November December 2017 Book Choice

Our last book for 2017 is  I Am America (and so can you) by Stephen Colbert

“I Am America” describes “heroes” as “people who did not skip ahead” to that speech “but read the book from start to finish as intended.” Heroism aside, to experience the speech in print is to understand what “I Am America” is missing.Mr. Colbert and his staff write for a particular character with impeccable, deadpan delivery, and there is no book-worthy equivalent of what happens when the real McCoy gets near a microphone. The printed speech falls surprisingly flat. Neither this chapter nor the rest of “I Am America” is helped by little red annotations in the margins, though these, too, mimic a tactic that happens to be funny on TV.
mong the funnier sections is the “Higher Education” chapter. It includes what purports to be Mr. Colbert’s college application essay, featuring ripe malapropisms, overuse of a thesaurus (“the apex, pinnacle, acme, vertex, and zenith of my life’s experience”) and the lying claim that his great-great-uncle’s name is on a building at Dartmouth. There are also fake course selections with student annotations, among them “Ethnic Stereotypes and the Humor of Cruelty” (“A professor will tell you a bunch of hilarious jokes, and you’re not allowed to laugh”) and “Dance for Men.” (“Go ahead. Break your mother’s heart.”) Heterosexuality that protests too much is a big part of the official Colbert attitude...If “I Am America (And So Can You!)” had nothing but its title, its Colbert cover portrait and 230 blank pages instead of printed ones, it would make a cherished keepsake just the same."

2007 NY Times book review



Betsy will once again host the Holiday Cookie Exchange end of the year party.

October November 2017 Book Choice

Our late fall book choice is A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

"If a Japanese-American writer who is also a Zen Buddhist priest wrote a post-Japanese tsunami novel, what themes might you imagine she would address? Biculturalism, water, death, memory, the female predicament, conscience, the nature of time and tide? Tick. All there. Throw in the second world war, the reader-writer relationship, depression, ecological collapse, suicide, origami, a 105-year-old anarchist nun and a schoolgirl's soiled knickers, and you have Ruth Ozeki's third novel, A Tale for the Time Being.


Ozeki's meditative, era-flipping story starts with a chance discovery by a Japanese-American novelist called Ruth. Ruth lives on an island in British Columbia. Walking on the beach she stumbles on a barnacle-studded wad of plastic bags protecting a Hello Kitty lunchbox. Inside are some old letters and the diary of 16-year-old Nao (pronounced "now") Yasutani, who describes herself as "a little wave person. Floating about on the stormy sea of life"...
Seen from space, or from the vantage point of those conversant with Zen principles, A Tale for the Time Being is probably a deep and illuminating piece of work, with thoughtful things to say about the slipperiness of time. But for those positioned lower in the planet's stratosphere, Ozeki's novel often feels more like the great Pacific gyre it frequently evokes: a vast, churning basin of mental flotsam in which Schrödinger's cat, quantum mechanics, Japanese funeral rituals, crow species, fetish cafes, the anatomy of barnacles, 163 footnotes and six appendices all jostle for attention. It's an impressive amount of stuff." 

The Guardian Book Review March 2013

Kim hosted the Dinner Party

September October 2017 Book Choice

Our September October book choice is Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

"In the most vivid chapter of Ann Patchett’s rich and engrossing new novel, “Commonwealth,” it is 1971 and six step ­siblings ranging in age from 6 to 12 years old have been left to their own devices. Their blended family is on a car trip, staying in a motel near a lake, and the parents — the beautiful, overwhelmed mother of two of the girls and the affably selfish father of two more girls and two boys — have left a note that reads We’re sleeping late. Do not knock. Thus the children eat breakfast at a diner, then gather supplies, including soda, candy bars, a gun and a fifth of gin, and hike to the lake, where they spend several hours swimming and leaping from a high rock.

Patchett wisely underplays the drama — the chapter is a masterly example of showing rather than telling — and the increasingly shocking details speak for themselves.

Her observations about people and life are insightful; and her underlying tone is one of compassion and amusement. If “Commonwealth” lacks the foreign intrigue of “Bel Canto” or “State of Wonder,” both of which took place in South America and contained more suspense, this novel, much of which unfolds in American suburbs, recognizes that the passage of time is actually the ultimate plot. As anyone who has attended a high school reunion knows, people themselves don’t need to have been doing anything particularly interesting in order for their lives to generate interest, so long as you run into them at infrequent enough intervals. Patchett also skillfully illustrates the way that seemingly minor, even arbitrary deci­sions can have long-lasting conse­quences and the way that we often fear the wrong things." 

NY times book review September 2016


Michele hosted the Dinner Party 

August September 2017 Book Choice

Late summer book choice was A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
(we also read another book by him - My Grandmother asked me to tell you she's sorry)
Here is a NYTimes 2016 review

Fredrik Backman got tepid responses when he sent out the manuscript for his debut novel, “A Man Called Ove.” Most publishers ignored him, and several turned it down.
After a few months and a few more rejections, he began to think perhaps there wasn’t a market for a story about a cranky 59-year-old Swedish widower who tries and fails to kill himself.
“It was rejected by one publisher with the line, ‘We like your novel, we think your writing has potential, but we see no commercial potential,” said Mr. Backman, 35, who lives outside Stockholm with his wife and two children. “That note I kept.”
In hindsight, that critique seems wildly, comically off base. Four years later, “A Man Called Ove” has sold more than 2.8 million copies worldwide, making the book one of Sweden’s most popular literary exports since Stieg Larsson’s thriller “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”
The novel’s protagonist, Ove, is a lonely curmudgeon who screams at his neighbors for parking in the wrong place and punches a hospital clown whose magic tricks annoy him. Six months after his wife’s death, he’s planning to commit suicide and has turned off his radiators, canceled his newspaper subscription and anchored a hook into the ceiling to hang himself. But he keeps getting interrupted by his clueless, prying neighbors. He strikes up a friendship with an Iranian immigrant and her two young daughters, who find Ove’s grumpiness endearing.

Peter Borland, who acquired United States rights to “Ove” for Atria, said he was struck by the book’s pathos and humor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPoaN2XROk8

Molly Hosted the Dinner Party: 

June/July 2017 Book choice

Our first summer read was a historic foodie book Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee by Thomas J. Craughwell 

Here is a brief overview by Goodreads:

This culinary biography recounts the 1784 deal that Thomas Jefferson struck with his slaves, James Hemings. The founding father was traveling to Paris and wanted to bring James along “for a particular purpose”— to master the art of French cooking. In exchange for James’s cooperation, Jefferson would grant his freedom. 

Thus began one of the strangest partnerships in United States history. As Hemings apprenticed under master French chefs, Jefferson studied the cultivation of French crops (especially grapes for winemaking) so the might be replicated in American agriculture. The two men returned home with such marvels as pasta, French fries, Champagne, macaroni and cheese, crème brûlée, and a host of other treats. This narrative history tells the story of their remarkable adventure—and even includes a few of their favorite recipes! 


Sally hosted the dinner party 

May 2017 Book Choice

Our May 2017 book choice was The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer
Here is part of the 2015 book review from the Guardian writer Celeste Ng 

Kate Hamer’s debut novel has the trappings of a thriller. Sensitive eight-year-old Carmel –the red-coated girl of the title – is spirited away by a man who claims to be her estranged grandfather. As Beth, her mother, desperately searches for her, Carmel realises that her kidnapper has not taken her at random: he believes she has a special gift. Told in the alternating perspectives of the grieving mother and the missing daughter, it keeps the reader turning pages at a frantic clip.
Image result for girl in the red coat
It’s no accident that the title calls to mind Little Red Riding Hood, the ultimate story of a young girl captured by a predator. Carmel is abducted from a storytelling festival, and both she and her mother make frequent reference to the fairytale nature of what’s happened. Beth wishes she’d kept her daughter “shut away in a fortress or a tower. Locked with a golden key that I would swallow.” Spotting her shadow on the wall beside her captor’s, Carmel muses: “We both look like the paper puppets … and I wonder what story we’d be telling if we were.” She steels herself by thinking: “Sometimes, it’s easier to think of things as stories … If I made these things into stories I could float away from them, and look at them sideways, or like they were happening inside a snow globe.”

Jeannie hosted the dinner party 

April 2017 Book post

The April 2017 book selection is Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman.
Here is a brief review from Goodreads:

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Dovekeepers and The Museum of Extraordinary Things: a forbidden love story set on the tropical island of St. Thomas about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro; the Father of Impressionism.

Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel's mother, a pillar of their small refugee community of Jews who escaped the Inquisition, has never forgiven her daughter for being a difficult girl who refuses to live by the rules. Growing up, Rachel's salvation is their maid Adelle's belief in her strengths, and her deep, life-long friendship with Jestine, Adelle's daughter. But Rachel's life is not her own. She is married off to a widower with three children to save her father's business. When her husband dies suddenly and his handsome, much younger nephew, Fréderick, arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes her own life story, beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal that affects all of her family, including her favorite son, who will become one of the greatest artists of France.

Building on the triumphs of The Dovekeepers and The Museum of Extraordinary Things, set in a world of almost unimaginable beauty, The Marriage of Opposites showcases the beloved, bestselling Alice Hoffman at the height of her considerable powers. Once forgotten to history, the marriage of Rachel and Fréderick is a story that is as unforgettable as it is remarkable.





Kitty Hosted the Event:

Books of 2016 Looking Back

The Books of 2016 Looking back...

February 2016

March April 2016

May 2016

June 2016

August 2016 

September 2016 

October 2016 

November December 2016

March 2017 Book!

Our next meeting is March 10th and our book is The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark. (less)