Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Title Starting with ‘M’

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: Manhattan Beach
Author: Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Scribner
Publishing Date: 2018 (2017)
No. of Pages: 433

Synopsis: 

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard as the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.

With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in American history from one of the great writers of our time.

Title: My Brilliant Life
Author: Ae-ran Kim
Translator (from Korean): Chi-Young Kim
Publisher: Forge
Publishing Date: 2020
No. of Pages: 203

Synopsis: 

My Brilliant Life explores family bonds and out-of-the-ordinary friendships, interweaving the past and present of a tight-knit family, finding joy and happiness in even the most difficult times.

Areum vicariously lives life to its fullest through the stories of his parents, conversations with Little Grandpa Jang – his sixty-year-old neighbor and best friend – and the books he reads to visit the places he would otherwise never see.

For several months, Areum has been working on a manuscript, piecing together his parents’ often embellished stories about his family and childhood. He hopes to present it on his birthday, as a final gift to his mom and dad: their own falling-in-love story.

Through it all, Areum and his family will have you laughing and crying for all the right reasons.

Title: My Name is Asher Lev
Author: Chaim Potok
Publisher: Anchor
Publishing Date: March 2003
No. of Pages: 369Author: Orhan Pamuk

Synopsis: 

Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.

Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.

Title: Miles from Nowhere
Author: Nami Mun
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: September 2009
No. of Pages: 286

Synopsis: 

Teenage Joon is a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father’s infidelity; he has left the family, and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides she’ll be better off on her own, a choice that commences a harrowing, often tragic, and sometimes hopeful journey of a life lived on the margins. Joon’s adolescent years take her from a homeless shelter to an escort club, through struggles with addiction, to jobs selling newspapers and cosmetics, committing petty crimes, and, finally, toward something resembling hope.

Title: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Author: Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher: Perennial Classics
Publishing Date: 2000
No. of Pages: 448

Synopsis: 

It’s 1949. It’s the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is their moment of young – a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep affection. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos has created a rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss, memory and desire.

Title: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
Author: Steven Millhauser
Publisher: Vintage Contemporaries
Publishing Date: April 1997
No. of Pages: 293

Synopsis: 

Steven Millhauser’s eagerly awaited new novel is set in late-nineteenth-century New York City, when new buildings were bursting from the bedrock of Manhattan every day and you might have met an inventor or entrepreneur on any street corner. One such entrepreneur is Martin Dressler, a cigar maker’s son, a young man who has the audacity to make his dreams come true and the ability to do so on such a grand scale that other people will want to dream them too – for a little while.

Steven Millhauser’s eagerly awaited new novel is set in late-nineteenth-century New York City, when new buildings were bursting from the bedrock of Manhattan every day and you might have met an inventor or entrepreneur on any street corner. One such entrepreneur is Martin Dressler, a cigar maker’s son, a young man who has the audacity to make his dreams come true and the ability to do so on such a grand scale that other people will want to dream them too – for a little while.