Happy Tuesday everyone! As it is Tuesday, it is time for a Top Ten Tuesday update. Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.
This week’s given topic: Books on My Fall 2025 to-Read Lis
TTitle: 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: Lincoln in the Bardo
Author: George Saunders
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 2017
No. of Pages: 343
Synopsis:
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willlie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.
Title: Death in the Andes
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Translator (from Spanish): Edith Grossman
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Publishing Date: 1997
No. of Pages: 276
Synopsis:
In an isolated community in the Peruvian Andes, a series of mysterious disappearances has occurred. Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomas believe the Shining Path guerrillas are responsible, but the townspeople have their own ideas about the forces that claimed the bodies of the missing men. This riveting novel is filled with unforgettable characters, among them disenfranchised Indians, eccentric local folk, and a couple performing strange cannibalistic sacrifices. As the investigation moves forward, Tomas entertains Lituma with the surreal tale of a precarious love affair.
Death in the Andes is both a fascinating detective novel and an insightful political allegory. Mario Vargas Llosa offers a panoramic view of Peruvian society, from the recent social upheaval to the cultural influences in its past. (Source: Goodreads)
Title: East of Eden
Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 2016 (1952)
No. of Pages: 601
Synopsis:
East of Eden is the masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck’s later years – a vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis. In his journal, Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love’s absence.
Title: Idu
Author: Flora Nwapa
Publisher: Heinemann International
Publishing Date: 1989 (1970)
No. of Pages: 218
Synopsis:
‘What we are all praying for is children. What else do we want if we have children?’ These two sentences from Idu contain the basic theme of the book, a novel set in a small Nigerian town where the life of the individual is woven into that of the community as a whole. For long it appears as though Idu is unable to have a child, and her husband Adiewere even takes a second wife. But finally Idu gives birth to a fine boy, Ijoma. But it is not until Ijoma is four years old that Idu becomes pregnant for a second time. Before her second child arrives, however, Adiewere mysteriously dies. Idu flouts all conventions by refusing to marry her husband’s brother, preferring to follow her husband to the next world. Clearly, children are not the only thing she wants from life.
Title: In the Time of the Butterflies
Author: Julia Alvarez
Publisher: PLUME
Publishing Date: August 1995 (1994)
No. of Pages: 321
Synopsis:
They were the four Mirabal sisters – symbols of defiant hope in a country shadowed by dictatorship and despair. They sacrificed their safe and comfortable lives in the name of freedom. They were Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies,” and in this extraordinary novel Patria, Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Dedé speak across the decades to tell their own stories – from tales of hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture – and describe the everyday horrors of life under the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Now through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in a warm, brilliant, and heartbreaking novel that makes a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression.
Title: Slaughterhouse-Five
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Publisher: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence
Publishing Date: March 1994
No. of Pages: 205
Synopsis:
A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, “the Florence of the Elbe,” a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.
Title: Alias Grace
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Virago
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 542
Synopsis:
Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor” Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim?
Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created an extraordinarily potent tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery.
Title: The Corrections
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2001
No. of Pages: 566
Synopsis:
A comic, tragic epic stretching from the Midwest of the midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed.
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkingon’s disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on bringing the family together for one last Christmas at home.
Title: Dream Count
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 399
Synopsis:
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until – betrayed and brokenhearted – she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.
In Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is it true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 