By: Louis Sachar (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) Summary: “There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.” Louis Sachar, former lawyer and author of There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom and the Wayside books, begins the Newbery Medal and National Book...
By: Donna Tartt (New York: Little, Brown, 2013) Summary: Eleven years after Donna Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend, she published The Goldfinch, a novel of Russian scope and Dickensian characters that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This first-person...
By: Lois Lowry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993) Summary: Jonas lives in a society where pain has been eliminated. Marriages are arranged and couples are provided with children; careers are assigned; the elderly are “released.” There is no terrain or alteration in...
By: Marilynne Robinson (New York: Picador, 2004) Summary: John Ames, a Congregationalist pastor in Iowa, is going to die. He has a heart condition which prompts him to begin a series of letters in 1957 to his seven-year-old son in order to teach the boy that which...
By: Peter Shaffer (New York: Scribner, 2005). Summary: Equus is a Broadway play written in 1973 by Peter Shaffer, who also wrote Amadeus. (Both plays won the Tony Award for Best Play.) In 2008, there was a Broadway revival of Equus with Harry Potter’s Daniel...
By: Michael Ondaatje (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1992) Summary: “Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert,” says the English patient, a mysterious and knowledgeable man burned beyond any type of recognition. In 1945, Hana, a...
By: Orson Scott Card (New York: Tor Books, 1985) Summary: Ender Wiggin is a “Third,” a child born to a family that already has two siblings, something that requires government permission. The government allowed Ender to be born because there is a great need. The...
By: John Steinbeck (New York: Viking Press, 1952) Summary: Steinbeck, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote in his journal, “There is only one book to a man.” East of Eden was this book. An allegory written to...
By: Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1993) Summary: Written in 1866, Crime and Punishment is a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky that bears no little influence from the author’s actual decade of suffering during his...
Gilead By: Marilynne Robinson (New York: Picador, 2006) Some may triply wonder why I would use this space to review first, a novel rather than a non-fiction book, secondly, a novel by liberal Presbyterian Marilynne Robinson, and thirdly a novel published ten years...
