Wednesday

September 2013 Book Choice

Quiet by Susan Cain is our later summer reading selection here are some of the reviews of this book.



"book just about introversion? At first blush, this may seem like a too narrow focus, but according to Cain, this trait is the “single most important aspect of personality.” She makes a good case by listing the various things in life that are linked to the dichotomy of Introversion/Extraversion – choice of friends, career and education, exercise, adultery, risk-taking, delayed gratification, to mention a few." 



The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking is about people who are quiet, their qualities, and how society underestimates these people. The book starts with a bang with the example of Rosa Parks who was an African-American woman with a quiet demeanor. The place is Alabama in the 1950s. She is in a segregated bus and when she refuses for not giving a seat to a white person, she is arrested. When she is on stage with Martin Luther King, the crowd becomes motivated to fight against the injustice.
The author, a self-confessed introvert, points out how society is biased against the introvert. From childhood they are taught that to be sociable is to be happy. Introversion is now "somewhere between a disappointment and pathology." The Power of Introverts is not about extrovert-bashing. Extroversion is good, but we have made it into an "oppressive standard" to which introverts must conform.

Seattle Book Review 

July August 2013 Dinner Party

Jane hosted the July August dinner at her cozy cottage on 51st street. The event was extra special because sister Michelle was visiting and joined in the festivities. There was lots of great food and book related conversation and a Birthday or two to celebrate.

Some really like the story others found the character of Clara hard to warm up to, but most found the struggle of women in the turn of the century work force fascinating.





Sunday

July August Book Choice

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/09/132781989/-Clara-And-Mr-Tiffany-A-Brightly-Colored-Story

NPR interview with the author of Clara and Mr. Tiffany, Susan Vreeland -our summer reading choice

Here is what others have said about this book:

"In Clara and Mr. Tiffany, Susan Vreeland's careful, informative, and intermittently grinding fifth novel, the creative force behind the iconic Tiffany lamp steps forward into sepia-tinted light.

Though Louis Comfort Tiffany took credit for the stunning stained glass windows, mosaics, and decorative objects that his Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company produced in turn-of-the-century New York, many of his signature pieces were designed and produced by a group of skilled female artisans known as the Tiffany Girls. Their leader was Clara Driscoll, a forward-thinking and artistically ambitious woman who worked at the studio for more than two decades...Clara proves highly appealing to her fellow characters, many of whom are also based on real people. She forms a tight friendship with George Waldo, a puckish painter, and his lover, Henry McBride, The New York Sun's long-time art critic. And a slow-simmering romance with another resident at her Irving Place boarding house, actor Edward Booth (in the novel, he is Bernard), gives the novel its ultimate conflict: which is more important, Art or Love?" 

Reviewed by  Barnes and Noble



"While I enjoyed Clara’s story (I’m always ready to learn about women doing things that women aren’t “supposed” to do), it was the study of the exacting process of putting a lamp or stained glass window together that really had me enthralled. So many people had to get their parts just right in order for it to become the treasure we see in museums today. The meticulous labor required is shown throughout this book from learning about the initial drawings, through selecting all the different glasses, metals, and ceramics. Art, created for the glory of how a person responds to its color and shape, is the real central character here. And what people will do to have that beauty in their lives.
While this is certainly not a scholarly treatise on leaded glass lampshades, nor on the life of working women in the 1900′s, it is a wonderful treasure of a book that helps you take that first magical step into those worlds. Read this book and, if it doesn’t at least inspire you to do a “Google” image search of Tiffany lamps and windows I will be extremely surprised." 
Dallas Library Book Review 



May/June Bookclub dinner

Michelle hosted the May/June bookclub gather at her Italian Country Estate complete with outdoor dinning, art and chickens. A warm night filled with wonderful book conversation and creative food choices.


May June Book Club Choice

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey is our May/June reading choice recommended by Judy.

Here is an overview of the story: 

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.
This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

What are other writers saying about this book:

"If Willa Cather and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a book, THE SNOW CHILD would be it. It is a remarkable accomplishment -- a combination of the most delicate, ethereal, fairytale magic and the harsh realities of homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness in 1918. Stunningly conceived, beautifully told, this story has the intricate fragility of a snowflake and the natural honesty of the dirt beneath your feet, the unnerving reality of a dream in the night. It fascinates, it touches the heart. It gallops along even as it takes time to pause at the wonder of life and the world in which we live. And it will stir you up and stay with you for a long, long time."
-Robert Goolrick, New York Times bestselling author of A Reliable Wife

"THE SNOW CHILD is enchanting from beginning to end. Ivey breathes life into an old tale and makes it as fresh as the season' s first snow. Simply lovely."
-Keith Donohue, New York Times bestselling author of The Stolen Child

"A transporting tale . . . an amazing achievement."
-Sena Jeter Naslund, New York Times bestselling author of Ahab's Wife

"THE SNOW CHILD is a vivid story of isolation and hope on the Alaska frontier, a narrative of struggle with the elements and the elemental conflict between one's inner demons and dreams, and the miracle of human connection and community in a spectacular, dangerous world. You will not soon forget this story of learning to accept the gifts that fate and love can bring."
-Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek


April Book Club Dinner

Suzi hosted our Hawaiian based dinner party at her charmingly cozy bungalow. There was a wonderful assortment of food all inspired by the book as well as a few beverages including a delicious punch and desert. The book discussion stayed on track despite the fact that Beth was not present to guide us. Several members of the group felt that this was one of their favorite books.






















Saturday

April Book Choice

Moloka'i by Alan Brennert is our April book choice, here is a brief overview from Amazon-

This richly imagined novel, set in Hawai'i more than a century ago, is an extraordinary epic of a little-known time and place---and a deeply moving testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.

Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. Then one day a rose-colored mark appears on her skin, and those dreams are stolen from her. Taken from her home and family, Rachel is sent to Kalaupapa, the quarantined leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka'i. Here her life is supposed to end---but instead she discovers it is only just beginning.

With a vibrant cast of vividly realized characters, Moloka'i is the true-to-life chronicle of a people who embraced life in the face of death. Such is the warmth, humor, and compassion of this novel that "few readers will remain unchanged by Rachel's story" (mostlyfiction.com).

Monday

March 2013 Bookclub dinner

Our February/March meeting was held at Deborah's warmly appointed Victorian home. The gathering was well attended and the food was a colorful and healthy assortment of tastes and cultures. The book talk turned to travel and worldly adventures.


Saturday

Bookcooker blog site of interest

This looks like a fun book site connecting reading and eating and even has recipes:
Wendy (the blog admin)  read The Cat's Table in Aug and offers up some food suggestions, photos and a recipe for milk toffee, visit and enjoy...


http://bookcooker.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-cats-table-and-milk-toffee.html

February/March Book Choice

Because of the shortness of February we decided to move our book club meeting to the first of March. Our reading selection this time was suggested by Beth : The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje (of The English Patient, fame).
Here is a excerpt of what the New York Times book review writer Liesl Schillenger (Oct, 2011) had to say-

In “The Cat’s Table,” Ondaatje seems to lead the reader on a journey through three deeply submerged weeks in his own memory — from the year 1954, when, at age 11, he traveled on the ocean liner Oronsay from Colombo, in what was then Ceylon, to England, a passage that would lead him from his past to his future self. As the novel opens, prominent passengers are granted seats at the captain’s table, but young Michael (nicknamed Mynah) and the two boys he befriends, Cassius (a troublemaker) and Ramadhin (a contemplative asthmatic), are relegated to a table of dubious characters: a mute tailor, a retired ship dismantler, a pianist who has “hit the skids,” a botanist and a lady who hides pigeons in the pockets of her jacket, and reads thrillers in her deck chair, flinging them overboard when they bore her. It’s the pigeon lady who remarks that theirs is “the cat’s table” since “we’re in the least privileged place.”

This turns out to be a matter of perspective...
 So convincing is Ondaatje’s evocation of his narrator’s experience that the reader could easily mistake it for the author’s own. But in a note at the end of the book Ondaatje takes pains to establish that “The Cat’s Table” is “fictional,” though it “sometimes uses the coloring and locations of memoir and autobiography.” This disclaimer will not keep the reader from reflecting that any life so richly recounted belongs more to fiction than fact.

January 2013 Bookclub dinner

Betsy once again agreed to host book club at her elegantly appointed home and all who attended had a grand time indeed. The food traveled the globe from India and Ethiopia to Italy, England and the USA. Cutting for Stone was a epic family saga and one of the longest books this group has taken on. Two guests in attendance had completed the book and several more were just a chapter or two away from the end. The discussion covered such topics as earliest memories, what makes a good Dr. and how do we effect and connect to the ones we love. Beth provided a sip of Ethiopia with a coffee tasting and Lori brought her own birthday cake to round out the evening with singing and well wishing a plenty!
Happy Birthday Lori!

2013 January Book Selection

Our January reading choice is the novel Cutting for Stone by  Abraham Verghese.


Here is a selection from the New York Times book review:

“I will not cut for stone,” runs the text of the Hippocratic oath, “even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.”

Those words provide an epigraph partway through Abraham Verghese’s first novel, “Cutting for Stone,” and also explain the surname of its narrator, Marion Stone, along with his twin brother, Shiva, and their father, the almost entirely absent surgeon Thomas Stone. Absent in body only: in spirit, Thomas’s disappearance after their birth haunts and drives this book.

Yet until the reader comes across the oath, well into the novel, the title may seem pleasing to the ear but puzzling to the mind: it tries to do too many jobs at once. It neither suggests the book’s action — as, say, “Digging to America” does — nor evokes its mood, as “Bleak House” does. Still, Verghese strives for the empathy of Anne Tyler and the scope of Dickens. If he doesn’t quite manage either, he is to be admired for his ambition.

Verghese is a physician and an already accomplished author. His two nonfiction books, “My Own Country,” about AIDS in rural Tennessee, and “The Tennis Partner,” a moving and honest memoir of a difficult, intimate friendship, are justly celebrated. His commitment to both his professions is admirable: currently a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, he also holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But why mention qualifications? What do qualifications matter where fine writing is concerned? Not at all, is the correct answer, and yet qualifications like Verghese’s are tribute, at the very least, to his stalwart effort. This effort is both the making and the unmaking of “Cutting for Stone.”
The plot of this big, dense book is fairly straightforward. Marion and Shiva Stone are born one dramatic afternoon in 1954 in Addis Ababa, the same day their mother — a nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise — dies of complications from her hidden pregnancy. The boys are conjoined at the skull, yet separated at birth; they are raised by Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha, a forceful woman known as Hema, and Dr. Abhi Ghosh, both immigrants from Madras and both doctors at the hospital where the boys’ natural parents also worked. Missing Hospital, it’s called: “Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on the Ethiopian tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like ‘Missing.’ ” They grow up amid the political turmoil of Ethiopia...

This is a first novel that reveals the author’s willingness to show the souls, as well as the bodies, of his characters.

for the complete review visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/books/review/Wagner-t.html?_r=0

Monday

2012 Holiday Cookie Exchange

The Beehive ladies ended the year with their now traditional holiday cookie exchange hosted by Betsy at her storybook Christmas tree filled home of sparkle and tinsel. We dined together on homemade minestrone soup, salad and bread. After a most lively book conversation we recessed to the kitchen and family room to enjoy sweet treats as well as more stories and laughter. This party like gathering is a lovely way to welcome the holiday season and say good-bye to another year all while making plans for the next series of reading adventures.