Some Books I Read in 2004
Explore a curated list of books read in 2004, featuring standout fiction by Donna Tartt, Chinua Achebe, and V. S. Naipaul. Discover classic and compelling novels from this memorable reading year.
Book
The Little Friend
by Donna Tartt
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. • “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.
Book
M
by Peter Robb
Recounts the life and deeds of sixteenth-century artist Michaelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio), and provides insight into the politics, art, and people of the period.
Book
A House for Mr. Biswas
by V. S. Naipaul
From the Nobel Prize-winning author: an unforgettable comedy of manners inspired by the author's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels. “A marvelous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.” —Newsweek In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous—and endless—struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark yet comedic novel, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.
Book
Vernon God Little
by D. B. C. Pierre
After a school shooting where sixteen kids are shot Vernon Little's best friend turns the gun on himself, leaving Vernon to be accused as an accessory to murder.
Book
I'm Not Scared
by Niccolò Ammaniti
In the summer of 1978 in a small Italian village, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano loses his innocence of childhood when he accidentally uncovers a dark secret being kept by the adults of Acqua Traverse.
Book
The Samurai's Garden
by Gail Tsukiyama
Shortly before World War II, a Chinese man, sent to Japan to recover from tuberculosis, meets a lovely Japanese girl and four older residents, in a story of passion and sacrifice.
Book
Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
Book
Girls at War
by Chinua Achebe
Full of characteristic energy and authenticity, the stories in this classic collection capture the remarkable talent of one of the world's most acclaimed writers and storytellers. Here we read of an ambitious farmer who is suddenly shunned by his village when a madman exacts his humiliating revenge; a young nanny who is promised an education by her well-to-do employers, only to be cruelly cheated out of it; and in three fiercely observed stories about the Nigerian civil war, we are confronted with the economic, ethnic, cultural, and religious tensions that continue to rack modern Africa. Displaying an astonishing range of experience, Chinua Achebe deftly takes us inside the heart and soul of a people whose pride and ideals must compete with the simple struggle to survive.
Book
Anthills of the Savannah
by Chinua Achebe
A searing satire of political corruption and social injustice from the celebrated author of Things Fall Apart "Achebe has written a story that sidesteps both ideologies of the African experience and political agendas, in order to lead us to a deeply human universal wisdom." —Washington Post Book World In the fictional West African nation of Kangan, newly independent of British rule, the hopes and dreams of democracy have been quashed by a fierce military dictatorship. Chris Oriko is a member of the president's cabinet for life, and one of the leader's oldest friends. When the president is charged with censoring the opportunistic editor of the state-run newspaper--another childhood friend--Chris's loyalty and ideology are put to the test. The fate of Kangan hangs in the balance as tensions rise and a devious plot is set in motion to silence a firebrand critic. From Chinua Achebe, the legendary author of Things Fall Apart, Anthills of the Savannah is "A vision of social change that strikes us with the force of prophecy." (USA Today)