Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I just have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.
This week’s theme: Love
I guess a happy Valentine’s day to everyone is in line! Not really my favorite day (HAHA) for some personal reason. Anyway, I hope everyone is showered with love, not just on February 14 but every day. I guess this is the reason why this week’s prompt is about love. I used to like romance novels, back when I was still a university student. However, I outgrew this phase but I do have several romance books on my bookshelf; not purely though as most romance books are coupled with other genres, say mystery. Nevertheless, here are love stories/romance novels I am more than happy to make some concessions for. Happy Monday everyone! Happy reading!
5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!
Title: Oscar and Lucinda
Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Publishing Date: 1989
No. of Pages: 515
Synopsis:
Peter Carey’s Booker Prize winning novel imagines Australia’s youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story. Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Australia. Peter Carey’s visionary brilliance, and his capacity to delight and surprise, propel this story to its stunning conclusion. (Source: Goodreads)
Title: My Antonia
Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc.
Publishing Date: 1995
No. of Pages: 419
Synopsis:
Her fourth novel, My Antonia (1918), which she thought “the best thing I’ve ever done,” is set in pioneer-era Nebraska and is a story of contrasts – most noticeably the contrast between Antonia Shimerda, the destitute child of Bohemian immigrants, and Jim Burden, a native Virginian who, after being orphaned at the age of ten, is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska. The novel traces the parallel lives of Jim and Antonia – Jim (said to be modeled in Cather herself) goes to Harvard, becomes a traveling businessman, and returns to Nebraska infrequently; Antonia elopes with a shiftless railway conductor, comes home disgraced, and finds happiness with Anton Cuzak, a gentle farmer, like Alexandra Bergson of O Pioneers! – and like the land they both call home – Antonia comes to embody unshakeable simplicity and integrity.
Title: Adam Bede
Author: George Eliot
Publisher: The Zodiac Press
Publishing Date: 1984
No. of Pages: 509
Synopsis:
Adam Bede, the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time.
The story’s plot follows four characters’ rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral and close-knit community in 1799. The novel revolves around a love triangle between beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel, Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her, Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor, and Dinah Morris, Hetty’s cousin, a fervent, virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher. (Source: Goodreads)
Title: Far from the Madding Crowd
Author: Thomas Hardy
Publisher: William Collins
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 429
Synopsis:
I shall do one thing in this life – one thing certain – that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.
Independent and spirited, Bathsheba Everdene owns the hearts of three men. Striving to win her love in different ways, their relationships with Bathsheba complicate her life in idyllic Wessex – and cast shadows over their own. With the morals and expectations of rural society weighing heavily upon her, Bathsheba experiences the torture of unrequited love and betrayal, and discovers how random acts of chance and tragedy can alter life’s course dramatically.
Title: The Rainbow
Author: D.H. Lawrence
Publisher: Wordsworth Classics
Publishing Date: 1995
No. of Pages: 418
Synopsis:
The Rainbow chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family of Nottinghamshire, and is a metaphysical inquiry into the possibilities that human relationships hold amid the uncompromising circumstances of industrial culture, which Lawrence continued in Women in Love. Throughout the novel the rainbow symbolizes each character’s search for self-fulfillment.
The novel concentrates on the passionate natures of the various Brangwens, in particular those of Ursula who is of the third generation of the family. The frankness with which Lawrence treated sexuality cased the books to be seized by the police and banned shortly after publication in 1915.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 