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: Released More Than 5 Years Ago

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: Persuasion
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Publishing Date: 2008 (1818)
No. of Pages: 249

Synopsis: 

Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her social circle and Anne finds her old feelings for him reignited. However, when they meet again Wentworth behaves as if they are strangers and seems more interested in her friend Louisa. With humour, insight and tenderness, Jane Austen tells the story of a love that endures the tests of time and society.

Title: Life Among the Savages
Author: Shirley Jackson
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1997 (1948)
No. of Pages: 241

Synopsis: 

Shirley Jackson, author of the classic short story, “The Lottery,” was known for her terse, haunting prose. But the writer possessed another side, one which is delightfully exposed in this hilariously charming memoir of her family’s life in rural Vermont.

“Our house,” writes Jackson, “is old, noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books.”

Children who won’t behave, cars that won’t start, furnaces that break down, a pugnacious corner bully, household help that never stays, and a patient husband who remains lovingly oblivious to the many thousands of things mothers and wives accomplish every single day – these pages are blissfully crowded with the raucous and rendering voices of Jackson’s extraordinary family living a wonderfully ordinary life.

Title: The Rum Diary
Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 204

Synopsis: 

Begun in 1959 by then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliant, tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, The Rum Diary is an outrageous drunken romp in the spirit of Thompson’s bestselling Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels.

Title: Dream of Ding Village
Author: YAN Lianke
Translator (from Chinese): Cindy Carter
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2011 (2005)
No. of Pages: 341

Synopsis: 

Officially censored in China, and long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize, Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village is a deeply moving and beautifully written novel, his most important work yet. Based on a real-life scandal in eastern China and drawing on three years of undercover work, it is a tale of one family in a poor village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood banks. While one son rises to the top of the Party by exploiting the situation, another is infected. Dream of Ding Village is an extraordinary critique of China’s ruthless path to development and what happens to those who get in the way.

Title: The Enchantress of Florence
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 382

Synopsis: 

The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess the powers of enchantment and sorcery, attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities at the height of their powers-the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. Profoundly moving and completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s most important living writers.