Fiction
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Modern fiction feels whittled down, simplified in comparison to the wandering conversations, philosophical musings and side characters in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
1984 is often ranked as one of the most quintessential books in the dystopian genre. But while I was reading it, I couldn’t look past the main character’s attitude toward women. Eventually, I found myself questioning whether the attitude belonged to the character, or to the author himself.
If you’re like me, you’re starting to daydream about warmer days filled with less ice and more sunshine. Spring always makes me of new beginnings. Little green plants peeking out of city gardens, birds singing, and people emerging from their homes to enjoy the longer daylight hours. This spring I want to read books about starting fresh. Here are a few suggestions if you’re looking for the same.
The Great Believers is staggering in its level of detail, in the number of characters you fall in love with, in the beauty of the prose, and in the scope of the tragedy it covers. Rebecca Makkai paints a picture of the 1980s AIDS epidemic in Chicago that is devastating and poignant, but also hopeful.
At its core, All the Birds in the Sky is a love story, but not just in the traditional romantic sense. It’s a love story between two people, a love letter to the city of San Francisco, a love letter to nature, even a love letter to technology. The characters explore existential questions about whether we have a bigger duty to our fellow humans or to the earth we live on. This is one of my favorite books, and I hope you enjoy it too!
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel through life with nobody ever remembering who you are? Sounds depressing right? Well, buckle up, because The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue offers about 500 pages exploring in painstaking detail just what that kind of a life would be like.
Have you ever wondered how your life might have turned out differently? What would your life be like if you had taken a different job or if your family hadn’t moved when you were a kid? These are impossible questions that we’ll never be able to answer for ourselves, so in Life After Life, Kate Atkinson answers them for us. The book tells the story of Ursula Todd, a girl with an odd ability to die and be reborn again and again into the exact same life.
Leave the World Behind takes the dystopian genre to a new and pragmatic level. While many apocalypse stories focus on drama, action, and survival, this novel takes a more realistic approach. What would you really be doing if the end of the world was imminent? Most likely, you’d be hunkering down in your house, stocking up on canned goods, and wondering what the hell was going on, just like our protagonists do in this novel.
Before reading this book, I had a very limited understanding of Chicago’s South Side. Everywhere You Don’t Belong gave me a nuanced view of what life is like there. It taught me about many of the challenges and tragedies of life in South Shore. Importantly, it also showed me the joys and the everyday struggles.
Books about passing make up an important and unique genre in American literature and film, and Bennett’s novel undoubtedly is a new essential read in this genre. The story follows Desiree and Stella, identical twins who grow up in a small town in Louisiana. At age 16, they run away from home, and Stella makes a choice that alters her life forever.
The Immortalists is a heartbreaking story that explores a number of themes that are fundamental to our existence. Or more aptly put, it explores themes that are fundamental to the end of our existence.
The Year of the Flood is an essential follow up to Oryx and Crake. Margaret Atwood tells the same story so skillfully from entirely different perspectives, asking us, as readers, to reflect on critical themes like class, religion, and the role humans should play in engineering their world.
If there ever was a book for our times, Oryx and Crake is it. This novel is a story about a pandemic that is even more shocking than the one we are living through. Yet, in spite of the dystopian plot, Oryx and Crake gave me hope.
There’s nothing I love more than a book by a woman about a woman, so Circe certainly fits the bill. In this book, Circe, a goddess and sorceress who appears briefly in The Odyssey, finally gets her moment in the spotlight.
Disappearing Earth is the perfect novel for a person stuck at home during a global pandemic. Rarely has a book so thoroughly transported me away from my own life.
At its core, this is a book about a breakup, but it doesn’t end the way Hollywood has trained my brain to expect it would — Carty-Williams defied my expectations with a refreshingly modern ending.
My first time reading Jane Austen far exceeded expectations! What a funny, delightful story filled with believable quirky characters.