We had a lovely evening at the Hasting household at the end of August to discuss Behind the Beautiful Forever's. Several members of the group were absent due to vacations and other summer activities so we were a bit of a small group. But a lively discussion was had. We ate dinner out back until we heard the spray planes and headed inside for cover. We discussed the characters of this non-fiction book and how unbelievable their living conditions were. Some of us found the book a bit depressing but some found it inspiring that people can survive anywhere. The day to day survival of these people was more then most of us could even imagine- living in trash, seeing dead bodies and people lighting themselves on fire. Everyone agreed it was well written and read like fiction. Like all good books, we were introduced to new places and new experiences.
The food was a mix of Indian cuisine, vegetables , rice, salad and a dump cake (they lived in a dump) plus an interesting after- dinner tea. Overall a good read, great food and a good gathering.
Next month we are reading And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. The meeting will be at Molly's house on September 26th.
Sunday
Thursday
August Book Choice 2014
Our late summer reading choice is "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" here is what the NY Times had to say about this powerful story...
Katherine Boo writes in “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” her exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter.
Half an acre. 335 huts. 3,000 people. And a concrete wall that is supposed to hide them from view: this is Annawadi, the Mumbai slum that comes vibrantly to life in this book’s pages. Ms. Boo says that she chose Annawadi because the scale of this “sumpy plug of slum” bordering a lake of sewage was small, and its location was fraught with possibilities. Annawadi sits beside the road to the Mumbai airport, on “a stretch where new India and old India collided and made new India late.” In 2008, at the time the events in the book unfolded, scavenging and trash sorting were the children of Annawadi’s most promising career choices.
Without condescending to her subjects in the slightest, Ms. Boo explains that dreams of upward mobility are just barely possible in Annawadi. And Zehrunisa’s family has set out to renovate the kitchen of the hut in which they live. The book takes its peculiar title from sunshine-yellow ads for ceramic tile that are painted on the concrete wall that hides Annawadi: the ad series repeats the words “Beautiful” and “Forever.” Behind those “beautiful forevers,” Zehrunisa wants some of that tile for her own.
The book’s cover, with an image of abject squalor, does not do justice to its agile prose, wry tone and surprisingly upbeat theatrics. Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted.
Sunday
June 2014 Bookclub Dinner
A cooling Delta breeze created the visitors as the arrived to celebrate the May June book choice "Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore" at Michele's home of loveliness. It was a small but lively group with a variety of Google inspired salads and NYC vs SanFran. dishes as well as sourdough bread and the classic Rice a Roni . What do you read "on" an electronic devise or an actual printed book? Is one better than the other? What is the future of bookstores? These and many other questions were discussed. Also we are setting our plans for the next 5 selections taking us into 2015!
Thursday
May-June 2014 Book Club Choice
May June is always a very busy time for many of our group members so we decided to add extra reading time to this choice. Our book is Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Here is a bit of the NY Time review December 2012
We take an arrogant pleasure in the notion we might be the generation that renders so ancient a technology obsolete. “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” by Robin Sloan, dexterously tackles the intersection between old technologies and new with a novel that is part love letter to books, part technological meditation, part thrilling adventure, part requiem.
Clay Jannon, an unemployed Web designer, takes a job working the graveyard shift at a 24-hour bookstore, owned by the strange Mr. Penumbra. The store is just as inscrutable, with two kinds of customers — random passers-by who stop in so rarely Clay wonders how the store is able to stay open and a furtive “community of people who orbit the store like strange moons. . . . They arrive with algorithmic regularity. They never browse. They come wide-awake, completely sober and vibrating with need.” These customers borrow from a mysterious set of books, which Clay has been warned not to read. He surrenders to his curiosity and discovers that the books are written in code. With the help of his roommate, a special effects artist; his best friend, a successful creator of “boob-simulation software”; and his romantic interest, Kat Potente, who works for Google in data visualization, our likable hero goes on a quest.
“Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” is eminently enjoyable, full of warmth and intelligence. Sloan balances a strong plot with philosophical questions about technology and books and the power both contain. The prose maintains an engaging pace as Clay, Mr. Penumbra and the quirky constellation of people around them try to determine what matters more — the solution to a problem or how that solution is achieved.
There are charming moments. When the friends are staking out the Unbroken Spine, Clay observes, “Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.” We are reminded there are two kinds of people — those who function in an analog world and those who are so enamored with technology they cannot.
Here is a bit of the NY Time review December 2012
We take an arrogant pleasure in the notion we might be the generation that renders so ancient a technology obsolete. “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” by Robin Sloan, dexterously tackles the intersection between old technologies and new with a novel that is part love letter to books, part technological meditation, part thrilling adventure, part requiem.
Clay Jannon, an unemployed Web designer, takes a job working the graveyard shift at a 24-hour bookstore, owned by the strange Mr. Penumbra. The store is just as inscrutable, with two kinds of customers — random passers-by who stop in so rarely Clay wonders how the store is able to stay open and a furtive “community of people who orbit the store like strange moons. . . . They arrive with algorithmic regularity. They never browse. They come wide-awake, completely sober and vibrating with need.” These customers borrow from a mysterious set of books, which Clay has been warned not to read. He surrenders to his curiosity and discovers that the books are written in code. With the help of his roommate, a special effects artist; his best friend, a successful creator of “boob-simulation software”; and his romantic interest, Kat Potente, who works for Google in data visualization, our likable hero goes on a quest.
“Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” is eminently enjoyable, full of warmth and intelligence. Sloan balances a strong plot with philosophical questions about technology and books and the power both contain. The prose maintains an engaging pace as Clay, Mr. Penumbra and the quirky constellation of people around them try to determine what matters more — the solution to a problem or how that solution is achieved.
There are charming moments. When the friends are staking out the Unbroken Spine, Clay observes, “Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.” We are reminded there are two kinds of people — those who function in an analog world and those who are so enamored with technology they cannot.
April Book Group Meeting
For our April Book Group we met at Betsy's Sunset Magazine home and enjoyed a lovely meal and a sparkling book discussion. Originally planned for outside but moved indoors because of the possible threat of rain, the gathering was intimate and lively. One of our big surprises for the evening was no one brought Chinese food!
This poetic/operatic sad tale captured our hearts and made for an interesting discussion regarding making good-bad choices and bad-good choices.
This poetic/operatic sad tale captured our hearts and made for an interesting discussion regarding making good-bad choices and bad-good choices.
Saturday
April 2014 Book Group - Songs of Willow Frost
A Talk with Jamie Ford, Author of Songs of Willow Frost
Your debut Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet sold over 1.3 million copies, was on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years, won the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, and was even transformed into a popular stage play. Why do you think it resonated so deeply with readers across the country? Are there any particularly memorable or surprising reactions that you’d like to share?
At its core, Hotel is a love story—or actually a love-lost-and-then-found story, which I think everyone can relate to on some level. There’s a reason why people try to lose 20 pounds before class reunions. There are just some people in our lives whom we love, and lose, and unfailingly long for. They orbit our hearts like Halley’s Comet, crossing into our universe only once, or if we’re lucky, twice in a lifetime. Hotel also deals with race relations during an oft-forgotten period in US history. As a researcher and storyteller, I like turning over rocks and looking at the squishy things underneath. I think others do too.
As far as memorable reactions, here are three that immediately come to mind:
1) Being invited to the Minidoka Reunion (Minidoka was an internment camp outside Twin Falls, Idaho), where former internees had a karaoke night where they sang Don’t Fence Me In.
2) Going to Norway and speaking to high school students who were assigned the book, which was surreal.
3) A sansei (third generation Japanese American) woman sharing that she had read the book to her mother, a former internee, while she’d been in hospice, and that the book was the first time they’d talked about “camp.”
Hotel has been described as “a wartime-era Chinese-Japanese variation on Romeo and Juliet” (Seattle Times). In what ways is Songs of Willow Frost a different kind of love story, and why did you want to turn to this narrative next?
If I were to create a perfume, it would come in a cracked bottle and be called Abandonment. That’s how Songs of Willow Frost opens. It’s another love story—and while there are boy-meets-girl aspects to the tale, the real love story is about a mother and her son, and about how two people can be so close, yet so far away from each other, and ultimately so misunderstood. I don’t think we ever really understand our parents until they’re gone—at least that’s been my experience. William experiences that loss, and it affects him profoundly. But then he has something many of us don’t get—the opportunity to find his mother again, to see her through new eyes.
Willow breaks into the movie industry at a studio in Tacoma, WA. What was Washington’s role in early American film? Does it still bear the footprint of that era?
Before the film industry coalesced in Southern California, there were viable studios in unusual places, like Minnesota, Idaho, and even Tacoma, WA., where H.C. Weaver Productions has long been forgotten. Early in the research process I called the Washington Film Office, and they told me the first film shot in Washington State was Tugboat Annie (1933). I’d read about movie crews on Mt. Rainier around 1924, so I knew the film office information was off. I kept digging and found press clippings which led to the H.C. Weaver production stage, which at the time was the third-largest freestanding film space in America (the larger two were in Hollywood). H.C. Weaver produced three films, Hearts and Fists (1926), Eyes of the Totem (1927), and The Heart of the Yukon (1927). These silent films were tied up in distribution and unfortunately released when talkies were overtaking their silent predecessors. The studio closed its doors as the roaring 20s stopped roaring. The building was converted into an enormous dance hall, which burned to the ground in 1932. The films have all been lost, though the Tacoma Public Library has a wonderful collection of production shots by Gaston Lance, the studio’s art director.
You have said that Liu Song/Willow is also an amalgamation of your own mother and Chinese grandmother. Are there particular real-life experiences that work their way into your story, and what was it like to write with them in mind?
I come from a family of big families. Both of my Chinese grandparents had more siblings than you could count on one hand, yet my father was an only child. The reason for that is because my Chinese grandmother had a backroom “procedure” that left her unable to bear more children. And yet my grandmother was fierce. She was an alpha-female at a time where it was perhaps culturally and socially unacceptable, but in America, as a U.S. citizen, she could become something different. That said, as a Chinese woman, she was still minority within a minority, and unable to receive proper medical care. My mom on the other hand was Caucasian. But she was dirt-poor—so poor that when she became pregnant with my oldest sister, she could only dream of giving birth in an actual hospital. That dream went unfulfilled, as her husband at the time gambled away the money she’d saved for the delivery. But, like my grandmother, she picked herself up after every setback, after every sacrifice. There are elements of both of them in Willow—in the kinds of challenges she faces, and the determination with which she faces them, and survives.
What do you hope readers take away from Songs of Willow Frost?
I hope they’re equally entertained and enlightened. I hope they value their time spent with Willow and William. And I hope they see growth in me as a writer. Is that too much to hope for? I mean, before the Beatles wrote Abbey Road they were singing, “She loves you, yeah-yeah-yeah.” We all have to start somewhere.
Your debut Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet sold over 1.3 million copies, was on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years, won the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, and was even transformed into a popular stage play. Why do you think it resonated so deeply with readers across the country? Are there any particularly memorable or surprising reactions that you’d like to share?
At its core, Hotel is a love story—or actually a love-lost-and-then-found story, which I think everyone can relate to on some level. There’s a reason why people try to lose 20 pounds before class reunions. There are just some people in our lives whom we love, and lose, and unfailingly long for. They orbit our hearts like Halley’s Comet, crossing into our universe only once, or if we’re lucky, twice in a lifetime. Hotel also deals with race relations during an oft-forgotten period in US history. As a researcher and storyteller, I like turning over rocks and looking at the squishy things underneath. I think others do too.
As far as memorable reactions, here are three that immediately come to mind:
1) Being invited to the Minidoka Reunion (Minidoka was an internment camp outside Twin Falls, Idaho), where former internees had a karaoke night where they sang Don’t Fence Me In.
2) Going to Norway and speaking to high school students who were assigned the book, which was surreal.
3) A sansei (third generation Japanese American) woman sharing that she had read the book to her mother, a former internee, while she’d been in hospice, and that the book was the first time they’d talked about “camp.”
Hotel has been described as “a wartime-era Chinese-Japanese variation on Romeo and Juliet” (Seattle Times). In what ways is Songs of Willow Frost a different kind of love story, and why did you want to turn to this narrative next?
If I were to create a perfume, it would come in a cracked bottle and be called Abandonment. That’s how Songs of Willow Frost opens. It’s another love story—and while there are boy-meets-girl aspects to the tale, the real love story is about a mother and her son, and about how two people can be so close, yet so far away from each other, and ultimately so misunderstood. I don’t think we ever really understand our parents until they’re gone—at least that’s been my experience. William experiences that loss, and it affects him profoundly. But then he has something many of us don’t get—the opportunity to find his mother again, to see her through new eyes.
Willow breaks into the movie industry at a studio in Tacoma, WA. What was Washington’s role in early American film? Does it still bear the footprint of that era?
Before the film industry coalesced in Southern California, there were viable studios in unusual places, like Minnesota, Idaho, and even Tacoma, WA., where H.C. Weaver Productions has long been forgotten. Early in the research process I called the Washington Film Office, and they told me the first film shot in Washington State was Tugboat Annie (1933). I’d read about movie crews on Mt. Rainier around 1924, so I knew the film office information was off. I kept digging and found press clippings which led to the H.C. Weaver production stage, which at the time was the third-largest freestanding film space in America (the larger two were in Hollywood). H.C. Weaver produced three films, Hearts and Fists (1926), Eyes of the Totem (1927), and The Heart of the Yukon (1927). These silent films were tied up in distribution and unfortunately released when talkies were overtaking their silent predecessors. The studio closed its doors as the roaring 20s stopped roaring. The building was converted into an enormous dance hall, which burned to the ground in 1932. The films have all been lost, though the Tacoma Public Library has a wonderful collection of production shots by Gaston Lance, the studio’s art director.
You have said that Liu Song/Willow is also an amalgamation of your own mother and Chinese grandmother. Are there particular real-life experiences that work their way into your story, and what was it like to write with them in mind?
I come from a family of big families. Both of my Chinese grandparents had more siblings than you could count on one hand, yet my father was an only child. The reason for that is because my Chinese grandmother had a backroom “procedure” that left her unable to bear more children. And yet my grandmother was fierce. She was an alpha-female at a time where it was perhaps culturally and socially unacceptable, but in America, as a U.S. citizen, she could become something different. That said, as a Chinese woman, she was still minority within a minority, and unable to receive proper medical care. My mom on the other hand was Caucasian. But she was dirt-poor—so poor that when she became pregnant with my oldest sister, she could only dream of giving birth in an actual hospital. That dream went unfulfilled, as her husband at the time gambled away the money she’d saved for the delivery. But, like my grandmother, she picked herself up after every setback, after every sacrifice. There are elements of both of them in Willow—in the kinds of challenges she faces, and the determination with which she faces them, and survives.
What do you hope readers take away from Songs of Willow Frost?
I hope they’re equally entertained and enlightened. I hope they value their time spent with Willow and William. And I hope they see growth in me as a writer. Is that too much to hope for? I mean, before the Beatles wrote Abbey Road they were singing, “She loves you, yeah-yeah-yeah.” We all have to start somewhere.
March Book Group Dinner
For our March group we met at Kitty's lovely home in East Sac to
discuss March by Geraldine Brooks. This is the story of the father from Little Women during his time in the war. For fans of Little Women, the father has always been a bit of a mystery as he is missing for over half of the book. At the start of Little Women they read a letter from father where he tells them to be his "Little Women". This books shows us the terrible things he sees and ordeals he has been through while away for the war cause. It is interesting because he is not well liked by the other soldiers because of his outspoken beliefs. He has a relationship with a slave but we are left wondering if it was physical or not. Some of our group was convinced it was. It is left open in the book.
Overall the group liked it and it was a good discussion. I would not rank it at the level of Little Women but it was a interesting tale. Also gave us some new insights into Marmee and her famous temper. We had some nice vegetarian dishes in honor of his diet of no meat. We didn't necessarily honor the no eggs and milk rule. Suzi brought a delicious chocolate chip cookie in a skillet that was full of chocolate goodness. Who could resist.
April is Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford. Same author who wrote Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. Should be fun!
Sunday
March 2014 Book Club choice
The book "March" by Geraldine Brooks is our March reading choice. Here is a excerpt from Ms. Brooks website regarding the writing of this historic fiction.
A conversation with Geraldine
Brooks:
In your afterward, you make an amusing apology to your
husband, a well-known writer and Civil War aficionado, for your previous lack
of appreciation for his passion. Although you say you’re not sure “when or
where” it happened, would you talk a bit about your change of heart and what
led to your new and profound interest in the American Civil War and eventually
to the writing of March?
In the early 1990s we came to live in a small Virginia village where
Civil War history is all around us. There are bullet scars on the bricks of the
Baptist church where a skirmish took place; we have a Union soldier’s belt
buckle that was unearthed near the old well in our courtyard. The village was
Quaker, and abolitionist, but in the midst of the Confederacy. The war brought
huge issues of conscience for the townsfolk, a few of whom sacrificed their
nonviolent principles to raise a regiment to fight on the Union side. It was
thinking about the people who once lived in our house, and the moral challenges
the war presented for them, that kindled my interest in imagining an idealist
adrift in that war. I am gripped by the stories of individuals from the generation
Oliver Wendell Holmes so eloquently described when he said: “In our youth our
hearts were touched with fire.” I’m still not all that interested in the order
of battles, I still drive Tony crazy by failing to keep the chronology
straight, and offered the choice between a trip to the dentist and another
midsummer reenactment; it’d be a hard call. But sometimes, alone on a
battlefield as the mists rise over the grass, I feel like a time traveler, born
back by the ghosts of all those vivid, missing boys.
Grace Clement is such an extraordinary character and is
pivotal in shaping March’s life. You tell us that her voice was inspired by an
1861 autobiography, but what inspired you to create a romantic relationship
between Grace and March? Were there any historical hints that Alcott had had
such a relationship?
The idea of an attraction between March and Grace is
entirely imagined and not at all suggested by Bronson Alcott’s biography. It
grew naturally out of the narrative: they are young and attractive when they
first meet, he is an idealist, she is a compelling person in a dramatic and
moving situation. It seemed inevitable to me.
A year after March enlists he says, “One day I hope to go
back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the man of moral certainty that I
was . . . that innocent man, who knew with such clear confidence exactly what
it was that he was meant to do.” Do you think he can go back? Is it even
possible? Would you discuss how you think March changes by the end of the novel
and what parts of him remain intact?
I don’t think he can go back. Nor do I think it is
necessarily desirable. Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other
than their own. By the end of the book, March is damaged, but he is still an
idealist; it’s just that he sees more clearly the cost of his ideals, and
understands that he is not the only one who must pay for them.
Your book Nine Parts of Desire deals with the issues of
Muslim women. Year of Wonders had a female heroine, Anna Frith. How was it
different writing principally from a man’s point of view this time?
I have always believed that the human heart is the human
heart, no matter what century we live in, what country we inhabit, or what
gender we happen to be. This is a book about strong feelings: love and fear. I
can’t believe there’s much difference in how a man or a woman experiences them.
And then, I had the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, which are perhaps
as complete a record of a Victorian man’s interior life as any you could find.
February Book Club dinner
Molly hosted the February dinner and as always she was a lovely and generous hostess. The rainy weather and health issues kept several members home, but the event was still cheerful and filled with book talk and sinfully good food. Our book was the Holy and the Broken, which we agreed was a good idea for a book but most agreed it went on a bit to long (like a broken record?) There was a lot of talk about art created by a artist and what happens when it becomes public (or public property). Can you truly own art?
February 2014 Book Choice
Our February Book choice is The Holly or the Broken by Alan Light
Here is a bit of what the NY Times wrote about this book in 2012
Here is a bit of what the NY Times wrote about this book in 2012
“The Holy or the Broken” comes with codes that, when
scanned, are supposed to yield different versions of “Hallelujah.” Or you can
go straight to YouTube and find the renditions that matter most to this book.
Mr. Light discusses these performances of “Hallelujah” in chronological order,
but there’s much more to “The Holy or the Broken” than a litany of cover
versions. The real questions are these: How did this obscure song get into our
elevators, subway stations, movies and TV shows? Why is it used at benefits to
help victims of disaster? Why won’t contestants on musical talent shows quit
butchering it? Why do the lyrics of different versions vary so much? And how
did this song get its reputation for universality when nobody, not even Mr.
Cohen, really knows what it means?
The album containing “Hallelujah” came out on an independent
label in 1984, and then it languished. See Ms. Simmons’s account for an
understanding of why, by 1991, the world was nonetheless ready for a Leonard
Cohen tribute album: “I’m Your Fan,” put together by the French music magazine
Les Inrockuptibles. This album prompted a major overhaul of “Hallelujah” by
John Cale, once of the Velvet Underground, who re-edited the lyrics, coming up
with a version that has proved more enduring than Mr. Cohen’s. Mr. Cale’s
stark, exquisitely pure rendition, with an emphasis on the song’s eroticism, is
by some lights (like this one) the best “Hallelujah” ever recorded.
January Book Club dinner
The January 2014 Bookgroup dinner was hosted by Jane at her artistically eclectic Elmhurst home. The food choices were culturally diverse from American KFC to treats found at a proper English tea. All were enjoyed and the book talk was as diverse and varied as the dinner choices.
January 2014 Bookgroup book choice
Our January 2014 book choice is Death comes to Pemberley by P.D. James. Here is what the NY Times had to say about this prolific and well respected writer of mysteries.
Ms. James cleverly weaves in references to both “Emma” and “Persuasion” in a way that expands the world of her novel, and “Death Comes to Pemberley” also has a descriptive density greater than any of Austen’s books. Austen could take the 19th century, its customs and culture, for granted. Ms. James very satisfyingly recreates them.
The story is set in 1803, six years after “Pride and
Prejudice” was finished (though it wasn’t published until 1813) and presumably
when the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy took place. They have two young sons
now, and the arrival of a third child is shortly to be announced. But their
tranquillity is interrupted one wet and windy evening when an unexpected
carriage comes rocketing up the drive.
Inside is Elizabeth ’s airhead
sister Lydia ,
the one who eloped with the charming but unreliable George Wickham, screaming
that her husband is dead. Actually he isn’t, though many, including Darcy, for
whom Wickham is a constant source of embarrassment and irritation, might wish
he were. A search party discovers Wickham in the woods, drunk and bloodstained,
beside the body of his best friend, Captain Denny, and he babbles what sounds
like a confession. But is Wickham, although a deadbeat and a serial seducer of
young women, really a murderer? Even Darcy can’t quite believe that of him.
Ms. James, 91 and the author of 20 previous books, is the
greatest living writer of British crime fiction, and probably that genre’s most
talented practitioner ever. It’s hard to imagine any of her predecessors — like
Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Julian Symons or even Agatha Christie, who for
all her plotting skills was not much of a prose stylist — having the nerve to
attempt an Austen sequel, let alone the ability to pull it off.
The style of “Death Comes to Pemberley” is a loose
approximation of 19th-century prose, a sort of modern equivalent, rather than a
painstaking imitation. But it’s more than convincing and every now and then, as
a kind of homage or reminder, hits the precise, epigrammatic Austen note.
Ms. James cleverly weaves in references to both “Emma” and “Persuasion” in a way that expands the world of her novel, and “Death Comes to Pemberley” also has a descriptive density greater than any of Austen’s books. Austen could take the 19th century, its customs and culture, for granted. Ms. James very satisfyingly recreates them.
Monday
Holiday Cookie Exchange and Book Club dinner
In December we met at Betsy lovely home in Elk Grove to discuss Dead End in Norvelt and to share delicous Holiday Cookies. Yes, it is the annual cookie exchange!
The book is actually a young adult book about the summer vacation in a small town that is slowly dying and how a young boy makes new friends, learns a bit about history and deals with his parents.
" Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is "grounded for life" by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. "
The book was pretty good and an easy read. We like something easy for December but this might have been a little too easy. We discussed the characters and the action. I would say overall all it got mixed reviews. Fun and fast but not exciting enough to hold our attention. The real excitment of the evening was the company and the delicious cookies. As usual, everyone out-did themselves and we had a ton of cookies to choose from. Betsy made her delicious vegetarian minestone soup, bread and cheese. Plus, Judy brought a salad. Beth did her annual coffee tasting with Starbucks Christmas Blend. We left there full and happy. We decided on our next 6 books! Nice Job everyone
. January- Death comes to Pemberly- recommended by Suzi
February- The Holy and the unbroken; Leonard Cohn, Jeff Buckley and the unlikely ascent of Hallelujah- recommended by Rory
March- March recommended by Beth
April- Songs of Willow Frost- recommended by Lori
May- Mr Pemumbras 24 hour bookstore- recommended by Molly
June- Behind the Beautiful Forevers- recommended by Jane.
It's going to be a great 2014 !
The book is actually a young adult book about the summer vacation in a small town that is slowly dying and how a young boy makes new friends, learns a bit about history and deals with his parents.
" Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is "grounded for life" by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. "
The book was pretty good and an easy read. We like something easy for December but this might have been a little too easy. We discussed the characters and the action. I would say overall all it got mixed reviews. Fun and fast but not exciting enough to hold our attention. The real excitment of the evening was the company and the delicious cookies. As usual, everyone out-did themselves and we had a ton of cookies to choose from. Betsy made her delicious vegetarian minestone soup, bread and cheese. Plus, Judy brought a salad. Beth did her annual coffee tasting with Starbucks Christmas Blend. We left there full and happy. We decided on our next 6 books! Nice Job everyone
. January- Death comes to Pemberly- recommended by Suzi
February- The Holy and the unbroken; Leonard Cohn, Jeff Buckley and the unlikely ascent of Hallelujah- recommended by Rory
March- March recommended by Beth
April- Songs of Willow Frost- recommended by Lori
May- Mr Pemumbras 24 hour bookstore- recommended by Molly
June- Behind the Beautiful Forevers- recommended by Jane.
It's going to be a great 2014 !
Coffee tasting |
November Book Group Dinner
Simone hosted the Ghost Bride dinner party in her cozy Elmhust cottage. Food varied from Chinese and Asian selections to beyond the grave and heavenly. The book talk was just as varied and spirited. I enjoyed the graphic novel feel of the book and really learned a lot about the Chinese view of the after life, customs and traditions surrounding, life, marriage, death and beyond.
Fall reading Ghost Bride
This month we are reading the debut novel by Yangsze Choo Ghost Bride here is what USA Today had to say about this novel:
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
Like all good literary heroines, Li Lan is motherless,
impoverished, educated beyond the custom of the times, and uninterested in
marriage, especially to someone who's dead.
Since she lives in 19th-century Malacca, the British colony
in what is now Malaysia ,
this is a situation whose disadvantages Jane Austen herself would appreciate. Author Yangsze Choo bases her first novel The Ghost Bride (3
stars out of four) on a little-known custom of Chinese immigrants to the Malay
peninsula: marrying young women to recently deceased grooms, sometimes when
romance is tragically cut short by death, sometimes to belatedly elevate a
mistress to a wife.
Li Lan's potential match is for more complicated reasons,
and her disembodied fiancé turns out to be especially importunate. Driven to a
rash decision, Li Lan finds herself making a journey to the underworld to sort
out her increasingly complex, and dangerous, romantic life.
Like the cultural stew of the Malayan peninsula Choo
describes, the book folds in religious traditions from Muslim purdah to the
Buddhist wheel of life. The Chinese underworld is apparently the Cook County
of the afterlife, a flatland full of corrupt officials and scheming plutocrats,
furnished entirely by offerings to the dead made by their survivors. Like Persephone of Greek myth, Li Lan is told to eat nothing
or she will never return to the living world. Her Virgil is a slightly shady
coquette; her protector is part hard-boiled cop putting her in harm's way, and
part Cary Grant, well-dressed and bantering flirtatiously.
There are ox-headed demons, puppet servants, attacking
vultures and bribable Courts of Judgment. No wonder Li Lan thinks the proper
Anglican cemeteries of the British colonials, with their "neat green
swards and tidy gravestones under the frangipani trees,'' seem so restful.
Even as she describes rolling her eyes at her overprotective
amah, her childhood nanny, or plowing through a platter of treats at a fancy
mah-jongg party, Li Lan has a clear and amusing voice. She also proves to be
resourceful, brave, passionate, and spirited enough to trade repartee with a
dragon.
Choo's book is a bit overstuffed: from whodunit to ghost
story to coming-of-age to romance, there is enough plot to fill several more
novels.
But the beguiling tale of Li Lan navigating both the land of
the dead and the territory of her own heart makes you hope Choo is the author
who writes all of them.
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