Thoughts for Thursday

Who is your most memorable or loved character (recent, classic or both)?

Find other thoughts at BTT.

My favorite contemporary female character is Susie Salmon from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. My favoite contemporary male character is Conrad Jarrett from Ordinary People by Judith Guest (Is it still contemporary? 1980 was almost 30 years ago!).













My favorite classic female character is Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. My favorite classic male character is Edmond Dantes from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.














Scroll down for the Reading Challenge.

Reading Challenge

I heard about this reading challenge called Fill in the Gaps: 100 Project and thought I would try it out. The challenge encourages you to make a list of 100 books that you want to read in the next 5 years. The woman/author who started it "collected a list of 100 books that she wants to read in her life to fill in some of her reading gaps of classics and great contemporary fiction." Other people joining the challenge have different types of lists: all fiction, all non-fiction, biographies, ABC authors, ABC titles, books already owned, classics, and all sorts of other list types. I decided to try a Prize Winners list. I included books from the past 20 years (1989-2009) that won one or more of the following awards: Man Booker Prize, National Book Award for Fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award, Orange Prize for Fiction, Faulkner Award for Fiction, and/or the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Here's my list:

Reading Challenge: 100 Prize Winners

1. Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
2. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
3. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
4. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
5. The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck
6. The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
7. Three Junes by Julia Glass
8. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
9. In America by Susan Sontag
10. Waiting by Ha Jin
11. Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
12. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
13. Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett
14. Sabbath's Theater by Phillip Roth
15. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis
16. The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
17. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
18. Mating by Norman Rush
19. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
20. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
21. The Gathering by Anne Enright
22. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
23. The Sea by John Banville
24. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
25. Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
26. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
27. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
28. Digrace by JM Coetzee
29. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
30. The God of Small Things by Araundhati Roy
31. Last Orders by Graham Swift
32. The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
33. How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman
34. Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
35. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
36. The Famished Road by Ben Okri
37. Possession by AS Byatt
38. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
39. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
40. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
41. March by Geraldine Brooks
42. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
43. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
44. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
45. Empire Falls by Richard Russo
46. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
47. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
48. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
49. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
50. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
51. Independence Day by Richard Ford
52. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
53. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
54. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
55. Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
56. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
57. The March by EL Doctorow
58. Atonement by Ian McEwan
59. Being Dead by Jim Crace
60. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
61. The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
62. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
63. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
64. The Road Home by Rose Tremain
65. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
66. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
67. We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver
68. Small Island by Andrea Levy
69. Property by Valerie Martin
70. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
71. The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville
72. When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
73. A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
74. Larry's Party by Carol Shields
75. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
76. A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore
77. Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
78. Everyman by Philip Roth
79. War Trash by Ha Jin
80. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
81. Postcards by E. Annie Proulx
82. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
83. The King's Evil by Will Heinrich
84. The Book of Salt by Monique Truong
85. Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (co-winner)
86. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
87. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
88. The Early Stories by John Updike
89. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
90. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
91. Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories by Gina Berriault
92. Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin
93. Billy Bathgate by EL Doctorow
94. Spartina by John Casey
95. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
96. The Caprices by Sabina Murray
97. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
98. The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor
99. Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
100. The Great Man by Kate Christensen

I might substitute some of these with new prize winners as they come out. I'm starting with #78 Everyman by Philip Roth. From Goodreads:

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The bestselling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.

The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.

The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.



Do you want to participate in the challenge (using my list or your own)? If you make your own list, post it in the comments. I'll post updates on the challenge as I make progress on the books.

Weekly Word Wednesdays

misqueme
v.
to displease

The impromtu bar top dancing by the Princess misquemed the Queen.

Adopt this word or others at Save the Words.

Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesdays (started on Should Be Reading) asks you to:

Grab your current read (or a book on your shelf that you've read or been wanting to read). Let the book fall open to a random page. Share two teaser sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. Don't forget to share the title and author of the book in case someone is teased into reading. Please avoid spoilers!

I've posted my teaser below. Post yours in the comment section if you'd like to share as well!



By 3:00 that afternoon, Bridget had to remind herself of the gravity of the incident, repeating the words "he almost died" to shock herself into a more alert state. In silence, mother and son had driven home, Matt at first refusing to enter the house.

p. 61 of A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve

Group Picture--Water for Elephants

Movie Mondays

The Notebook

Book, 1996 by Nicholas Sparks

From Goodreads:

The Notebook, a Southern-fried story of love-lost-and-found-again, revolves around a single time-honored romantic dilemma: will beautiful Allison Nelson stay with Mr. Respectability (to whom she happens to be engaged), or will she hook up with Noah, the romantic rascal she left so many years ago?



Movie, 2004 directed by Nick Cassavetes

Features: Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner, Gena Rowlands

Tagline: Behind every great love is a great story.

Dialogue Excerpt:

Anne: She is out foolin' around with that boy until two o'clock in the morning and it has got to stop! I didn't spend seventeen years of my life raising a daughter and giving her EVERYTHING, so she could throw it away on a summer romance!

Young Allie: [Screaming] DADDY!

Anne: She will wind up with her heart broken or pregnant! Now he's a nice boy, but he's...

Young Allie: He's WHAT? He is what? Tell me!

Anne: He is trash! Trash! Trash! Not for you!

Did you read and/or see The Notebook? Have you read the follow-up novel to The Notebook called The Wedding? Have you read any other novels by Sparks? Have you seen any of the other movies based on his novels...Nights in Rodanthe, Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember?

Meeting Tonight!

Our first meeting is tonight @ 6 pm @ my house: 5523 Walsh St.

Don't forget to bring your book!

Saturday Spotlight

Today's spotlight author is Truman Capote.

Quick Facts:

1. He was was born in New Orleans on September 30, 1924 and died in Los Angeles on August 25, 1984.
2. He was a neighbor and friend of Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird).
3. At age seventeen, he got a job with The New Yorker and within a few years was writing regularly for an assortment of publications.
4. He was well known for his distinctively odd, high-pitched voice.
5. He invented a new literary genre — the non-fiction novel (In Cold Blood).
6. His childhood is the focus of a permanent exhibit in Monroeville, Alabama's Old Courthouse Museum.
7. At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from his novels, stories and screenplays.
8. His works include Other Voices, Other Rooms; Breakfast at Tiffany's; In Cold Blood; Answered Prayers.
















Have you read any of Capote's works? Are you a fan? Did you know that Dill from To Kill a Mockingbird is based on him?

Feature Fridays

Today's featured classic is The Outsiders (1967) by S.E. Hinton.

From Goodreads:

First published in 1967, S. E. Hinton's novel was an immediate phenomenon. Today, with more than eight million copies sold and now available with a perceptive introduction by Jodi Picoult, The Outsiders continues to resonate with its powerful portrait of the bonds and boundaries of friendship.

In Ponyboy's world there are two types of people. There are the Socs, the rich society kids who get away with anything. Then there are the greasers, like Ponyboy, who aren't so lucky. Ponyboy has a few things he can count on: his older brothers, his friends, and trouble with the Socs, whose idea of a good time is beating up greasers. At least he knows what to expect—until the night things go too far.

Excerpt:

They walked out slowly, silently, smiling. "Need a haircut, greaser?" The medium-sized blond pulled a knife out of his back pocket and flipped the blade open. I finally thought of something to say. "No." I was backing up, away from that knife. Of course I backed right into one of them. They had me down in a second. I fought to get loose, and almost did for a second; then they tightened up on me and slugged me a couple of times. So I lay still, swearing at them between gasps. A blade was held against my throat. "How'd you like that haircut to begin just below the chin?"

Have you read The Outsiders? Who is your favorite character? Have you read any other books by Hinton, like Rumble Fish or That Was Then, This is Now?

I read The Outsiders in 7th grade in Ms. Meier's class. I loved Ponyboy the most. I'm always partial to the narrator.

Thoughts for Thursday

How do you choose to read a book? Summary, cover design, reading an excerpt, recommendations, reviews?

I choose a lot of best sellers. I also like to get recommendations from people who've already read the book. Sometimes I read the first page. If I like an author, I tend to try to read all of her books (Jodi Picoult, especially).

Weekly Word Wednesdays

lubency
n.
willingness; pleasure

He is running for office, hence his sudden lubency to help little old women cross the street.

Adopt this word at Save the Words.

Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesdays (started on Should Be Reading) asks you to:

Grab your current read (or a book on your shelf that you've read or been wanting to read). Let the book fall open to a random page. Share two teaser sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. Don't forget to share the title and author of the book in case someone is teased into reading. Please avoid spoilers!

I've posted my teaser below. Post yours in the comment section if you'd like to share as well!



We have a number of such patients, also on the aphasia ward, although, technically, they do not have aphasia, but, instead, a form of agnosia, in particular a so-called 'tonal' agnosia. For such patients, typically, the expressive qualities of voices diappear--their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire character--while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly understood.

from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (Part I, Section 9--Losses, The President's Speech, p. 83) by Dr. Oliver Sacks

P.S. Oliver Sacks also wrote Awakenings (made into 1990 movie featuring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams as Dr. Sacks)

Vote Now

The poll should be working now, so you can vote anytime.

Movie Mondays

The Virgin Suicides

Book, 1994 by Jeffrey Eugenides

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Eugenides's tantalizing, macabre first novel begins with a suicide, the first of the five bizarre deaths of the teenage daughters in the Lisbon family; the rest of the work, set in the author's native Michigan in the early 1970s, is a backward-looking quest as the male narrator and his nosy, horny pals describe how they strove to understand the odd clan. The sensationalism of the subject matter (based loosely on a factual account) may be off-putting to some readers, but Eugenides's voice is so fresh and compelling, his powers of observation so startling and acute, that most will be mesmerized.



Movie, 1999 directed by Sophia Coppola

Features: Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett

Tagline: Beautiful, mysterious, haunting, invariably fatal. Just like life.

Quotation: When she jumped, she probably thought she could fly.

Did you read or see The Virgin Suicides? What did you think? Have you read the Oprah's Book Club selection, Middlesex, also by Jeffrey Eugenides?

I saw the movie before I read the book. I liked both (a little weird, but good). I recently bought Middlesex but haven't started it yet. The beginning makes it sound really interesting:

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

Hold off on voting for now

There was a problem with the poll. It was only keeping track of one person's vote. If you already voted, you'll have to vote again when I re-post it tomorrow. Sorry!

Next Month's Book

It's time to vote on next month's book selection. Veronica is hosting the second meeting, so she chose the 3 books for us to vote on. They are The Shack by William P. Young, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, and Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Make sure to vote (in the sidebar at the right)!


About The Shack:

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant The Shack wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?" The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You'll want everyone you know to read this book!


About The Story of Edgar Sawtelle:

Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a fictional breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomized by Almondine, Edgar's lifelong friend and ally. But with the unexpected return of Claude, Edgar's paternal uncle, turmoil consumes the Sawtelles' once peaceful home. When Edgar's father dies suddenly, Claude insinuates himself into the life of the farm--and into Edgar's mother's affections. Grief-stricken and bewildered, Edgar tries to prove Claude played a role in his father's death, but his plan backfires--spectacularly. Forced to flee into the vast wilderness lying beyond the farm, Edgar comes of age in the wild, fighting for his survival and that of the three yearling dogs who follow him. But his need to face his father's murderer and his devotion to the Sawtelle dogs turn Edgar ever homeward. David Wroblewski is a master storyteller, and his breathtaking scenes create a riveting family saga, a brilliant exploration of the limits of language, and a compulsively readable modern classic.


About Life of Pi:

Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion." At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a book.

Vote for the one you want to read most!

Hope everyone liked Water for Elephants...can't wait to talk about it next week! Scroll down to leave your rating.

Sunday Survey

One week left to finish Water for Elephants...how are you liking it?

5= I love it.
4= I really like it.
3= I like it.
2= It's just okay.
1= I don't like it.

Saturday Spotlight

Today's author is Barbara Kingsolver.

Quick Facts:

1. She was born in 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, and grew up in rural Kentucky.
2. After high school she entered DePauw University on a piano scholarship, but she transferred from the music school to the college of liberal arts and graduated with a degree in biology.
3. After living in Greece, France and England, she moved to Tucson, Arizona and pursued graduate studies in evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.
4. During her student and post-college years she held various jobs including typesetter, housecleaner, medical laboratory technician, artist's model, archaeological assistant, translator, teaching assistant, and copy editor.
5. She wrote her first novel, The Bean Trees, entirely at night due to chronic insomnia during pregnancy.


6. She has written eleven books (as well as poems, short stories and essays) since then, including Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven, The Poisonwood Bible, and Prodigal Summer.















7. In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal for service through the arts.
8. She established the Bellwether Prize, awarded in even-numbered years to a first novel that exemplifies outstanding literary quality and a commitment to literature as a tool for social change.
9. She is the mother of two daughters, Camille and Lily, and is married to Steven Hopp, a professor of environmental sciences.
10. She currently lives on a farm in Virginia where she raises free-range chickens, turkeys, Icelandic sheep, and an enormous vegetable garden.

From her latest non-fiction work, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

"This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."



Are you a fan of Barbara Kingsolver? Which one of her books is your favorite?

I've read The Poisonwood Bible and I loved it. I need to read the rest of her books.

Feature Fridays

The classic feature today is Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck.

Plot from Goodreads:

Drifters in search of work, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except each other - and a dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch, but their hopes are doomed as Lennie - struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and jealousy - becomes a victim of his own strength. Tackling universal themes, friendship and a shared vision, and giving a voice to America's lonely and dispossesed, Of Mice And Men remains Steinbeck's most popular work.

Steinbeck originally titled it Something That Happened, but he changed it after reading a poem:

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley (Go oft' astray)" from To a Mouse by Robert Burns

Of Mice and Men has been banned from American public and school libraries for containing profanity and generally vulgar, offensive language and racial slurs. It is on the American Library Association's list of the Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century. Even though it has been targeted by censors, Of Mice and Men is still often required high school reading.

Did you read it in high school? Did you like it? Did you think it was vulgar? Have you read other books by John Steinbeck?

I did read Of Mice and Men in high school...I remember liking it a lot. It's pretty short, so I think I might re-read it to remember the details. I think I also read The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, but I don't really remember much about it...I guess I didn't like it as much.

Thoughts for Thursday

What was your favorite children's book growing up?
Do you have a favorite children's book author?

I remember a lot of books I really liked growing up:


Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Freckle Juice (and other Judy Blume books)
The Indian in the Cupboard
How to Eat Fried Worms

The ones I remember liking the most though are the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary.

Weekly Word Wednesdays

uglyography
n.
bad handwriting

Marion had uglyography ever since she was young, and she eventually became the country's top doctor.

Visit Save the Words to adopt this word.

Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesdays (started on Should Be Reading) asks you to:

Grab your current read (or a book on your shelf that you've read or been wanting to read). Let the book fall open to a random page. Share two teaser sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. Don't forget to share the title and author of the book in case someone is teased into reading. Please avoid spoilers!

I've posted my teaser below. Post yours in the comment section if you'd like to share as well!

Brad bought me this book when I started my medical rotations. It's called Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. The teaser is from Part II, Section IV: Doing Right, The Doctors of the Death Chamber.

"They say an electrocution is not an issue. But when someone comes up out of that chair six inches, it's not for nothing." p. 143

Movie Mondays

The Green Mile

Book, 1996 by Stephen King

Synopsis from the Stephen King site:

The story is told by former prison guard, Paul Edgecomb, of events in Cold Mountain penitentiary during 1932 when an unusual inmate by the name of John Coffey is brought to the prison. He and his fellow guards are assigned to watch inmates on death row, known as The Green Mile. John Coffey has been convicted of murdering two young girls and sentenced to death but there's something about him that makes Paul question whether this man could have committed that crime.



Movie, 1999 directed by Frank Darabont

Features: Tom Hanks, Michael Clarke Duncan (Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor)

Tagline: Miracles do happen.

Awards: Nominated for four Oscars, but won none.

Do you remember why it was called The Green Mile? Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) explains it: "They usually call death row the Last Mile, but we called ours the Green Mile, because the floor was the color of faded limes."

Did you read the book or see the movie? If you read it, did you read it volume by volume or all at once? Are you a Stephen King fan? What's your favorite Stephen King book?

I saw The Green Mile, but didn't read it. I did just read Jodi Picoult's book Change of Heart, and it reminded me a lot of The Green Mile. I have read a few other Stephen King books...my favorite one was Bag of Bones.

Book Fair Coming Up

The Greater St. Louis Book Fair runs from Thursday, April 23rd through Sunday, April 26th @ West County Mall...80 West County Center, St. Louis MO 63131 (Lower Level of Macy's East Parking Garage).

Schedule

Thursday April 23rd (Opening Night)
$10 General Admission 4:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Auction Preview 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Auction 7:30 pm
See auction items here.

Friday April 24th
FREE General Admission 10:00 am - 9:30 pm

Saturday April 25th
Shopping for Persons with Disabilities 9:00 am - 10:00 am
FREE General Admission 10:00 am - 9:30 pm

Sunday April 26th
FREE General Admission
Half-Price Day 11:00 am - 6:00 pm

Pricing

Paperback Books $1
Hardback Books $1 - $5
Records, Tapes & CDs $1 - $5
Video & DVDs $1 - $5
Magazines $1 - $5
Ephemera $1 - $5

For more information, go here.

Sunday Survey & Happy Easter!

How are you liking Water for Elephants? Share your rating in the comment section.

5= I love it.
4= I really like it.
3= I like it.
2= It's just okay.
1= I don't like it.

Saturday Spotlight

Today's Saturday Spotlight author is Amy Tan.

Quick Facts:

1. She was born in the US on February 19, 1952 to immigrant parents from China.
2. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in English and Linguistics from San José State University.
3. Her novels are The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning, all New York Times bestsellers and winners of various awards.
4. She also wrote a memoir entitled The Opposite of Fate, as well as two children's books.
5. The adaptation of her most popular fiction work, The Joy Luck Club, became a commercially successful film.


Here's a description from Goodreads:

A stunning literary achievement, The Joy Luck Club explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken of lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves. Heartwarming and bittersweet, this is a novel for mother, daughters, and those that love them.

Learn more about Amy Tan and her books here.

Have you read any of Amy Tan's books? Do you recommend any of them?