Novel Assignment Book Club Early Alert
We will be doing this project with your book club groups in class and reading out of class from weeks 11 to 13. Each student will be responsible for finishing one of the following two books; here is some info on the books to help you decide what you want to choose.
- Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion; From the back cover of the 1994 edition: “A ruthless dissection of American Life in the late 1960s, [Didion in her 1971 novel] Play It As It Lays [chooses] Hollywood to serve as her microcosm of contemporary society and exposed a culture characterized by emptiness and ennui. Maria Wyeth is an emotional drifter who has become almost anesthetized against pain and pleasure. She finds herself, in her early thirties, radically divorced from husband, lovers, friends, her own past and her own future. Actress, daughter, wife, mother, [white] woman: she has played each role to the sound of one hand clapping. Play It as It Lays is set in a place beyond good and evil, literally in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the barren wastes of the Mojave, but figuratively in the landscape of the arid soul. …decades after its original publication, it remains a profoundly disturbing novel.” Some readers might want to know that the novel includes scenes or discussions of drug and alcohol abuse, violence, offensive language (cussing and a homophobic slur), illegal abortion, and suicide. The book is 214 pages and Time Magazine named it among its TIME 100 Best English-language novels from 1923-2005.
- The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston; From the February 5, 2018 version of the amazon.com description: “Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American.As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family’s past and her own present.” Some readers may want to know that this book includes offensive language (some cussing and racial/ethnic slurs). This book is 209 pages and won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award.
If you choose to read some or all of the book ahead of time, you must understand and agree that when we start the project as a class, you will re-read/review the book according to the schedule set by your group, and do the annotation, quote collecting, and other related group study work according to your group designed schedule.
You will write your novel essay independently, not with your group members.