The Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee

This book is a testament to the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity. It tells the story of Michael K, who was born with a cleft palate and made a living as a gardener until civil war in South Africa makes life untenable for Michael and his mother Anna. Then he tries to take her to the farm she remembers from her childhood. Nothing comes easily for Michael, and he's continually faced with setbacks. But he perseveres despite it all. Winner of the 1983 Booker prize.

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

This book portrays the extreme poverty of the Lester family in a story that might be compared to a train wreck: you know you shouldn't be looking (and in this case laughing), but you can't look away either. The book relies neither on sentimentality nor on a proletarian call to action, but rather by turning the readers' reactions back on them: instead of a moral or a plan, Caldwell interrogates why we respond to this family with humor, contempt, and perhaps pity. The failure of the land to produce crops is equated with the family's inability to reproduce within social norms (the Lesters have had seventeen children, but only two still live at home, for example, and the ones who have left want nothing to do with the family). While Jeeter Lester (the head of the family) instinctively knows that his fate is tied to the land and that he wants no part of industrialization (symbolized by the possibility of a mill job in Augusta), the family is completely unable to cope with modernity: they treat their new car as if it were almost human--and in so doing manage to almost destroy it in a few short days. Finally, this book is about rural poverty in the South in the same way that Moby Dick is about whales--certainly it's a relevant topic, but Tobacco Road raises bigger and more pressing questions: What does it mean to be human? and What are the costs of living in a society that allows some of its members to become so abject?

Mason's Retreat by Christopher Tilghman

This book--an elegaic, pastoral journey into a family's past as well as the history of Maryland's Eastern Shore--slowly and inexorably moves to a tragic climax, as it depicts the Mason family. The Masons, American expatriates in England for almost a decade, have finally hit rock bottom, financially, and indulge in one last luxurious trip across the Atlantic on the Normandie to take over the family estate on Maryland's Eastern Shore. But while Edward, the patriarch, finds it hard to fit in, his wife and sons readily take to the Retreat. When the threat of World War II and the upswing in Edward's British manufacturing business threaten to tear the family from the estate, tensions that have been simmering beneath the family's surface come to a dangerous boil. I really enjoyed this book.

The Right-Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman

This book gives the history of a plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as its owner decides whether to leave it to a distant cousin who seems interested in pursuing a life elsewhere. I found the mystery wonderfully handled: even though it hangs over the entire story, it doesn't dominate the smaller set-pieces. In each vignette, we learn a little more about life on the plantation and the tragedies that the cultural and economic institutions cause to the inhabitants of this world. I'm definitely going to look at Tilghman's other work.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

I found this story incredibly moving. It covers a broad swath of time, and you can definitely see where it's going at points, but I really loved its humanity. It starts with a kitten up a telephone pole, and only gets better from there. I was particularly interested in the variety of languages in play in the community, and the portrait of a multi-ethnic community it created. I was also interested in Alexandra's growth into her own person. Beautiful and well-worth the time both to read and to write about.