This year’s challenge is simple, just pick an author that was born in that month and read a piece of their work. I told you, easy!
Obviously there are hundreds of books and authors to choose from so we’ve just listed a few for February in case you’re in need of inspiration.
Toni Morrison – Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love.
Kent Haruf – Plainsong
Set in Kent Haruf’s fictional landscape of Holt County, Colorado, Plainsong, is a story of simple lives told with extraordinary empathy. Tom Guthrie is struggling to bring up his two young sons alone and, in the same town, school girl Victoria Roubideaux is pregnant and homeless. Whilst Tom’s boys find their way forward without their mother, brothers Harold and Raymond McPheron – gentle, solitary, gruff and unpolished – agree to take Victoria in, unaware that their lives will change forever.
Rachel Cusk – Outline
A novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great a great loss.
Ruth Rendall – From Doon With Death
The trampled grass led to the body of Margaret Parsons. With no useful clues and a victim known only for her mundane life, Chief Inspector Wexford is baffled until he discovers Margaret’s dark secret – a collection of rare books, each inscribed from a secret lover and signed only as ‘Doon’. Who is Doon? And could the answer hold the key to Wexford solving his first case?
Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities thrives on tension and conflict between Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton who fight for Doctor Manette’s beautiful and kind daughter Lucie Mannette. From the tranquil streets of London, they are found against their will in the treacherous streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, the bloody backdrop of the French Revolution.
Muriel Spark – Loitering With Intent
Would-be novelist Fleur Talbot works for the snooty, irascible Sir Quentin Oliver at the Autobiographical Association, whose members are all at work on their memoirs. When her employer gets his hands on Fleur’s novel-in-progress, mayhem ensues as its scenes begin coming true… Spark’s inimitable style make this literary joyride thoroughly appealing.
Ransom Riggs – A Map of Days
Joined by Miss Peregrine, Emma and their peculiar friends, life has become carefree. They spend days at the beach, and take part in ‘normalling’ lessons. But it’s not meant to last. The discovery of Jacob’s grandfather’s subterranean bunker leads to clues about his double-life as a peculiar operative.
Amy Tan – The Joy Luck Club
In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters’ futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers’ advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they’ve unknowingly inherited of their mothers’ pasts.
Eowyn Ivey – The Snow Child
Alaska, the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before. When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in their hearts for her?
Malorie Blackman – Boys Don’t Cry
You’re waiting for the postman – he’s bringing your A level results. University, a career as a journalist – a glittering future lies ahead. But when the doorbell rings it’s your old girlfriend; and she’s carrying a baby. Your baby. You’re happy to look after it, just for an hour or two. But then she doesn’t come back – and your future suddenly looks very different.
Other suggestions from Cwts Club Discussion Group. include, Chuck Palahniuk, Alice Walker, Ayn Rand, John SteinBeck, Jules Verne, John Grisham, Gillian Flynn, Judy Blume, Victor Hugo, Helen Fielding, Anthony Burgess, James Joyce, Rainbow Rowell and Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket).
Pick a book from our list, pop along to your local book shop or library or pick something that’s already in your TBR pile. What ever you decide, don’t forget to let us know what you’re reading over on Cwts Club Discussion Group.
Happy New Reading Year!
For Reading Addicts Reading Challenge 2024
For Reading Addicts Reading Challenge 2023 – Read a Rainbow – October