Take Poll for Reading Envy Readalong No. 2

It's time to plan for the next Reading Envy Readalong! There is no fee or participation level requirement. This is to tackle another mighty tome along with other readers.

How to participate:

1. Read descriptions (below)
2. Join Goodreads group for discussion
3. Take poll to select book (by August 10)
4. Purchase book by September 1
5. Participate using #readingenvyreadalong in Instagram or Litsy; participate in discussion in Goodreads or by joining in on final episode recording (watch for call.)


Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871, 904 pages)

By the time the novel appeared to tremendous popular and critical acclaim in 1871-2, George Eliot was recognized as England's finest living novelist. It was her ambition to create a world and portray a whole community--tradespeople, middle classes, country gentry--in the rising provincial town of Middlemarch, circa 1830. Vast and crowded, rich in narrative irony and suspense, Middlemarch is richer still in character, in its sense of how individual destinies are shaped by and shape the community, and in the great art that enlarges the reader's sympathy and imagination. It is truly, as Virginia Woolf famously remarked, 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992, 559 pages)

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last - inexorably - into evil.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962, 640 pages)

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006, 433 pages)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.