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Summary: The story is set in the Depression-era and Bigger is the novel's twenty-year-old protagonist, a resident of the "Black Belt," a Chicago ghetto that is predominantly black. Bigger lives in a one-room apartment with his mother ("Ma") and younger siblings, Vera and Buddy. The depressing mood of the novel is set in the opening scene: Bigger is awakened by the screams of his sister and mother. An overgrown, yellow-fanged rat is prowling around the room. Bigger and his brother back the rat into a corner and as the rat strikes back, tearing a gash in Bigger's pants, Bigger strikes the rat dead, crushing its head with a heavy iron skillet. Bigger's life is miserable and after a stint in a reform school, he remains bitter and angry about poverty and racism. Bigger's dream is to become an aviator but instead he is given a job through the relief agency-a chauffeur for a white millionaire-philanthropist named Henry Dalton. Ma warns Bigger to avoid his gang and set aside his criminal habits, lest he end up in the "gallows." Ma is unable to relate to Bigger and he is unresponsive to her religiosity and her overtures on "manhood." When Ma asserts that Bigger would go out and get a job if he "had any manhood in him," Bigger resents his mother for her dependence upon him. While he sincerely cares about his family, Bigger knows that he will never be offered the type of job that would allow him to offer his family substantial support.

Summary found on: http://www.gradesaver.com/native-son/study-guide/summary

Thoughts: I would be interested in reading this because it shows struggles that I don't usually struggle with and it also implies the circumstances that people had to go through in order to live the life that they were dreaming of.

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Summary: The novel opens after the death of Suyuan Woo, an elderly Chinese woman and the founding member of the Joy Luck Club. Suyuan has died without fulfilling her "long-cherished wish": to be reunited with her twin daughters who were lost in China. Suyuan’s American-born daughter, Jing-mei (June) Woo, is asked to replace her mother at the Joy Luck Club’s meetings. At the first meeting, Jing-mei learns that her long-lost half-sisters have been found alive and well in China. The other three elderly members of the Club – her mother’s best friends and Jing-mei’s "aunties" – give Jing-mei enough money to travel to China and meet her sisters. Essentially, Jing-mei has the opportunity to fulfill her mother’s greatest wish. Jing-mei’s aunties assign her the task of telling her twin sisters about the mother they never knew. The only problem is, Jing-mei feels like she never really knew her own mother.

Summary found on: http://www.shmoop.com/joy-luck-club/summary.html

Thoughts: I would be interested in reading this novel as it appeals to my reading taste and it can really be an eye opener as it tells the horrific life styles families had to live in order to maintain a "normal" lifestyle

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Summary: It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she was an independent woman, had a job of her own, a husband and child. But all of that is gone now...everything has changed.

Summary found on: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/handmaids-tale-margaret-atwood/1100295471#productInfoTabs

Thoughts: I would be interested in this novel as it encapsulates the life of this trapped girl and it can show her struggles and her actions of rebellion towards her situation

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Summary: Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion’s widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke out whatever meager promise isn’t already boarded up.Miles Roby gazes over this ruined kingdom from the Empire Grill, an opportunity of his youth that has become the albatross of his daily and future life. Called back from college and set to work by family obligations—his mother ailing, his father a loose cannon—Miles never left home again. Even so, his own obligations are manifold: a pending divorce; a troubled younger brother; and, not least, a peculiar partnership in the failing grill with none other than Mrs. Whiting. All of these, though, are offset by his daughter, Tick, whom he guides gently and proudly through the tribulations of adolescence. A decent man encircled by history and dreams, by echoing churches and abandoned mills, by the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors, Miles is also a patient, knowing guide to the rich, hardscrabble nature of Empire Falls: fathers and sons and daughters, living and dead, rich and poor alike. Shot through with the mysteries of generations and the shattering visitations of the nation at large, it is a social novel of panoramic ambition, yet at the same time achingly personal. In the end, Empire Falls reveals our worst and best instincts, both our most appalling nightmares and our simplest hopes, with all the vision, grace and humanity of truly epic storytelling.

Summary found on: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187020.Empire_Falls

Thoughts: I would not want to read this book as it seems repetitive by the summary provided and it would make me struggle with keeping up with the reading

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Summary: Middlesex tells 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 1967 before moving 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.

Summary found on:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2187.Middlesex

Thoughts: I would enjoy reading this novel as it is a non usual topic and it would be interesting to read the life of a non so normal life

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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.

Summary found on: https://www.amazon.com/Tortilla-Curtain-T-Coraghessan-Boyle/dp/014023828X

Thoughts: I would not really enjoy reading this as the prompt did not call for my attention with the plot provided

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Summary: The book tells the story of the murder of the Clutter family, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Clutter and their two teenage children, Kenyon and Nancy (two older daughters were grown and out of the house), and the events that lead the killers to murder. The family was living in Holcomb, Kansas, and in November 1959, they were brutally killed, with no apparent motive, by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. The family was discovered bound and shot to death, with only small items missing from the home. Capote read about the crime in The New York Times soon after it happened, and before the killers were caught, he began his work in Kansas, interviewing the people of Holcomb and doing extensive research with the help of his friend Harper Lee, who would go on to write the classic To Kill a Mockingbird.

Summary found on:
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/i/in-cold-blood/book-summary

Thoughts: I would be interested in reading this novel as it uncovers a murder story, leaving a lot of suspense which I enjoy also probably having a lot of page turners which would inspire me to read more and more

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This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Summary: This Side of Paradise chronicles the life of Amory Blaine from his childhood up through his early twenties. Born the son of a wealthy and sophisticated woman, Beatrice, Amory travels the country with his mother until he attends the fictitious St. Regis prep school in New England. He is handsome, quite intelligent though lazy in his schoolwork, and he earns admission to Princeton. Though initially concerned with being a success on campus, after failing a class he gives himself over to idleness; he prefers to learn through reading and discussions with friends than through his classes.

Summary found on:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/paradise/summary.html

Thoughts: I would be interested in this novel as it takes the reader through the life of the protagonist, living everything along with the protagonist

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I Know Why The Caged Birds Sing by Maya Angelou

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I Know Why The Caged Birds Sing by Maya Angelou

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Summary: In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou describes her coming of age as a precocious but insecure black girl in the American South during the 1930s and subsequently in California during the 1940s. Maya’s parents divorce when she is only three years old and ship Maya and her older brother, Bailey, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in rural Stamps, Arkansas. Annie, whom they call Momma, runs the only store in the black section of Stamps and becomes the central moral figure in Maya’s childhood.

Summary found on:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/cagedbird/summary.html

Thoughts: I would be interested in reading this book as it involves the life of Maya, being a African american girl, during a time period that was difficult and the suffering. Also because it can show how she overcame these hard moments

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Summary: Esther Greenwood, a college student from Massachusetts, travels to New York to work on a magazine for a month as a guest editor. She works for Jay Cee, a sympathetic but demanding woman. Esther and eleven other college girls live in a women’s hotel. The sponsors of their trip wine and dine them and shower them with presents. Esther knows she should be having the time of her life, but she feels deadened. The execution of the Rosenbergs worries her, and she can embrace neither the rebellious attitude of her friend Doreen nor the perky conformism of her friend Betsy. Esther and the other girls suffer food poisoning after a fancy banquet. Esther attempts to lose her virginity with a UN interpreter, but he seems uninterested. She questions her abilities and worries about what she will do after college. On her last night in the city, she goes on a disastrous blind date with a man named Marco, who tries to rape her

Summary found on: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/belljar/summary.html

Thoughts: I would be interested in reading this novel as it involves a criminal case and it would be interested in reading the suspenseful story.

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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurtson

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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurtson

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Summary: Janie Crawford, an attractive, confident, middle-aged black woman, returns to Eatonville, Florida, after a long absence. The black townspeople gossip about her and -speculate about where she has been and what has happened to her young husband, Tea Cake. They take her confidence as aloofness, but Janie’s friend Pheoby Watson sticks up for her. Pheoby visits her to find out what has happened. Their conversation frames the story that Janie relates.

Summary found on:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/eyes/summary.html

Thoughts: I would not read this book, as it does not appeal to my reading taste, seems similar to "The Scarlet Letter"

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Summary: Jake Barnes, the narrator, describes his friend, Robert Cohn. Cohn, like Jake, is an American expatriate living in Paris, although unlike Jake he did not fight in World War I. He's a Jewish writer who has recently published a novel and was a middleweight boxing champion in college at Princeton. Cohn lives with a woman named Frances Clyne, who was originally using him for his money but now that she's older wants to make him marry her. After reading a book that romanticizes travel Cohn has come to the conclusion that he's wasting his life, and one day he visits Jake, who is a journalist, at his office to ask him to take a trip with him to South America. Jake refuses, on the grounds that the only people who don't waste their lives are bullfighters.
Summary found on: http://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-sun-also-rises/summary

Thoughts: In my opinion this novel seems interesting as it tells the story of a person wanting to make a new life. In my opinion I would read this novel