Hi @1000_Books people! Here are five books to choose from for December. Please vote for all you’d be willing to read. Discussion will open December 15.
Childhood’s End is a 1953 science fiction novel by the British author Arthur C. Clarke (author of 2001: A Space Odyssey). The story follows a peaceful alien invasion of Earth by mysterious Overlords, whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirect alien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture. 224 pp.
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell was published in 1853, and is a comedic novel about the seemingly mundane lives of old spinsters in a small rural village. 257 pp.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel by Zora Neale Hurston that follows the life and self-discovery of an African-American woman named Janie Crawford The story is framed as a flashback. Janie returns to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, after a major tragedy and sits down to tell her life story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson.
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (who Mustiche calls “a 20th-century Jane Austen”). This 1952 novel is a witty, sharp, and gentle comedy of manners set in post-World War II London. It explores the quiet, polite, and often overlooked lives of middle-class English society.
Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart. Pruitt, a widow and mother who washed clothes for a living in Denver, planned to work as a housekeeper for some rancher while learning all she would need to know about homesteading a place for herself. In 1909 she went to work for Clyde Stewart, whose ranch was near Burnt Fork, Wyoming, and within six weeks she married him. She maintained her independence by filing on a quarter section adjacent to her husband’s land and proving it up herself. Her delightful letters, written from the time of her arrival until 1913, authentically depict life in the Old West.