the New Year January Book Choice 2019

We started 2019 reading year with The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Below is a part of the NPR 2013 book review:

He's a socially inept scientist who's tone deaf to irony. She's an edgy young woman whose fallback mode is sarcasm. Put them together, and hilarity ensues in Australian IT consultant Graeme Simsion's first novel, The Rosie Project. It's an utterly winning screwball comedy about a brilliant, emotionally challenged geneticist who's determined to find a suitable wife with the help of a carefully designed questionnaire, and the patently unsuitable woman who keeps distracting him from his search. If you're looking for sparkling entertainment along the lines of Where'd You Go Bernadette and When Harry Met Sally, The Rosie Project is this season's fix. 

The book wouldn't work, of course, if we couldn't see the sweetness and charm beneath Don Tillman's geekiness. But Simsion's hyper-efficient, fastidious 39-year-old narrator endears us from the moment he starts explaining his Wife Problem, which of course is directly related to his People Problem. Like Christopher Boone, the 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon's 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he's appealing not just despite his eccentricities but because of them.

Don isn't stupid, and he knows he has problems with intimacy. But he finds it hard to understand why people have trouble with his time-saving Standardized Meal System (which reduces "cognitive load" by rotating seven hilariously elaborate dishes on a strict weekly schedule), or why his impermeable, clearly superior Gore-Tex jacket won't do at a posh restaurant where jackets are required. Over their first dinner together, he tells Rosie that she seems "quite intelligent for a barmaid." "The compliments just keep on coming," Rosie responds tartly — at which point Don reflects that "It seemed I was doing well, and I allowed myself a moment of satisfaction, which I shared with Rosie."

Sharp dialogue, terrific pacing, physical hijinks, slapstick, a couple to root for, and more twists than a pack of Twizzlers — it's no surprise that The Rosie Project is bound for the big screen. But read it first.

Molly hosted our first gather of 2019 at her lovely home. 

January 2015 Book Choice

Welcome 2015! Here is our book choice for the New Year: The Master Butchers Singing Club
by Louise Erdrich


Having survived World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend, killed in action. With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious knife set, Fidelis sets out for America. In Argus, North Dakota, he builds a business, a home for his family—which includes Eva and four sons—and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. When the Old World meets the New—in the person of Delphine Watzka—the great adventure of Fidelis's life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted. She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine's life, and the trajectory of this brilliant novel.

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.

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.

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