Similar in style to "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" but with a male protagonist. 
 Reading this while traveling through crowded stone cities, I appreciated the idea that the simpleness of the earth itself could heal all of your ails. 
 The one thing that keeps eating at me is the idea that Wang Lung's wife worked in the fields all day, went inside to give birth, and came right back out to finish helping in the fields. Um, no. I can't wrap my mind around that one. 
 Favorite Quotes: 
 She spoke in a shocked tone as one might speak of gods being hungry. 
 ...moving together in a perfect rhythm without a word, hour after hour, he fell into a union with her which took the pain from his labor. He had no articulate thought of anything; there was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods. 
 All through the late spring and early summer the water rose and at last it lay like a great sea, lovely and idle, mirroring cloud and moon and willows and bamboo whose trunks stood submerged. 
 ...and he himself took a hoe and broke up the soil into fine loamy stuff, soft as black sugar, and still dark with the wetness of the land upon it. 
 ...Wang Lung was healed of his sickness of love by the good dark earth.