Hey All,
So we are going to be finishing up the Gaiman next week (the 22nd) and then, we'll need to get started on the next book in the discussion.
Shaggylocks has generously offered to serve as moderator for that discussion, so after our next discussion, I'll be turning over the keys of the book club to Shaggylocks.
I've received several suggestions for books to read. I'll post what I've received, and then ask if there are more suggestions.
As it worked out last time, the moderator wound up choosing the book, taking into account what people were lobbying for. (But thank goodness, I don't have to be Ms. Bossy Pants this time.)
Suggestions:
my friends and I loved a book by Laura Esquivel called 'Like Water for Chocolate'. Its style is fantasy, 'magical realism'. We're all women in our club and it is a very feminine novel, a story of female servitude, envy, feminine sexuality - and astounding recipes!--submitted by Psychomama
I vote for Dune. --suggested by Coyote Old Style, who had lobbied for the book previously.
Mark Helprin's "A Soldier of the Great War."
Helprin has been a favorite of mine ever since I read Winter's Tale, a wonderful and magical book. This book that I suggest is so moving, so transcendent, that it is not unusual to find yourself silently weeping. It is a story of life and love, told from a man's point of view, caught in a series of circumstances that touch on the most integral themes of humanity.
I don't understand why he has not been given more recognition for his work. This book is among the best I have ever read and would love the opportunity to read it anew and to share it with my fellow OS bibliophiles. --suggested by ABlonde
i would love us to read an older book. i was thinking, what about a classic? and a short one. something like Henry James "Turn of the Screw" or "Daisy Miller"? suggested by Theodora L'Engle Knight
"Tinkers" by Paul Harding
Paul Harding's first novel is only now arriving in bookstores, from Bellevue Literary Press, a small publisher affiliated with NYU's School of Medicine — but it's fast becoming one of the most talked-about books of the season. "Astonishing," says the L.A. Times. "An especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship," according to Publishers Weekly. --suggested by Shaggy Locks
I propose the novel The Life of Pi for our next book club selection. The book is by Yann Martel. It is SUCH a wonderful story, told by a great storyteller, about faith and survival. I highly recommend it. It is becoming required reading in a lot of high school Advanced Placement programs as an alternative to The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. (Both are excellent stories.)
--suggested by Bella Joffre
(certified curricululm specialist, English/Language Arts - K-12)
Have more suggestions? A vote? An idea? Please post in comments. Thanks!!
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Laurenjwalter
Steven Axelrod
scupper
Stim
Jeff Shelden
Sally Swift
Salon.com
Comments
From Publishers Weekly:
"Surreal and hilariously funny, this alternate history, the debut novel of British author Fforde, will appeal to lovers of zany genre work (think Douglas Adams) and lovers of classic literature alike. The scene: Great Britain circa 1985, but a Great Britain where literature has a prominent place in everyday life. For pennies, corner Will-Speak machines will quote Shakespeare; Richard III is performed with audience participation … la Rocky Horror and children swap Henry Fielding bubble-gum cards. In this world where high lit matters, Special Operative Thursday Next (literary detective) seeks to retrieve the stolen manuscript of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The evil Acheron Hades has plans for it: after kidnapping Next's mad-scientist uncle, Mycroft, and commandeering Mycroft's invention, the Prose Portal, which enables people to cross into a literary text, he sends a minion into Chuzzlewit to seize and kill a minor character, thus forever changing the novel. Worse is to come. When the manuscript of Jane Eyre, Next's favorite novel, disappears, and Jane herself is spirited out of the book, Next must pursue Hades inside Charlotte Bront‰'s masterpiece. The plethora of oddly named characters can be confusing, and the story's episodic nature means that the action moves forward in fits and starts. The cartoonish characters are either all good or all bad, but the villain's comeuppance is still satisfying. Witty and clever, this literate romp heralds a fun new series set in a wonderfully original world."
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
used starting from $6.70..
I've doing lots of reading lately---The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao was fantastic! I also read the White Hotel (gave me weird dreams) and Water for Elephants.
I started the Lazarus Project but I am up for whatever you guys choose!
I will read in the backyard and then take those kinds of naps which make you wake up and wonder where you really are.
"A book by an unknown author, from a new and nearly unknown press, lands on a reviewer's desk. What are the chances it will command her attention? Or turn out to be a beautifully written meditation on life, death, the passage of time and man's eternal attempt to harness it?
Not great, you might say. But Paul Harding's Tinkers defies expectations and proves to be one of 2009's most intriguing debuts."
--Carole Goldberg, Hartford Courant
"Tinkers confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls."
--Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson
This one's a sleeper hit that's been taking book clubs across America by storm. I say we give it a go.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It's complex, but poetic, and each chapter can be read on it's own, perfect for putting down and coming back to - from Wikipedia: "The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 cities, apparently narrated by Polo... The interludes between Khan and Polo are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device, a story with a story, that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories."
OR Fledgling one of the last books written by Octavia Butler (the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant) before she passed. From Publisher's Weekly: "The much-lauded Butler creates vampires in her 12th novel that have about as much to do with Bram Stoker's Dracula as HBO's Deadwood does with High Noon. They need human blood to survive, but they don't kill unless they have to, and given several hundred years they'll die peacefully of old age. They are Ina, and they've coexisted with humans for millennia, imparting robust health and narcotic bliss with every bite to their devoted human blood donors, aka "symbionts." Shori is a 53-year-old Ina (a juvenile) who wakes up in a cave, amnesiac and seriously wounded... In the feisty Shori, Butler has created a new vampire paradigm—one that's more prone to sci-fi social commentary than gothic romance—and given a tired genre a much-needed shot in the arm." And from the Washington Post, "...How many of our happy relationships involve a degree of dominance or dependence that we can't acknowledge? This is Butler's typically insidious method: to create an alternative social world that seems, at first, alien and then to force us to consider the nature of our own lives with a new, anxious eye. It's a pain in the neck, but impossible to resist."
i'd be happy to read Dune if someone could promise me that i don't have to be a SCif Fi fan to understand it. Strangers in a Strange Land was one that i got and loved but it's been a long while.
i tried to read Glass Castle but i can tell already that the father is an asshole and it's a grim grim life. Anatomy of a Face is okay but the Ann Packer book about her friend Lucy is better i think.
sorry, the dogs are barking furiously. is Julie's choice a new one??? can't afford it. sorry. that's not fair to the rest of you. i'll just see what everyone chooses.
Mine was for The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. Humor and history rolled into one. Sarah Vowell is very funny. The book is about the Puritans who settled Massachusets and built Harvard.
How's the decision making going? bwahahahaha/ :)
It seems a compelling time to read it.
Last day of school and my principal had to tell me how I yell too much & some jerk who was supposed to helping in gardening (he's a shadow-aide for a kids with god-knows-what problem) wrote a letter about me to a newspaper (not using my name) saying I'm out to get kids. The guy used to sit and stare at the crazy-gardening lady like she was a goddess while the kids threw mud balls at one another. How horrible I yelled at them to be quiet and listen or not smack one another in the head with shovels!
I need a good escape folks....(As many books as I can get into my brain this summer!)
Bring it ON!!!!!!!!!
@Julie - re: classics for later, I would go for The Great Gatsby at some point - never read it (hanging head) but became fascinated after reading the chapter about it in "Reading Lolita in Tehran" Also seems very timely... Catcher in the Rye - good one also (and haven't picked that one up since high school).