There are just so many books to read and so little time throughout the week to enjoy them. This week, we’ve picked out some great reads for you to enjoy this weekend. If you haven’t read them already, pick one and revel in the words and venture into worlds unknown. If you have, then these books will make great rereads – you know just how wonderful the titles are.
The books on this list all deserve to be read – at the very least once.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
You read Marquez for the language that is so utterly descriptive. And then there’s his imagination. This is one author who can imagine his way through almost every scenario and leave the readers mesmerized. One Hundred Years of Solitude is such a beautiful story that it has the power to destroy you. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, life and death, and the ultimate search for peace and truth are some universal themes that dominate the novel. It’s definitely not an easy read and you might have to go back a few times just to understand who’s who but in the end, it’s completely worth the time and effort you put in.
Hamro Kitab: For the book-loving society
The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
The novel, which dramatizes family life in a Chinese village before World War I, was published in 1931 and the author was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel a year later. The story begins on Wang Lung’s wedding day and follows the rise and fall of his fortunes. Lung is a poor, hard-working farmer born and raised in a small village of Anhwei. The narrative is smooth and the plotline is intriguing; you can’t help but be pulled in by its beauty and simplicity. Besides being quite informative about the pre-revolutionary Chinese culture, The Good Earth makes for an interesting emotional journey. Lung and his wife, O-Lan, with her humility and frugal ways, will charm you and keep you hooked till the last page.
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Notable for its controversial subject, the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a literature professor called Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather, Lolita is a timeless classic of obsession, delusion, and lust. Lolita is a book that can sharply divide opinions, even among those who love fiction. There are those who consider Humbert a pedophile, and then there are those who think he suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance. Nabokov was good with words even though English was not his mother tongue and for that reason too this novel deserves to be read.
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
There is sadness and happiness, racism and equality, immaturity and maturity, injustice and redemption in this timeless classic by Harper Lee. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior – to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Published in 1960, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Regarded as a masterpiece of American literature, this book has been translated into forty languages and made into a film that is also a classic. You will love Atticus Finch, and his strong sense of morality will compel you to have many internal debates and contemplate on your sense of right and wrong.
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
It takes guts to make your main character spoiled, selfish, and stupid, someone without any redeeming qualities, and write an epic novel about her. But it works, and works really well in Gone with the Wind. Scarlett – we all know people like her. The characters in the book are so vivid that whether you like or dislike them, you cannot get them out of your head. There are no more vibrant characters in the history of literature than Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Everyone should read it at least once in their life to appreciate the civil war and understand the sadness and loss that enveloped the people during the time. You might not agree with many things in the book in this politically correct era we live in, but despite its flaws it’s a masterpiece in its own ways.
The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997. The characters Roy has created are wonderful, and she has succeeded in evoking all the noises and sights and smells of Kerala. This is a lyrical, mysterious tale of misunderstanding and pain – melancholic and sad, yet strangely uplifting. At its dark heart, it demonstrates how small things can have multiple and major consequences, and how everything can change in a single day. Really a demonstration of the Butterfly Effect, this isn’t a book that you barrel right through to find out what happens next. It’s a book that you have to float through, a book whose style dictates your pace. And because the narrative is disjointed, be prepared to savor it sentence by sentence.
The Village by the Sea
by Anita Desai
The Village by The Sea is the story of siblings Hari and Lila, along with their younger sisters Kamal and Bella, as they struggle in a quickly changing India. Living in a small village by the sea, the children have to adapt to difficult circumstances that include a drunken father, a terribly ill mother, and extreme poverty. It’s not a story of overcoming adversity, but one of resilience. Desai’s writing is simple and her descriptions of natural locations and of the busy city Bombay are the best parts of the book. This book also imparts quite a few messages – the most prominent one being that of ‘change’. Change is inevitable in life and in society. And to prosper you have to adapt to it. This is a simple story – written for young adults – but meant for all kinds of readers.