Books We Have
Read and Discussed and Future
Titles
March
2009 Loving
Frank: A Novel
by Nancy Horan (Judy) Horan's ambitious first novel is a
fictionalization of the life of
Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd
Wright's first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but
a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the
restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married
and with children, met when Mamah's husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank
to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they
left their families to live and travel together, going first to
Germany, where Mamah found rewarding work doing scholarly translations
of Swedish feminist Ellen Key's books. Frank and Mamah eventually
settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry
press, with tragic repercussions. Horan puts considerable effort into
recreating Frank's vibrant, overwhelming personality, but her primary
interest is in Mamah, who pursued her intellectual interests and love
for Frank at great personal cost. As is often the case when a life
story is novelized, historical fact inconveniently intrudes: Mamah's
life is cut short in the most unexpected and violent of ways, leaving
the narrative to crawl toward a startlingly quiet conclusion.
Nevertheless, this spirited novel brings Mamah the attention she
deserves as an intellectual and feminist.
February
2009 Moloka'i by Alan Brennert
(Sharron) Brennert's sweeping debut novel tracks the grim struggle of a
Hawaiian
woman who contracts leprosy as a child in Honolulu during the 1890s and
is deported to the island of Moloka'i, where she grows to adulthood at
the quarantined settlement of Kalaupapa. Rachel Kalama is the plucky,
seven-year-old heroine whose family is devastated when first her uncle
Pono and then she develop leprous sores and are quarantined with the
disease. While Rachel's symptoms remain mild during her youth, she
watches others her age dying from the disease in near total isolation
from family and friends. Rachel finds happiness when she meets Kenji
Utagawa, a fellow leprosy victim whose illness brings shame on his
Japanese family. After a tender courtship, Rachel and Kenji marry and
have a daughter, but the birth of their healthy baby brings as much
grief as joy, when they must give her up for adoption to prevent
infection. The couple cope with the loss of their daughter and settle
into a productive working life until Kenji tries to stop a quarantined
U.S. soldier from beating up his girlfriend and is tragically killed in
the subsequent fight. The poignant concluding chapters portray Rachel's
final years after sulfa drugs are discovered as a cure, leaving her
free to abandon Moloka'i and seek out her family and daughter.
Brennert's compassion makes Rachel a memorable character, and his
smooth storytelling vividly brings early 20th-century Hawaii to life.
Leprosy may seem a macabre subject, but Brennert transforms the
material into a touching, lovely account of a woman's journey as she
rises above the limitations of a devastating illness.
January
2009 Astrid
& Veronika
by Linda Olson (Kelly) Veronika, a 30-year-old Swedish writer, rents a
home in a remote
village to finish work on her second novel. Her only neighbor for miles
is Astrid, a reclusive octogenarian who has earned a reputation
(perhaps undeserved) as the village witch. Veronika and Astrid
gradually become friends, taking long walks and sipping wine made from
the wild strawberries in Astrid's garden. Each shares painful secrets
along the way. Veronika abandoned a devoted boyfriend to take up with a
bartender from New Zealand. They fell passionately in love, then
tragedy befell him, leaving Veronika incapacitated by grief. Astrid
endured sexual abuse from her father and a long loveless marriage to a
man chosen by him. Until now, she has never told anyone the truth about
her infant daughter's death.
December
2008 The
Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel by Debra Dean
(Susan) Russian emigré Marina Buriakov, 82, is preparing
for her
granddaughter's wedding near Seattle while fighting a losing battle
against Alzheimer's. Stuggling to remember whom Katie is marrying (and
indeed that there is to be a marriage at all), Marina does remember her
youth as a Hermitage Museum docent as the siege of Leningrad began; it
is into these memories that she disappears. After frantic packing, the
Hermitage's collection is transported to a safe hiding place until the
end of the war. The museum staff and their families remain, wintering
(all 2,000 of them) in the Hermitage basement to avoid bombs and
marauding soldiers. Marina, using the technique of a fellow docent,
memorizes favorite Hermitage works; these memories, beautifully
interspersed, are especially vibrant. Dean, making her debut, weaves
Marina's past and present together effortlessly. The dialogue around
Marina's forgetfulness is extremely well done, and the Hermitage
material has depth.
November
2008 Rising
Tede: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
In
the spring of 1927, America witnessed perhaps its greatest natural
disaster: a flood that profoundly changed race relations, government,
and society in the Mississippi River valley region. Barry (The
Transformed Cell, LJ 9/1/92) presents here a fascinating social history
of the effects of the massive flood. More than 30 feet of water stood
over land inhabited by nearly one million people. Almost 300,000
African Americans were forced to live in refugee camps for months. Many
people, both black and white, left the land and never returned. Using
an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, Barry clearly
traces and analyzes how the changes produced by the flood in the lower
South came into conflict and ultimately destroyed the old planter
aristocracy, accelerated black migration to the North, and foreshadowed
federal government intervention in the region's social and economic
life during the New Deal. by John Barry (Martha
Lou)
October
2008 Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
(Jo) In 1946, Laura McAllan, a college-educated Memphis
schoolteacher,
becomes a reluctant farmer's wife when her husband, Henry, buys a farm
on the Mississippi Delta, a farm she aptly nicknames Mudbound. Laura
has difficulty adjusting to life without electricity, indoor plumbing,
readily accessible medical care for her two children and, worst of all,
life with her live-in misogynous, racist, father-in-law. Her days
become easier after Florence, the wife of Hap Jackson, one of their
black tenants, becomes more important to Laura as companion than as
hired help. Catastrophe is inevitable when two young WWII veterans,
Henry's brother, Jamie, and the Jacksons' son, Ronsel, arrive, both
battling nightmares from horrors they've seen, and both unable to bow
to Mississippi rules after eye-opening years in Europe. Jordan
convincingly inhabits each of her narrators, though some descriptive
passages can be overly florid, and the denouement is a bit maudlin. But
these are minor blemishes on a superbly rendered depiction of the fury
and terror wrought by racism.
September
2008 The
Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Angela) Death himself narrates the
World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger
from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany,
with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids,
acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the
work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first
book–although she has not yet learned how to read–and her foster father
uses it, The
Gravediggers Handbook, to lull her to sleep
when shes roused by
regular nightmares about her younger brothers death.
August 2008 Three
Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson (Susan) Some
failures lead to phenomenal successes, and
this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's
second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he
finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by
the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build
the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the
Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50
schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.
July 2008 Will
in the World by Stephen Greenblatt (Martha Lou) Stephen Greenblatt,
the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more
about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's),
has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an
acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of
Elizabethan life—full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and
danger—could have become the world's greatest playwright.
June 2008 The
Devil in the White City by Eric Larson (Lisa) Author Erik Larson
imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893
Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves
checking the book's categorization to be sure that The Devil in the White
City
is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories
of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's
construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a
charming doctor.
May 2008 Pillars
of the Earth by Ken Follett (Barbara) A radical departure from
Follett's novels of international suspense and
intrigue, this chronicles the vicissitudes of a prior, his master
builder, and their community as they struggle to build a cathedral and
protect themselves during the tumultuous 12th century, when the empress
Maud and Stephen are fighting for the crown of England after the death
of Henry I.
April 2008 Montana
1948 by Larry
Watson (Jo) A stark
tragedy unfolds in Watson's taut, memorable novel, the winner
of the publisher's National Fiction Prize. During the summer of 1948, a
solid, middle-class family in a small Montana town is wrenched apart by
scandal, murder and suicide. Narrator David Hayden tells the story as
an adult looking back at the traumatic events that scarred yet matured
him when he was 12. His pious Lutheran mother informs his father,
Wesley, the county sheriff, that David's uncle Frank, a doctor, has
been molesting and raping Native American girls during routine medical
exams. Uncle Frank's latest victim is Marie Little Soldier, the
Haydens' Sioux housekeeper. When Marie dies, presumably of pneumonia,
David provides key evidence that implicates his uncle in her murder.
March 2008 The
House of Mondavi: The
Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty byJulia Flynn Siler
(Angela). Set in
California's lush Napa Valley and spanning four generations of a
talented and visionary family, The House of Mondavi is a tale of
genius, sibling rivalry, and betrayal. From 1906, when Italian
immigrant Cesare Mondavi passed through Ellis Island, to the Robert
Mondavi Corp.'s twenty-first-century battle over a billion-dollar
fortune, award-winning journalist Julia Flynn brings to life both the
place and the people in this riveting family drama.
February
2008 The
Curious Incident of th Dog in the Night by Mark Haddon
(Lisa). Mark Haddon's bitterly funny debut novel, The Curious Incident of
the Dog in the
Night-Time,
is a murder mystery of sorts--one told by an autistic version of Adrian
Mole. Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically
gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents
who can barely cope with their child's quirks. He takes everything that
he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the
strange behavior of his elders and peers.
January 2008
Isle
of Canes by
Elizabeth Shown Mills
(Martha Lou). From the Author: For years I have worked on Isle of
Canes-a
four-generation saga that startes with Coincoin's African-born parents
in 1737 and follows the family into the early 1900's, by which time Jim
Crow had stripped them of their fortune and forced them from their
"mansion houses" into the hoary cabins once occupied by their slaves.
Coincoin's story is, innately, a melding of Roots with Gone with the
Wind.
December 2007 The
Last Town on Earth by Thomas
Mullen. (No leader). The
Last Town on Earth centers on the
inhabitants of a small
logging town in Washington and what happens when they take drastic
measures (quarantine) to try and protect themselves from the virulent
and deadly flu epidemic of 1918. When a deserting WWI soldier demands
sanctuary, events are set in motion that change the town forever.
November 2007 Suite
Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (Jo). Celebrated in pre-WWII
France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish
Russian-born Nemirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942,
months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Nemirovsky, a
convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces
overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the
first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut
short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first,
"Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch
of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble
priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving
lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic
countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second,
"Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation,
tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois
collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers.
October 2007 The
Maytrees: A Novel by Annie Dillard
(Susan). Lou Bigelow meets her husband-to-be, Toby Maytree, when
Toby returns to
Provincetown following WWII. In the house Lou inherits from her mother,
they read, cook soup, play games with friends, vote and raise a child.
Toby writes poetry and does odd jobs; Lou paints. Years into the
marriage, Toby suddenly decamps to Maine with another local woman,
Deary Hightoe; flash forward six years to Lou reading Toby's
semimonthly letters (and Deary's marginal notes) "with affectionate
interest." Thus, when Deary's heart falters 20 years later
and Toby brings her home to Lou for hospice care, Lou puts up water for
tea and gets going. She feels too much, not too little, for mere drama,
although people who don't know her misread her.
Septemer 2007 A
Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmeal Beah
(Lisa). This account
by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra
Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in
revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of
warfare. Beah's harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child
enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee
bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown
deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic
rebel and army forces.
August
2007 Black
Swan Green by David Mitchell (Jo). Thirteen chapters provide
a
monthly snapshot of Jason Taylor's life in
small-town England from January 1982 to January 1983. Whether the
13-year-old narrator is battling his stammer or trying to navigate the
social hierarchy of his schoolmates or watching the slow disintegration
of his parents' marriage, he relates his story in a voice that is
achingly true to life. Each chapter becomes a skillfully drawn creation
that can stand on its own, but is subtly interwoven with the others.
While readers may not see the connectedness in the first two thirds of
the book, the final three sections skillfully bring the threads
together. The author does not pull any punches when it comes to the
casual cruelty that adolescent boys can inflict on one another, but it
is this very brutality that underscores the sweetness of which they are
also capable.
July 2007 Skip
June 2007 Pride
and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Angela). Tracing the intricacies (not
to mention the economics) of 19th-century British mating rituals with a
sure hand and an unblinking eye. As usual, Austen trains her sights on
a country village and a few families--in this case, the Bennets, the
Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst comes Mr. Bingley, a single
man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is even richer.
Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an
opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters.
May 2007 March
(Lead by Delma Porter from McNeese). Brooks's second novel
imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr.
March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.
An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later
finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that
employs freed slaves, or "contraband." His narrative begins with
cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what
he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and
Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to
prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he
met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations.
April 2007 The
Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf
Coast by
Douglas Brinkley
(Brenda & Susan). Bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley, a
professor at Tulane
University, lived through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina with his
fellow New Orleans residents, and now in The Great Deluge
he has written one of the first complete accounts of that harrowing
week, which sorts out the bewildering events of the storm and its
aftermath, telling the stories of unsung heroes and incompetent
officials alike. Get a sample of his story--and clarify your own
memories--by looking through the detailed
timeline he
has put together of
the preparation, the hurricane, and the response to one of the worst
disasters in American history.
March 2007
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Martha Lou). With its
spotlight on elephants, Gruen's romantic page-turner hinges on
the human-animal bonds that drove her debut and its sequel (Riding Lessons and Flying
Changes)—but
without the mass appeal that horses hold. The novel, told in flashback
by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period
he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a
traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression. When
23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car
crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school
and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus,
where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures
February 2007 Raising
Fences: A Black Man's Love Story by Michael Datcher
(Sharron).
Datcher's debut confronts the psychosocial damage caused by
fatherlessness. In this case, the paternal absence is compounded by
abandonment by Datcher's mother. A former editor-in-chief at Image
magazine, and now a successful poet and writer, the author spent part
of his childhood in Long Beach, Calif., obsessed with the idea of
becoming a husband and father, but determined not to become an absentee
dad like many of the men in his African-American community. As a young
boy, he idolized his adoptive mother, who acted as an emotional anchor
for him during the turbulent years of his adolescence in the 1970s.
January 2007
Snow
Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (Judy). See's
engrossing
novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting
story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong,
or "old sames") Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes
of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While
granting immediacy to Lily's voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly
transmits historical background in graceful prose. Her in-depth
research into women's ceremonies and duties in China's rural interior
brings fascinating revelations about arranged marriages, women's
inferior status in both their natal and married homes, and the
Confucian proverbs and myriad superstitions that informed daily life.
Beginning with a detailed and heartbreaking description of Lily and her
sisters' foot binding ("Only through pain will you have beauty. Only
through suffering will you have peace"), the story widens to a vivid
portrait of family and village life.
December
2006 A
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (Anita). Meet
Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A
Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with
his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing
pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will
listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser
bound for Baton Rouge. But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing
his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a
halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who
mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with
his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and
before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of
a job.
November 2006 The
Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (Alison). A finalist for
both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle
Award, The
Things They Carried marks a subtle but
definitive line of
demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the
memoir If
I Die in a Combat Zone and the
fictional Going
After Cacciato,
and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor
novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination
of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he
seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different
perspectives from which he depicts it.
October 2006
The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Jo). The time is the 1950s; the place,
Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10
when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by
Julián
Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a
horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of
Carax's novels. The man calls himself LaÃn Coubert-the name
of
the devil in one of Carax's novels. The colorful cast of
characters, the gothic turns and the straining for
effect only give the book the feel of para-literature or the Hollywood
version of a great 19th-century novel.
September
2006 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Martha
Lou). Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of
Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money,
ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in
the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before
us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run
faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--"
Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of
cautionary tale about the American Dream.
August
2006 Plainsong by Kent Haruf
(Judy). In the same
way that the plains define the American landscape,
small-town life in the heartlands is a quintessentially American
experience. Holt, Colo., a tiny prairie community near Denver, is both
the setting for and the psychological matrix of Haruf's beautifully
executed new novel. Alternating chapters focus on eight compassionately
imagined characters whose lives undergo radical change during the
course of one year.
July 2006 The City of
Falling Angels by John
Berendt (Anita). Berendt moves to Venice in 1997, just three days
after the city's famed
Fenice opera house burns down during a restoration. The Venetian
chattering classes, among whom Berendt finds a home, want to know
whether it was an accident or arson. Initially, Berendt investigates,
but is soon distracted by the city's charming denizens. Early on, he's
warned, "Everyone in Venice is acting," which sets the stage for
fascinating portraits: a master glassblower creating an homage to the
fire in vases, an outspoken surrealist painter, a tenacious prosecutor
and others. As the infamous Italian bureaucracy drags out the
investigation, Berendt spends more time schmoozing with the expatriate
community in long discussions about its role in preserving local art,
culture and architecture. By the time the Fenice is rebuilt and
reopens, Berendt has delivered an intriguing mosaic of modern life in
Venice, which makes for first-rate travel writing, albeit one that
lacks a compelling core story to keep one reading into the night.
June
2006 Midwives
by Chris Bojhalin (Martha) Teleconference with author. (Highly
recommend teleconference with Mr. Bojhalin.) On a violent, stormy
winter night, a home birth goes disastrously
wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick with ice. The midwife,
unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both
mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman's
terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks
to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant
suggests that maybe the woman wasn't really dead when the midwife
operated:
May
2006 The Constant Gardner by John LeCarre
(Sharron). As the
world seems to move ever further beyond the comparatively
clear-cut choices of the Cold War into a moral morass in which greed
and cynicism seem the prime movers, le Carr 's work has become
increasingly radical, and this is by far his most passionately angry
novel yet. Its premise is - cynical pharmaceutical firm allied with
devious doctors attempts
to foist on the world a flawed but potentially hugely profitable
drug. Le Carr
has placed the prime action in Africa, where the drug is being
surreptitiously tested on poor villagers. Tessa Quayle, married to a
member of the British High Commission staff in corruption-riddled
contemporary Kenya, gets wind of it and tries in vain to blow the
whistle on the manufacturer and its smarmy African distributor.
April
2006 Across
the Water
by Curt Iles (Curt). Curt Iles is a local author who has written
about his faith journey to the far east in the aftermath of the Tsumani
. He also relates his Dry Creek community's response to
hurricainew Katrina and Rita. Stories are told about the many
people that he met and helped. Book available in DeRidder at
Author's Alley.
February
2006 Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy Tyson
(Martha Lou). In
this outstanding personal history, Tyson, a professor of
African-American studies who's white, unflinchingly examines the civil
rights struggle in the South. The book focuses on the murder of a young
black man, Henry Marrow, in 1970, a tragedy that dramatically widened
the racial gap in the author's hometown of Oxford, N.C. Tyson portrays
the killing and its aftermath from multiple perspectives, including
that of his contemporary, 10-year-old self; his progressive Methodist
pastor father, who strove to lead his parishioners to overcome their
prejudices; members of the disempowered black community; one of the
killers; and his older self, who comes to Oxford with a historian's eye.
January
2006 The Brothers K by David James Duncan
(Judy). a
complex tapestry of family tensions, baseball, politics and religion,
by turns hilariously funny and agonizingly sad. Highly inventive
formally, the novel is mainly narrated by Kincaid Chance, the youngest
son in a family of four boys and identical twin girls, the children of
Hugh Chance, a discouraged minor-league ballplayer whose once-promising
career was curtained by an industrial accident, and his wife Laura, an
increasingly fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist. The plot traces the
working-out of the family's fate from the beginning of the Eisenhower
years through the traumas of Vietnam. One son becomes an atheist and
draft resister; another immerses himself in Eastern religions, while
the third, the most genuinely Christian of the children, ends up in
Southeast Asia. In spite of the author's obvious affection for the
sport, this is not a baseball novel; it is, as Kincaid says, "the story
of an eight-way tangle of human beings, only one-eighth of which was a
pro ballpayer."
December
2005 Blink: The Power of Thinking
Without Thinking by Malcolm
Gladwell (Sharron). Blink is about the first two
seconds of
looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the
best-selling author of The
Tipping Point,
campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for
translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with
scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on
the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades
readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of
behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7
mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated
information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
November
2005 Ireland by Frank Delaney
(Martha). BBC
reporter Delaney's fictionalized history of his native country, an
Irish bestseller, is a sprawling, riveting read, a book of stories
melding into a novel wrapped up in an Irish history text. In 1951, when
Ronan O'Mara is nine, he meets the aging itinerant Storyteller, who
emerges out a "silver veil" of Irish mist, hoping to trade a yarn for a
hot meal. Welcomed inside, the Storyteller lights his pipe and begins,
telling of the architect of Newgrange, who built "a marvelous, immortal
structure... before Stonehenge in England, before the pyramids of
Egypt," and the dentally challenged King Conor of Ulster, who tried,
and failed, to outsmart his wife. The stories utterly captivate the
young Ronan, and
they'll draw readers in, too, with their warriors and kings, drinkers
and devils, all rendered cleanly and without undue sentimentality.
October
2005 Founding
Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation by Cokie Roberts
(Barbara). Focusing
mainly on the wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of the
Founding Fathers, this lively and engaging title chronicles the
adventures and contributions of numerous women of the era between 1740
and 1797. Roberts includes a surprising amount of original writings,
but uses modern language and spellings to enable readers to enjoy fully
the wit and wisdom of these remarkable individuals. While their men
were away serving as soldiers, statesmen, or ambassadors, the women's
lives were fraught with difficulty and danger. They managed property,
and raised their children and often those of deceased relatives, while
trying to make their own contributions to the cause of liberty. They
acted as spies, coordinated boycotts, and raised funds for the army.
September
2005 The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd.
(Jo) The soulful
tale of Jessie Sullivan, a middle-aged woman whose stifled
dreams and desires take shape during an extended stay on Egret Island,
where she is caring for her troubled mother, Nelle. While Kidd
places an obvious importance on the role of mysticism and
legend in this tale, including the mysterious mermaid's chair at the
center of the island's history, the relationships between characters is
what gives this novel its true weight.
August
2005 The
United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T. R. Reid.
While the United States flexes its economic and military muscles around
the world as the dominant global player, it may soon have company.
According to the Washington Post's T.R. Reid, the
nations of
Europe are setting aside differences to form an entity that's gaining
strength, all seemingly unbeknownst to the U.S. and its citizens. The
new Europe, Reid says, "has more people, more wealth, and more trade
than the United States of America," plus more leverage gained through
membership in international organizations and generous foreign aid
policies that reap political clout. Reid tells how European countries
were willing to discontinue their individual centuries-old currencies
and adopt the Euro, the monetary unit that is now a dominant force in
world markets. This is noteworthy not just for exploring the
considerable economic impact of the Euro, but also for what that spirit
of cooperation means for every facet of Europe in the 21st century,
where governments and citizens alike believe that the rewards of
banding together are worth a loss in sovereignty.
July 2005 The
Pact by Jodi Picoult. Teenage suicide is the provocative
topic that Picoult plumbs, with
mixed results, in her fifth novel. Popular high-school swimming star
Chris Harte and talented artist Em Gold bonded as infants; their
parents have been next-door neighbors and best friends for 18 years.
When they fall in love, everyone is ecstatic. Everyone, it turns out,
except for Em, who finds that sex with Chris feels almost incestuous.
Her emotional turmoil, compounded by pregnancy, which she keeps secret,
leads to depression, despair and a desire for suicide, and she insists
that Chris prove his love by pulling the trigger. The gun is fired in
the first paragraph, and so the book opens with a jolt of adrenaline.
June 2005 I
Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe. Dupont University--the
Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of
America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused
with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte
Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon
learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of
Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.
May 2005 The
Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. (Martha) The Kite Runner follows the story of
Amir, the privileged son of
a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's
servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early
1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites
and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an
unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and
eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever
predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains
haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these
demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring
him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule.
("...I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the
fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up,
and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.")
April 2005 Odd
Girl Out: Hidden Culture of Agression in Girls by Racel
Simmons. There is little sugar but lots of spice in journalist
Rachel Simmons's
brave and brilliant book that skewers the stereotype of girls as the
kinder, gentler gender. Odd Girl Out begins with the
premise that girls are socialized to be sweet with a double bind: they
must value friendships; but they must not
express the anger that might destroy them. Lacking cultural permission
to acknowledge conflict, girls develop what Simmons calls "a hidden
culture of silent and indirect aggression." The author, who
visited 30 schools and talked to 300 girls, catalogues chilling and
heartbreaking acts of aggression, including the silent treatment,
note-passing, glaring, gossiping, ganging up, fashion police, and being
nice in private/mean in public. She decodes the vocabulary of these
sneak attacks, explaining, for example, three ways to parse the meaning
of "I'm fat."
March
2005 The
Ladder of Years by Ann Tyler. (No leader) BALTIMORE WOMAN
DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION, declares the
headline. Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is last seen strolling down
the Delaware shore, wearing nothing more than a bathing suit and
carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her
husband and three almost-grown children, she has vanished without trace
or reason. But for Delia, who feels like a tiny gnat buzzing around her
family's edges, "walking away from it all" is not a premeditated act
but an impulse that will lead her into a new, exciting, and unimagined
life. . . .
February 2005 The
Lovely Bones by Ann Sebold. (Laura) Alice Sebold's
haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones,
unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where
Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as
well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As
Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven.
Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high
school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no
teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The
boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks
were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."
January 2005 East
of Eden by John Steinbeck. (Jo) Novel by John Steinbeck,
published in 1952. It is a symbolic recreation
of the biblical story of Cain and Abel woven into a history of
California's Salinas Valley. With East of Eden Steinbeck hoped to
reclaim his standing as a major novelist, but his broad depictions of
good and evil come at the expense of subtlety in characterization and
plot and it was not a critical success. Spanning the period between the
American Civil War and the end of World War I, the novel highlights the
conflicts of two generations of brothers; the first being the kind,
gentle Adam Trask and his wild brother Charles. Adam eventually marries
Cathy Ames, an evil, manipulative, and beautiful prostitute; she
betrays him, joining Charles on the very night of their wedding. Later,
after giving birth to twin boys, she shoots Adam and leaves him to
return to her former profession. In the shadow of this heritage Adam
raises their sons, the fair-haired, winning, yet intractable Aron, and
the dark, clever Caleb. This second generation of brothers vie for
their father's approval. In bitterness Caleb reveals the truth about
their mother to Aron, who then joins the army and is killed in France.
December 2004 Christmas
Stories from Louisiana by Dorothy Robbins. (Martha) Fiction that ranges
over the many moods and spirits of Yuletide in the Pelican State Edited
by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins, with stories by Robert
Olen Butler, Kelly Cherry, Kate Chopin, Debra Gray De Nous and O'Neil
De Noux, Laura J. Dulaney, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Harnett T. Kane, James
Knudsen, Patty Friedmann Muchmore, Solomon Northrup, Katherine Anne
Porter, Kenneth Robbins, Lyle Saxon, Genaro Ky Ly Smith, Cheryl St.
Germain, and Ruth McEnery Stuart. Illustrations by Francis X. Pavy.
November
2004 The
Dive From Clausen's Pier : A Novel by Ann Packer. (Sharron) Carrie Bell
is the worst person in the world. Or so she would have you
think. In the gripping, carefully paced debut novel of personal
epiphany, The
Dive from Clausen's Pier, by O. Henry Award
winner Ann Packer, Carrie's very survival is dependent upon her leaving
her fiancé, even after he dives
into shallow water
at a
Memorial Day
picnic and becomes paralyzed. Things hadn't been going so well for the
Madison, Wisconsin, high school and college sweethearts. Carrie knew,
deep down, that she wasn't going to become Mrs. Michael Mayer. But
expectations and pressure from all sides--his family, her mother, her
best friend Jamie, Mike's best friend Rooster--force Carrie to shut
herself up in her room and sew outfits of her own design as if in a
trance. Then one night she slips out of the only universe she's ever
known.
October 2004 Skip
September 2004:
The
Language of Light by Meg Waite Clayton. (Telephone conference
with author.) Set in the old-moneyed horse country of Maryland,
the story of a young
mother trying to put her life back together after the death of her
husband Nelly Grace moves her two young children to a
privileged, horse-breeding world in the Baltimore countryside, after
the unexpected death of her husband. Struggling to build a new life,
Nelly finds herself swept up in the traditions and social politics of
this insular world. Emma, the matriarch of the fox-hunting community,
offers Nelly guidance and friendship until past and present secrets
begin to unfold. Encouraged by Emma and her grown son, Dac,
Nelly rekindles her desire to become a photojournalist, like her
father. As she sets to work with her camera, though, she realizes her
success is tangled up not only in her feelings about her husband's
death, but also in her relationship with her father, a man who has
allowed fame and ambition to come before his family. Then her father
comes to visit, and Nelly's fragile new beginning is thrown into chaos.
A brilliant old-fashioned read, filled with secrets and surprises, The Language of Light is a beautifully told
story of a woman moving into the future by uncovering the past.
.
August
2004:
Cane River by Lalita Tademy. :(Brenda) Lalita
Tademy's riveting
family saga chronicles four generations of women born into slavery
along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring
of racial boundaries: great-grandmother Elisabeth notices an
unmistakable "bleaching of the line" as first her daughter Suzette,
then her granddaughter Philomene, and finally her great-granddaughter
Emily choose (or are forcibly persuaded) to bear the illegitimate
offspring of the area's white French planters. In many cases these
children are loved by their fathers, and their paternity is widely
acknowledged. However, neither state law nor local custom allows them
to inherit wealth or property, a fact that gives Cane River
much of its narrative drive.
July
2004:
Life of Pi by Yann Martel. (Mary)
The son of a zookeeper, Pi
Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent
love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to
North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo
animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself
alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a
wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the
tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning
allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at
sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees
to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who
interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them
"the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story
much less fantastical, much more conventional--but is it more true?
June
2004:
Three Junes by Julia Glass.
(Marti). An
astonishing first novel
that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they
confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in
all its guises.
May
2004:
Abraham : A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths by Bruce Feiler.
(Martha)
At a time when conflicts
among three of the world's major religions--Islam, Judaism, and
Christianity--are in the global spotlight, Bruce Feiler offers a
stunning biography of the one man who unites all three religions:
Abraham. "The most mesmerizing story of Abraham's life--his offering a
son to God--plays a pivotal role in the holiest week of the Christian
year, at Easter," writes Feiler. "The story is recited at the start of
the holiest fortnight in Judaism, on Rosh Hashanah. The episode
inspires the holiest day in Islam, 'Id al-Adha,' the Feast of
the Sacrifice, at the climax of the Pilgrimage. And yet the religions
can't even agree on which son he tried to kill." Herein lies the irony
and perfection of Feiler's timing. As we struggle to find a path to
peace among these three religions, all warring in Jerusalem, near the
stone where Abraham brought his son for sacrifice, this captivating
biography speaks to Abraham as the metaphor he is: the historically
elusive man who embodies three religions, a character who has
shape-shifted over the millennia to serve the clashing goals and dogma
of each religion.
April 2004: Middlesex : A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. (Martha Lou)
Eugenides weaves
together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years
of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small
town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the
early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony
suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story
to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is
astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly,
spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence,
insight, and generous amounts of humor:
March
2004: A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
. (Kelly)In
a small Cajun community
in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric
chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone
bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not
pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of
the verdict or the penalty. From
the author of A
Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a
deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun
country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he
didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of
resisting.
February
2004: Atonement
by Ian McEwan. (Susan) This haunting novel,
which just failed to win the Booker this year, is at once McEwan at his
most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most
sweeping and expansive. It is in effect two, or even three, books in
one, all masterfully crafted. The first part ushers us into a domestic
crisis that becomes a crime story centered around an event that changes
the lives of half a dozen people in an upper-middle-class country home
on a hot English summer's day in 1935.
January 2004: John
Adams by David McCullough (Jo) Here
a preeminent master of narrative history takes on the most fascinating
of
our founders to create a benchmark for all Adams biographers. With a
keen
eye for telling detail and a master storyteller's instinct for human
interest, McCullough (Truman; Mornings on Horseback) resurrects the
great Federalist (1735-1826), revealing in particular his restrained,
sometimes off-putting disposition, as well as his political
guile.
December 2003: Skip
November 2003: The
Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau. (Martha Lou) What happens if a wealthy, white Southern man falls in
love, marries, and has children with his black housekeeper after his
white wife has died? If he lives in the country and is discreet, if his
light-skinned children are sent off to school and he never tells anyone
he is actually
married, perhaps nothing. But what about his children and
grandchildren?
Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize, The Keepers of the House attacks the
hypocrisy
of Southern racism and examines the results of rage
October 2003: Palace
Walk by Naguib Mahfouz.
(Mary) The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations
of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who
rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of
self-indulgence. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle,
oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and
his three
sons–the
tragic and
idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute
hedonist
Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. Al-Sayyid Ahmad's
rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in Palace
of Desire, as the world around them opens to the
currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the
1920s.
September 2003: The Da Vinci Code by Dan
Brown. (Kelly) With The
Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown masterfully concocts an intelligent and
lucid thriller that marries the gusto of an international murder
mystery with a collection of fascinating esoteria culled from 2,000
years of Western history.
August 2003: Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of
Louisiana's Cajun Coast by Mike Tidwell. (Barbara)
This
lyrically intense travelogue will
provide historians of
the not too distant future with a guide to a vanishing landscape and a
lost
culture. Tidwell (Mountains of Heaven) graphically recounts catching
rides
on shrimp boats and crab boats through the dark water swamps of
southern Louisiana
into the heart of Cajun country. Here, among the great blue heron,
spoonbill,
gar and gator, the reader meets bayou folk-from the honest and generous
fishermen,
who provide the author with room, board and transport for his work as a
deck
hand, to the disheveled backwoods healer who intrigues and tantalizes
the
writer with his shamanistic spells and incantations.
July 2003: The
Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. (Judy) In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees,
14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their
South Carolina peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy
when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely
remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the
family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily
accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah
is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South
Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need
to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written
coming-of-age story set in the
early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest.
June 2003: Red
Clay, Blue Cadillac: Stories of 12 Southern Women by Michael
Malone. (Billie) The first four
selections in this collection of 12 stories are so sterling in their
style and structure, so well crafted, captivating and entertaining,
that the reader wants to
slow down and savor their authentic voices and characterizations,
qualities
that have led Malone to major writing awards (the Edgar, the O. Henry).
May 2003: The
Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by
Simon Wiesenthal. (Barbara) Author Simon
Weisenthal
recalls his demoralizing life in a concentration camp and his envy of
the
dead Germans who have sunflowers marking their graves. At the time he
assumed
his grave would be a mass one, unmarked and forgotten. Then, one day, a
dying
Nazi soldier asks Weisenthal for forgiveness for his crimes against the
Jews.
What would you do? This important book and the provocative question it
poses
is birthing debates, symposiums, and college courses.
April 2003: The
Secret History by Donna Tartt (Kelly) This well-written first novel attempts to be several
things: a psychological suspense thriller, a satire of collegiate mores
and popular culture, and a philosophical bildungsroman. Supposedly
brilliant students at a posh Vermont school (Bennington in thin
disguise) are involved in two murders, one supposedly accidental and
one deliberate. The book's many allusions, both literary and classical
(the students are all classics majors studying with a professor
described as both a genius and a deity)
March 2003: My
Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story
by Latifa (Mary) Readers who want to know what
life
was really like when the Taliban ruled Kabul should turn off CNN and
read
this book. Latifa (who writes under a pseudonym) was a 16-year-old
aspiring
journalist when her brother rushed home one day in late 1996 with word
that
the white flag of the Taliban flew over their school and mosque. She
writes,
"We knew the Taliban were not far away... but no one truly believed
they
would manage to enter Kabul." The bizarre edicts of the
women-suppressing
regime slowly become a reality: women weren't allowed outside the home
unless
they were shrouded in a "chadri"
February 2003: Ava's
Man by Rick Bragg (Jo)
The same fierce
pride and love that animated All Over but the Shoutin' glow in
Rick Bragg's new book. In fact, he informs us in the prologue that it
was the readers
of his bestselling 1997 memoir about his mother's struggle to raise
three
sons out of dire poverty who told him what he had to write about next.
"People asked me where I believed my own momma's heart and backbone
came from ... they said I short-shrifted them in the first book." Bragg
sets out to make amends in this heartfelt biography of his maternal
grandfather, Charlie
Bundrum, who with wife Ava nurtured seven children through hard times
that
never seemed to ease in rural Alabama and Georgia.
January
2003: Peace
Like a River by Leif Enger (Lilly) To the list of great American child narrators
that includes Huck Finn and Scout Finch, let us now add Reuben "Rube"
Land, the asthmatic 11-year-old boy at the center of Leif Enger's
remarkable first novel, Peace Like a River. Rube recalls the events of
his childhood, in
small-town Minnesota circa 1962, in a voice that perfectly captures the
poetic, verbal stoicism of the northern Great Plains. "Here's what I
saw,"
Rube warns his readers. "Here's how it went. Make of it what you will."
And Rube sees plenty. In the winter of his 11th year, two
schoolyard
bullies break into the Lands' house, and Rube's big brother Davy
guns them down with a Winchester. Shortly after his arrest, Davy breaks
out of jail and goes on the lam. Swede is Rube's younger sister, a
precocious writer who crafts rhymed epics of romantic Western outlawry.
Shortly after Davy's escape, Rube, Swede, and their father, a
widowed school custodian, hit the road too, swerving this way and that
across Minnesota and North
Dakota, determined to find their lost outlaw Davy. In the end it's not
Rube
who haunts the reader's imagination, it's his father, torn between love
for
his outlaw son and the duty to do the right, honest thing. Enger finds
something quietly heroic in the bred-in-the-bone Minnesota decency of
America's heartland. Peace Like a River opens up a new chapter in
Midwestern literature.
December 2002:
We
will read a short Christmas story and meet at Mary's for fellowship. (Skipping
Christmas)
November
2002: Frankenstein
by Mary Shelly. (Mary) Frankenstein,
loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary
critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you
haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping
force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the
multilayered doppelgänger
themes of Mary
Shelley's
masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the
reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main
text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows
and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the
monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image
…
but is rather
the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's
illustrations show
their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful
stench
of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong
book-making
for one of the world's strongest and most rearkable books."
October
2002: Pope
Joan by Donna Wolfolk Cross. Cross
makes an excellent, entertaining case in her work of historical fiction
that, in the Dark Ages, a woman sat on the papal throne for two years.
Born in Ingelheim in A.D. 814 to a tyrannical English canon and the
once-heathen Saxon he made his wife, Joan shows intelligence and
persistence from an early
age. We had a great teleconference with the author. We
highly
recommend doing so if you haven't already.
September
2002: White
Teeth by Zadie Smith (Jo) Epic in scale
and intimate in approach, White Teeth is a formidably ambitious debut.
First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the
minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness
that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an
impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to
Turkey to Bangladesh and back again. Still, the book's home base
is a scrubby North London borough, where we
encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and
intemperate
Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion
during
World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and
multiplied:
Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her
Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries
stroppy
Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in
its
most elemental form: "Children with first and last names on a direct
collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus,
cramped boats
and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."
August
2002: Saving
Grace by Lee Smith (Kelly) Florida Grace
("Florida for the state I was born in,
Grace for the grace of God" ) pours out
her life story in a voice as clear and sweet as mountain water. And
what a story it is: raised by her charismatic father, an
itinerant, serpent-handling preacher, and her devout, long-suffering
mother, Gracie harbors a secret hatred of Jesus. She yearns to live in
a brick house and to have a Barbie doll
instead of having to travel and to live with strangers in tents and old
school buses. Her father believes that God
will provide and turns a blind eye to his family's poverty and
suffering. The first
chance she gets, she marries the duty-bound Reverend Travis Word, but
by the time she turns 33, she feels like an old woman. She eventually
comes full circle at Uncle Slidell's Christian Fun Golf Course, for at
hole number 10, "The First Christmas," she hears the baby Jesus cry out
to her. Returning to a North Carolina cabin, the site of her few happy
childhood
memories, Gracie discovers she has the gift of second sight and
reunites
with the serpent-handling congregation her father originally founded.
Popular
southern writer Smith sweeps readers in with her fascinating portrayal
of
a bizarre, arcane religious cult; in particular, the scenes depicting
religous
ecstasy are mesmerizing.
July
2002:
Skip
June
2002:
Stolen
Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by
Malika Oufkir. (Barbara)
At
the age of 5, Malika Oufkir, eldest daughter of General Oufkir, was
adopted
by King Muhammad V of Morocco and sent to live in the palace as part of the royal
court. There she led a life of unimaginable privilege and luxury
alongside the king's own daughter. King Hassan II ascended the throne
following Muhammad V's death, and in 1972 General Oufkir was found
guilty of treason after staging
a coup against the new regime, and was summarily executed. Immediately
afterward, Malika, her mother, and her five siblings were arrested and
imprisoned, despite having no prior knowledge of the coup attempt. They
were first held in an abandoned fort, where they ate moderately well
and were allowed to
keep some of their fine clothing and books. Conditions steadily
deteriorated, and the family was eventually transferred to a remote
desert prison, where they suffered a decade of solitary
confinement, torture, starvation, and the complete
absence of sunlight. Oufkir's horrifying descriptions of the conditions
are mesmerizing, particularly when contrasted with her earlier life in
the royal court, and many graphic images will long haunt readers. Her
account of their final flight to freedom makes for breathtaking
reading. Stolen Lives is a remarkable book of unfathomable deprivation
and the power of the human will to survive.
May
2002: Islam:
A Short History by Karen Armstrong (Lisa)
The picture of Islam as a violent, backward, and insular tradition
should be laid to rest, says Karen Armstrong, bestselling author of
Muhammad and A History of God. Delving deep into Islamic history,
Armstrong sketches the arc of a story that begins with the stirring of
revelation in an Arab businessman named Muhammad. His concern with the
poor who were being left behind in the blush of his society's new
prosperity sets the tone for the tale of a culture that values
community as a manifestation of God. Muhammad's ideas catch fire,
quickly blossoming into a political empire. As the empire expands and
the once fractured Arabs subdue and overtake the vast Persian domain,
the story of a community becomes a panoramic drama. With great
dexterity, Armstrong narrates the Sunni-Shi'ite schism, the rise of
Persian influence, the clashes with Western crusaders and Mongolian
conquerors, and the spiritual explorations that traced the route to
God. Armstrong brings us through the debacle of European colonialism
right up to the present day, putting Islamic fundamentalism into
context as part of a worldwide phenomenon. Islam: A
Short History, like Bruce Lawrence's Shattering the Myth and Mark
Huband's Warriors of the Prophet, introduces us to a faith that beckons
like a minaret to those who dare to venture beyond the headlines.
April
2002: The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (June) Like the comic books that animate and
inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both
larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and
miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic
battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams
and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel
Klayman--self-described little man, city boy, and Jew--first meets
Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling
him to make room for their cousin, a
refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's
the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In
short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless,
academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of
lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist
"roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of
those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier
and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the
epicenter of comics' golden age.
March
2002: A
Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (Susan)
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work
of
Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and
corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place
is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has
just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four
strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic
hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of
their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one
cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from
distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an
enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.
February
2002: Fortune's
Rocks by Anita Shreve. (Lisa). The
year is 1899, and Olympia Biddeford, the headstrong daughter of a
Boston
Brahmin family, has decided to test the limits of her cloistered world.
Spending the summer at her father's New Hampshire estate, the teenage
heroine
of Fortune's Rocks is entranced with the visiting salon of artists,
writers,
and lawyers. She's especially captivated, however, by John Haskell, a
charismatic
physician who ministers to the blue-collar community in the nearby mill towns. This middle-aged Good Samaritan
hires Olympia to assist him as a nurse, and their collaboration soon
evolves into a fiery love affair. Alas, it's only a matter of weeks
before this passionate exercise in managed care is exposed--with
disastrous consequences for the young, impregnated heroine. Even
her adoring father now considers her "an overplump sixteen-year-old
girl whose judgment can no longer be trusted," and insists that she
break off her relationship. The author
did some meticulous research for her New England background, which
gives
this study of one particular wayward woman some extra historical heft.
January
2002: Servants
of the Map by Andrea Barrett We were
very fortunate to be able to preview the book and have a
tele-conference book
discussion group with the author. It was very interesting and we
would
recommend it to anyone who has the chance. [No one limns the
opposing
pull of inner and outer worlds more eloquently than Andrea Barrett. Her
naturalists, explorers, scientists, and healers are driven to work and
above all to know; they categorize, theorize, and collect the phenomena
of the natural world with an urgency that feels like physical need. But
they are motivated equally by desire and loneliness, and the theme of
domestic life runs like a countermelody through each of the six lovely,
deeply memorable stories in Servants of
the Map. The narrator of the title story, a cartographer in the Grand
Trigonometrical Survey of India, is a timid, home- and family-loving
man, but the Himalayas strike him with the force of a revelation. The
heroine of the lyrical "Theories of Rain" is a creature of strong
feelings and appetites, driven to ask
questions about the world around her in the same spirit as she longs
for
a neighbor and mourns the brother separated from her in childhood. Her
scientific
curiosity is scarcely different from her desire: "Through that channel
of
longing, the world enters me."]
November
2001: We
Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates. (Anne) A happy family, the Mulvaneys. After
decades of marriage, Mom and Dad are still in love--and the proud
parents of a brood of youngsters that includes a star athlete, a class
valedictorian, and
a popular cheerleader. Home is an idyllic place called High Point Farm.
And the bonds of attachment within this all-American clan do seem both
deep and unconditional. But as we all know, Eden can't last
forever. And in
the hands of Joyce Carol Oates, who's chronicled just about every
variety of familial dysfunction, you know the fall from grace is going
to be a doozy. By the time all is said and done, a rape occurs, a
daughter is exiled, much alcohol is consumed, and the farm is
lost. We Were the Mulvaneys is populated with such richly
observed and complex characters that we can't help but care about them,
even as we wait for disaster to strike them down.
October
2001: The
Awakening and Other Stories by Kate Chopin. (Susan). The Awakening shocked
turn-of-the-century readers with its forthright treatment of sex and
suicide. Departing from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed
to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a
Louisiana resort owner, whom she meets on vacation. The power of
sensuality, the delusion of ecstatic love, and the solitude that
accompanies the trappings of middle- and upper-class life are the
themes of this now-classic novel. As Kaye Gibbons points out in her
Introduction, Chopin "was writing American realism before most
Americans could bear to hear that they were living it." (This
Modern Library Paperback
Classics edition includes selected stories from Chopin's Bayou Folk and
A
Night in Acadie.) (We are fortunate to live within an hour or
so's
drive from her home and now museum in Cloutierville, La and plan an
outing
after we read the book.)
September
2001: Paper
Daughter by Elaine Mar. (Kelly)
Born in Hong Kong to parents who immigrated there from the Toishan
region of mainland China, Elaine Mar came to America in 1972, when she
was not quite 6. Colorado was quite a shock to a girl who had
previously shared a five-room apartment with four other families.
Mar's pungent memoir of her odyssey from poor immigrant to
Harvard undergraduate shatters stereotypes about
Asians as the "model minority." She was a smart girl and a good student
who
soon preferred the American name Elaine and "only spoke Chinese when
absolutely necessary." Honestly chronicling conflicts with her parents,
whose horizons and expectations seemed unbearably limited, Mar outlines
her youthful rebellion and their response with mature understanding.
Her observation of American life is as clear-eyed and unsentimental as
her self-portrait of a girl adrift between two
cultures.
August
2001: Girl
With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on the Dutch painter
Johannes Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When
Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant,
turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly
intimate with her master.
Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit
for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic
tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous,
eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the
relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic.
Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious
twist. (This one also was great for discussion. Our leader
brought a book of his paintings which added to the discussion.)
July
2001: The
Red Tent by Anita Diamant. The red
tent is the place where women gathered during their cycles of birthing,
menses, and even illness. Like the conversations and mysteries held
within
this feminine tent, this sweeping piece of fiction offers an insider's
look
at the daily life of a biblical sorority of mothers and wives and their
one and only daughter, Dinah. Told in the voice of Jacob's daughter
Dinah
(who only received a glimpse of recognition in the Book of Genesis), we
are privy to the fascinating feminine characters who bled within the
red
tent. (We had a great discussion with this book.)
June 2001: In
My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescurer by Irene Gut Opdyke. When World War II began, Irene Gutowna was a
17-year-old Polish nursing student. Six years later, she writes in this
inspiring memoir, "I felt a million years old." In the intervening time
she was separated from her family, raped by Russian soldiers, and
forced to work in a hotel serving German officers. Sickened by the
suffering inflicted on the local Jews, Irene began leaving food under
the walls of the ghetto. Soon she was scheming to protect the Jewish
workers she supervised at the hotel, and then hiding them in the lavish villa where she
served as housekeeper to a German major. When he discovered them in the
house, Gutowna became his mistress to protect her friends--later
escaping him to join the Polish partisans
during the Germans' retreat. The author presents her extraordinary
heroism
as the inevitable result of small steps taken over time, but her
readers
will not agree as they consume this thrilling adventure story, which
also
happens to be a drama of moral choice and courage. Although adults will
find Irene's tale moving, it is appropriately published as a young
adult
book. Her experiences while still in her teens remind adolescents
everywhere
that their actions count, that the power to make a difference is in
their
hands. (Anne)
May
2001: The
Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle.
From the day of Delaney Mossbacher's accident on the canyon
road, his life and that of Candido Rincon continue to collide. Though
cultures
apart, Candido's homelessness and Delaney's yuppie paranoia make their
interactions tragic and inevitable. Boyle presents interesting
characters
to the listener but seems to want to rush us through the story. The
frenetic
pace reflects Delaney's world better than Candido's. (Susan)
April 2001:
RELIC Series.
We will not meet this month in order for members
to participate in the library's RELIC Series which is titled Louisiana
Characters. Meetings are start March 8th on Thursdays from 6-8:00
for six weeks.
March 2001:
Daughter
of Fortune by Isabel Allende. Until Isabel Allende burst onto the scene with
her 1985 debut, The House of the Spirits, Latin American fiction was,
for the most part, a boys' club comprising such heavy hitters as
Gabriel GarcÃÂÂa
Márquez, Jorge
Luis Borges,
and Mario
Vargas Llosa. But the Chilean Allende shouldered her way in with her
magical realist multi-generational tale of the Trueba family, followed
it up with four more novels and a spate of nonfiction, and has remained
in a place of honor ever since. Her sixth work of fiction, Daughter of
Fortune, shares some characteristics with her earlier works: the canvas
is wide, the characters are multi-generational and multi-ethnic, and the protagonist is an
unconventional woman who overcomes enormous obstacles to make her way
in the world. Yet one cannot accuse Allende of telling the same story
twice; set in the mid-1800s, this novel follows the fortunes of Eliza
Sommers, Chilean by birth but adopted by a British spinster, Rose
Sommers, and her bachelor brother, Jeremy, after she's abandoned on
their doorstep. (Mary)
February
2001: Ghosts
from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence by Robin Karr-Morse. Hardly a week goes
by without
a headline screaming out the details of another heinous crime committed
by
an adolescent or young child. A 14-year-old massacres his classmates at
a
school prayer circle, two even younger boys fire into a crowd of middle
school
children killing five people, a student kills his teacher at the school
prom.
There is no doubt that crimes committed by children are increasing at
an
alarming rate and the big question is why? The authors of Ghosts from
the
Nursery produce compelling if not controversial evidence that violent
behavior
is learned and cultivated in the first few months of childhood
development. Even more startling, the authors Robin Karr-Morse and
Meredith S. Wiley believe that a predisposition to violent behavior can
be learned before birth.
A "chemical wash" of toxins such as drugs and alcohol, combined with a
mother's
stress hormones generated from rage or fear can directly effect the
babies
brain development. Illustrative case studies and anecdotes make for a
fascinating and factually "fat" read. Lacking in the book is an
acknowledgment of the larger picture--not all children raised in
violent homes will become violent, and on an even larger scale, there
is no mention of other contributing factors leading to teen violence.
Would crimes be cut if guns weren't so readily
available? Still, Ghosts from the Nursery is an engrossing book,
which
is bound to generate hot debate in the scientific world. (Lisa)
January
2001: One
Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus. An American western with a
most unusual twist, this is an imaginative fictional account of the
participation of May Dodd and others in the controversial "Brides for
Indians" program, a clandestine U.S. government-sponsored program
intended to instruct "savages" in the ways of civilization and to
assimilate the Indians into white culture through the offspring of
these unions. May's personal journals, loaded with humor and
intelligent reflection, describe the adventures of some very
colorful white brides (including one black one), their marriages to
Cheyenne
warriors, and the natural abundance of life on the prairie before the
final
press of the white man's civilization. Fergus is gifted in his ability
to
portray the perceptions and emotions of women. He writes with
tremendous
insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the
political
and religious issues of the time, many of which are still relevant
today.
This book is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small
details
that bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a
pivotal
time in U.S. history. (jo)
Nov. 2000:
Princess:
A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia by Jean P. Sasson. While living in Saudi
Arabia, Jean Sasson befriends a woman named Sultana. Sultana wants her
life to be known and she gives Jean her diaries and notes, entrusting
her to write her life story. Jean does, changing names and places for
Sultana's protection. The result is a vivid depiction of the
restrictions of Saudi Arabian society and the raw, corrupt, and
unquestionable power of the royal males and religious leaders. Born
into the royal family in 1956, the independent Sultana is the tenth
daughter and the youngest of her mother's living children. By age
fifteen, Sultana has seen her brother participate in the rape of an
eight-year-old, brought her seventeen-year-old sister home after an
attempted suicide because of her forced marriage to a sadistic
fifty-three-year-old man, and buried her mother. Sultana marries, and
at home she dresses as she pleases and
voices her opinions about the inequities she lives, though usually her
views
are ignored. Outside her home she must cover herself completely in
black
and is expected to be subservient in every way. Talks with Marci, her
Filipino maid since birth, expose Sultana to the countless wrongs
suffered by foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. Sultana's lifestyle -
which includes four homes, shopping trips to Europe, and gardens in the
desert -contrasts sharply with what she learns from Marci and causes
her further anguish and anger. Princess is an intimate look at one
woman's struggle against the injustices of an
extremely repressive society. (Barbara)
Sept. 2000: The
Fifth Child by Doris Lessing. The married couple in this novel
pull off a remarkable achievement: They purchase a three-story house
with
oodles of bedrooms, and, on a middle-class income, in the '70s, fill it
to the brim with happy children and visiting relatives. Their holiday
gatherings are sumptuous celebrations of life and togetherness. And
then the fifth child arrives. He's just a child--he's not supernatural.
But is he really human? This is an elegantly written tale that the New
York Times called "a horror story of maternity and the nightmare of
social collapse . . . a moral fable of the genre that includes Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein and George Orwell's 1984."
August 2000: Ahab's
Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund. It has been said that one
can see farther only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Ahab's
Wife, Sena Naslund's epic work of historical fiction, honors that
aphorism, using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as looking glass into
early-19th-century America. Through the eye of an outsider, a woman,
she suggests that New England life was
broader and richer than Melville's manly world of men, ships, and
whales.
This ambitious novel pays tribute to Melville, creating heroines from
his
lesser characters, and to America's literary heritage in general.
(Mary)
June 2000: Return
to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue by Wendy
Shalit. The 23-year-old author first heard of
"modestyniks"--Orthodox Jewish women who withhold physical contact from
men until marriage--while a freshman at Williams College. She was
initially fascinated by the way in which they cleave to old ideals,
especially amid a sexually saturated contemporary
world. But more so, Wendy Shalit was aghast at how modestyniks are
dismissed
as sick, delusional, or repressed by the secular community.
"Why,"
asks the author, "is sexual modesty so threatening to some that
they
can only respond to it with charges of abuse or delusion?"
In
her thoughtful three-part essay, the author reveals an impressive
reading
list as she probes the cultural history of sexual modesty for
women
and considers whether this virtue may be beneficial in today's
world--if
not an antidote to misogyny. In an age when women are embarrassed by
sexual
inexperience, when sex education is introduced as early as primary
school,
and when women suffer more than ever from eating disorders,
stalking,
sexual harassment, and date rape, Shalit believes a return to
modesty
may place women on equal footing with men. She yearns for a time when
conservatives
can believe the claims of feminists and feminists can differentiate
between
patriarchy and misogyny and share in the dialectic of female sexuality.
(Jo)
May 2000: The
Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway. From the
first sentence, you will be drawn inexorably into the story of her
childhood
in New South Wales, Australia, and her gradual discovery of--and
by--the
larger world: the clarity of Conway's language satisfies like cold
clear
water after a day in the desert: the rhythm of her sentences has a
timelessness
and expansiveness akin to the Australian landscape itself. This is very
likely a book you will remember the rest of your life. (Susn)
April 2000 The group
will not meet in order to
participate in the RELIC (Readings in Literature and Culture) series,
The Newest South, Contemporary Writers in a Traditional Society.
Dr. Delma McLeod-Porter of McNeese State University will intorduce and
lead discussions on contemproary voices and themes of Southern
literature.
March 2000: Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling. Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, first published
in England as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, continues to
win
major awards in England. So far it has won the National Book Award, the
Smarties Prize, the Children's Book Award, and is short-listed for the
Carnegie Medal, the U.K. version of the Newbery Medal. This magical,
gripping,
brilliant book--a future classic to be sure--will leave kids clamoring
for
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the
Prisoner
of Azkaban. (Barbara)
February
2000: Possession:
A Romance by A. S. Byatt Winner
of the 1990 Booker Prize--the U.K.'s highest literary award--Possession
is
a gripping and compulsively readable novel. A.S. Byatt exquisitely
renders
a setting rich in detail and texture. Her lush imagery weaves together
the
dual worlds that appear throughout the novel--the worlds of the mind
and
the senses, of male and female, of darkness and light, of truth and
imagination--into an enchanted and unforgettable tale of love and
intrigue. (Anne)
January 2000:
A
Good Scent from a Strange Mountain : Stories by Robert Olen
Butler. The Vietnam War continues to play itself out in fiction,
autobiography, and history books, but no American author has captured
the experiences of the Vietnamese themselves--and caught their
voices--more tellingly than Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1993 for A Good Scent From
a Strange Mountain. The 15 stories collected here, all written in the
first
person, blend Vietnamese folklore, the terrible, lingering memories of
war,
American pop culture and family drama. Butler's literary ventriloquism,
as
he mines the experiences of a people with a great literary tradition of
their own, is uncanny; but his talents as a writer of universal truths
is
what makes this a collection for the ages. (Lisa)
November
1999: The
Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows,
men who
drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come
to
any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the
Lord or
Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on
the
fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara
Kingsolver
sends missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters
off
to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation is
the
one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is
the
Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word
in
a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his
family
are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from
Bethlehem,
Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah,
one
of Nathan's four daughters. But of course it isn't long before they
discover
that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their
clothes
are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval
as
the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to
poisonous
snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to
Nathan's
fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in
the
jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse?
(Lilly)
October
1999: A
History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. This wide-ranging and erudite exploration of the
topic of
reading is suffused with the spirit of Manguel's fellow Argentinian
Jorge Luis Borges. Manguel takes us through the history of reading as
if leading us room by room through the infinite library Borges
constructed in one of his famous stories. Manguel's approach is not
chronological, but thematic. His chapter topics jump from attempts to
censor reading to the physical surroundings favored by readers, from
the limitations of translations to the esotericism of books written for
a restricted readership. Throughout he moves easily through time and
geography to quote anecdotes and examples from diverse sources.
Manguel's enthusiasm, and the impressive breadth of his reading, will
make his readers eager to rush to the nearest library. (Barbara)
September
1999: Cat's
Eye by Margaret Eleanor Atwood.
Returning to the city of her youth for a retrospective of her art,
controversial
painter Elaine Risley is engulfed by vivid images of the past.
Strongest
of all is the figure of Cordelia, leader of the trio of girls who
initiated
her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of
friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her
own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman-but above
all, she must seek release from Cordelia's haunting memory. Disturbing,
hilarious, and compassionate, Cat's Eye is a breathtaking contemporary
novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life. (Kelly)
August 1999:
The
Gift of Fear : Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by
Gavin De Becker. Each hour, 75 women
are raped in the United States, and every few seconds, a woman is
beaten. Each day, 400 Americans suffer shooting injuries, and another
1,100 face criminals armed with guns. Author Gavin de Becker says
victims of violent behavior usually feel a sense of fear before any
threat or violence takes place.
They may distrust the fear, or it may impel them to some action that
saves
their lives. A leading expert on predicting violent behavior, de Becker
believes we can all learn to recognize these signals of the "universal
code
of violence," and use them as tools to help us survive. The book
teaches
how to identify the warning signals of a potential attacker and
recommends
strategies for dealing with the problem before it becomes life
threatening.
The case studies are gripping and suspenseful, and include tactics for
dealing with similar situations. People don't just "snap" and become
violent,
says de Becker, whose clients include federal government agencies,
celebrities,
police departments, and shelters for battered women. "There is a
process
as observable, and often as predictable, as water coming to a boil."
Learning
to predict violence is the cornerstone to preventing it. De Becker is a
master of the psychology of violence, and his advice may save your
life.
(Susan)
June 1999: Where
the Heart Is by Billie Letts. The
tribulations of 17-year-old Novalee Nation, daughter of the Tennessee
trailer
parks, make up a surprisingly long, none-too-subtle tale. The story
opens
with pregnant Novalee, abandoned by boyfriend Willie Jack Pickens,
living
in a small, dusty Oklahoma town's Wal-Mart. After she is discovered
writhing in labor and rushed to the hospital, Sam Walton (Wal-Mart's
late, billionaire owner) offers her a job. Conveniently, her housing
dilemma is solved, too, when she moves in with the local eccentric with
a heart-of-gold. The rest of the book (300-plus pages) follows the next
five years in the lives of Novalee and her daughter. We meet more
idiosyncratic yet lovable characters and learn the fate of Willie Jack.
Although the book's emotional manipulation may be distasteful to some,
others may find its soap-opera plot and Forrest Gump-ish optimism
appealing. (Mary)
May 1999: Accordion
Crimes by Annie Proulx. The novel follows an accordion
from the hands of its maker in Sicily in 1890 until it is flattened by
a truck in Florida in 1996. In the intervening century it passes
through
the hands of a host of unlucky owners and their kin: Abelardo
Relampago,
who dies from the bite of a poisonous spider; Dolor Gagnon, decapitated
by his own chain saw; Silvano, cut down in the jungles of Venezuela by
an
Indian's arrow. (Jo)
April 1999:Memoirs of
a Geisha by Arthur Golden. According
to Arthur Golden's absorbing first novel, the word "geisha" does not
mean "prostitute," as Westerners ignorantly assume--it means "artisan"
or "artist." A novel with the broad social canvas (and love of
coincidence) of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen's intense attention to
the nuances of erotic maneuvering. Readers experience the entire life
of a geisha, from her origins as an orphaned fishing-village girl in
1929 to her triumphant auction of her mizuage (virginity) for a record
price as a teenager to her reminiscent old age as the distinguished
mistress of the powerful patron of her dreams. We discover that a
geisha
is more analogous to a Western "trophy wife" than to a prostitute--and,
as
in Austen, flat-out prostitution and early death is a woman's
alternative to the repressive, arcane system of courtship. (Peggy)
March 1999:
The group will
participate in the Literary Lagniappe Louisiana Writers Discussion
Series. Corinne
Pearce of Northwestern State University will introduce and lead
discussions
of the literature and literary scene of Louisiana beginning Thusday,
February 4th and continuing each Thursday until March 11th.
January
& February 1999: Personal
History by Katherine Graham. Personal
History reads like a good novel: A woman survives a wealthy childhood
not without its
problems, outlives a marriage that goes disastrously wrong, then takes
over
the family business and not only makes it a success, but influences
American
history as well. Best of all, it's true. This large memoir (625 pages)
by
Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post and undoubtedly one
of
the most powerful women of her time, is an extraordinary American
story.
(Most of us were glad we read at least part of it. We found it much too
long
and tedious at times. A good editor could have helped it read better.
The
parts about Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and the Pressmens strike
were interesting.)
November
1998: Angle
of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Stegner's
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel--the magnificent story of four generations
in the life of an American family. A wheelchair-bound retired historian
embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now
long
dead. The unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the
tone
for Stegner's masterpiece. (Made for a good discussion! Readers may
find
the beginning a bit slow, but stay with it.)
October
1998: Cider
House Rules by John Irving. Wilbur
Larch, a physician, philosopher, obstetrician, and abortionist at St.
Cloud's orphanage struggles through his relationship with his
apprentice and surrogate son, Homer Wells. (Had a great discussion with
this one.)
September
1998: Tuesdays With Morrie An
Old Man,
a Young Man, and the Last Great Lesson by Mitch Albom. This true story about the love between a spiritual
mentor and his pupil. We meet Morrie Schwartz--a one of a kind
professor, whom the author describes as looking like a cross between a
biblical prophet and
Christmas elf. We are privy to intimate moments of Morrie's final days
as
he lies dying from a terminal illness. Even on his deathbed, this
twinkling-eyed mensch manages to teach us all about living robustly and
fully. (Everyone enjoyed this one.)
August 1998: Cold
Mountain by Charles Frazier. The hero of Charles Frazier's
beautifully written and deeply-imagined first novel is Inman, a
disillusioned Confederate soldier who has failed to die as expected
after being seriously wounded in battle during the last days of the
Civil War. Rather than waiting to
be redeployed to the front, the soul-sick Inman deserts, and embarks on
a dangerous and lonely odyssey through the devastated South, heading
home
to North Carolina, and seeking only to be reunited with his beloved,
Ada,
who has herself been struggling to maintain the family farm she
inherited.
Cold Mountain is an unforgettable addition to the literature of one of
the most important and transformational periods in American history.
(Everyone
loved this book..good character development, good prose, good
discussion.)
June 1998: Snow
Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. On San Piedro Island,
Puget Sound, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial for
cold-blooded murder in the shadow of World War II, and the journalist
who covers the trial
comes close once again to the wife of the accused, his boyhood love.
Winner
of the PEN/Faulkner Award. (An enjoyable read with good discussion.)
May 1998: A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. This is the
unforgettable American masterpiece about a young girl's coming of age
at the turn of
the century. (Enjoyed by all and provided a good discussion. Some in
the
group could indentify with and others were moved by the poverty.)
April 1998: Mothers
of Invention : Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust. From hundreds of diaries, letters, and
memoirs of the period, historian Drew Gilpin Faust reveals how war
changed the
lives of Southern women forever--from a housewife having to do physical
labor for the first time to a Virginia aristocrat turned military nurse
to a ruthless teenaged girl spy. A New York Times Notable Book of the
Year,
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, and Winner of the Avery Craven
Prize.
40 b&w photos throughout. (The group had a good discussion with
this
book. We were motivated to seek out individual women's stories also.)
March 1998: My
Antonia by Willa Cather. Novel by Willa Cather, published in
1918. Her best-known work, it honors the immigrant settlers of the
American
plains. Narrated by the protagonist's lifelong friend, Jim Burden, the
novel recounts the history of Antonia Shimerda, the daughter of
Bohemian
immigrants who settled on the Nebraska frontier. The book contains a
number
of poetic passages about the disappearing frontier and the spirit and
courage
of frontier people. Many critics consider My Antonia to be Cather's
finest
achievement. (Everyone enjoyed this classic.)
February 1998: The
Liar's Club by Mary Karr. In this funny, razor-edged memoir,
Mary Karr, a prize-winning poet and critic, looks back at her
upbringing in
a swampy East Texas refinery town with a volatile, defiantly loving
family. She recalls her painter mother, seven times married, whose
outlaw spirit could tip into psychosis; a fist swinging father who spun
tales with his cronies - dubbed the Liars' Club; and a neighborhood
rape when she was eight. An inheritance was squandered, endless bottles
emptied, and guns leveled
at the deserving and undeserving. With a row authenticity stripped of
self
pity,and a poet's eye for the lyrical detail, Karr shows us a "terrific
family
of liars and drunks...redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth." (We
liked
reading about an area geographically near us, but the consensus was
that
most did not like the book. The discussion was good, but a bit
depressing.)
January 1998: Reviving
Ophelia : Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher. This
powerful New York Times bestseller explores the confounding behavior of
adolescent girls, who in rapidly increasing numbers are succumbing to
depression, eating disorders, addictions and suicide. Furthermore, Dr.
Pipher issues
a call for parents to understand their daughters' behavior, helping
them
reconnect with their lost sense of self. (This book provided a very
lively
discussion. Many could relate to their own lives.)
November 1997: The
Color of Water by James McBride. McBride's extraordinary
memoir of a young black man's search to uncover his white mother's past
along with his own identity results in a powerful portrait of growing
up, a meditation on race and identity, and a poignant, beautifully
crafted hymn from a
son to his mother.(We had a very good discussion on this book. Most
everyone liked it and had a lot to talk about.)
October 1997: Salt
Dancers by Ursula Heli. Ursula Hegi follows her masterful and
critically acclaimed novel Stones from the River with a dramatic
contemporary
tale of one woman's journey back to her childhood through layers of
memory,
fear, longing, and love. Unmarried and pregnant at forty-one, Julia
returns
home to a father she hasn't seen in twenty-three years, and to the
memories of secrecy, betrayal, abuse and abandonment that haunt her
still. Haunting and lyrical, beautiful and harrowing, Salt Dancers
fulfills the promise of
Hegi's earlier work. (Was enjoyed by most. Good discussion, some were
able
to relate personally. Most agreed her writing style very good.)
September 1997: Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt. A seductive
and mesmerizing account that skillfully weaves the unpredictable twists
and
turns of a landmark murder case with introspective first person
memoirs,
creating a strange and sublime portrait of the stubborn and isolated
remnants
of the Old South. In this book, remarkable characters that could have
once
prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story lend
their
voices to this lyrical work of nonfiction. (Again, some liked, some did
not. The majority enjoyed the character development of the quirky
characters.
Those who didn't did not think it had enough depth.)
August 1997: In
the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O'Brien. The author of The
Things They Carried offers a riveting novel of love and mystery. When
long-hidden secrets about the atrocities he committed in Vietnam come
to light, a candidate for the U.S. Senate retreats with his wife to a
lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. Within days of their arrival, his
wife mysteriously vanishes
into the watery wilderness. (Some liked the book, some did not. It did
create
a lot of discussion regarding the possible outcome of the story and the
Vietnam issue.)
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