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By Richard Wright

Summary:
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

Source: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15622.Native_Son

Opinion:
I would not like to read this book because i don't enjoy reading novels like this. I think i would not be interested in it and it would make it harder for me to read.

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By Amy Tan
Summary:
Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is about four Chinese mothers, who came to America when they were young, and their grown daughters who were born in the United States. The mothers formed a club, where they play a Chinese tile game, eat a lot of food, and talk about life. Their stories about their youth in China are both sad and magical. The moms are filled with old-fashioned wisdom, while their daughters' lives are more modern and involve complications their mothers never dreamed of. Because they have different ways of looking at the world, the mothers and daughters often don't see eye-to-eye, but there is a strong bond between them. Told from different points of view, the wisdom in this novel plays out in stories of love, hope, desire, and loss.
Source: http://www.schoolbytes.com/english/summary.php?id=390#.WNGM9jsrK00

Opinion: i would enjoy reading this book because it is about chinease girls growing up in America and although i was not born here, i am growing up here and i think i would be able to relate to it which would make it even more interesting for me.

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By Margaret Atwood

Summary:
The Handmaid's Tale takes place in the 1990's in the Republic of Gilead. But Gilead isn't a real place, it's a place that might be (according to a feminist in the 80's). Gilead used to be the United States before the Gileadeans take over. They are a Christian fundamentalist regime. Their society shows what "family values" might look like if they were enforced. Women stay at home (a woman's place…) gardening and having babies. If women cannot or refuse to do this they are labeled unwomen and executed or sent to concentration camps called The Colonies.This book was written during the anti-feminist backlash of the 80's, and it paints a very bleak and nasty picture of the patriarchy. The main character, a handmaid, is a sex slave. Lots of women in Gilead are infertile because of pollution and radiation. If an important woman is infertile she is allowed to remain just a wife. A handmaid will be given to her. The handmaid occasionally sleeps with the wife's husband in a weird menage a toi ritual so that the wife can have a baby. This isn't really perverted. In the bible this is how Jacob and Rachel have kids, so in Christian Gilead it’s the way things are done. If a woman is fertile she has to be a handmaid. She dresses like a nun, except all in red. She looks "sexy" and is hard to miss. If a woman is sterile she can be a martha (think Martha Stewart). They are housekeepers and wear green. The wives wear blue. Econonwives wear stripes.The book recounts the main character's training as a handmaid at the Red Center, her servitude at the Commander's house, and her eventual escape. The novel ends at an history conference in 2092 where a bunch of academics and scientists talk about Gilead. The handmaid recorded her story on a bunch of cassette tapes and they are discovered and translated. But, ironically, the scholars don't learn anything important from her stories. They just talk about the facts. There are very few facts which they are certain of. The novel ends asking, "Are there any questions?"

Source: http://www.schoolbytes.com/english/summary.php?id=353#.WNGL5zsrK00

Opinion:

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By Richard Russo

Summary:
Empire Falls, Maine: once a thriving hub of industry, this small town nestles in a bend of the vast and winding Knox River, and has always been the empire of the wealthy Whiting family. Now the last Mrs Whiting presides like a black widow spider over its declining fortunes. She harbours a grudge against her employee Miles Groby, who runs the Whiting-owned Empire Grill, but hopes one day to own it himself. Miles, gentle and hopeless, has other problems: his wife has run off with his worst customer, he frets about his adored teenage daughter, and his drunken father sponges off everyone.

As the novel builds to a shocking climax, Russo constantly surprises with characters who will disarm you, a plot with as many twists and falls as the Knox River itself, and an ending that will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

Source: https://www.buffalolib.org/vufind/Record/1168279/Reviews

Opinion:

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By Jeffrey Euenides

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.
Source: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2187.Middlesex

Opinion: I think i would enjoy reading this book because i enjoy shows with mysteries such as revealing secrets and i like Greek novels because i am interested in greek mythology.

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By T.C. Boyle
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. 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: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24731.The_Tortilla_Curtain

Opinion: I don't think i would enjoy reading this book because i think the storyline would not be interesting for me. I like books i can relate to and this does not seem like something i can relate to.

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By Truman Capote

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.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/In-Cold-Blood-novel-by-Capote

Opinion:
I would like to read this book because i enjoy thriller/crime stories. I like investigation novels and the whole process of figuring out who the killer is which is why i think that this novel would interest me.

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By F. Scott Fitzgrald

Summary:
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semiautobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the Jazz Age, based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript. In this definitive text, This Side of Paradise captures the rhythms and romance of Fitzgerald's youth and offers a poignant portrait of the "Lost Generation."
Source: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46165.This_Side_of_Paradise

Opinion:
I would like to read this book because i really enjoyed the Great Gatsby and like the way Fitzgerald writes. I am interested to see how he wrote this book and how it is different from Gatsby.

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By Maya Angelou

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.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/I-Know-Why-the-Caged-Bird-Sings

Opinion: I would like to read this book because i like reading about people's lives and listening to their stories. I would like to see how her first 17 years played out and how they shaped her, as i am 17 now.

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By: Sylvia Plath

Summary: Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic

Source: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6514.The_Bell_Jar

Opinion:  I would like to read this book because i am interested in psychology and this book shows the darkest corners of the human psyche which i think would be very interesting to read.

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By: Zora Neale Hurston

Summary: Zora Neale Hurston was an African American woman who wrote many books and essays about black people between 1920 and the 1950’s. She writes this novel about a small town's black woman, Janie, who lives in Eatonville, Florida. This is the first incorporated black town in America. The story is told in one night on Janie’s back porch to her friend, Pheoby Watson. Hurston tells Janie's story in a ‘frame’. Telling the story with the same two people in the same setting (back porch) with only an hour or two having passed is telling the story in a ‘frame’. There are four parts to this book. (1) Janie's early years with Nanny, her grandmother, (2) Nanny telling about her life (born a slave) and Janie's short first marriage, (3) Janie’s years with Joe Starks, her second husband and (4) Janie’s marriage to Tea Cake Woods. Hurston uses ‘local-color’ words or colloquialisms as dialogue when her characters speak and this can be totally confusing. If you find the language is bogus just keep plugging away and the meaning will filter through eventually. This is a story about the quest for love.

Source: http://www.schoolbytes.com/english/summary.php?id=446#.WNBHhzsrLIU

Opinion:
I would not like to read this book because i don't like books that are too descriptive and i think this would be a very descriptive book as they are telling the story of her life, which would not keep me interested.

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By: Ernest Hemingway

Summary:
Hemingway’s first novel is about young, American and British expatriates living in Paris after WWI. Jake Barnes is the protagonist and narrator, and he’s impotent because of a war wound. Jake is an American newspaperman who stayed in Paris after the War as did many Americans, what with Prohibition in full swing. Jake’s a drunk and so are all of the other characters. The Sun Also Rises centers on the "Lost Generation," and Hemingway chose to quote this phrase of Gertrude Stein’s in one of the book’s two epigraphs. The impact of WWI on that generation is lost on most of us, but the war seems to have killed all the romantics by destroying the Old World order. When you think of the Lost Generation, think Gen X and everything associated with it: aimlessness, lack of "ambition," wasted potential. The people in this novel share with Gen X a sense that they live in a post-everything world.

Source: http://www.schoolbytes.com/english/summary.php?id=440#.WNBDkDsrLIU

Opinion: I would like to read this novel because it would be interesting to learn more about the "lost generation" and their experiences and how WWI affected different people. I would also like to see how the narrator acts as a result of the war and how it has personally affected him.