Serios Fiction Fan Club June meeting

Our June reading selection is the 1987 novel, "Beloved" by Toni Morrison.

The holy grail of any writer is the Nobel Prize for Literature - the ultimate recognition of writing excellence throughout the world, and since World War Two, only five American writers have been honored as Nobel laureates: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Bellow, and Toni Morrison. The Nobel Prize is awarded for a body of work over a lifetime, but this month's book, "Beloved," is generally acknowledged as the novel that brought the award to Morrison.

Equally convincing, in 2006 the "New York Times" did a survey among 200 plus contemporary writers and critics which resulted in "Beloved" being voted the most significant American novel of the past quarter century. Certainly, this is a book that any serious reader should have on his shelf.

Toni Morrison is a national treasure. She has spent a lifetime teaching literature and creative writing, most recently at Princeton, and serving as mentor to squadrons of aspiring writers. It won?t be a surprise that the book could serve as a model on how to structure a novel and develop living and breathing characters. It's a richly complex story that weaves together historical threads from American slavery into the tapestry of those ageless questions of love, family, tragedy, personal sacrifice, motherhood, religion, and superstition. It's not a simple minded "feel good" story with an inspiring or happy ending and for sure it's not an easy read, but the word pictures created by Morrison's masterful use of the English language will stick in the reader's imagination for a very long time.