I have started re-reading The Color Purple by Alice Walker and I am reminded why it held the distinction for a very long time of being my favorite book. “Dear God,” the book starts and is written all the way through in a series of short letters with such a powerful and distinctive voice that the reader understands in just a few pages who the main character is and what suffering she is enduring.
Then, of course, there is Beloved, which tells the story of another African American woman dealing with unspeakable pain. Lovely prose and language that pulls you into the story and holds you right up to the end.
Snow Falling on Cedars with its mystery to be solved and the love that motivates the main character to push past his personal pain to help a woman who has rejected him. Great complications with the backdrop of the era of Japanese Internment Camps. Great story.
Others?
The Turn of the Screw, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, Lonesome Dove, A Yellow Raft on Blue Water, The Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Slaughterhouse Five, Ethan Frome, A Farewell to Arms, Wise Blood, To Kill a Mockingbird, and others I can’t recall right this moment…
I wish I were more well read. I have so many books I want to read. Hundreds, really. Maybe I will over time.
For now I am going to head to bed.
I’ve done about all I can do for today.
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