Future Reading - Part Trois (oder Drei, o tres..... ) and on and on... how about Three

This will be a relatively short post, I think. In the past two entries, I've looked at possible future reading for my Individual challenges for the rest of the year. So far I've covered my Mystery, Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction selections. Today I'm going to look at my Modern Fiction choices. If you click on 'modern fiction' in the previous sentence, you can see what my original thoughts on this challenge were back in November of 2016. When I said Modern Fiction, I meant books published after 1900. My plan was to read 15 books in this category. So far I've read 5. (I will add that in my second 12 + 4 challenge, I have read other books that would fit into this category.) I don't know that I'll manage to read 10 more in this category with my other challenges.

Of the 8 books I proposed as possibles I've only read 2 so far. I will try to read a few more of the six below books but will also look at some other possibles. If you want the synopses of the six below books, click on Modern Fiction above.

1. Daphne du Maurier - My Cousin Rachel (1951).

2. Iain M. Banks - Walking on Glass (1985).

3. Matthew Pearl - The Dante Club (2003).

4. Carson McCullers - The Member of the Wedding (1946).

5. Evelyn Waugh - Scoop (1938).

6. Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway (1925).








Below are some other possible options in this genre. The field is WIDE OPEN!

1. P.G. Wodehouse - Leave it to PSmith (1923).

"Ronald PSmith (“the ‘p’ is silent, as in pshrimp”) is always willing to help a damsel in distress. So when he sees Eve Halliday without an umbrella during a downpour, he nobly offers her an umbrella, even though it’s one he picks out of the Drone Club’s umbrella rack. Psmith is so besotted with Eve that, when Lord Emsworth, her new boss, mistakes him for Ralston McTodd, a poet, Psmith pretends to be him so he can make his way to Blandings Castle and woo her. And so the farce begins: criminals disguised as poets with a plan to steal a priceless diamond necklace, a secretary who throws flower pots through windows, and a nighttime heist that ends in gunplay. How will everything be sorted out? Leave it to Psmith!"

2. George Orwell - A Clergyman's Daughter (1935). 

"Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied housekeeper. Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play, by the hopelessness of preaching to the poor and by debts she cannot pay in 1930s Depression England. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket and cannot remember her name. Orwell leads us through a landscape of unemployment, poverty and hunger, where Dorothy's faith is challenged by a social reality that changes her life." 

3. Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). 

"Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress - product of an inbred, decadent, expatriate community - a sensitive girl at once beguiled and repelled by the lush Jamaican landscape. Soon after her marriage to Rochester rumours of madness in the Cosway family poison Rochester's mind against her."

4. Patricia Highsmith - Carol (originally titled The Price of Salt) (1952). 

"Arguably Patricia Highsmith's finest, The Price of Salt is story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover."

So there you go. Another look at future reads. I guess I'd better finish my current books so I can start some of them eh? Oh, there are still a couple of other genres to cover. More to follow.