#109 Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates

“Here’s to moms. Without moms, where’d we all be?” quips Nikki Eaton, toasting her mother Gwen on Mother’s Day. Two days later, Nikki is suddenly, though an act of inexplicable violence, without her mother. This novel tells the story of Nikki’s first year missing her Mom. It is a year of moving back into her mother’s house and wearing her mother’s clothes. It is also a year in which Nikki discovers some startling secrets of Gwen’s past. These revelations are difficult for Nikki to reconcile with the sparkly Gwen, her bread-baking, craft-making, church-going, loving mother, but at last Nikki can fully know the mother she must miss all her life.

#108 The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

Reading this book is like stepping into another dimension. Nothing is as it seems. Take the story “Daemon Lover”. Is it really the laughter of her missing betrothed the woman hears behind the closed door of that otherwise-empty building? Or in “The Dummy,” does the ventriloquist insult his companion in the green dress, or can the dummy talk by itself? Did the stranger in “The Witch” actually commit the gruesome murder he describes to the little boy? In “The Lottery”, Jackson’s most famous story, the inhabitants of a village gather for an annual drawing. The village’s location is unstated, but, considering the prize it must lie somewhere within The Twilight Zone.

#107 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Domineering father

+ Controlling, pill-popping mother

+ Depressed, alcoholic, mixed- grill-making son

+ Desperate, swindling, couch-humping, running-off-to-Lithuania son

+ Sleeping-with-both-husband-and-wife-of-same-married-couple, celebrity chef, emotionally masochistic daughter

=

The Lamberts, one of the most dysfunctional families in contemporary American literature. Alfred, the patriarch of the family, is suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease, which, among other debilitating things, makes him hallucinate that he is being taunted by a talking turd. His wife, Enid, is convinced that having her children come home to spend one last Christmas in the house they grew up in will fix everything. Christmas is time to hope for a miracle, but barring that, there’s no quick fix for this family.

#106 A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

Sung to the tune of the “Good Times” theme song:

The Youngers!

Will be getting a big payment

The Youngers!

From an insurance policy

The Youngers!

Walter Sr. passed some years ago

Now they’ll get out of the ghetto with the money he left them

Mama takes some of the money and goes out and buys them a house

But Brother buys a liquor store—Mistake!

The money then gets ripped off—Heartbreak!

A white man doesn’t want them buyin’ ---No Doubt!

In an all white neighborhood—Stay Out!

Will they stay in or move out of the ghetto? --- Youngers!

A postwar “Good Times”, with few good times, but plenty of hardy hope.

#105 A Room With a View by E.M. Forster

A kiss among the violets on a hilltop near Florence, Italy would cause any young woman to lose her head, especially if that young woman were anything like Lucy Honeychurch. Miss Honeychurch, stepping out from the confines of her small English country society, is hoping for adventure in Italy in spite of having her cousin, Charlotte, a persnickety spinster, as a chaperone. Lucy craves an awakening; she yearns for something to happen to her. This something comes in the form of George Emerson, a quiet, melancholy young man whose dormant passions Lucy arouses and who sends her headlong into a muddle by arousing hers with that impetuously stolen, though welcomed, kiss.

#104 Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Living with The Damp and The Sickness is wretched enough, but add to that The Hunger and you’ve got misery that goes beyond the beyonds. It was in this state of abject poverty that Frank McCourt passed his childhood in 1940’s Ireland. Frank, born in New York, was four when his parents moved the family to their native Ireland following the death of their infant daughter. Frank’s father, an indolent alcoholic, did little to support his family and in Ireland their lives were dogged by despair. McCourt writes also of The Shame, which tore at him as a boy. He finally defeats it with this searing telling of his life story.

#103 The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz

Only one word describes the phenomenon that drove millions of teenagers to scream, writhe, cry, tremble and faint: Beatlemania. For a decade, John, Paul, George and Ringo-- to say nothing of their music—captured hearts and minds worldwide. This book gives an extraordinarily detailed account of the lives of the four Scousers from Liverpool, England—their turbulent childhoods, larger-than-life musical influences, and the fateful meeting between John and Paul that was the beginning of one of the most legendary songwriting collaborations of all time. The stories behind the music are absolute gems of Beatle’s trivia. (For instance, the guitar we hear gently weeping on George’s haunting song? That’s Mr. Eric Clapton.)