Recommended Reading:
Some of these books have audio versions available. You may want to consider getting the book AND the audio version (be sure to get the unabridged (complete) audio version of the book so that you can listen as you read.)
Many of these books as well as their audio versions are available at the public library. We have linked the books and audio versions to www.amazon.com where you can read more information or order the books. Many are also available at the Stanford book store on campus.
Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America - Firoozeh Dumas
In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since.
Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
Audio Version available
Tony Hillerman Novels
Hillerman wrote 18 books in his Navajo series. He wrote more than 30 books total, among them a memoir and books about the Southwest, its beauty and its history. Many are available in audio versions as well.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze - Peter Hessler
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society.
Audio Version available
The 19th Wife: A Novel - David Ebershoff
It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of her family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how both she and her mother became plural wives. Yet soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death. And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love, family, and faith.
Audio Version available
Lonesome Dove: A Novel - Larry McMurtry
A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize— winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.
Audio Version available
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (this is a famous book)
The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.
Audio version available
Cannery Row - John Steinbeck (about the canneries in Monterey (about 2 hours of Stanford)
First published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is—both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. John Steinbeck draws on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, and interweaves their stories in this world where only the fittest survive—creating what is at once one of his most humorous and poignant works. In Cannery Row, John Steinbeck returns to the setting of Tortilla Flat to create another evocative portrait of life as it is lived by those who unabashedly put the highest value on the intangibles—human warmth, camaraderie, and love.
Audio version available
Travels with Charlie in Search of America - John Steinbeck
In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. A picaresque tale, this chronicle of their trip meanders through scenic backroads and speeds along anonymous superhighways, moving from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley in Search of America is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycle of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.
Audio version available
Amy Tan Novels -
Tan was born in Oakland, Califormia. She is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants Daisy who was forced to leave her three daughters from a previous marriage behind in Shanghai, and John Tan, an electrical engineer and minister. This incident provided the basis for Tan's first novel, 1989 New York Times bestseller The Joy Luck Club. When Tan was 15 years old, her older brother Peter and father both died of brain tumors within a year of each other. Daisy moved Amy and her younger brother John Jr. to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school. During this period, Amy learned about her mother's former marriage to an abusive man in China, and of their four children, including three daughters and a son who died as a toddler. In 1987 Amy traveled with Daisy to China. There, Amy met her three half-sisters.
Many are available as Audio versions.
West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco, 1915
"It is like a fairyland." So Laura Ingalls Wilder described her 1915 voyage to San Francisco to visit her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Laura's husband, Almanzo, was unable to leave their Missouri farm and it is her faithful letters home, vividly describing every detail of her journey, that have been gathered here. Includes 24 pages of exciting photographs and completely redesigned jacket art.
My Antonia - Willa Cather
This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic™ includes a glossary and reader’s notes to help the modern reader contend with Cather’s allusions and vocabulary. My Ántonia, Willa Cather’s vivid portrayal of immigrant life on the American prairie during the nineteenth century, has been a favorite since it first appeared in 1918. The harsh—yet forgiving—land, the growth and maturity of Jim Burden, the narrator, the intriguing characters, and the force of Ántonia’s strength all combine to make this novel exceptional. Cather’s style perfectly depicts the sparseness of the prairie and the desolation of the immigrants’ existence in winter and comes alive when the glory and beauty of spring emerge.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition
In a radical departure from standard editions, Twain's most famous novels are published here as the continuous narrative that the author originally envisioned. More controversial will be the decision by the editor, noted Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben, to eliminate the pejorative racial labels that Twain employed in his effort to write realistically about social attitudes of the 1840s. In his detailed introduction, Gribben points out that dozens of other editions currently make available the inflamatory words, but their presence has gradually diminished the potential audience for two of Twain's masterpieces.
"Both novels can be enjoyed deeply and authentically without those continual encounters with the hundreds of now-indefensible racial slurs," Gribben explains.
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey - Lillian Schlissel
After the depression of 1837, the prospect of "free land" and gold prompted more than 250,000 people to emigrate to Oregon and California between 1840 and 1870. History, relying predominantly on men's writings, often presents this journey in terms of mythic adventure. But what was it like for women? After studying the writings of 103 women, Lillian Schlissel determined that "If ever there was a time when men and women turned their psychic energies toward opposite visions, the overland journey was that time." In Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, she explores her findings, quoting at length from her sources and including a selection of diaries and reminiscences at the end. Although unmarried adolescents were often exuberant about their experience, for the married women, particularly those with young children, the trip was fraught with danger and fear. Children could fall under wagon wheels or be left behind in the confusion of traveling with as many as one hundred other wagons. There were buffalo stampedes, Indian attacks, snakebites, dysentery, starvation, and cholera - many women note individual graves, sometimes one per mile. In addition, one of every five women was pregnant when the journey began or became so in the course of a trip that guidebooks said would take three to four months, but often took six to eight. Through Lillian Schlissel's fascinating and extremely readable account, we gain a fuller understanding of the journey few of these women wanted to take.
Many of these books as well as their audio versions are available at the public library. We have linked the books and audio versions to www.amazon.com where you can read more information or order the books. Many are also available at the Stanford book store on campus.
Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America - Firoozeh Dumas
In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since.
Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
Audio Version available
Tony Hillerman Novels
Hillerman wrote 18 books in his Navajo series. He wrote more than 30 books total, among them a memoir and books about the Southwest, its beauty and its history. Many are available in audio versions as well.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze - Peter Hessler
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society.
Audio Version available
The 19th Wife: A Novel - David Ebershoff
It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of her family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how both she and her mother became plural wives. Yet soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death. And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love, family, and faith.
Audio Version available
Lonesome Dove: A Novel - Larry McMurtry
A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize— winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.
Audio Version available
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (this is a famous book)
The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.
Audio version available
Cannery Row - John Steinbeck (about the canneries in Monterey (about 2 hours of Stanford)
First published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is—both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. John Steinbeck draws on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, and interweaves their stories in this world where only the fittest survive—creating what is at once one of his most humorous and poignant works. In Cannery Row, John Steinbeck returns to the setting of Tortilla Flat to create another evocative portrait of life as it is lived by those who unabashedly put the highest value on the intangibles—human warmth, camaraderie, and love.
Audio version available
Travels with Charlie in Search of America - John Steinbeck
In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. A picaresque tale, this chronicle of their trip meanders through scenic backroads and speeds along anonymous superhighways, moving from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley in Search of America is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycle of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.
Audio version available
Amy Tan Novels -
Tan was born in Oakland, Califormia. She is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants Daisy who was forced to leave her three daughters from a previous marriage behind in Shanghai, and John Tan, an electrical engineer and minister. This incident provided the basis for Tan's first novel, 1989 New York Times bestseller The Joy Luck Club. When Tan was 15 years old, her older brother Peter and father both died of brain tumors within a year of each other. Daisy moved Amy and her younger brother John Jr. to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school. During this period, Amy learned about her mother's former marriage to an abusive man in China, and of their four children, including three daughters and a son who died as a toddler. In 1987 Amy traveled with Daisy to China. There, Amy met her three half-sisters.
Many are available as Audio versions.
West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco, 1915
"It is like a fairyland." So Laura Ingalls Wilder described her 1915 voyage to San Francisco to visit her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Laura's husband, Almanzo, was unable to leave their Missouri farm and it is her faithful letters home, vividly describing every detail of her journey, that have been gathered here. Includes 24 pages of exciting photographs and completely redesigned jacket art.
My Antonia - Willa Cather
This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic™ includes a glossary and reader’s notes to help the modern reader contend with Cather’s allusions and vocabulary. My Ántonia, Willa Cather’s vivid portrayal of immigrant life on the American prairie during the nineteenth century, has been a favorite since it first appeared in 1918. The harsh—yet forgiving—land, the growth and maturity of Jim Burden, the narrator, the intriguing characters, and the force of Ántonia’s strength all combine to make this novel exceptional. Cather’s style perfectly depicts the sparseness of the prairie and the desolation of the immigrants’ existence in winter and comes alive when the glory and beauty of spring emerge.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition
In a radical departure from standard editions, Twain's most famous novels are published here as the continuous narrative that the author originally envisioned. More controversial will be the decision by the editor, noted Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben, to eliminate the pejorative racial labels that Twain employed in his effort to write realistically about social attitudes of the 1840s. In his detailed introduction, Gribben points out that dozens of other editions currently make available the inflamatory words, but their presence has gradually diminished the potential audience for two of Twain's masterpieces.
"Both novels can be enjoyed deeply and authentically without those continual encounters with the hundreds of now-indefensible racial slurs," Gribben explains.
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey - Lillian Schlissel
After the depression of 1837, the prospect of "free land" and gold prompted more than 250,000 people to emigrate to Oregon and California between 1840 and 1870. History, relying predominantly on men's writings, often presents this journey in terms of mythic adventure. But what was it like for women? After studying the writings of 103 women, Lillian Schlissel determined that "If ever there was a time when men and women turned their psychic energies toward opposite visions, the overland journey was that time." In Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, she explores her findings, quoting at length from her sources and including a selection of diaries and reminiscences at the end. Although unmarried adolescents were often exuberant about their experience, for the married women, particularly those with young children, the trip was fraught with danger and fear. Children could fall under wagon wheels or be left behind in the confusion of traveling with as many as one hundred other wagons. There were buffalo stampedes, Indian attacks, snakebites, dysentery, starvation, and cholera - many women note individual graves, sometimes one per mile. In addition, one of every five women was pregnant when the journey began or became so in the course of a trip that guidebooks said would take three to four months, but often took six to eight. Through Lillian Schlissel's fascinating and extremely readable account, we gain a fuller understanding of the journey few of these women wanted to take.
