged me," she writes. "The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world." From her parents she inherited a love of language--her mother's speech was "an endlessly interesting, swerving path"--and the understanding that "you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself," not for anyone else's approval or desire. And one would be mistaken to call the energy Dillard exhibits in An American Childhood merely youthful; "still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day," she writes, "as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive."

Dorris, Michael. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. New York: H. Holt, 1987.

Summary: Rayona is a typical teenager, dealing with her mixed ethnicity and the usual angst, when her mother takes her away from home and literally dumps her on the side of the road near Aunt Ida's home on the Montana reservation. Christine moves in with an old family friend, and Aunt Ida deals with all of them the best way she knows how. Christine shares her growing up years, how she met Rayona's father and how she ultimately became ill. And then Aunt Ida tells more than you'd ever expect, something that ties all three of the stories together.

Doyle, Roddy. Paddy Clarke, ha-ha-ha. New York : Viking, 1994.

Summary: an Irish lad named Paddy rampages through the streets of Barrytown with a pack of like-minded hooligans, playing cowboys and Indians, etching their names in wet concrete, and setting fires. Roddy Doyle has captured the sensations and speech patterns of preadolescents with consummate skill, and managed to do so without resorting to sentimentality. Paddy Clarke and his friends are not bad boys; they're just a little bit restless. They're always taking sides, bullying each other, and secretly wishing they didn't have to. All they want is for something--anything--to happen.

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Summary: A culinary romance set in Mexico. Condemned by tradition to look after her tyrannical mother and remain a spinster, Tita finds her destiny in the kitchens of the family ranch. Her recipes for Mexican dishes are woven into the story of her doomed romance with Pedro, her brother-in-law.

Findley, Timothy.  The Wars. New York: Delacorte Press, 1977.

Summary: Robert Ross is a sensitive young man from Canada. The nineteen-year-old fights in the First World War, where he is exposed to unbelievable violence, constant death and the insanity of trench warfare. Ross is himself victimized, and he sees many around him die or go mad. Eventually, he is accused of betraying his country. An odd story, almost a myth, circulates about Ross's attempt to save horses at the cost of men during the war. The unraveling of the events suggests that Ross saw that war turned humans into brutes.

Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

Summary: Cold Mountain is at once a Civil War story, a magnificent love story, and the story of two parallel odysseys. The first is the odyssey of Inman, a wounded, disillusioned Confederate soldier who has failed to die in the hospital. He deserts and begins a lonely, dangerous walk across the devastated southern Appalachians. The thought of being reunited with his beloved Ada helps him endure the perils that hinder his way. He meets rogues and outlaws, and survives Teague¡¯s Home Guard more than once. In addition, he survives severe weather, rugged terrain and a close encounter with a bear. Along the way he helps people whose lives have been destroyed by the war. In return, he is saved from starvation by what meager offerings they share.

Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Summary: In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermino Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs ¡ª yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez, Gabriel. One hundred years of solitude. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Summary: The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family.

Gibbons, Kaye.  Ellen Foster. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1987.

Summary: Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

A fisherman's daughter in 1930s Japan rises to become a famous geisha. After training, Sayuri's virginity is sold to the highest bidder, and then the school finds her a general for a patron. When he dies, she is reunited with the only man she loved.

Goldman, William. The Princess Bride. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974.

Summary: Buttercup, one of the world's twenty most beautiful women, and tomboy lives on a farm with her parents, her horse, and Westley, their farm-boy. Unexpectedly, she falls suddenly, madly, jealously in love with this man she has known all her life. She professes her love to him, and he leaves immediately to America to seek his fortune, and soon is reported to have been murdered by the Dread Pirate Roberts. Buttercup is broken, and vows never to love again.

Hoffman, Alice.  Local girls. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1999.

Summary: A Jewish girl's adolescent years on Long Island are described in a collection of stories. In one, her father remarries, in a second her brother drops out of university, in a third her mother dies of cancer.

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.

Summary: Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

Irving, John. A Prayer for Owen Meany.  New York: Morrow, 1989.

Summary: In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys--best friends--are playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother. Owen Meany believes he didn't hit the ball by accident. He believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after 1953 is extraordinary and terrifying. He is Irving's most heartbreaking hero.

Keneally, Thomas. Schindler's list. New York : Simon and Schuster, 1982.

Summary: Schindler¡¯s List recounts the lives of the flamboyant profiteer and womanizer Schindler; Schindler's long-suffering wife, Emilie; the brutal SS (Nazi secret service) commandant Amon Goeth; Schindler's quietly courageous factory manager, Itzhak Stern; and dozens of other Jews who underwent the horrors of the Nazi machinery. At the center of the story, though, are the actions and ambitions of Schindler, who comes to Krak¨®w, Poland, seeking his fortune and ends up outwitting the SS to protect his Jewish employees. It is the story of Schindler's unlikely heroism and of one man's attempt to do good in the midst of outrageous evil. The book explores the complex nature of virtue, the importance of individual human life, the role of witnesses to the Holocaust, and the attention to rules and details that sustained the Nazi system of terror.

Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Viking, 2002.

Summary: 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother.

King, Laurie R. The Beekeeper's Apprentice.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

Summary: Sherlock Holmes & a brilliant 15-year-old girl become a detective duo & match wits with great criminal minds in England during World War I. What would happen if Sherlock Holmes, a perfect man of the Victorian age--pompous, smug, and misogynistic--were to come face to face with a twentieth-century female? If she grew to be a partner worthy of his great talents¡­

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998.

Summary: The drama of a U.S. missionary family in Africa during a war of decolonization. At its center is Nathan Price, a self-righteous Baptist minister who establishes a mission in a village in 1959 Belgian Congo. The resulting clash of cultures is seen through the eyes of his wife and his four daughters. By the author of Pigs in Heaven.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal Dreams. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1990.

Summary: Codi Noline, a young woman unsure of her purpose in life, returns to her hometown of Grace, Arizona, to teach high school and care for her father. As the novel unfolds, Codi gradually becomes aware of important political and environmental issues. She also learns that the detached and cynical individualism that has dominated her life is not the best recipe for happiness. Her exposure to Hispanic and Native American culture shows her the value of the communal way of living, which emphasizes deep and lasting ties to family and to the earth. Although her life is blighted by the tragic death of her sister, Hallie, Codi finally finds peace in the knowledge and acceptance of who she is and where she comes from.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Pigs in Heaven. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1993.

Summary: When a six-year-old child named Turtle is the sole witness to a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, she and her adoptive mother Taylor have a moment of celebrity that will change their lives forever. Annawake Fourkiller, a Cherokee activist, claims turtle, who is said to have been wrongly taken from the Cherokee nation. Fear of losing Turtle sends Taylor fleeing across the country with her mother Alice, pursued by Annawake. In the course of their journey, the three find love and wisdom in surprising places.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior.  New York: Knopf, 1976.

Summary: The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and in defiance of the pain.

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1982.

Summary: As a Japanese Canadian, Naomi is separated from her parents, persecuted and eventually placed in an internment camp ¨C common practice in Canada during WWII. The one bright spot in Naomi's life is her Aunt Obasan, her protector and caregiver after she is separated from her parents. It is only after Naomi grows up that she is able to face the hardship of her past.

Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air.  New York: Villard, 1997.

Summary: A history of Mount Everest expedition is intertwined with the disastrous expedition the author was a part of, during which five members were killed by a hurricane-strength blizzard. When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10, 1996, he hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion....

Krakauer, Jon. Into The Wild. New York : Anchor Books, 1996.

Summary: After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving Krakauer, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seedpods.

Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. New York, Knopf, 1994.

Summary: This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process ¨C putting distance between herself and a world that wanted no part of her. But in time, the aloneness that had once been forced upon her becomes a precious right ¨C relinquished only in her overwhelming need for love. Again and again, Morag is forced to test her strength against the world ¨C and finally achieves the life she had determined would be hers.

Lee, Chang-rae. A Gesture Life.  New York : Riverhead Books, 1999.

Summary: The secret life of a Japanese-American pharmacist in a small town in New York. On the surface a model of propriety and serenity, he is torn by memories of his service in the Japanese army in World War II and the comfort woman he loved and could not save. By the author of Native Speaker.

Lee, Chang-rae. Native Speaker.  New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Summary: A clash of ethnic and professional loyalties is the subject of this novel. The protagonist is a Korean-American who works for a private intelligence service and is assigned to spy on a rising Korean-American politician. To blow the whistle on a fellow ethnic would hurt his tribe, on the other hand there is his professional reputation to consider.

Lee, Chang-rae. Aloft.  New York: Riverhead Books, 2004.

Summary: Jerry Battle's favorite diversion is to fly his small plane over the neighboring towns and villages. When his daughter and her fianc¨¦ arrive from Oregon to announce their marriage plans, he looks back on his life and faces his disengagement with it-his urge to fly solo-and the people he loves Aloft is an unforgettable portrait, filled with vitality and urgency, of a man who has secured his life's dreams but who must now figure out its meaning.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The left Hand of Darkness.  New York: Walker, 1969.

Summary: Le Guin's Hainish series begins with the assumption that centuries ago humanoids from the planet Hain ventured through the solar system establishing colonies on various planets including Earth. For mysterious reasons these colonies lose all contact and knowledge of each other until the 21st century when an attempt is made to establish a galactic league....

McBride, James. The Color of Water. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.

Summary: As a boy in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked about it, she'd simply say, "I'm light-skinned." Later he wondered if he was different too, and asked his mother if he was black or white. "You're a human being," she snapped. "Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!" And when James asked what color God was, she said, "God is the color of water".  This is the story of a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a Baptist church, and put twelve children through college. The Color of Water is James McBride's tribute to his remarkable, eccentric, determined mother and an eloquent exploration of what family really means.

MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Fall On Your Knees. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Summary: The story of a jinxed family, a catalog of rape, incest and death. James Piper abuses his daughter, atones by sending her to New York to study singing while he goes to war, she returns pregnant, dies in childbirth when her mother opens her to save her twins. One of the twins dies, mother commits suicide, the second twin contracts polio while being baptized in a creek by an aunt.

MacLeod, Alistair. No great mischief. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

Summary: This extraordinary novel, telling the story of the substantial branch of the MacDonald clan that settled on Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia, offers every satisfaction except an ending as quietly mighty as what has gone before. At the end of the text, Alistair MacLeod acknowledges the 'spiritual assistance' that came his way during its completion, but from a reader's point of view the notes of reconciliation and transcendence in the closing pages license the sentimentality that has been suppressed so long and so well.

McCourt, Frank. Angela's Ashes. New York: Scribner, 1996.

Summary: When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood". So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland....

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2002.

Summary: On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister, Cecilia, strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed forever....

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

Summary: Martel tells a story both striking and unique, the life story of Piscine Patel. When he was growing up in India as the son of a zookeeper, Piscine was teased unmercifully for his name, so he shortened it to Pi, as in the mathematical symbol ¦Ð. This change of name is only the first of several fascinating changes Pi experiences. Some are more or less under his control, like his pursuit of truth by simultaneously studying Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Some, like his father's decision to move the family to Canada, are not under Pi's control, especially when the ship carrying the Patel family sinks and Pi is stranded in a lifeboat with only a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a 450-pound tiger for company.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. In Country. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Summary: Sam resents the effects of the Vietnam War, especially the death of her father and her uncle's suffering from Agent Orange ingestion.

Mathabane, Mark. Kaffir boy. New York: New American Library, 1987.

Summary: Kaffir Boy begins in the predawn of a bitterly cold winter day in 1965 with the five-yearold Johannes Mathabane lying awake, terrified by nightmares. After his father leaves for work and his mother for the community outhouse, he finally falls asleep. Within moments, his nightmare becomes reality when Peri-Urban, the Alexandra Police Squad, makes one of its unannounced raids. His mother slips back into the house, awakens Johannes, and engages him in a quiet but frantic search for her passbook (apartheid regulations require that every black person in South Africa carry a document containing his or her photograph, name, address, tribal origin, work and marital status). Once it is found, she again slips out of the house¡ªthis time in search of a hiding place. Johannes is left alone with full responsibility for his three-year-old sister and one-year-old brother.

Michaels, Anne. Fugitive pieces. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1997.

Summary: A tale of Holocaust survival whose protagonist is Jakob Beer, a Jewish boy in Poland. A Greek scientist who takes him home to his island, where Beer develops an interest in archeology, saves him from death. He describes the way the Nazis manipulated archeology to prove the superiority of the Aryan race.

Momaday, N. Scott. House made of dawn. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Summary: House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, tells the story of a young American Indian named Abel, home from a foreign war and caught between two worlds: one his father's, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons and the harsh beauty of the land; the other of industrial America, a goading him into a compulsive cycle of dissipation and disgust.

Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. University of New Mexico Press, 1969.

Summary: The author retells the Kiowa myths learned from his grandmother, speculates on the actual history they may symbolize, and describes with infectious nostalgia the Indian life he knew as a child.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Summary: After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade....

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume Book, 1994.

Summary: Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes....

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Plume Book, 1987.

Summary: Song of Solomon is based on an African-American folktale about slaves who can fly back to Africa when they choose. Morrison fictionalizes this folktale through the character of Solomon, the great grandfather of the story's protagonist, Milkman Dead. Through his discovery of the story of Solomon and his ability to fly, Milkman learns to take pride in his ancestry and to value his connections to family and community. Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1977.

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Summary: The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other....

O'Brien, Tim.  In the Lake of the Woods. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Summary: John Wade, a senatorial candidate, is accused of participating in a massacre during the Vietnam War. Hounded by the press, he flees with his wife to a cottage and his wife disappears. Did she desert him, or did he kill her?

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Summary: Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.

Patchett, Ann. The Patron Saint of Liars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Summary: Unanticipated pregnancy makes liars out of young women, this thoughtful first novel shows, as they try to rationalize, explain, and accept what is happening to them. When she arrives at St. Elizabeth's, a home for pregnant girls in Habit, Kentucky, Rose Clinton seems as evasive and deceptive as the other unwed mothers. But Rose is different: she has a husband whom she has deserted. Unlike most St. Elizabeth's visitors, she neither gives up her baby nor leaves the home, staying on as cook while her daughter grows up among expectant mothers fantasizing that they, too, might keep their infants. The reader learns from Rose how she came to St. Elizabeth's, but it is her doting husband and rebellious daughter who reveal her motives and helpless need for freedom. Together, the three create a complex character study of a woman driven by forces she can neither understand nor control.

Potok, Chaim. The Chosen. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

Summary: Two Jewish boys growing to manhood in Brooklyn discover that differences can strengthen friendship and understanding.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1992.

Summary: A young female landowner in 1840s Jamaica marries a just-arrived Englishman to avoid losing her property. All seems to be perfect, love arises, and happiness is on the way, but she is hiding an old secret regarding her childhood and her mother. Slowly, this secret begins to erode this perfect relationship and, perhaps, her mother's story will begin again...with her.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things.  New York: Random House, 1997.

Summary: The story of an Indian family during the 1969 Communist disturbances in Kerala province. It is told through the eyes of a boy and his sister who are the children of a rich rubber planter. Politics, family drama, illicit love.

Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.

Summary: This is the tale of family, memory, love, and living told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. Through the voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family's grief a hopeful and joyful story.

Shields, Carol. The Stone Diaries. New York: Viking, 1994.

Summary: This is the fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The events of Daisy's life, however, are less compelling than her rich, vividly described inner life--from her memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

Silko, Leslie. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Summary: This story, set on an Indian reservation just after World War II, concerns the return home of a war-weary Navaho young man. Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation....

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam's, 1989.

Summary: In 1949, four Chinese women--drawn together by the shadow of their past--begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club--and forget a relationship that binds them for more than three decades.

Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God's Wife. New York: Putnam's, 1989.

Summary: The mesmerizing story a Chinese ¨¦migr¨¦ mother tells her daughter.

Urquhart, Jane. Away. New York: Viking, 1994.

Summary: An Irish family escapes the potato famine by immigrating to Canada. The novel traces its contribution to the culture of its adopted land--from Irish sense of humor to Irish idealism--the latter leading one of its members to engage in political assassination.

Urquhart, Jane. The Stone Carvers. New York: Viking, 1994.

Summary: Klara Becker is the granddaughter of a woodcarver in German-settled southern Ontario. She has a love affair with a brooding, silent Irish lad who then goes off to fight, and die, in World War I. Meanwhile her older brother Tilman has literally snapped the ties that would have chained him to the family home, and vanished. Of course, as in all great romantic epics, the two are destined to meet again.

Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown, 1945.

Summary: During World War II, Charles Ryder is stationed near the dilapidated Brideshead, the former home of Lord and Lady Marchmain and their broken family, the Flytes. Much of Charles's life, from his days at Oxford through the end of his first marriage, was closely interwoven with that of the Flytes. Revisiting Brideshead leads him to recall that strange weaving, beginning with his questionably homosexual relationship with the young Sebastian Flyte through his extramarital affair with the Flytes' eldest daughter, Julia. These memories span the end of an era, as Lady Marchmain loses the property for financial reasons, and the venerable Flyte family splinters and falls apart; but they are just about Charles's spiritual awakening.

Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.

Summary: After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Summary: Set in the period between the world wars, this novel tells of two sisters, their trials, and their survival.

Watson, Larry. Montana 1948. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1993.

Summary: This is the retrospective tale of a childhood event told by the protagonist 40 years later. Family relationships and bonds in conflict with professional and community obligations vie with the shadow of racism and sexual abuse in the doctor/patient relationship for the core tensions in the book. The setting is a small rural community where the pioneer family about which the tale evolves controls the law and the medicine. The boy narrator relates his view of the breakdown of family as its secret--a physician uncle who is suspected of sexually abusing his native-American women patients--becomes a force that demands action from the doctor's brother who serves as the sheriff.

Wilson, August. The Piano Lesson. New York: Plume, 1990.

Summary: August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano, which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home....

Wilson, August. Joe Turner's Come and Gone. New York: New American Library, 1988.

Summary: Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, the play examines African Americans¡¯ search for their cultural identity, following the repression of American slavery. For Herald Loomis, this search involves the physical migration from the South to Pittsburgh in an attempt to find his wife. Pittsburgh was one of the many urban areas in the North that other blacks migrated to in the 1910s, in an effort to flee the discrimination they faced in the South, while attempting to find financial success in the North. Herald¡¯s search for his identity, represented as his song, is unsuccessful until he has embraced the pain of both his own past and the past of his ancestors, and moved on to self-sufficiency.

Wilson, Ethel. Swamp Angel. New York: Harper, 1954.

Summary: Walking out on a demoralizing second marriage, Maggie Lloyd leaves Vancouver to work at a fishing lodge in the interior of British Columbia. But the serenity of Maggie¡¯s new surroundings is soon disturbed by the irrational jealousy of the lodge-keeper¡¯s wife. Restoring her own broken spirit, Maggie must also become a healer to others. In this, she is supported by her eccentric friend, Nell Severance, whose pearl-handled revolver ¨C the Swamp Angel ¨C becomes Maggie¡¯s ambiguous talisman and the novel¡¯s symbolic core.