Here's what Dorcas Haller, Library Department
Chair, writes about her five favorite books:
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The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Lessing (2007 Nobel Prize for Literature) has been a prolific
writer. Her themes of racial inequality, political activism,
work, love, marriage, motherhood, and independence, spoke to me
strongly in the early 1970s, when I was a young wife and mother.
This novel is written in a very structured way: a woman keeps four
separate notebooks, each detailing distinct aspects of her life --
Africa, communist political activism, writing about a love affair,
and dream-life -- and finally attempts to integrate them all into
one �golden notebook.� Interspersed with the notebooks is the
�novel� of the lives of two women friends and their families.
Although Lessing does not see "The Golden Notebook" as a feminist
novel, it certainly was that for me and many other women of my
generation. It is a solid, serious, and satisfying book that
still holds great power for me.
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Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871 � 1872) by George
Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) While I enjoy Jane Austen�s
novels for their lightness, I love George Eliot�s novels for their
seriousness. "Middlemarch" presents a picture of the lives of a
number of ordinary people in a small town in mid-nineteenth century
England. This was a time of change, politically and
culturally. Industrialization and new ideas were taking hold.
This novel deals with such important issues as the nature of
marriage, the status of women, idealism, the importance of
education, and class. "Middlemarch" is seen by many as Eliot�s
greatest novel and Virginia Woolf called it �one of the few English
novels written for grown-up people.�
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A Judgement in Stone
by Ruth Rendell �Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family
because she could not read or write.� I was hooked from the
moment I read that first line of this utterly unforgettable novel by
suspense writer Ruth Rendell. The novel has been translated to
film: in 1986, as "The Housekeeper," and in 1995, by
Claude Chabrol, as "La Ceremonie."
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Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
This remains one of the funniest books I have ever read.
Amis�s novel of poor Jim Dixon, an indifferent young history
instructor at a �red brick� university in England, describes in
hilarious detail Jim�s misadventures, and his impotent rage and
frustration, as he deals with the cultural pretensions of his dean
and other academics. Later authors who have followed Amis in
writing comic academic novels include
David Lodge,
Tom Sharpe, and
Howard
Jacobson.
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The Ice Age by
Margaret Drabble I am an admirer of all of Drabble�s novels.
Her characters are real and her treatment of them is generous and
sympathetic. I have many favorites, but perhaps "The Ice Age" is a
suitable one for our current economic climate. The novel takes place
in Britain in the mid-1970s -- oil crisis, economic recession,
political upheaval. "With debts spiraling out of control,
Anthony [Keating] realizes that he and his friends are bound to the
engine driving the society in which they live and that should it
falter, so will they.
'The Ice Age' is a
portrait of a Britain of boom and bust, and greed -- and uncannily
predicts the Thatcher years."*
* Book description from
amazon.com |
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