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Short Summary:
Native Son, novel by Richard Wright, published in 1940. The novel addresses the issue of white American society’s responsibility for the repression of blacks. The plot charts the decline of Bigger Thomas, a young African American imprisoned for two murders—the accidental smothering of his white employer’s daughter and the deliberate killing of his girlfriend to silence her. In his cell Thomas confronts his growing sense of injustice and concludes that violence is the only alternative to submission to white society.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/Native-Son
My Opinion on the Novel:
I believe that the basis of this novel is interesting, because it deals with the issue of race which is highly discussed today. I don't think I will read this book because of the amount of violence that is in the novel.

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Short 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, eat dim sum, and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Nearly forty years later, one of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother's lifelong wish-and the tragic way in which it has come true. The revelation of this secret unleashes an urgent need among the women to reach back and remember... In this extraordinary first work of fiction, Amy Tan writes about what is lost-over the years, between generations, among friends-and what is saved.
Source: Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/joy-luck-club-amy-tan/1100023550#productInfoTabs
My Opinion on the Novel:
I will not read this novel, because the story does not seem to have exciting action. The story is about the relationship between mothers and daughters, and it focuses more on a life lesson, then on interesting action.

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Short Summary:
In this widely discussed work, Atwood creates a dystopic future in which the population has become threateningly infertile and women are reduced to their reproductive capabilities. Patriarchy takes on a new, extreme aspect; one that oppresses in the name of preservation and protection, one in which violence is perpetrated by the language of ownership and physical delineation. In this nightmare society women are unable to have jobs or money, and are assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the Wives. The tale’s protagonist, Offred—so named to denote the male master to whom she belongs (Of-Fred)—recounts her present situation with a clinical attention to her body, now only an instrument of reproduction. A counterpoint is provided through moving glimpses into her past life: memories of a sensual love for her lost family.

Set in a future Cambridge, Massachusetts, and partly inspired by New England’s puritan American society, Atwood transforms the institutions and buildings of a familiar landscape into a republic called Gilead, after a military coup of extreme Christians has killed the U.S. president and most of Congress and installed a totalitarian theocratic regime under an elite group of men called Commanders. The population is kept in check through fear. Torture is commonplace, spying and denunciation are encouraged, and there are frequent public executions. The society is strictly hierarchical, women are subservient, and most people are infertile due to pollution and sexually transmitted diseases; hence the need of official breeders for the ruling elite.
Offred is in her mid-30s and is running out of time before being sent to the colonies to clear up hazardous waste. She is considered a debauched woman, because she was married to a divorced man when the coup occurred; the new regime does not recognize divorce, meaning Offred is officially an adulterous. Her growing despair with her existence permeates the book. Fred is Offred’s current Commander, and as a leader of the regime, he feels he can bend the rules: instead of confining his contact with Offred to the monthly insemination ceremony, he seeks out her company, even giving her material to read, which is forbidden to women. His wife, Serena Joy, is desperate for a child, so dangerously arranges for Offred to have sex with the chauffeur, Nick. Offred learns from another handmaid, Ofglen, that there is an underground rebellion. When Ofglen is found out, she commits suicide rather than betray other members of the group, thus buying precious time for Offred. Nick helps Offred to escape, but is he a member of the rebellion or really a government agent? The story ends with Offred being taken away. An epilogue then explains that the events of the story are part of a symposium on Gileadian Studies in 2195 and hints that a more equitable society followed the Gileadian theocracy.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Handmaids-Tale-by-Atwood
My Opinion on the Novel:
The novel is a dystopian novel, which makes for an interesting read. Also, I like how it is written by a female writer about female issues.

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Short Summary:

C. B. Whiting is the last in the line of Whiting males. The Whiting dynasty has ruled the town of Empire Falls for generations, owning the town's major employers, the shirt factory and the textile mill. Charles Beaumont Whiting grows up in privilege in the grandiose Whiting mansion. In his twenties, he moves to Mexico, where he dreams of being a poet and painter. However, his father summons him back to Maine to take over the management of the shirt factory. Ten years later, resigned to his life in Maine, Charles decides to build himself a hacienda across the river from Empire Falls. Before construction begins, however, he notices that great quantities of trash keep washing up on the banks of the river, on his future doorstep. Hired analysts explain that the "design" of the river, "one of God's poorer efforts," is to blame for the problem. To improve the flow of the river, a channel is blasted through a strip of land Charles buys from a poor family named Robideaux.

The Whiting men have a common curse: they share their lives with women who make them miserable. C. B. Whiting chooses Francine Robideaux.
Source: Encyclopedia http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/empire-falls#PlotSummary
My Opinion on the Novel:
I do appreciate that the story is about a family dynasty, but I don't like how the story is about unhappy marriages.

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Short Summary:
So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Source: Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/middlesex-jeffrey-eugenides/1100355974?ean=9780312427733
My Opinion on the Novel:
The novel seems highly interesting, because it is about the life of an hermaphrodite, which is something that is rarely discussed in the literature.

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Short Summary:
Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.
Source: Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tortilla-curtain-t-c-boyle/1100309780?ean=9780140238280#productInfoTabs
My Opinion on the Novel:
I don't think that I will read this novel, because I have already read The Grapes of Wrath which is about the American dream as well.

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Short Summary:
Capote’s most famous work is a pioneering example of both the "nonfiction novel" and the modern "true crime" story. It retells the story of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Kansas by a pair of drifting misfits, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, and of the subsequent trial and execution of the killers. Capote also uses the polarities of this particular case as the starting point for a larger examination of the values of late 1950s and early 1960s America; the respectable Clutters are so wholesomely all-American that they could almost have been invented, while Smith and Hickock come over as brutal real life versions of the James Dean "rebel" culture. The world of the victims is painstakingly and sympathetically reconstructed, but Capote’s real interest is in the emotional lives of Perry and Dick, and what might have led them into such murderous excess. Indeed, some argue that Capote was so fascinated by Perry Smith because he saw in him a possible alternative version of himself.

Given that Capote wrote about the crime throughout the trial, it has even been suggested that the final verdicts were conditioned by the way in which his journalism had portrayed the killers. In this light, In Cold Blood offers a larger, more disturbing insight. Like Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979), it embodies a debate about fact, fiction, and the overlaps and differences between their ethical responsibilities.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/In-Cold-Blood-novel-by-Capote
My Opinion on the Novel:
The novel looks interesting because it is non-fiction, but murder stories don't interest me as much as other types of stories.

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The Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerlad

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The Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerlad

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Short Summary:
This Side of Paradise, first novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1920. Immature though it seems today, the work when it was published was considered a revelation of the new morality of the young in the early Jazz Age, and it made Fitzgerald famous. The novel’s hero, Amory Blaine, is a handsome, spoiled young man who attends Princeton, becomes involved in literary activities, and has several ill-fated romances. A portrait of the Lost Generation, the novel addresses Fitzgerald’s later theme of love distorted by social climbing and greed.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/This-Side-of-Paradise
My Opinion on the Novel:
I would like to read the novel, because it is written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote the Great Gatsby. I really liked the Great Gatsby, and I know this novel is similar to it.

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

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Short Summary:
In her distinctive lyrical prose, Angelou recounts the first seventeen years of her life, discussing her unsettled childhood in America in the 1930s and her changing relationships. When her parents separate, Maya and her brother Bailey, three and four years old respectively, are sent from their parental home in California back to the segregated South, to live with their grandmother, Momma, in rural Arkansas. Momma provides a strict moral center to their lives. At the age of eight, Maya goes to stay with her mother in St. Louis, where she is molested and raped by her mother’s partner. With her brother she later returns to stay with Momma before returning again to live with her mother and her mother’s husband in California. The book ends with the birth of Maya’s first child, Guy.

Angelou became a prominent figure in the American civil rights movement, fighting for African-American rights during the 1960s. She became a close associate of Malcolm X, and later of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When King was assassinated in 1968, Angelou was inspired by a meeting with James Baldwin and cartoonist Jules Feiffer to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as a way of dealing with death of her friend, and to draw attention to her own personal struggles with racism.

Against the backdrop of racial tensions in the South, Angelou confronts the traumatic events of her own childhood and explores the evolution of her own strong identity as an African American woman. Her individual and cultural feelings of displacement are mediated through her passion for literature, which proves both healing and empowering.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/I-Know-Why-the-Caged-Bird-Sings
My Opinion on the Novel:
I would be interested in reading the novel, because I do know of Maya Angelou. Also, the story centers on the problems faced by people of color.

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Short Summary:
This thinly veiled autobiography details the life of Esther Greenwood, a college woman who struggles through a mental breakdown in the 1950s. Plath examines coming of age in a hypocritical world in this painfully introspective novel, which is noted for its symbolic use of bottles and jars and black-and-white colours and its symbols of imprisonment and death.

DETAIL: Casually described by Sylvia Plath in a letter to her mother as a "pot boiler," The Bell Jar has become one of the most notorious depictions of a mental breakdown in American literature. First published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, the novel provides a thinly disguised autobiographical account of Plath’s teenage years. It covers the life of Esther, from her spell as a guest editor of a teen magazine to her failed suicide attempt and the crude care of midtwentieth-century American psychiatry.

Initially celebrated for its dry self-deprecation and ruthless honesty, The Bell Jar is now read as a damning critique of 1950s social politics. Plath makes clear connections between Esther’s dawning awareness of the limited female roles available to her and her increasing sense of isolation and paranoia. The contradictory expectations imposed upon women in relation to sexuality, motherhood, and intellectual achievement are linked to Esther’s sense of herself as fragmented. Esther’s eventual recovery relies on her ability to dismiss the dominant versions of femininity that populate the novel.

Yet concern with the stifling atmosphere of 1950s America is not limited to examination of gender. The opening sentence—"It was a queer sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs"—very precisely locates the novel in Cold War McCarthyism and makes implicit connections between Esther’s experiences and the other paranoias and betrayals that characterized the decade.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Bell-Jar
My Opinion on the Novel:
I don't find the Cold War era in the United States as intriguing as other periods in history, so I don't think I will read the novel.

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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

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Short Summary:
This novel about a proud, independent black woman was first published in 1937 and generally dismissed by reviewers. It was out of print for nearly 30 years when the University of Illinois Press reissued it in 1978, at which time it was instantly embraced by the literary establishment as one of the greatest works in the canon of African-American fiction.

Mesmerizing in its immediacy and haunting in its subtlety, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford—fair-skinned, long-haired, dreamy woman—who comes of age expecting better treatment than what she gets from her three husbands and community. Then she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who captivates Janie's heart and spirit, and offers her the chance to relish life without being one man's mule or another man's adornment.
Source: Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/their-eyes-were-watching-god-zora-neale-hurston/1116756380?ean=9780061120060
My Opinion on the Novel:
I do appreciate how the novel is about a woman wanting to receive better treatment from her love interests, so there might be a chance of me reading the novel.

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Short Summary:
Set in the 1920s, the novel deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and Spain. They are members of the cynical and disillusioned post-World War I Lost Generation, many of whom suffer psychological and physical wounds as a result of the war. Two of the novel’s main characters, Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes, typify this generation. Lady Brett drifts through a series of affairs despite her love for Jake; she and Jake are unable to consummate their love, because of a war wound that rendered him impotent. Friendship, stoicism, and natural grace under pressure are offered as the values that matter in an otherwise amoral and often senseless world.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Sun-Also-Rises
My Opinion on the Novel:
I'm not really interested in novels about the Lost Generation, because I have learned a lot about the Lost Generation, and I don't feel like I could learn more about it.