Snider, Book Review Titles #
Dr. Clifton Snider
English 100
California State University, Long Beach
READING
LIST FOR BOOK REVIEW
Choose from the following one book to review, following the
guidelines in my Course Packet and my
web page.
FICTION
Ackroyd, Peter, The Clerkenwell Tales (a mystery
story and a generous slice of life in 1399 London)
Alexie, Sherman, The Business of Fancydancing or The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in
Heaven (two books by the well-known Native American poet and
fiction writer about contemporary Native American experience)
Allende, Isabel, Daughter of Fortune (a young Chilean
woman goes to California during the gold rush to follow and find her
lover)
Alumit, Noël, Letters to Montgomery Clift (a
Filipino boy loses his parents to the thugs of the Marcos dictatorship
and grows
up in Southern California; a powerful first novel by the Filipino
performance artist and writer) or Talking
to the Moon (a novel based on the real-life shooting of a
Filipino postman and a Jewish day care center)
Arenas, Reinaldo, Old Rosa
(an extraordinary novel in
two stories, "Old Rosa" and "The Brightest Star," by one of Cuba's
finest writers, whose life is the subject of the Julian Schnabel film, Before
Night Falls;
"Old Rosa" is the story of a strong woman farmer who loses her older
son
and her land to the Revolution and discovers her favorite, younger son
in
bed with another young man; "The Brightest Star" tells the story
of
that son, Arturo, a writer imprisoned in one of Castro's forced labor
concentration camps for homosexuals); The Doorman (about a
Cuban refugee who becomes a doorman at an expensive Manhattan apartment
building and to whom the
pets in the building talk); The Color of Summer (a comic
satire set in
the Cuba of Castro (called "Fifo"), the last book Arenas wrote before
dying
in 1990, the next-to-last novel in his quintet, Pentagonia)
Baldwin, James, Giovanni's Room (a love story in Paris),
Another Country (whites and blacks try to get along in New York),
two novels by one of America's most important black writers
Bennett, Alan, The Laying on of Hands (very funny,
satiric novella, together with two other amusing stories)
Berger, Thomas, Little Big Man (the only white man to
survive "Custer's Last Stand," who's lived as an Indian and a white
man)
Brown, Rita Mae, Rubyfruit Jungle (a lesbian comes of
age)
Bradford, Richard, Red Sky At Morning (adolescents
struggle in a fictitious Santa Fe, New Mexico)
Cather, Willa, O Pioneers!, My Antonia (novels
about two strong pioneer women), Death Comes for the Archbishop (based
on the life of Father Lamy, who built the cathedral in Santa Fe, NM), Shadows
on the Rock (a young girl in 17th-century French Quebec)
Cunningham, Michael, The Hours (Cunningham intertwines
the actual (albeit imagined) life of Virginia Woolf with two fictional
women who
don't know each other; the basis for the movie of the same name)
Dickey, James, Deliverance (Southern men on a perilous
river journey)
Dhalla, Ghalib Shiraz, Ode to Lata (a young man of East
Indian heritage, born and raised in Kenya, looks for love in Los
Angeles and finds obsession, lust, and some resolution to the conflicts
between his past and his present; a superb first novel)
Forster, E. M., Where Angels Fear To Tread, A
Passage to India, Maurice (set mainly in, respectively,
Italy, India, and
England--English xenophobia, colonialism, and homophobia)
Fowles, John, The French Lieutenant's Woman (a Victorian
love story told by a modern writer)
Fuentes, Carlos, The Old Gringo (by one of Mexico's most
important writers, set in Mexico during the Revolution, near the Texas
border)
Gaarder, Jostein, Sophie's World: A Novel About the History
of Philosophy (an international bestseller from Norway that is just
what its subtitle says with a little bit of Alice in Wonderland and
many other surprises)
Geraci, Joseph, The Deaf-Mute Boy (an American
archaeologist goes to speak at a conference in Tunisia and becomes
involved with the local people as he tries to help a young deaf-mute
Tunisian)
Guest, Judith, Ordinary People (a middle-American family
faces the early death of one of two sons)
Hardy, James Earl, B-Boy Blues: A Seriously Sexy, Fiercely
Funny, Black-on-Black Love Story (the subtitle pretty much sums it
up; a rollicking first novel by an important new voice in gay
African-American literature)
Heinlein, Robert, Stranger In A Strange Land (a man from
Mars comes to Earth)
Highsmith, Patricia, The Talented Mr. Ripley (a
complicated American in Europe commits murder and assumes the identity
of his victim)
Hinton, Gregory, Cathedral City (gays and Latino
families try to get along in a neglected community between Palm Springs
and Rancho Mirage) or Santa
Monica Canyon (a well-established visual artist forms a close
relationship with the poet-partner of a closeted movie star)
Hollinghurst,
Alan, The Swimming Pool
Library,
The Folding Star, The
Spell, and The Line of Beauty
(one of the best living novelists writing in English; The Line of Beauty recently won the
Man Booker Prize, comparable to the Pulitzer Prize in the U.S.)
Isherwood, Christopher, The Berlin Stories (inspiration
for the musical, Cabaret), A Single Man (a gay
professor in Los Angeles loses his lover through death)
Jackson, Helen Hunt, Ramona (a late 19th-century classic
romantic novel about a half-Indian orphaned girl brought up on a
wealthy
California Mexican hacienda who runs away with a Luiseño Indian,
set against the backdrop of the demise of the California missions and
the
destruction of the Southern California Indians)
Jong, Erica, Fear of Flying (a woman's sexual
liberation
in the 1970s)
Knowles, John, A Separate Peace (a boy's initiation
novel set at a prep school in 1942)
Kosinski, Jerzy, The Painted Bird (a boy faces prejudice
and anti-Semitism in WW II Eastern Europe), Being There (a
simple
man raised on television has to live in the real world, funny but with
a
serious message)
Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers (Lawrence's classic
initiation novel), Women in Love, The Rainbow (two
more classic Lawrence novels), The Fox (two women running
a ranch find their lives disrupted by a male stranger), The Virgin
and the Gipsy, St. Mawr (partly set in the American
Southwest), The Man Who Died
(a fantasy about Christ after the crucifixion). The last four are
all short novels.
Leavitt, David, Family Dancing (short stories), The
Lost Language of Cranes (a father and his son face their
sexuality), Equal Affections (a family copes with the terminal
illness of its mother), A Place I've Never Been Before (short
stories), While England Sleeps (love set against the
background of the Spanish Civil War), Arkansas (three novellas)
Lim, Paulino, Jr., Tiger Orchids on Mount Mayon (the
first of a trilogy by retired CSULB Professor of English Lim, this
novella
introduces a set of characters in the modern Philippines in the context
of political violence and an erupting volcano)
Lowry, Malcolm, Under the Volcano (a powerful novel
about an alcoholic British consul in Mexico)
Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice (a short novel about an
aging writer who finds love and beauty in a young boy in Venice)
Maupin, Armistead, Tales of the City (the 1970s in San
Francisco)
McCoy, Maureen, Junebug (a late adolescent growing
up in western Nebraska with her mother in an institution for killing
her father)
McCullers, Carson, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, The Member
of the Wedding (girls coming-of-age novels), The Ballad of the
Sad Café
(obsessive love), Reflections in a Golden Eye (love on a
military
camp), Clock Without Hands (a man copes with dying)
Meriwether, Louise, Daddy Was a Number Runner (a young
African American girl in Harlem)
Mishima, Yukio, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea,
Confessions of a Mask (two novels by a modern master in Japanese)
Momaday, N. Scott, House Made of Dawn (an American
Indian caught between two cultures, white and Indian)
Morrison, Toni, Sula (this bestselling novel by the
Nobel Prize-winning novelist explores the relationship between two
African American woman in the first half of the last century and
reveals much about African American women in general)
Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita (an aging man's obsessive lust
for an underage girl, by one of the century's finest novelists)
O'Connor, Flannery, Wise Blood (a short, intense
religious novel set in the South)
Phillips, Caryl, Cambridge (an examination of
slavery in the West Indies, the main characters are an English woman
who visits her father's Caribbean plantation and an African slave, the
title character, educated in England but enslaved on the plantation)
Proulx, Annie, Larry McMurtry and
Diana Ossana, Brokeback
Mountain: Story to Screenplay (includes Proulx's award-winning
story, the screenplay by McMurtry and Ossana, and commentaries by all
three) or you may review the
published version of the story, "Brokeback
Mountain")
Proulx, Annie, The Shipping News (the Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel about a widower who returns to his ancestral
homeland, Newfoundland, with his aunt and two daughters to start a new
life)
Puig, Manuel, Kiss of the Spider Woman (a
gay/transgendered Argentine convicted of a sexual crime entertains with
old movie plots his/her cell mate, a heterosexual political prisoner,
in a Buenos Aires prison; in
this highly-acclaimed, innovative novel, they both change in remarkable
ways)
Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys imagines what
happened to an important character in Charlotte Brontë's Jane
Eyre)
Rice, Christopher, A Density
of Souls (the
debut novel of Anne Rice's son tells the story of four friends whose
worlds completely change after they start high school: a southern
gothic thriller set in New Orleans)
Rölvaag,
Ole, Giants in the Earth (Norwegian
immigrant
farmers struggle to make it in the United States)
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's
Children (an epic-length story of a Moslem Indian/Pakistani
family that tells the history of India and Pakistan from their founding
in 1947)
Silko, Leslie Marmon, Ceremony (a Laguna Pueblo, New
Mexico, man, half Native American and half white, returns home from
WW II in desperate need of psychic healing)
Snider, Clifton, Loud Whisper
(the story of a 1980s rock band from Long Beach, CA, whose bisexual,
drug-addicted leader falls from stage during a concert and becomes
paralyzed); Bare Roots
(the
coming out/coming of age story of an only child of divorced parents,
born in Wisconsin and raised from the age of seven in Southern
California; despite the constraints of
fundamentalist Christian religion, the protagonist is able to find
himself
through a relationship with his college roommate); Wrestling
with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers (two gay Pentecostal
preacher's sons become friends; then one disappears under ominous
circumstances; based on a true story)
Spanbauer, Tom, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
(the story of a part-Indian boy who grows up in a late-19th/early
20th-century whorehouse in Idaho surrounded by Mormons)
Vallejo, Fernando, Our Lady of the Assassins (a
brilliant revelation of the absurd, murderous gang and drug violence of
contemporary Colombia, its overpopulation, and its sterile
institutions, told by a writer returning after 30 years away from his
homeland)
Vidal, Gore, Myra Breckinridge (a transsexual in
Hollywood)
Waters, Frank, The Man Who Killed the Deer (an American
Indian caught between two cultures, white and Indian)
Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited (the novel about two
Oxford friends upon which the PBS mini-series was based, told from a
Catholic
point of view), The Loved One (a short, funny novel satirizing
the
funeral industry in Southern California)
West, Nathanael, The Day of the Locust (trouble in
Hollywood's early years)
White, Edmund, A Boy's Own Story (a gay initiation
novel), [and Adam Mars-Jones] The Darker Proof: Stories from a
Crisis [AIDS]
White, Patrick, A Fringe of Leaves (an historical novel
about the important issues of early 19th-century Australia; an English
woman is captured by an Aboriginal tribe)
Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (a young man
gets his wish to stay forever young while his portrait grows old and
shows the effects of his evil deeds)
Winterson, Jeanette, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (an
orphan is raised by a strict Pentecostal mother to be a missionary and
comes out as a lesbian in the North of England), The Passion (an innovative
historical novel about a peasant soldier in Napoleon's army and a
web-footed young woman from Venice), or Written on the Body (the narrator,
whose gender is undisclosed, is in love with a woman)
Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway,
Orlando, or The Waves (the best novels by one of the
20th-century's
best novelists)
You may find some links to these fiction writers on my Reading List
for English 384. The links are meant to provide information
and are not necessarily authorized for scholarly use. Remember
that you are limited to the titles on this page only.
NON-FICTION
Ackroyd, Peter, Chaucer (a brief biography of the
first great poet in English)
Arenas, Reinaldo, Before Night Falls
(a painfully
realistic and flamboyant memoir by the late Cuban writer, made into the
Julian Schnabel film of the same title)
Armstrong, Karen, Islam: A Short History
Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time (Baldwin's letter to
his nephew about Civil Rights)
Beck, Gad, with Frank Heibert, An Underground Life: The Memoirs of a Gay
Jew in Nazi Berlin
Berendt, John, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
(strange goings on and fascinating characters in Savannah, Georgia)
Bono, Chastity, with Billie Fitzpatrick, Family Outing
(Sonny Bono and Cher's only child describes coming out to herself, her
parents, and the public; she also tells the stories of a variety of gay
and lesbian young people--a good primer on coming out both for gay and
lesbian individuals and their families and friends)
Boswell, John, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the
Christian Era to the
Fourteenth Century (the definitive work on this topic); Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
Bugliosi, Vincent, The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme
Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President (Bugliosi
calls
the illegal decision of the Supreme Court which handed Bush the
presidency in 2000
"one of the most frightening and dangerous events ever to have occurred
in this country," as indeed it is; the book is a good contrast to the
more
meticulous but just as valid argument by Alan Dershowitz in Supreme
Injustice;
see below).
Capote, Truman, In Cold Blood (true crime,
"nonfiction novel," about the brutal killing of a Kansas family in 1959)
Carnes, Patrick, Out of the Shadows: Understanding
Sexual Addiction, 3rd edition.
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The
Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution
(examines
many important issues, including language and overpopulation)
Cheever, Susan, My Name Is Bill (the latest
biography of Bill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, by the
daughter of the famous author, John Cheever)
Combs, Allan, and Mark Holland,
Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of
Science, Myth, and the Trickster (an important book on one of C.
G. Jung's psychological concepts)
Dershowitz, Alan M., Supreme Injustice: How the High Court
Hijacked Election 2000 (an excellent account of the lawless,
partisan, unprincipled, unprecedented, corrupt, and immoral decision
that handed George W. Bush the
2000 election; meticulously well-reasoned, with suggestions for better
ways
to nominate future justices)
Eban, Abba, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (by the
eminent Israeli statesman and scholar)
Friedman, Myra, Buried Alive: A Biography of Janis Joplin
Fromm, Eric, The Art of Loving
Gaustad, Edwin S., Roger Williams (a very short
biography of the founder of Rhode Island and the first prominent
American to advocate freedom of religion and separation of church and
state)
Genet, Jean, Prisoner of Love (the French novelist among
the Palestinians and the Black Panthers)
Goldwater, Barry, The Conscience of a Conservative
(one of the most influential modern conservatives, Goldwater (with the
help of his ghostwriter) says
"politics" is "the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for
individuals . . ." and "If we reduce taxes before firm, principled
decisions are made about expenditures, we will court deficit spending
and the inflationary effects that invariably follow.")
Goodwin, Donald W., Alcoholism: The Facts, 3rd
edition
Gordon, Mary, Joan of Arc (part of the new Penguin Lives
Series, a short biography of the famous French warrior/saint from a
feminist
point of view)
Greenblatt, Stephen, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare (a highly readable and informative biography by one
of the leading "new historicist" critics writing today)
Haley, Alex, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (one
African-American man traces his family history back to Africa; the
basis for the extremely successful television mini-series)
Hopcke, Robert H., Persona: Where Sacred Meets Profane
(a Jungian therapist examines Jung's concept of persona, the masks
we wear)
Huxley, Aldous, Heaven and Hell, The Doors of Perception
(Huxley's experiments with hallucinogenic drugs; to choose this one,
you
must review both books)
Isherwood, Christopher, Ramakrishna and His Disciples,
Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple (biographical
and autobiographical; the second title tells what really happened in
Isherwood's Berlin Stories)
Jung, C. G., Man and His Symbols (a coherent
explanation of Jung's
psychology by
Jung and Jungians, written for the
general reader)
Kramnick, Isaac, and R. Laurence Moore,
The Godless Constitution: The Case
Against Religious Correctness (A professor of government and a
professor of history examine the reasons our founding fathers left God
out of the Constitution: "The creation of a godless constitution was
not an art of irreverence. Far from it. It was an act of
confidence in religion." Although the book also traces the
history of politics and religion in America up to the mid-1990s, it is
if anything more relevant to current issues.)
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying (five
stages of coping with terminal illness)
Longman, Jere, Among the Heroes: United Flight 93 and
the Passengers and Crew Who Fought Back (documents the actions of
the heroes of 11 September 2001 who gave their lives preventing the
fourth hijacked
flight from achieving its terrorist goals)
McBride, Dwight A., Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays
on Race and Sexuality (essays by an important African
American-Queer Studies specialist)
McMurtry, Larry, Crazy Horse (the famous Sioux warrior
who fought at "Custer's Last Stand," the Battle of Little Bighorn, part
of the new Penguin Lives Series)
Monette, Paul, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir; Becoming A
Man: Half a Life Story
Neihardt, John G., Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of
a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux
Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler
Philbrick, Nathaniel, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (a bestseller about the first fifty years of Plymouth
Colony and King Philip's War, the bloodiest war per capita between whites and
Native Americans)
Plant, Richard, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against
Homosexuals
Quinn, D. Michael, Same-sex Dynamics Among
Nineteenth-century Americans: A Mormon Example (Mormans and other
Americans were not always as homophobic as many are today, a thorough
and revealing study)
Rodriguez, Richard, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My
Mexican Father; Brown: The Last Discovery of America; essays
exploring what Rodriguez calls the "browning" of American from his
personal perspective; an important cross-cultural study
Roscoe, Will, The Zuni Man-Woman, Queer Spirits, Changing
Ones (the first and last are about third and fourth gender
American Indians)
Rosen, David, The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity
(ancient Eastern Taoism and the life of C. G. Jung)
Schaef, Anne Wilson, Escape from Intimacy: The
Pseudo-Relationship Addictions, Untangling the "Love" Addictions: Sex.
Romance, Relationships; When Society Becomes an Addict
Schneebaum, Tobias, Keep the River to Your Right, Wild Man,
Where the Spirits Dwell: An Odyssey in the Jungle of New Guinea (in
all of
these autobiographical books Schneebaum, a New Yorker, describes living
with
native peoples around the world)
Shilts, Randy, And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and
the AIDS Epidemic; The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of
Harvey
Milk
Stone, Merlin, When God Was a Woman (written by a woman)
Tattersall, Ian, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human
Uniqueness (examines how our species differs from our evolutionary
ancestors and other predecessors and from our closest living relatives,
the apes; discusses such issues as the development of language, human
consciousness, and the threat of overpopulation)
Tuchman, Barbara W., A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th
Century (a long but very readable and scholarly history of Europe,
includes great events such as the "Black Death," the moving of the
Popes to Avignon, and the Hundred Years' War, as well as the lives of
ordinary people)
Woititz, Janet Geringer, Adult Children of Alcoholics,
Expanded Edition
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own (Woolf's famous
feminist statement)
Last updated: 21 January 2008
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