January 2022 Book Choice

 We started the year with Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Meet the author:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wfaQS3beOQ

Here is a section of the NPR 2020 book review:

"James McBride's Deacon King Kong is a feverish love letter to New York City, people, and writing. The prose is relentless and McBride's storytelling skills shine as he drags readers at breakneck speed trough a plethora of lives, times, events, and conversations. The novel is 370 pages, but McBride has packed enough in there for a dozen novellas, and reading them all mashed together is a pleasure.

The year is 1969, and Sportcoat is the hard-drinking deacon of an old church in the Cause Houses projects in south Brooklyn. Sportcoat, also known as Deacon Cuffy, lost his wife a while ago, and his life has been on a downward spiral since. He argues with her ghost almost constantly and is obsessed with the money from the Christmas Club, which was in a secret place she didn't tell anyone about before dying.

Deacon King Kong is fast, deep, complex, and hilarious. McBride's prose is shimmering and moving, a living thing that has its own rhythm, pulls you in from the first page and never lets go. His story focuses on the people that make the Big Apple what it is: the strange, the poor, the insane, the mobsters. He also showcases the city's wonderful diversity, filling his pages with Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Italians, and Irish folks.

Deacon King Kong is full of heart, humor, and compassion. It contains page-long sentences that sing and individual lines that stick to your brain like literary taffy. This is a narrative about flawed, poor people navigating an ugly, racist world and trying their best with the help of God, each other, or the bottle; their stories are unique, but the struggles are universal — and that makes this a novel about all of us. In Deacon King Kong, McBride entertains us, and shows us both the beauty and the ugliness of humanity. I say we give him another National Book Award for this one. It's that good."

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas.

January Book Choice 2020

Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce started our new season of ready.
Here is the Kirkus Review July 2018:

Innocence and perky optimism are tempered by less sunny feelings over the course of British novelist Pearce’s debut, which opens with a relatively upbeat evocation of World War II London as experienced by 22-year-old legal secretary Emmy. Fond of larky contemporary expressions and capital letters—“I gave what I hoped was a plucky Everything Is Absolutely Tip Top smile”—Emmy yearns to be a Lady War Correspondent and finds a new job at Woman’s Friend magazine. But her duties turn out to include destroying problem-page letters on unacceptable topics (“Premarital relations, Extramarital relations, Physical relations,” etc.) on behalf of her boss, battle-axe agony aunt Mrs. Henrietta Bird. Warmhearted Emmy can't bear to leave these needy women's letters unanswered and begins replying to them in secret, forging Mrs. Bird’s signature. Matters turn more serious after Emmy has an argument with her best friend Bunty’s fiance, William, over his risky work as a fireman.  Vividly evocative of wartime life, with its descriptions of bombed streets, frantic fire stations, and the desperate gaiety and fortitude of ordinary souls enduring nightly terror, Pearce’s novel lays a light, charming surface over a graver underbelly. With its focus on the challenges and expectations placed on those left behind, it also asks: Who is supporting the women in a world turned upside down by war?

 “a jaunty, heartbreaking winner” (People)—for fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Lilac Girls.

Jane hosted the dinner at her bungalow the conversation was lively and the food yummy.

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 Book Club Dinner 2015

Jane hosted the first meeting of the New Year at her arty Elmhurst cottage. Interesting discussion on the lessons of life and the choices we make based on love, survival, lust and security . Lots of meaty food choices, sweets and belly laughs.

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.