Just like that, we are in the last month of the year. November simply flew past us. How time flies! This means we have twenty-nine days to wrap things up before we greet a new year. I can’t believe that it will already be 2024 in a couple of days. As the year slowly inches closer to its inevitable close, I hope you are all doing well. I hope that 2023 has been and will be kind to everyone. Otherwise, I hope the rest of the year will be filled with good news, healing, happiness, and blessings. I hope you will get repaid for everything you worked hard for during the year. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy in body, mind, and spirit.

Before I bid November goodbye, I am sharing my book haul for the previous month. While I held myself from binge buying in October, I can’t say the same in November. As such, I will divide my November book haul into two, the first of which features works written by American writers. The rationale is the literary journey across North America I recently commenced. This is in part due to my ongoing reading challenges. It seems I left all works of North American literature for last. Without more ado, here are the books I obtained in November. Happy reading!

Title: The Glass Menagerie
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Paperbook
Publishing Date: 1999 (1945)
No. of Pages: 105

Synopsis: No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. As Williams’s first popular success, it launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, Menagerie has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world.

The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by the editor of The Tennessee Williams ANnual Review, Robert Bray, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams’s essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, “The Catastrophe of Success,” as well as a short section of Williams’s own “Production Notes.”

Title: The Tortilla Curtain
Author: T Coraghessan Boyle
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1996 (1995)
No. of Pages: 355

Synopsis: Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Cándido and América Rincón desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Cándido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.

Title: Thirteen Moons
Author: Charles Frazier
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 420

Synopsis: Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons is the story of one man’s remarkable life, spanning a century of relentless change. At the age of twelve, an orphan named Will Cooper is given a horse, a key, and a map and is sent on a journey through the wilderness to the edge of the Cherokee Nation, the uncharted white space on the map. Will is a bound boy, obliged to run a remote Indian trading post. As he fulfills his lonesome duty, Will finds a father in Bear, a Cherokee chief, and is adopted by him and his people, developing relationships that ultimately forge Will’s character. All the while, his love of Claire, the enigmatic and captivating charge of volatile and powerful Featherstone, will forever rule Will’s heart.

In a distinct voice filled with both humor and yearning, Will tells of a lifelong search for home, the hunger for fortune and adventure, the rebuilding of a trampled culture, and above all an enduring pursuit of passion. As he comes to realize, “When all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time.”

Will Cooper, in the hands of Charles Frazier, becomes a classic American soul: a man devoted to a place and its people, a woman, and a way of life, all of which seem forever just beyond his reach. Thirteen Moons takes us from the uncharted wilderness of an unspoiled continent, across the South, up and down the Mississippi, and to the urban clamor of a raw Washington City. Throughout, Will is swept along as the wild beauty of the nineteenth century gives way to the telephones, automobiles, and encroaching railways of the twentieth. Steeped in history, rich in insight, and filled with moments of sudden beauty, Thirteen Moons is an unforgettable work of fiction by an American master.

Title: The Women
Author: T Coraghessan Boyle
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 451

Synopsis: Is it easy to live with a genius?

T.C. Boyle’s dazzling new novel, The Women, will let you know. Having brought to life eccentric cereal king John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle, Boyle now turns his fictional sights on an even more colorful and outlandish character: Frank Lloyd Wright. Boyle’s account of Wright’s life, as told through the tempestuous experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with the author’s trademark wit and invention.

Wright’s life was one long, howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral or romantic. He never did what was expected, and despite the overblown scandals surrounding his amours and very public divorces and the financial disarray that dogged him through his career, he never let anything get in the way of his larger-than-life appetites and visions. Wright’s triumphs and defeats were always tied to the women he loved: Olgivanna Milanoff, an exotic, imperious Montenegrin beauty who was a student of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and was known by Wright’s apprentices as “the Dragon Lady”; Maude Miriam Noel, a passionate Southern belle with a mean temper and a fondness for morphine; the spirited Mamah Borthwick Cheney, tragically murdered at Wright’s Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin, with whom he had six children.

Each of these four women’s stories plays out in a surprising, comedic and ultimately poignant manner. Overseeing the action is a handsome young Japanese man, Tadashi Sato, who arrives at Taliesin in the fall of 1932 to begin an apprenticeship with Wright, and who is put to work right away – in the kitchen, peeling vegetables and washing dishes – and whose story provides a lens into the strange and tumultuous world of Taliesin at that time, when Wright and Olgivanna held sway not just over matters architectural, but over everything from the apprentices’ diets to their clothes to whom they could choose to date or marry.

Needless to say, this is fantastic subject matter for a writer as sly and intrepid as Boyle, The Women is a sexy, gripping, fabulously entertaining drama about marriage, the bargains that men and women make, and the privilege and twisting of genius and fame, from one of America’s most talented and imaginative writers.

Title: True At First Light
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Publisher: William Heinemann
Publishing Date: 1999
No. of Pages: 311

Synopsis: We waited by the hunting car for it to be light enough to start and we were all solemn and deadly. Ngui nearly always had an evil temper in the very morning so he was solemn, deadly, and sullen. Charo was solemn, deadly but faintly cheerful. He was like a man going to a funeral who did not really feel too deeply about the deceased. Mthuka was happy as always sin his deafness watching with his wonderful eyes for the start of the lighening of the darkness.

We were all hunters and it was the start of that wonderful thing, the hunt.

Written when Hemingway returned from his 1953 safari, but only recently edited by his son Patric, True at First Light, is a rich blend of autobiography and fiction, a breathtaking final work from one of this century’s most beloved and important writers.

The book opens on the day Hemingway’s close friend, Pop, a legendary hunter, leaves him in charge of the camp. Meanwhile, tensions are heightening among the various tribes and news arrives of a potential attack. Hemingway must take on his new role of leader and, of equal importance, assist his wife Mary to pursue the great lion she is determined to kill before Christmas.

Hemingway chronicles his exploits among the African men with whom he has become very close; aids his wife achieve her goal of killing her lion, whilst worrying about her wayward aim; is drawn further into the village life and customs of Debba, a beautiful young African woman whom he dubs his ‘second wife’; reminisces about writing and his days in Paris and Spain; and satirises, among other things, the role of organised religion in Africa. Torn between the rituals of his camp and life in Debba’s village, Hemingway reveals the many facest of rural Africa and explores the complexities of married life.

Passionately detailing the African landscape, the thrill of the hunt, and the heartfelt relationships with his African neighbours, Hemingway, a master of dramatic fiction, weaves a tale that is rich in laughter, beauty, and insight.

Published here for the first time, True at First Light is an extraordinary and powerful addition to the perpetually popular work of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

Title: Run
Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Harper
Publishing Date: 2007
No. of Pages: 295

Synopsis: Since their mother’s death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children – all his children – safe.

Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run takes us from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to a home for retired Catholic priests in downtown Boston. It shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you’ve never even met. As in her bestselling novel, Bel Canto, Ann Patchett illustrates the humanity that connects disparate lives, weaving several stories into one surprising and endlessly moving narrative Suspenseful and stunningly executed, Run is ultimately a novel about secrets, duty, responsibility, and the length we go to protect our children.