Monday 17 May 2021

#5OnMyTBR | Literary Fiction


This meme was created by E. @ Local Bee Hunter's Nook and you can find the announcement post here. Also, side note, these aren't necessarily books that I own physically but they're all on my Goodreads TBR and they'll mostly be the five most recently added.  
 

This Week's Prompt is...

Literary Fiction! Literary fiction isn't a genre a read a ton from and I also find it difficult to label a book primarily as literary when there's often another more recognisable genre in there too but here's five I think fit this weeks prompt.
 

1. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides  

 
Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. 

 

Why I want to read it ✨

 
Modern classic
Family focused
Owned TBR 

2. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

 
Working in New York one hot summer, Esther Greenwood is on the brink of her future. Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal. In this vivid and unforgettable novel about the struggles of growing up, Esther's world shines through: the wide-eyed country girls, her crazed men-friends, hot dinner dances and nights in New York, and a slow slide into breakdown.

 

Why I want to read it ✨

 
Mental health
Feminism
A book to read before you die  

3. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

 
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.

But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life's lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world–until the unthinkable happens.

 

Why I want to read it ✨

 
Mystery element
The hype is real
Getting the movie treatment  

4. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

 
This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. 

 

Why I want to read it ✨

 
Shortie
Highly acclaimed
Vague synopsis 

5. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

 
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

 

Why I want to read it ✨

 
Mother and son relationship
Written in letter format
Emotional content  

Which literary fiction books are on your TBR? If you've already read some of these, let me know what you thought! Leave a comment with your own #5OnMyTBR posts for me to check out! Happy Reading!

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