2023 Reading Challenge: Literary Classic

The professor and the poet who've come to Patriarch's Ponds for a stroll on a hot and stagnant Moscow afternoon are dismayed to encounter a quite extraordinary stranger, surely a deranged foreigner. As this quixotic character recalls a centuries-old story of destiny, his infamy becomes a matter of gruesome revelation for the doomed professor and his poor companion. And what will become of the Master's suppressed masterpiece? Something his lover, Margarita,...

Emma Woodhouse, a spoiled young woman used to having her own way, learns that she is not the best person to make decisions about other people's lives.

"Light-skinned Clare Kendry married a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage after deciding to 'pass' as a white woman. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, chose to remain within the African American community, and is both allured and repelled by Clare's racial masquerade. Clare's own interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for the identity she abandoned and can never regain, and forces her...

It's been six years since four members of the Blackwood family died under suspicious circumstances. The remaining Blackwoods, elder sister Constance, wheel-chair bound Uncle Julian and 18 year old Mary Katerine live together in peaceful isolation, until a cousin, Charles sets his sights on the family fortune.

Beautiful and charming, Anna lives in a splendid world of her own making. She smokes, rides horseback, plays tennis, takes opium, practices birth control, and--although she is already married--falls in love with a handsome army officer. Anna's life is played out against a backdrop of dazzling balls and the vastness of Russia's landscape.

Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930's, journeys from being a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance.

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.