The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Welcome to The
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair • Welcome to The Jungle. There’s no fun and games. Just loads of rotten meat and rats being shoveled into grinders and packed into sausage by underpaid immigrants who are left to die and for dead in the wintry, sub-zero streets of Chicago’s more or less completely unregulated turn of the century meatpacking factories. If this does sound like fun and games, I should probably send you to the nurse. • Seriously, though it’s a great book that changed our country.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe • You could reason and rationalize all day long about Things Fall Apart and still come away with questions about the book’s feel and energy and tension. Achebe’s tale of villager Okonkwo’s fight against outside forces and his own paradigm of masculinity (yeah, I said it!) is curtly told, forcing the reader to come to it. Written in some ways as a retort to Heart of Darkness, in Things Fall Apart title says it all.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck • In 1939, in our country Grapes of Wrath was banned and burned. That same year it won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. 23 years later, the author of this Joad’s-eye view of the travels, troubles and travails of those in the Dust Bowl displacement was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. So what made the book so terrible it should be banned and burned and so amazing it and its author were covered in glory? You’ll have to read it to find out!
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison • “I am an invisible man. ” And with that Ellison is off and alluding and firing the opening salvo in the war against not just racism, but more perniciously “invisibility. ” More than 70 years before #Blacklivesmatter, Invisible Man was forcing readers to wrestle with race in America and what it means when a person can be made to feel and perhaps become literally invisible.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin • Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a timeless tale of a woman’s gradual realization of her and her life’s limitations. Like a bird who wises up to the cage’s confinement and the limitless blue sky beyond the gilded wires, so Chopin’s protagonist. She is, um, awakened, in all the ways a woman of her time might need, um, “awakened. ”
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley • Read this epistolary gothic novel and you’ll never think of Frankenstein the same way again. No, seriously: you’ll be able to chortle (inwardly or outwardly) whenever anyone says something like, “Frankenstein is a scary monster. ” because you’ll know, you’ll know… • Interested in the line between nature and nurture? Fascinated by the line between using science for good or evil? Like watching genius slowly curdle into madness? Frankenstein is the book for you.
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner You’re reading Faulkner? How do I know? Because of the perplexed look on your face that screams “multiple narrators and nonlinear plot line!” This modernist novel’s got its own sound and fury -- death, unwed mothers, barn burnings, coffins, and maybe some more death. Oh, and multiple narrators. And death. This novel won’t make you want to lay dying! Or will it…
Beloved by Toni Morrison • Too heart-wrenching for kitsch, this novel explores love, family, slavery, violence, and the paranormal. Written in 1987, this novel made its way into the canon, winning the Pulitzer and getting a movie deal starring Oprah. • Toni Morrison dedicates this book to “Sixty Million and more”. You’ll have to read to find out why.
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