Colors

I have to read an independent novel and need suggestions. I want something relatively short and easy to read and understand. I’d also like an exciting story, or at least something that I can "get into". For example, Moby Dick is out of the question… Long, confusing, tough to read, AND boring. Please help

Here’s the reading list, organized by author! Thank you!

Fiction (Novel & Short Story)

A, B
Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart)
Julia Alvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies)
Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim)
Martin Amis (Time’s Arrow)
Rudolfo Anaya (Serafina’s Stories)
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, Surfacing)
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain)
Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)
Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre)
Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights)

C
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities, The Baron in the Trees)
Albert Camus (The Plague, The Stranger)
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
Raymond Carver (Cathedral)
Willa Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop, O Pioneers!)
Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)
John Cheever (The Wapshot Scandal)
Kate Chopin (The Awakening)
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)

D
Louis DeBernieres (Corelli’s Mandolin)
Don DeLillo (Libra)
Anita Desai (Clear Light of Day)
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations)
E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, The Idiot)
Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie)

E, F
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man)
Louise Erdich (Antelope Wife)
William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury)
Henry Fielding (Tom Jones)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited)
Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier)
E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)
John Fowles (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus)

G, H
Myla Goldberg (Bee Season)
Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter)
Jane Hamilton (A Map of the World, The Book of Ruth)
Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables)
Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, Islands in the Stream)
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

I, J, K
Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day)
Henry James (The Aspern Papers, The American)
Ha Jin (Waiting)
James Joyce (Dubliners)
Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis)
Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior)
Joy Kogawa (Obasan)
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

L, M
Margaret Laurence (The Stone Angel)
D.H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers)
Bernard Malamud (The Fixer, The Natural)
Katherine Mansfield (The Garden Party and Other Stories)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Bobbie Ann Mason (In Country)
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian)
Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding)
Herman Melville (Moby Dick, Billy Budd)
Toni Morrison (Jazz, Beloved, Song of Solomon)
Bharati Mukherjee (Desirable Daughters, Tree Bride)

N, O, P
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
Joyce Carol Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys)
Tim O’Brien (Going After Cacciato, In the Lake of the Woods)
Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood)
George Orwell (1984)
Cynthia Ozick (Heir to the Glimmering World)
Alan Paton (Cry the Beloved Country)
Iain Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost)
Katherine Anne Porter (Ship of Fools)

R, S, T
Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front)
Jean Rhys (Voyage in the Dark)
JeanPaul Sartre (No Exit)
Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels)
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
Jean Toomer (Cane)
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (Fathers and Sons)
Mark Twain (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

U, V, W
John Updike (Gertrude and Claudius)
Luisa Valenzuela (Clara)
Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five)
Alice Walker (Temple of My Familiar)
Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One)
Eudora Welty (The Optimist’s Daughter)
Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)
John Edgar Wideman (Brothers and Keepers)
Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
Richard Wright (Native Son)

Jane Eyre. It’s a really good book. It has this dark gothic feeling to it, the characters aren’t three dimensional, or beautiful-she actually describes the leading man as ugly, romance, and strong female herione. I was actually shocked by how much I loved the book, I highly recommend you read this book.

need help with sound devices. Obasan by Joy Kogawa.
thanks

It sounds more like sound advice.

This is the poem:

Hiroshima Exit

In round round rooms of our wanderings
Victims and victimizers in circular flight
Fact pursuing fact
Warning leaflets still dip down
On soil heavy with flames,
Black rain, footsteps, witnessings –

The Atomic Bomb Memorial Building
A curiosity shop filled with
Remnants of clothing, radiation sickness,
Fleshless faces, tourists muttering
“Well, they started it.”
Words jingle down
“They didn’t think about us in Pearl Harbor”
They? Us?
I tiptoe around the curiosity shop
Seeking my target
Precision becomes essential
Quick. Quick. Before he’s out of range.

Spell the name
America?
Hiroshima?
Aid raid warnings wail bleakly
Hiroshima
Morning.
I step outside
And close softly the door
Believing, believing
That outside this store
Is another door

I need to find some tragic elements, and I was asked to apply 3 tragic terms to the poem.

The reason I am asking is because my English is not very good, and I am having some problems understanding the poem. I’m begging for your help!

Thanks,
Christian

The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima was and still is a source of terrible pain and shame for those who were there and survived. I have watched documentaries and heard survivors stories. First, there is survivor guilt. Then, the shame of defeat (they lost the war). Then there is the stigma of having been exposed to radiation that could cause fetal deformities in the family in the future. Survivors speak of other people making them feel ashamed. Their scars are a reminder of the war, and their disgrace.

The "round, round rooms " probably refers to the rooms in the mind where one goes to worry. Victims and victimizers refers to the fact that we cause each other pain and everyone has some responsibility in this terrible disaster, and everyone is a victim. The bombs were shame on everyone….that we let it go that far. That we could do such a thing. I would label that element..universality. The common experience, the shared guilt and pain and worries. Also duality; that one could be both victim and victimizer.

Then, in the lines "They didn’t think about us..", the writer is showing that we often cope with such horrors by saying that:
-they started it, therefore they deserve it
-they bombed Pearl Harbor so they deserved it

This speaks to the theme of accountability. Yes, we could do it, but should we have?

Finally, I think the writer speaks to the message that this was the only thing to do at the time…i.e. you have to believe their view of the situation, that they felt there was no other option at the time. This speaks of trust in our leaders.

Tragic elements, to me, would be:

-they felt they had no other choice
-to save lives, some lives must be sacrificed
-that the victims are victimized time and again by shame and blame
-many lives were ruined that day…not just the people who died or where injured and exposed to radiation. Future generations where affected. I was affected. This writer was also.

The real tragedy? That we still have these weapons on earth. May we one day lay all the weapons down.

I believe in God and I believe in evolution. God created everything, including science, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Do atheists rob themselves of joy, wonder and mystery when they adhere to the adjunct of "there is no God"?

I see joy and wonder almost everyday, without the belief in your god.

Romans 14:17 - for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

The Spiritual Light and Love of the Lord God is Infinitely pure, unconditional and unchanging.
When He dwells within our very being, all of Him reflects in every part of us.
All that is positive, loving and good radiates from our very being and we have peace and joy within.

Peace and Blessings
.