50 years of books – my listing of just one genre of books.
We will talk about books here. We entertain our readers’ input. We should be able to add variety to our book titles and their genre. We will begin with the 20 best books of this half century:
1. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez (1967) – A magic realist novel that follows the Buendía family over generations.
2. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison (1987) – A poignant exploration of the haunting effects of slavery.
3. “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood (1985) – A dystopian tale of a society where women are oppressed.
4. “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie (1981) – A novel intertwined with India’s transition from British colonialism to independence.
5. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy (2006) – A haunting story of a father and son’s journey in post-apocalyptic America.
6. “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco (1980) – A historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery.
7. “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) – A dystopian science fiction novel about cloned children.
8. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by Haruki Murakami (1994) – A surreal, multi-layered narrative set in Tokyo.
9. “A Brief History of Seven Killings” by Marlon James (2014) – A novel revolving around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica.
10. “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel (2009) – A historical novel about the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII.
11. “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy (1997) – A semi-autobiographical work and a critique of Indian societal norms.
12. “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith (2000) – A novel focusing on the later lives of two wartime friends in London and their families.
13. “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace (1996) – A dense and complex novel about addiction and entertainment.
14. “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel (2001) – A tale of a young boy stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger.
15. “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen (2001) – A family saga and a commentary on societal expectations.
16. “Atonement” by Ian McEwan (2001) – A story of love and war, and the lifelong consequences of a single act of misinterpretation.
17. “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt (2013) – A bildungsroman involving a young boy who loses his mother in a museum bombing.
18. “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr (2014) – A novel set during World War II, revolving around a blind French girl and a German boy.
19. “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) – A letter to the author’s teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities of being Black in America.
20. “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi (2016) – A novel that tracks the parallel paths of two half-sisters and their descendants over 300 years.
