The Waste Land and Other Writings by T.S. Eliot

October 18, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Borders Classics, 2007. Originally published 1922. 151 pgs. Purchased. This collection of poems and essays includes a selection of Eliot’s poems written between 1917 and 1920, critical essays on poetry and the nature of criticism itself from 1917 to 1923, and “The Waste Land”, which was published in 1922 and is largely considered Eliot’s masterpiece. Poetry is not a particular love of mine; I often find myself caught up in cleverness of the rhyme rather than the […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, Nobel Prize, Nonfiction, Poetry • Tags: T.S. Eliot

Beloved by Toni Morrison

May 15, 2015 by Christina

Fiction — print. Vintage, 2008. Originally published 1987. 324 pgs. Library copy. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988, this tale focuses on Sethe, a young salve who escaped to Ohio to join her mother-in-law (although her marriage to Halle was not legally binding) and her three other children, and the young daughter named Denver that Sethe was pregnant with during her escape. Eighteen years after her arrival in Ohio, she and her youngest daughter, Denver, live together in […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, Nobel Prize, North America, United States • Tags: Toni Morrison

Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano

April 8, 2015 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti. Yale University Press, 2014. 213 pgs. Library copy. Like many who read solely in English, the announcement that Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature left me a bit confounded. I have never heard of the author and never, to my recollection, seen a review for his work on one of the many book blogs I religiously read. Journalists and bloggers alike blamed the lack of awareness for his […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Europe, Fiction, France, French, Genocide, Holocaust, Nobel Prize, Short Stories, Translated • Tags: Patrick Modiano

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

October 18, 2012 by Christina

Fiction — print. Translated from the Russian. Bantam, 1963. Originally published 1962. 203 pgs. Purchased. This story follows Ivan Denisovich Shukhov through a course of a single day in his life as an inmate in a Soviet forced labor camp. An innocent man, Ivan was accused of becoming a spy after capture by the Germans as a prisoner of war during World War II and sentenced to the Siberian work camp as punishment by the government. The novel is one […]

Categories: 101 Great Books, 2012 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Classics, Europe, Fiction, Nobel Prize, Russia, Russian, Translated • Tags: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

October 14, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely. Vintage International, 2009. 536 pgs. Purchased. This long, tedious book rehashed every interaction, every moment Kemal had with Füsun. Like a friend who never overcame a bad breakup, Kemal mourns every little thing about Füsun and, in the process, manages to destroy the relationship he has with his fiancée and other people from his class in Istanbul society (young, educated, Westernized). “…I would like to ask them please to be careful […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Fiction, Middle East, Nobel Prize, Translated, Turkish • Tags: Orhan Pamuk

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Part Two)

August 16, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Penguin Classics, 2006. Originally published 1939. 464 pgs. Library copy. At the beginning of chapter nineteen, which I used as the dividing line between parts one and two, Steinbeck traces the ownership of the land know forming California from Mexicans to land-hungry Americans who actually worked the land, to owners who are more like overseers than farmers. This land is a distant notion — a sort of line in an accounts book – to these men rather […]

Categories: 101 Great Books, 2011 Reads, AP Literature, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Classics, Fiction, Food, Nobel Prize, North America, United States • Tags: John Steinbeck

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

August 13, 2011 by Christina

The marigolds did not bloom in Lorain, Ohio the year eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove gave birth to her father’s child. Told from the point of view of another young girl named Claudia, the novel details Pecola’s life and her desperate wish for her eyes to turn blue so that “she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America”. This is my first Morrison novel and although this isn’t her most famous novel, I picked it […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, AP Literature, Awards and Prizes, Fiction, Nobel Prize, North America, United States • Tags: Toni Morrison

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Part One)

August 9, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Penguin Classics, 2006. Originally published 1939. 464 pgs. Library copy. Despite having read two other works by Steinbeck (one I loved and one I didn’t), I have been afraid of this particular novel for quite some time. Maybe because my expectations have grown by leaps and bounds the more I read works by Steinbeck or maybe it’s because the back of my copy calls it “the most American of American classics” and the book won the Pulitzer […]

Categories: 101 Great Books, 2011 Reads, AP Literature, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Classics, Fiction, Food, Nobel Prize, North America, United States • Tags: John Steinbeck

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe

July 27, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan. Grove Press, 1969. First published 1964. 165 pgs. Library copy. Ōe won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994 and, according to the back of this book, is “known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his own struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son”. Presumably drawing from his own experiences, Ōe’s novel tells the story of a man named Bird who dreams of […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Asia, Awards and Prizes, Fiction, Japan, Japanese, Nobel Prize, Translated • Tags: Kenzaburō Ōe

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

July 9, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Penguin, 1994. First published 1948. 97 pgs. Library copy. Steinbeck’s novella examines the hold money has on people. The story begins with Kino and Juana’s baby boy, Coyotito, being bitten by a scorpion in La Paz, Mexico. The couple lacks the funds to pay the town’s doctor and are turned away with the slam of a gate. The couple take their sick little boy down to the waterfront and use a tribal cure to try to save […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Classics, Fiction, Nobel Prize • Tags: John Steinbeck

The Appointment by Herta Müller

March 30, 2011 by Christina

Fiction – eBook. Translated from German by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm. Picador, 2010. Originally published 1997. 212 pgs. Winner of the Nobel Prize, Müller’s novel is set in Communist Romania under dictator Nicolai Ceauşescu’s regime and follows an unnamed narrator on her way to an appointment with the secret police. As a worker in a garment factory, the unnamed narrator (who’s name we never learn) has been summoned repeatedly by the secret police for sneaking marriage proposals into pants before shipment to […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Europe, Fiction, German, Nobel Prize, Translated • Tags: Herta Müller

Blindness by José Saramago

January 10, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997. 293 pgs. Library copy. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, Saramago’s novel follows unnamed people in an unnamed city in an unnamed country as they deal with the fallout from being suddenly struck blind. The Government (always spelled with a capital ‘G’ in the story) has rounded all of the afflicted people up and placed them inside an old insane asylum under […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Dystopia, Fiction, Nobel Prize, Portuguese, Translated • Tags: José Saramago