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 2026 To-Read List
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: Less Than Zero
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1986
No. of Pages: 208
Synopsis:
The rich and spoiled children of Los Angeles have it all – sex, drugs, fast cars, air-conditioned mansions. Theirs is a world shaped by television, rock music, and too much money; it is a world devoid of feeling and of hope.
In a startling, staccato style reminiscent of music videos, Bret Easton Ellis re-creates this world in a dizzying journey through endless parties, seedy rock clubs, and the seamy underworld of drug dealing and prostitution. Haunting, unnerving, Less Than Zero is the inside story of a generation on a desperate search for the ultimate sensation.
Title: Bea Season
Author: Myla Goldberg
Publisher: Anchor Books
Publishing Date: May 2001
No. of Pages: 274
Synopsis:
Eliza Naumann has no reason to believe she is anything but ordinary, especially after her teachers place her in the class for slow learners. Her father, Saul dotes on her older brother Aaron’s rabbinical ambitions. Her mother, Miriam, seems fully absorbed by her law career. When a spelling bee threatens to reaffirm her mediocrity, Eliza amazes everyone: she wins. Her newfound gift garners an invitation not only to the national competition, but to her father’s sacred study where a new dictionary beckons, Jewish mysticism lurks in leather tomes, and language offers a spiritual awakening.
Eliza’s unexpected success sends her off-kilter family into a tailspin, and Eliza comes to depend upon her own divination to hold the family together.
Title: Portnoy’s Complaint
Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 1969
No. of Pages: 274
Synopsis:
Portnoy’s Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: ‘Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient’s “morality,” however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.’ (Spielvogel, O. ‘The Puzzled Penis’, Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) it is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
Title: Youth
Author: J.M. Coetzee
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 169
Synopsis:
Youth’s narrator, a student in 1950s South Africa, has long been plotting an escape from his native country. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he trie to ensure that when he arrives in the real world he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art. Arriving at least in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing and begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting.
Set against the background of the 1960s, Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness turning in on itself. J.M. Coetzee explores a young man’s struggle to find his way in the world with tenderness and a fierce clarity.
Title: Season of Migration to the North
Author: Tayeb Salih
Translator (from Arabic): Denys Johnson-Davies
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2009 (1969)
No. of Pages: 139
Synopsis:
After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.
But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man – whom he has asked to look after his wife – in an unsettled and violent no-man’s land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.
Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important novel of the twentieth century.
Title: The Sirens of Baghdad
Author: Yasmina Khadra
Translator (from French): John Cullen
Publisher: Anchor Books
Publishing Date: 2008
No. of Pages: 307
Synopsis:
The third novel in Yasmina Khadra’s bestselling trilogy about Islamic fundamentalism has the most compelling backdrop of any of his novels: Iraq in the wake of the American invasion. A young Iraqi student, unable to attend college because of the war, sees American soldiers leave a trail of humiliation and grief in his small village. Bent on revenge, he flees to the chaotic streets of Baghdad where insurgents soon realize they can make use of his anger. Eventually he is groomed for a secret terrorist mission meant to dwarf the attacks of September 11, only to find himself struggling with moral qualms. The Sirens of Baghdad is a powerful look at the effects of violence on ordinary people, showing what can turn a decent human being into a weapon, and how the good in human nature can resist.
Title: What I Loved
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Picadr
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 367
Synopsis:
The international bestseller What I Loved begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a SoHo gallery. He buys the work; tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler; and the two men embark on a lifelong friendship. Leo’s story, which spans twenty-five years, follows the evolution of the growing involvement between his family and Bill’s. But the bonds between the two families are tested, first by sudden tragedy, and then by a monstrous duplicity that slowly comes to the surface. Combining the intimacy of a family saga with the suspense of a thriller, What I Loved is a deeply moving story about art, love, loss, and betrayal.
Title: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth
Author: Meryem Alaoui
Translator (from French): Emma Ramadan
Publisher: Other Press
Publishing Date: 2020 (2018)
No. of Pages: 281
Synopsis:
Thirty-four-year-old prostitute Jmiaa reflects on the bustling world around her with a brutal honesty, but also a quick wit that cuts through the drudgery. Like many of the women in her working-class Casablanca neighborhood, Jmiaa struggles to earn enough money to support herself and her family – often including the deadbeat husband who walked out on her and their young daughter. While she doesn’t despair about her profession like her roommate, Halima, who reads the Quran between clients, she still has to maintain a delicate balance between her reality and the “respectable” one she paints for her own more conservative mother.
This daily grind is interrupted by the arrival of an aspiring young director, Chadlia, whom Jmiaa takes to calling “Horse Mouth.” Chadlia enlists Jmiaa’s help on a film project, initially just to make sure the plot and dialogue are authentic. But when she’s unable to find an actress who’s right for the starring role, she turns again to Jmiaa, giving the latter an incredible opportunity for a better life.
In her breakout debut novel, Meryem Alaoui creates a vibrant picture of the day-to-day challenges faced by working people in Casablanca, which they meet head-on with resourcefulness and resilience.
Title: Confessions of the Lioness
Author: Mia Couto
Translator (from Portuguese): David Brookshaw
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2015 (2012)
No. of Pages: 192
Synopsis:
Told through two haunting interwoven diaries, Mia Couto’s Confession of the Lioness reveals the enigmatic world of Kulumani, an isolated village in Mozambique whose traditions and beliefs are threatened when ghostlike lionesses begin hunting and killing the women who live there.
Mariamar, a young woman from the village, finds her life thrown into chaos just as the marksman hired to kill the lionesses, the outsider Archangel Bullseye, arrives in town. Mariamar’s sister was recently killed in one of the attacks, and her father has imprisoned her in his home, where she relives painful memories of past abuse and hopes to be rescued by Archangel. Meanwhile, Archangel attempts to track the lionesses out in the wilderness, but when he begins to suspect there is more to these predators than meets the eye, he slowly starts to lose control of his hands. The hunt grows more and more dangerous, until it’s no safer inside Kulumani than outside it. As the men of Kulumani feel increasingly threatened by the outsider, the forces of modernity upon their culture, and the animal predators closing in, it becomes clear that the lionesses might not be real lionesses at all but rather spirits conjured by the ancient witchcraft of the women themselves.
Both a riveting mystery and a poignant examination of women’s oppression, Confession of the Lionesses combines reality, superstition, and magic realism in an atmospheric, gripping novel.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 