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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.