A Reading List Just For Grandmother

September is Read A New Book month. We've done what we can to encourage the kids to find the joy in reading - now they're back in school and there is time for Us to settle down with a good book. A grown-up book!
Here's a list of my favorites:

Beloved - Toni Morrison

Beloved is the word written on the tombstone of Sethe's baby daughter, and Beloved is the name of a young woman without a history who appears at Sethe's door in post-Civil War Ohio. Toni Morrison reveals the painful story of slavery and its aftereffects through the voices and memories of Sethe and others who fled the South for freedom. Her narrative style recreates memory in jagged, crystalline pieces that finally yield an intensely personal yet universal picture of abuse, cruelty, and survival. Morrison was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, and Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Excerpt
Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe. Stooping to shake the damper, or snapping sticks for kindling, Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved's eyes. Like a familiar, she hovered, never leaving the room Sethe was in unless required and told to. She rose early in the dark to be there, waiting, in the kitchen when Sethe came down to make fast bread before she left for work. In lamplight, and over the flames of the cooking stove, their two shadows clashed and crossed on the ceiling like black swords.

Sula by Toni Morrison is another one of my favorites - do yourself a favor and just read every book Toni Morrison wrote!

Floating in My Mother's Palm - Ursula Hegi

Even though this book calls itself a novel, each chapter can stand alone as a self-contained drama. Each story concerns one or another of the characters who populate the small town of Burgdorf, a small German town trying to regain normalcy after World War II. Hanna Molter, the curious and perceptive child narrator, relates the stories she has learned from Trudi Montag, a dwarf and the town gossip. In these stories we meet Hanna's father, whose "one reckless act" was to marry her unconventional mother; Rolf, the housekeeper's illegitimate son and the first boy Hanna ever kissed; and the townsman, consumed by fear, who was destroyed by his seven watchdogs. The presence of Hanna's mother in all these stories, provides the stability and security Hanna needs to freely explore her world. Observed with intense interest and compassion, the people of Burgdorf stir our interest and compassion as well.

Excerpt
The other painting shows the quarry hole during a storm, the somber sky highlighted by streaks of silver that make the water look as if it were bubbling. If I look closely, I can almost see myself floating in my mother's palm. Yet when I shut my eyes, I find a different image of my mother releasing me as we dance in the storm and twirl in separate circles that cause the water to ripple from us in widening rings which merge in one ebbing bracelet of waves where the borders of the quarry meet the water, far from the center where my mother and I continue to spin our bodies in the radiant sheen of lightning.

The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood

The Robber Bride, inspired by the Grimm fairy tale "The Robber Bridegroom," explores female villainy and the way in which evil requires complicity from its victims. As the novel opens the three friends, Roz, Charis, and Tony, each having been ruthlessly exploited by the amoral Zenia, must come to grips with the fact that the presumed-dead Zenia is very much alive. The bulk of the novel consists of flashbacks in which author Margaret Atwood fleshes out these quirky and complicated characters and shows how Zenia insinuated herself into their lives and changed them forever. Part social satire, part gripping mystery, this modern story of women in relationship with each other and with men, is also a chilling account of wickedness. It is wonderfully entertaining as well.

Excerpt
The truth is that at certain times-early mornings, the middle of the night-she finds it hard to believe that Zenia is really dead. Despite herself, despite the rational part of herself, Tony keeps expecting her to turn up, stroll in through some unlocked door, climb through a window carelessly left open. It seems improbable that she would simply have evaporated, with nothing left over. There was too much of her: all that malign vitality must have gone somewhere.

Mama Day - Gloria Naylor

Like the island in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Willow Springs is a mystical island. It differs, however, from Shakespeare's island in that a bridge connects it to the world of reality. Founded in 1823, it is sustained by the legend of Sapphira Wade, a slave woman who married and killed her master after obtaining from him the deed to the island. Miranda "Mama" Day is a descendant of Sapphirra Wade and matriarch of the island. She possesses the powers of a deep connection to place, nature and her own psyche. When her niece Cocoa crosses the bridge and marries George, a northerner shaped by reason and technology, the struggle between worlds begins.
Mama Day is a fascinating, sometimes frightening, exploration of two colliding views of the world. Can we reconcile technology with nature? Naylor is not optimistic about the possibility.

Excerpt
We're sitting here in Willow Springs, and you're God-knows-where. It's August 1999-ain't by a slim chance it's the same season where you are. Uh, huh, listen. Really listen this time: the only voice is your own. But you done just heard about the legend of Sapphira Wade, though nobody here breathes her name. You done heard it the way we know it, sitting on our porches and shelling June peas, quieting the midnight cough of a baby, taking apart the engine of a car-you done heard without a single living soul really saying a word. Pity, though, Reema's boy couldn't listen, like you, to Cocoa and George down by them oaks-or he woulda left here with quite a story.

Life on Earth - Sheila Ballantyne

At times provocatively irreverent, always honest and insightful, Sheila Ballantyne chronicles the ordinary absurdities of life while addressing the bigger questions. Is there a way to balance passion and obligation? How do we know we're living the lives we're meant to live? How do we know we're happy? In these stories we see: a son agonize over choosing a nursing home for his mother; a wife and mother grieve as she tries to adjust and make sense of her husband's seriously disabling kidney disease; a daughter finally decide what to do with the ashes of her dead father; the irony of racing from California to Florida for Disney World's Main Street U.S.A. Some of these stories will make you laugh out loud, others press the heart; if you are a middle class American woman you will recognize yourself on every page. This collection belongs on everyone's "must read" list.

Excerpt
The years keep passing, but you're absorbed, you hardly notice. You look back from time to time, comparing what you have with what you thought you'd have. You understand the split between dream and reality, the tension that split creates. In time, perhaps you say: You can't live more that one life well; and eventually, you decide. You aim for that one thing--call it happiness. It can come when you least expect it, although you worked for it; and when it comes, it's often not what you had thought of as being "it." It's usually something ordinary--a thing so simple, you look back afterward and think: That was it? and laugh.

A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of an Iowa farm family is a rich, multi-layered parable of the destructive power of patriarchy, as well as a modern, American version of King Lear. In Smiley's retelling the reader witnesses a family's demise through the eyes of eldest daughter Ginny. As in Lear, this daughter is still quite capable of treachery, but in Smiley's version, she and her sister Rose appear in a sympathetic light.
The fertile Iowa farmland and the family's thousand acres attain near-mythic proportions as Smiley explores the self-destructive nature of the urge to master the land and dominate women. As in Shakespeare's classic, this novel can only end in tragedy, but Smiley leaves the door open to the possibility of healing and forgiveness.

Excerpt
It was easy, sitting there and looking at him, to see it his way. What did we deserve, after all? I squirmed, remembering my ungrateful thoughts, the deliciousness I had felt putting him in his place. When he talked, he had this effect on me. Of course it was silly to talk about "my point of view." When my father asserted his point of view, mine vanished. Not even I could remember it.