In 1949 four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past-begin meeting in San Francisco to play Mahjong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and “say” stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Nearly forty years later, one of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother’s lifelong wish-and the tragic way in which it has come true. The revelation of this secret unleashes an urgent need among the women to reach back and remember… In this extraordinary first work of fiction, Amy Tan writes about what is lost-over the years, between generations, among friends-and what is saved. Their stories told within this book ultimately display the double happiness that can be found in being both Chinese and American.
Tag Archives: Oxford Bookworms
Which Book Would You Read?
The Grapes of Wrath
Author: John Steinbeck
ISBN: 9780230031050
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.
First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.
Les Misérables
Author: Victor Hugo
ISBN: 9780194794404
One of the most widely read novels of all time, Les Misérables was the crowning literary achievement of Victor Hugo’s stunning career. Though he was considered the greatest French writer of his day, Hugo was forced to flee the country because of his opposition to Napoleon III. While in exile he completed Les Misérables, an enormous melodrama set against the background of political upheaval in France following the rule of Napoleon I.
Les Misérables tells the story of the peasant Jean Valjean—unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert. As Valjean struggles to redeem his past, we are thrust into the teeming underworld of Paris with all its poverty, ignorance, and suffering. Just as cruel tyranny threatens to extinguish the last vestiges of hope, rebellion sweeps over the land like wildfire, igniting a vast struggle for the democratic ideal in France.
A monumental classic dedicated to the oppressed, the underdog, the laborer, the rebel, the orphan, and the misunderstood, Les Misérables is a rich, emotional novel that captures nothing less than the entirety of life in nineteenth-century France.
Theme of the Week: Celebrating Authors of February
This week we celebrate authors of the past and present who had birthdays in the month of February. Check them out below.
James Joyce
(February 2, 1882 – January 13, 1941)
Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. He is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he utilized. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
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Johnston McCulley
(February 2, 1883 – November 23, 1958)
was the author of hundreds of stories, fifty novels, numerous screenplays for film and television, and the creator of the character Zorro.
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Robert Coover
(February 4, 1932 – )
Coover is an American author and professor emeritus in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He is most noted for the Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady.
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Susan Hill
(February 5, 1942 – )
Hill is an English author of fiction and non-fiction works. Her most noted novel is The Woman in Black which was turned into a film in 2012. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to literature.
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Laura Ingalls Wilder
(February 7, 1867 – February 10, 1957)
Wilder was an American writer, most notably the author of the Little House on the Prairie books of children’s novels based on her childhood in a settler family. Her daughter encouraged her to write and helped her to edit and publish the novels.
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Jules Verne
(February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905)
Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. One of his most popular books is Around the World in Eighty Days.
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Charles Lamb
(February 10, 1775 – December 27, 1834)
Lamb was an English writer and essayist, best known for the children’s book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced with his sister, Mary Lamb.
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Amy Tan
(February 19, 1952 – )
Tan is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese-American experience. Her best-known work is The Joy Luck Club, which has been translated into 35 languages. In 1993, the book was adapted into a commercially successful film.
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Jonathan Safran Foer
(February 21, 1977 – )
Safran Foer is an American writer. He is best known for his novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) which was adapted into a film in 2011.
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Wilhelm Grimm
(February 24, 1786 – December 16, 1859)
Grimm was a German author, the younger of the Brothers Grimm. He is best known for writing, with his brother, Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
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Victor Hugo
(February 26, 1802 – May 22, 1885)
Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers. In France, Hugo’s literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Outside France, his best-known work is the acclaimed novel Les Misérables (1862).
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John Steinbeck
(February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968)
Steinbeck was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939), widely attributed to be part of the American literary canon, is considered Steinbeck’s masterpiece. In the first 75 years since it was published, it sold 14 million copies.
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Inspirational Quotes
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Book of the Week: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
“There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments.”
Thus young Walter Hartright first meets the mysterious woman in white in what soon became one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. Secrets, mistaken identities, surprise revelations, amnesia, locked rooms and locked asylums, and an unorthodox villain made this mystery thriller an instant success when it first appeared in 1860, and it has continued to enthrall readers ever since. From the hero’s foreboding before his arrival at Limmeridge House to the nefarious plot concerning the beautiful Laura, the breathtaking tension of Collins’s narrative created a new literary genre of suspense fiction, which profoundly shaped the course of English popular writing.
Collins’s work with this novel was so gripping in the imagination of the world that he had his own tombstone inscribed: “Author of The Woman in White.”
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Which Book Would You Read?
This week we celebrate our authors of January by asking which book would you read?
Cold Comfort Farm
Author: Stella Gibbons
ISBN: 9780194792554
Winner of the 1933 Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, COLD COMFORT FARM is a wickedly funny portrait of British rural life in the 1930s. Flora Poste, a recently orphaned socialite, moves in with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, and becomes enmeshed in a web of violent emotions, despair, and scheming, until Flora manages to set things right.
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Death of an Englishman
Author: Magdalen Nabb
ISBN: 9780194791687
It is just before Christmas and the marshal wants to go South to spend the holiday with his wife and family, but first he must recover from the flu and also solve a murder. A seemingly respectable retired Englishman, living in a flat on the Via Maggio near the Santa Trinita bridge, was shot in the back during the night. He was well-connected and Scotland Yard has dispatched two officers to “assist” the Italians in solving the crime. But it is the marshal, a quiet observer, not an intellectual, who manages to figure out what happened, and why.
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Theme of the Week: Celebrating Authors of January
This week we celebrate authors of the past and present who had birthdays in the month of January. Check them out below.
J.D. Salinger
(January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010)
Jerome David “J. D.” Salinger was an American writer who won acclaim early in life. He led a very private life for more than a half-century. His novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) brought him a lot of public attention-which he did not like. He published Franny and Zooey in 1961 and gave his last interview in 1980.
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E. M. Forster
(January 1, 1879 – June 7, 1970)
Edward Morgan Forster was an English novelist, short story writer and essayist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster’s 1924 novel, A Passage to India brought him his greatest success.
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Isaac Asimov
(January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992)
Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books, such as I, Robot. Asimov was prolific and wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards and was considered one of the “Big Three” science fiction writers during his lifetime.
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Jacob Grimm
(January 4, 1785 – September 20, 1863)
Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was a German philologist, jurist and mythologist. He is known as the discoverer of Grimm’s Law, and as one of the Brothers Grimm (with his brother Wilhelm), as the editor of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
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Stella Gibbons
(January 5, 1902 – December 19, 1989)
Gibbons was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), which won the literary Prix Femina Étranger and has been reprinted many times.
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Wilkie Collins
(January 8, 1824 – September 23, 1889)
William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known work is The Woman in White.
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Jack London
(January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916)
John Griffith “Jack” London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. His most famous works include The Call of the Wild, set in the Klondike Gold Rush.
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Magdalen Nabb
(January 16, 1947 – August 18, 2007)
Nabb was a British author, best known for the Marshal Guarnaccia detective novels such as Death of an Englishman.
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Edgar Allan Poe
(January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849)
Poe was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. His most famous works include The Tell-Tale Heart, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Masque of the Red Death and The Pit and the Pendulum.
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Edith Wharton
(January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937)
Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. The Age of Innocence was Wharton’s twelfth book which won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making it the first novel written by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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W. Somerset Maugham
(January 25, 1874 – December 16, 1965)
William Somerset Maugham was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s. He is most remembered for his novels: Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Theatre, The Painted Veil and The Summing Up.
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Virginia Woolf
(January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941)
Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. Her most famous works include the novels: Orlando: A Biography, Between the Acts, The Common Reader and A Room of One’s Own.
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Lewis Carroll
(January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898)
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass.
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Book of the Week: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
The three laws of Robotics:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
2) A robot must obey orders givein to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
With these three, simple directives, Isaac Asimov changed our perception of robots forever when he formulated the laws governing their behavior. In I, Robot, Asimov chronicles the development of the robot through a series of interlinked stories: from its primitive origins in the present to its ultimate perfection in the not-so-distant future–a future in which humanity itself may be rendered obsolete.
Here are stories of robots gone mad, of mind-read robots, and robots with a sense of humor. Of robot politicians, and robots who secretly run the world–all told with the dramatic blend of science fact and science fiction that has become Asmiov’s trademark.
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Which Book Would You Read?
This week we celebrate J.D. Salinger and Edith Wharton by asking which book would you read?
Franny and Zooey
Author: J.D. Salinger
ISBN: 9780241950449
Franny Glass is a pretty, effervescent college student on a date with her intellectually confident boyfriend, Lane. They appear to be the perfect couple, but as they struggle to communicate with each other about the things they really care about, slowly their true feelings come to the surface.
Price: 16,9 GEL
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The Catcher in the Rye
Author: J.D. Salinger
ISBN: 9780241950432
Holden Caulfield is a dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Navigating his way through challenges of growing up, Holden dissects the ‘phony’ aspects of society, and the ‘phonies’ themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.
Price: 24,5 GEL
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The Age of Innocence
Author: Edith Wharton
ISBN: 9780194793346
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.”
This is Newland Archer’s world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a decision that will either courageously define his life—or mercilessly destroy it.
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Book of the Week: The Call of the Wild by Jack London
When men find gold in the frozen north of Canada, they need dogs – big, strong dogs to pull the sledges on the long journeys to and from the gold mines.
Buck is stolen from his home in the south and sold as a sledge-dog. He has to learn a new way of life – how to work in harness, how to stay alive in the ice and the snow… and how to fight. Because when a dog falls down in a fight, he never gets up again.
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