World Literature - Literature Circle Book Choices

World Literature - Literature Circle Book Choices

1.The Berlin Boxing Club by Robert Sharenow

Fourteen-year-old Karl Stern has never thought of himself as a Jew. But to the bullies at his school in Naziera Berlin, it doesn't matter that Karl has never set foot in a synagogue or that his family doesn't practice religion. Demoralized by relentless attacks on a heritage he doesn't accept as his own, Karl longs to prove his worth to everyone around him.

So when Max Schmeling, champion boxer and German national hero, makes a deal with Karl's father to give Karl boxing lessons, Karl sees it as the perfect chance to reinvent himself. A skilled cartoonist, Karl has never had an interest in boxing, but as Max becomes the mentor Karl never had, Karl soon finds both his boxing skills and his art flourishing.

But when Nazi violence against Jews escalates, Karl must take on a new role: protector of his family. Karl longs to ask his new mentor for help, but with Max's fame growing, he is forced to associate with Hitler and other Nazi elites, leaving Karl to wonder where his hero's sympathies truly lie. Can Karl balance his dream of boxing greatness with his obligation to keep his family out of harm's way?

2. The Kite Runner by KhaledHosseini

“This powerful first novel tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, KhaledHosseini’s privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country’s revolution and its invasion by Russian forces. But political events, even as dramatic as the ones presented in The Kite Runner, are only a part of this story. In The Kite Runner,Hosseini gives readers a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence –forces that continue to threaten them even today.” (NY Times Book Review)

3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by KhaledHosseini

I read many books in a year. Some I read for entertainment and others to increase my knowledge. Then there is the rare book that does both of those things, plus touches your heart as well. A Thousand Splendid Suns by KhaledHosseini does just that. Hosseini's The Kite Runner was a magnificent book, and I enjoyed A Thousand Splendid Suns even more.
Splendid Suns follows the lives of two Afghani women, Mariam and Laila, as they move from children to adults. The book spans 30 years, beginning with the Soviet invasion and ending with the overthrow of the Taliban. It's difficult to explain more of the story without spoiling the plot, but these two women go from being enemies to unlikely friends. A Thousand Suns is a moving story about the power of love, the bonds of friendship, the love of country, and the struggle to survive. I hated to see it end.

4. Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

July 1942 marked a dark period in the history of France where thousands of Jewish families were rounded up and forcibly kept in the Velodromed'Hiver. They were then sent off to transit camps in France such as Drancy, before being packed off to Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp. What is so unnerving about this whole incident is that the rounding up and mobilisation of Jews for deportation was done by the French authorities.
Based upon this seldom mentioned, little known piece of French history, author Tatiana de Rosnay has crafted a well-written novel that alternates between the past in 1942, and the present. The past centers around a 10 year old Jewish girl Sarah Strazynski who is forced to go to the Velodromed'Hiver with her mother and father, innocently leaving behind a 4 year old brother Michel locked in a secret cupboard with the assurance that she would return to let him out when it was safe.

5. Night by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel's narrative of his own one-year experience spent in a concentration camp has appropriately become a classic in the field. Read it to find meaning in a seeming meaningless life. Read "Night" if you are going through your own "dark night of the soul" and want to find an answer to the perennial question, "Where is God?" Read "Night" if you think deeply about life and how it often falls on us and crushes us. Don't read "Night" only if you have a queasy stomach or the need to think that this life is a bed of roses.
Wiesel discovered that, "God is there in the suffering." His explanation is anything but trite. Instead, it grapples candidly with the confusion that life can and does bring. Fortunately Wiesel's candor leads to hope--the confidence that behind the evils in this life there resides a good God working out plans in a mysterious, yet glorious, way. The inner depths and black darkness of "Night" call us not to squeamish forgetting but to stark remembering. For only in remembering will we insist, "Never again!"

6. Left to Tell by ImmaculeeIlibagiza

This beautiful, but heartbreaking true story by ImmaculeeIlibagiza brings a nation's horror right down to a personal level. So much of our world seems in an endless cycle of murder and revenge; Ilibagiza experienced unimaginable terror and personal loss, but emerged with a strong faith and a willingness to forgive.
In sharing her story, she gives hope, not only to her torn nation, but to the whole world. This is one of the finest stories of this genre since THE HIDING PLACE by Corrie Ten Boom or THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK.
This book is both timely in its relevance and timeless in its truth. It's well-written, but not an "easy" read. It's a book to ponder, to absorb, to weep with, and ultimately to learn from. Take this journey from despair to hope.

7. Stolen Lives by MalkikaOufkir

8. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

Ishmael Beah lived through and shares with the reader an experience that should befall no one, let alone a child, yet re-emerged somehow with his humanity intact. Well written, his book is paced to maintain the reader's interest, but details the horrors of a civil war in which both sides exploited the children they had made orphans, using drugs and the unchecked power of weapons to cruelly terrorize those victims caught in the middle. This is a story that needs to be told, as it leaves unanswered the question of why this war even occurred in the first place, and why, as Americans, did we know so little of it. As demonstrated by the current headlines in Darfur and elsewhere, regional conflict continues throughout parts of the world we are unfamiliar with and seemingly can overlook, yet the scale of death and atrocity far exceeds anything we can imagine. The best way to prevent such strife from continuing is to tell of it. Ishmael Beah has done so in a compelling way.

9. A Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

"All Quiet on the Western Front" is the story of Paul Baumer, a young German soldier serving in the trenches in France. Baumer's story is not a pleasant one; he volunteered for the war when his instructor in school, Kantorek, urged the class to join up for the glory of Germany. After a rigorous period of military training (where Paul and his buddies meet the hated drill instructor Himmelstoss, a recurring character throughout the book), Baumer and his friends go to the front as infantrymen. Filled with glorious ideas about war by authority figures back home, Baumer quickly discovers that the blood-drenched trenches of the Western Front are a quagmire of misery and violent death. As soon as the first shells explode in the mud Paul and his friends realize everyone back home is a liar, that war is not the glorious transformation of boys into men but rather the systematic destruction of all that is decent and healthy. As Paul's friends slip away one by one through death, desertion, and injury, Paul begins to wonder about his own life and whether he will survive not only the war but also a world without war.

10. A Farewell to Arms by Earnest Hemingway

A FAREWELL TO ARMS is one of Hemingway's earliest novels. With much of the material loosely based on his own personal experiences as an ambulance driver during World War I, the story captures in great detail the conflict in all of its horror and barbarism.

The book invites us to imagine all of the brave soldiers who went into the war in search of glory. What they found instead was the endless stalemate and hideous prospect of trench warfare. Perhaps more than any other war in the history of warfare, the first World War changed the traditional paradigms of how wars were fought and what the objectives of engagements were. Hemingway, who was there himself, serves as a perfect instrument to portray what it was really like.

The plot centers around Frederick Henry, an American ambulance driver for the Italian army (a job Hemingway performed himself). Henry is a typical masculine Hemingway male persona who falls in love with a beautiful, long-haired & impetuous British nurse named Catherine Barkley. Henry is an exemplar of the WWI soldier who gets more than he bargains for in the war; betrayal and ignominious soldiering of the Italians in the wake of defeat.

The tragic irony of this novel is what makes it so memorable. Henry, as a wounded man who withdraws from the battle, as well as the whims of the Italian Army. However, he does so only to find that life is full of tragedy whether you're in a war or not.

11. Reading Lolita in Tehran by AzarNafisi

Reading the reviews and the dust jacket, you can get the idea that this is a book about a book club. For this reader, it is more directly about the impact of the Islamic revolution on the lives of educated women in Iran. There women are required at the risk of their lives to wear the "veil," which symbolizes the surrender of their independence to a government that uses fear and intimidation to control them and, in the words of the author, make them "irrelevant."

The author, now living in the US, tells of almost two decades in Iran, as a teacher of English and American literature. She tells of the great hopes for reform after the fall of the Shah and the return from exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and with her we watch in horror as the revolution takes Iran by force instead into its medieval past. There are arrests, murders, and executions and those who can, flee to the West. The transformation of Iran is charted by the repressive attempts to make women invisible, by covering them in public from head to toe. It becomes a world in which wearing fingernail polish, even under gloves, is a punishable offense. And punishment, as we learn, is typically brutal.

12. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is a book that transcends the genre of war fiction. Actually, it transcends the genre of fiction in general. Although labeled "a work of fiction" on the title page, the book really combines aspects of memoir, novel, and short story collection. I think you could use AudreLorde's term "biomythography" to describe this book.

The first-person narrator of this book (named, like the author, Tim O'Brien) is a writer and combat veteran of the Vietnam War. The book actually deals with events before and after the war, in addition to depicting the war itself; the time span covers more than 30 years in the lives of O'Brien and his fellow soldiers.

"The Things They Carried" is an intensely "writerly" text. By that I mean that O'Brien and his characters often reflect directly on the activities of storytelling and writing. As a reader, I got the sense that I was being invited into the very process by which the book was created. This is an extraordinary technique, and O'Brien pulls it off brilliantly.

This being a war story, there are some truly disturbing, graphic, and violent scenes. But there are also scenes that are haunting, funny, surreal, or ironic. O'Brien depicts a memorable group of soldiers: the guilt-wracked Lieut. Cross; Kiowa, a Native American and devout, Bible-carrying Baptist; the sadistic but playful Azar; and more.

While this book is a complete and cohesive work of art, many of its component stories could stand alone as independent pieces of literature (in fact, I first encountered the title story in an anthology). But however you classify it, I consider "The Things They Carried" to be a profoundly moving masterpiece.

13. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

THE JOY LUCK CLUB, a novel by Amy Tan, tells of the intricate relationships between two strong-willed generations, four tough, intelligent American women and their equally tenacious Chinese daughters. The four families are connected through the Joy Luck Club, a mahjong group that meets each week. After its founding member passes away, her daughter is asked to take her place at the table and the stories begin. Each of the eight women narrates two stories from her own point of view except for the deceased whose daughter tells her stories for her. The mothers relate stories about their lives in China, and the daughters tell of the trials that they face growing up as first-generation Chinese-Americans. The women that Tan has crafted are well developed and extraordinarily believable. She shows the strong and weak sides to all eight of her main characters. Her men however, are flat and are there simply as supporting characters. This is to be expected since this is essentially a book about mother-daughter relationships and how women bond. Therefore, it is my assumption that this book is aimed, for the most part, at the female reader.

14. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

Reviewer's Disclaimer: I grew up in the Puget Sound area and worked a couple of summers picking strawberries on farms owned by Japanese-American farmers.

Snow Falling on Cedars was an absorbing, thoroughly enjoyable read. At times an interracial romance, a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and a fictionalized chronicle of the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, this book pulls the reader into an accurate rendering of life on an island in Puget Sound. The disparate aspects of the novel are seamlessly interwoven into a narrative that allows the reader to embrace the plot, the characters, and the dead-on descriptions of the physical characteristics of the novel's setting.

The novel is narrated by Ismael Chambers, the publisher of the only newspaper on San Piedro Island, the fictional stand-in for Bainbridge Island, Washington. The islanders are, with few exceptions, either strawberry farmers or Salmon fishermen. When a white fisherman dies under suspicious circumstances, the evidence points towards a Japanese-American fisherman who was the last person to see the dead man alive. Ishmael's boyhood romance with Hatsue, the girl that later becomes the accused man's wife, provides fertile material for interesting flashbacks to the early 1940s, when virtually all of the island's Japanese-American population was carted off to internment camps soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbour.

I have always believed that one of the true marks of a great novelist is his/her ability to create believable characters of the opposite sex. Many well-respected writers fail at this task. In this novel, David Guterson's portrayal of Hatsue rings as true as any reader could hope for.

15. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is an engrossing and fascinating story of women's friendships in nineteenth century rural China. This is an excellent, well-written novel--fascinating on so many levels. Lily, the narrator of the novel is in her eighties, looking back on her life. She shares the stories of her foot binding, nu shu, the secret women's writing, and the various formally women's friendships that society enforced. Lily's sister participated in a sworn sisterhood, where a group of young women formed a friendship that was to last until marriage, but Lily is paired with one girl, Snow Flower, her laotong or "old same." Lily and Snow Flower have a love that is stronger than all of her other relationships--and it causes them both more heartbreak. The novel is really the story of their friendship, its depths, its deceits, its strengths--and it is a fascinating read about a society so different from our own. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan reminds me in many ways of The Red Tent in that it explores female friendship in a setting much different than any contemporary one. A fascinating read.