As fall semester begins to end, I can't help but look back at the books I've read these past couple of weeks that have really moved me. Do you remember as a child ever closing your eyes and moving around pretending that you couldn't see. It was difficult. Remember opening your eyes and being happy you could see. In Jose Saramago's Nobel Peace Prize For Literature, Blindness, us the readers are able to see how compassionate human beings can be even in the face of a disaster. "The white sickness" or "the plague of blindness" which Saramago uses one for the other is not only eerie but metaphorical as well.

One of the other novels I was glad that I was assigned in classes to read was Toni Morrison's Beloved. Having heard of the many accolades that Morrison was able to garner, it was an absolute privilege to read one of the texts that really propelled her career as a writer. Beloved is not a ghost story, although there is a presence. It's a story behind the bond of a mother and daughter and slavery. The novel speaks to the horrors of America's past and those who long to forget it. And perhaps, perhaps one of the things that maybe the book is trying to say is that we can't forget the past, we just have to acknowledge it.

James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room was advised to be burned because of it sexual undertones. Despite opposition, Baldwin chose to publish the gay novel regardless in 1956. Giovanni's Room parallels F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Baldwin explores, examines, and shatters the "American Dream". Who comes unscathed from loving freely? This is just one of the questions that Baldwin begs the reader to ask themselves.

P.S. 100 Years of Solitude would make a great gift. People say it is the text that began magic realism (There may or may not be flying carpets in the novel...)

— Your Fellow English Major