ONTD Reading Challenge March: Everyone Was Dad
Heyy! Welcome to the March reading challenge! Our theme this month is "Everyone Was Dad", which means we'll be reading books with a memorable or prominent dad character or where fatherhood is a major theme. Good fathers, bad fathers, living or dead, fictional or real, you take your pick!
We've come up with a few reading suggestions, but as always, you can look for something else. Not sure if the title you have in mind fits the theme? Let's discuss in the comments!
The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-and each other.
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos.
King Lear (William Shakespeare)
King Lear is Shakespeare’s bleakest and profoundest tragedy, a searing dramatization of humankind at the edge of apocalypse that explores the family and the nature of being with passion, poetry, and dark humor.
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies. A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic.
Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders)
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state-called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo-a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.
The Pursuit of Love (Nancy Mitford)
Oh, the tedium of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the lookout for the perfect lover. But finding Mr Right is much harder than any of the sisters had thought. Linda must suffer marriage first to a stuffy Tory MP and then to a handsome and humourless communist, before finding real love in war-torn Paris. . .
My Father and Myself (JR Ackerley)
When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own--this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley's pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self, making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.
And When Did You Last See Your Father? (Blake Morrison)
Blake Morrison's subject is universal: the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, competent and inept, charming and infuriating, domineering and terribly vulnerable. But this memoir's central concern is identity. In reading about Dr. Arthur Morrison, we ask ourselves the same searching questions that Blake Morrison poses. Can we ever see our parents as themselves? Or are they forever defined by the lens of a child's or a teenager's eyes? What are the secrets of their lives, and why do they spare us that knowledge? How can we ever know our fathers in their other incarnations - as friends, as husbands and lovers, as employees? And when they die, what do they take with them that cannot be recovered or inherited?
Not My Father's Son (Alan Cumming)
Dark, painful memories can be put away to be forgotten. Until one day they all flood back in horrible detail. When television producers approached Alan Cumming to appear on a popular celebrity genealogy show, he hoped to solve the mystery of his maternal grandfather's disappearance that had long cast a shadow over his family. But this was not the only mystery laid before Alan. Alan grew up in the grip of a man who held his family hostage, someone who meted out violence with a frightening ease, who waged a silent war with himself that sometimes spilled over onto everyone around him. That man was Alex Cumming, Alan's father, whom Alan had not seen or spoken to for more than a decade when he reconnected just before filming for Who Do You Think You Are? began. He had a secret he had to share, one that would shock his son to his very core and set into motion a journey that would change Alan's life forever.
Père Goriot (Honoré de Balzac)
Monsieur Goriot is one of a select group of lodgers at Madame Vauquer's Parisian boarding house. At first his wealth inspires respect, but as his circumstances are reduced he is shunned by those around him, and soon his only remaining visitors are two beautiful, mysterious young women. Goriot claims that they are his daughters, but his fellow boarders, including master criminal Vautrin, have other ideas. And when Eugène Rastignac, a poor but ambitious law student, learns the truth, he decides to turn it to his advantage. Old Goriot is one of the key novels of Balzac's Comédie Humaine series, and a compelling examination of two obsessions, love and money. Witty and brilliantly detailed, it is a superb study of the bourgeoisie in the years following the French Revolution.
sources 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
lists found online with further suggestions 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
ONTD, what will you pick for this month?