Why don't we just assign 2 points to favorite and 1 point to second favorite.
Haven't gotten any responses yet. Just email me when you get a chance.
Haven't gotten any responses yet. Just email me when you get a chance.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Here is the list.
Cat, thanks for volunteering to count the votes. The end is in site at work (yeah!). So I can take care of it, it will give me a little break from the budget models.
As Cat mentioned the voting goes 3 pts for the first choice, 2 pts for the second choice, 1 pt for the third choice.
Note there are only 6 books on the list, do we want to vote for only our top 2 choices? Also, are we back to only reading books that no one has read, or does anything go? If we are eliminating books people have read let me know if any need to go. If the list gets too short, I have a few books in my back burner.
Book Club List October 2005
1. A Thousand Acres- Jane Smiley (384 p.)
When Larry Cook, the aging patriarch of a rich, thriving farm in Iowa, decides to retire, he offers his land to his three daughters. For Ginny and Rose, who live on the farm with their husbands, the gift makes sense—a reward for years of hard work, a challenge to make the farm even more successful. But the youngest, Caroline, a Des Moines lawyer, flatly rejects the idea, and in anger her father cuts her out—setting off an explosive series of events that will leave none of them unchanged. A classic story of contemporary American life, A THOUSAND ACRES strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a father, a daughter, and a family.
2. Charming Billy-Alice McDermott (280 p.)
Like Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Charming Billy, Alice McDermott's pitch-perfect evocation of post-World War II Irish American immigrant life, is a novel resonant with the voices of its voluble, bereaved characters and fueled by the twin engines of nostalgia and lost love. McDermott's National Book Award-winning book is the story of the life and tragic death of the much-loved Billy Lynch. At the heart of McDermott's novel is the revelation that the torch Billy carried for his long-dead love is predicated upon a lie: Eva, the Irish girl Billy loved in his youth and long believed dead, is actually alive, married, and living in Ireland. (Unable to tell Billy that Eva had left him for another man, his cousin Dennis instead invented the face-saving story of her untimely death.) Thus the central debate of the novel is set in motion: Was it the knowledge of Eva's betrayal or the discovery of Dennis's 30-year-old lie that killed Billy? Or was his death simply due to a genetic weakness for alcohol? Whatever the reason, observes Dennis's daughter (the narrator of the novel), of one thing there is no doubt: Billy had "ripped apart, plowed through, as alcoholics tend to do, the great deep, tightly woven fabric of affection that was some part of the emotional life, the life of love, of everyone in the room." Fierce, witty, and haunting, Alice McDermott's poignant evocation of postwar Irish American immigrant life is a masterpiece about the unbreakable bonds of memory and desire.
3. The Namesake-Jhumpa Lahiri (304 p.)
Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.
4. Gilead-Marilyn Robinson (256 p.)
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father - an ardent pacifist - and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son." This is also the tale of another remarkable vision - not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.
5. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer (276 p.)
At once hilarious and deeply moving, Jonathan Safran Foer's brilliant debut novel juxtaposes a boastful young Ukrainian guide -- whose endearingly mangled English makes for one of the most wildly original narrations in memory -- with a self-deprecating American Jew in search of his family's roots in a long-forgotten Russian shtetl. As the seemingly mismatched pair pursues an odyssey through post-Soviet Ukraine, they discover a common ground that illuminates if not everything, then at least the resilience of the human spirit and the redemptive power of friendship.
6. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (247 p.)
As a provocative tale of passion and complacency, ideals and self-delusions, Madame Bovary (1857) remains a milestone in European fiction. Madame Bovary is the story of a beautiful young woman who marries a luckless and loutish country doctor. She attempts to escape the narrow confines of her life through a series of passionate affairs, hoping to find in other men the romantic ideal she has always dreamed about. Her recklessness comes back to haunt her, however, and the strong-willed and independent Emma finds herself in a desperate fight for existence. In this novel, Flaubert inaugurated a literary mode that would be called Realism. But so exacting were Flaubert’s standards of authenticity that his portrayal of the breakdown of Emma’s marriage, and the frankness with which he treats her adulterous liaisons, scandalized many of his contemporaries. Yet to others, the mix of painful introspection, emotional blindness, and cynical self-seeking that distinguishes his characters made the novel instantly recognizable as a work of genius. It is a novel fixed upon the idea of romance—of the need for Romance—in the face of day-to-day banalities. It is a theme that is ironic insofar as the exquisite clarity of Flaubert’s prose serves to hauntingly underline the futility of the heroine’s ultimate tragedy.
Cat, thanks for volunteering to count the votes. The end is in site at work (yeah!). So I can take care of it, it will give me a little break from the budget models.
As Cat mentioned the voting goes 3 pts for the first choice, 2 pts for the second choice, 1 pt for the third choice.
Note there are only 6 books on the list, do we want to vote for only our top 2 choices? Also, are we back to only reading books that no one has read, or does anything go? If we are eliminating books people have read let me know if any need to go. If the list gets too short, I have a few books in my back burner.
Book Club List October 2005
1. A Thousand Acres- Jane Smiley (384 p.)
When Larry Cook, the aging patriarch of a rich, thriving farm in Iowa, decides to retire, he offers his land to his three daughters. For Ginny and Rose, who live on the farm with their husbands, the gift makes sense—a reward for years of hard work, a challenge to make the farm even more successful. But the youngest, Caroline, a Des Moines lawyer, flatly rejects the idea, and in anger her father cuts her out—setting off an explosive series of events that will leave none of them unchanged. A classic story of contemporary American life, A THOUSAND ACRES strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a father, a daughter, and a family.
2. Charming Billy-Alice McDermott (280 p.)
Like Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Charming Billy, Alice McDermott's pitch-perfect evocation of post-World War II Irish American immigrant life, is a novel resonant with the voices of its voluble, bereaved characters and fueled by the twin engines of nostalgia and lost love. McDermott's National Book Award-winning book is the story of the life and tragic death of the much-loved Billy Lynch. At the heart of McDermott's novel is the revelation that the torch Billy carried for his long-dead love is predicated upon a lie: Eva, the Irish girl Billy loved in his youth and long believed dead, is actually alive, married, and living in Ireland. (Unable to tell Billy that Eva had left him for another man, his cousin Dennis instead invented the face-saving story of her untimely death.) Thus the central debate of the novel is set in motion: Was it the knowledge of Eva's betrayal or the discovery of Dennis's 30-year-old lie that killed Billy? Or was his death simply due to a genetic weakness for alcohol? Whatever the reason, observes Dennis's daughter (the narrator of the novel), of one thing there is no doubt: Billy had "ripped apart, plowed through, as alcoholics tend to do, the great deep, tightly woven fabric of affection that was some part of the emotional life, the life of love, of everyone in the room." Fierce, witty, and haunting, Alice McDermott's poignant evocation of postwar Irish American immigrant life is a masterpiece about the unbreakable bonds of memory and desire.
3. The Namesake-Jhumpa Lahiri (304 p.)
Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.
4. Gilead-Marilyn Robinson (256 p.)
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father - an ardent pacifist - and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son." This is also the tale of another remarkable vision - not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.
5. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer (276 p.)
At once hilarious and deeply moving, Jonathan Safran Foer's brilliant debut novel juxtaposes a boastful young Ukrainian guide -- whose endearingly mangled English makes for one of the most wildly original narrations in memory -- with a self-deprecating American Jew in search of his family's roots in a long-forgotten Russian shtetl. As the seemingly mismatched pair pursues an odyssey through post-Soviet Ukraine, they discover a common ground that illuminates if not everything, then at least the resilience of the human spirit and the redemptive power of friendship.
6. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (247 p.)
As a provocative tale of passion and complacency, ideals and self-delusions, Madame Bovary (1857) remains a milestone in European fiction. Madame Bovary is the story of a beautiful young woman who marries a luckless and loutish country doctor. She attempts to escape the narrow confines of her life through a series of passionate affairs, hoping to find in other men the romantic ideal she has always dreamed about. Her recklessness comes back to haunt her, however, and the strong-willed and independent Emma finds herself in a desperate fight for existence. In this novel, Flaubert inaugurated a literary mode that would be called Realism. But so exacting were Flaubert’s standards of authenticity that his portrayal of the breakdown of Emma’s marriage, and the frankness with which he treats her adulterous liaisons, scandalized many of his contemporaries. Yet to others, the mix of painful introspection, emotional blindness, and cynical self-seeking that distinguishes his characters made the novel instantly recognizable as a work of genius. It is a novel fixed upon the idea of romance—of the need for Romance—in the face of day-to-day banalities. It is a theme that is ironic insofar as the exquisite clarity of Flaubert’s prose serves to hauntingly underline the futility of the heroine’s ultimate tragedy.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Erin, I think you're looking at a September calender. Monday is the 17th (and would work for me), Tuesday is the 18th, etc... I leave for the family vacation on the 22nd, so I can't do anything the week after that so my vote is for sometime next week.
Kelly can you give us an update on your travel plans? Last night you mentioned being back the 14th?
I think there's some confusion on dates,
Oct 19 is a wednesday.
Given the confusion, lets focus on th week of oct 17-21.
I am available wed the 19th thru friday the 21st.
I think there's some confusion on dates,
Oct 19 is a wednesday.
Given the confusion, lets focus on th week of oct 17-21.
I am available wed the 19th thru friday the 21st.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Hello Everyone-
Yes a book about a dog...go figure. So Kelly, no one ever posted about the dates. Seeing as it is now October 4th, I think it is going to have to be Oct 19th, 20th or 21st. I have finished the book (ages ago, can't wait to talk about it). As of now, any of those dates will work for me. I would prefer the Mon. the 19th or Tues. the 20th.
Any thoughts on restaurants?
Yes a book about a dog...go figure. So Kelly, no one ever posted about the dates. Seeing as it is now October 4th, I think it is going to have to be Oct 19th, 20th or 21st. I have finished the book (ages ago, can't wait to talk about it). As of now, any of those dates will work for me. I would prefer the Mon. the 19th or Tues. the 20th.
Any thoughts on restaurants?
