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: Challenging

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: Underworld
Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Scribner
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 827

Synopsis: 

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life; she is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times – Don DeLillo’s greatest and most powerful work of fiction.

Title: The Castle
Author: Franz Kafka
Translator: J.A. Underwood
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 2000
No. of Pages: 280

Synopsis: 

The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village and yet cannot go home. As he experiences certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.’s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 and it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make if feel strangely complete.

Title: The Crying of Lot 49
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2000
No. of Pages: 142

Synopsis: 

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover’s estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually,, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oedipa in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting The Crying of Lot 49.

Title: The Scarlet Letter
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Books
Publishing Date: 2004
No. of Pages: 216

Synopsis: 

The Scarlet Letter, America’s first psychological novel, exploded society’s view of Puritanism upon its initial publication in 1850, and today – perhaps more than ever – it holds the power to change the way we think about human relationships, punishment, and the status quo.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is a dark tale of love, crime, and revenge set in colonial New England. It revolves around a single, forbidden act of passion that forever alters the lives of three members of a small Puritan community: Hester Prynne, an ardent, fierce, and ultimately ostracized woman who bears the symbol of her sin – the letter A stitched into the breast of her gown – in humble silence; the Reverent Arthur Dimmesdale, a respected public figure who is inwardly tormented by long-hidden guilt; and the malevolent Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband – a man who seethes in an Ahab-like lust for vengeance.

The landscape of this classic novel is uniquely American, but the themes it explores are both timeless and universal – the nature of sin, guilt, and penitence, the clash between our private and public selves, and the spiritual and psychological cost of living outside society. Constructed with the elegance of a Greek tragedy, The Scarlet Letter brilliantly illuminates the truth that lies deep within the human heart.

Title: Nostromo
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Wilco Publishing House
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 505

Synopsis: 

A gripping tale of capitalist exploitation and rebellion, set amid the mist-shrouded mountains of a fictional South American republic, employs flashbacks and glimpses of the future to depict the lure of silver and its effects on men. Conrad’s deep moral consciousness and masterful narrative technique are at their best in this, one of his greatest works. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Mill on the Floss
Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Premier Classics
Publishing Date: 2010
No. of Pages: 598

Synopsis: 

George Eliot’s semi-autobiographical novel about the brilliant Maggie Tulliver epitomizes the author’s ability to find the drama at the heart of normal lives playing out in tandem with the universal themes of nature and society. Bankruptcy, death, flood, even the very flow of the river guide and often frustrate human ambition in The Mill on the Floss. Maggie and her brother Tom have grown up with a loving but hapless father who loses his living to the courts, leaving Tom to pay his debts and Maggie to languish in their impoverished house until she can escape into rich society with the help of her cousin, Lucy. Tender and tragic, The Mill on the Floss combines rich vignettes of family life with an elegant portrayal of the novel’s heroine. At the same time, Eliot offers a scathing critique of the Victorian era’s limiting social mores in matters of the heart while also celebrating many kinds of love.