CHOOSE TWO:

The Awakening by Kate Chopin: tells the story of Edna Pontellier and the changes that occur in her thinking and lifestyle as the result of a summer romance. "Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" is the classic novel about women that "Madame Bovary" purports to be but isn't."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life.

1984 by George Orwell: Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell.

My Antonia by Willa Cather: In Jim Burden's accounting of his life with, and without, Antonia Shimerda, listeners are transported to the hardscrabble Nebraska prairie and the rural immigrant experience. When Jim first sees the Shimerda family, immigrants from Bohemia, disembarking from the same train that is taking him West to live with his grandparents, he has no idea the impact they will have on his life. Nostalgically, he remembers the good and bad times they had on their respective farms and creates his portrait of Antonia, an independent and tough survivor.
This tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden.

The Color Purple by Alica Walker: It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983. A feminist novel about an abused and uneducated black woman's struggle for empowerment, the novel was praised for the depth of its female characters and for its eloquent use of black English vernacular.

Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis: shocked the Atlantic Monthly readership when it was published in 1861. It tells the story of Hugh Wolfe, a desperately poor worker in the iron mills, and his cousin Deb, who steals money so that Hugh might have a chance to become an artist. The anonymous narrator of the story is merciless, intent upon showing her readers life at the bottom, complete with drunkenness, rotten food, and slimy hovels. Hugh Wolfe's life is a daily as well as archetypal tragedy, grabbing at the hearts and stomachs of its readers, and Rebecca Harding Davis captures his life in prose that combines outrage, spirituality, and nightmare.

To vote, go to http://www.socwbc.org/polls/
and check two choices.

The Classic Book Club is an offshoot of the regular book club. It meets every second Wednesday at Coco's Restaurant in Mission Viejo at 7 pm. We read only classics.