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).

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.

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

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.

November 2012 Book Choice

For the month of  November we chose The Great Gatsby by
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a classic tale of love and  power soon to be yet
another major motion picture.

As per Wikipedia


The Great Gatsby is a novel by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book takes place from spring to autumn 1922, during a prosperous time in the United States known as the Roaring Twenties, which lasted from 1920 until the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Between 1920 and 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, commonly known as Prohibition, completely banned the sale and manufacturing of all alcoholic beverages: distilled spirits, beer, and wine. The ban made millionaires out of bootleggers, who smuggled alcohol into the U.S.. The setting of the novel contributed greatly to its popularity following its early release, but the book did not receive widespread attention until after Fitzgerald's death in 1940, when republishing in 1945 and 1953 quickly found a wide readership.

The Great Gatsby received mostly positive reviews when it was first published and many of Fitzgerald's literary friends wrote him letters praising the novel. However, Gatsby did not experience the commercial success of Fitzgerald's previous two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, and although the novel went through two initial printings, some of these copies remained unsold years later.

When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he had been largely forgotten. His obituary in The New York Times mentioned Gatsby as evidence of great potential that was never reached. Gatsby gained readers when Armed Services Editions gave away around 150,000 copies of the novel to the American military in World War II.

Today the book is widely regarded as a "Great American Novel" and a literary classic. The Modern Library named it the second best English-language novel of the 20th Century.

The cover of The Great Gatsby is among the most celebrated pieces of jacket art in American literature. A little-known artist named Francis Cugat was commissioned to illustrate the book while Fitzgerald was in the midst of writing it. The cover was completed before the novel, with Fitzgerald so enamored of it that he told his publisher he had "written it into" the novel.

October beehive book dinner

Our October dinner was hosted by Mary Beth and Rory at their hauntingly adorable home in the pocket area.

There was not a lot of food/meals mentioned in this book but we managed to connect to the season and symbols quite well. Fiendish foods, goblin greens and other tasty treats filled the tables and our tummies.

A Monster Calls had many surprises and questions. The book talk last for several hours and way into the night...we covered life, living, action vs thought and dying...big topics for an evening discussion.

October Book Club Choice

Our October book choice is A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (based on the idea of Siobhan Dowd).

Here is an overview by the Independent UK

"Children's writer Siobhan Dowd died when she only had the idea for this fifth book; Ness has taken that idea and made of it both a classic tale and a tribute to her. Young Conor's mother is ill with cancer, and he is having nightmares regularly.

They take on a physical form when the yew tree he can see from his bedroom window assumes a human shape, and speaks to him. It tells him three stories – about a bad prince, a foolish parson and an invisible man – as Conor, who is being bullied at school, is estranged from his father and dislikes his grandmother, struggles to accept what is happening to his mother. Ness's fracturing of the family here in many different ways, and his lonely, alienated child-hero, gives his moving tale of death and loss a modern touch, whilst also endowing it with some much-needed fantasy."

From the Telegraph 2012

"This year, for the first time ever, the same book, A Monster Calls, has won the CILIP Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and its companion prize for illustration, the Kate Greenaway Medal. It is an extraordinary outcome for a book with extraordinary beginnings. Its author, Patrick Ness, was passed the baton of an idea from a previous Carnegie Medal-winner, Siobhan Dowd, who died of breast cancer in 2008. (Dowd won the Medal posthumously for Bog Child.) Although Ness wrote a book that was very much his own, the spirit of Dowd was in the book, and in the illustrations by Jim Kay. "

September 2012 Book Club Meeting

Molly hosted our September gathering at her elegant and charmingly eclectic home. Most members had not completed/started/purchased the book choice so the literary discussion was limited yet we still had hours of conversation.

Judy shared stories from Italy, Beth from Seattle and Rory her journey home. The rest of us had humorous tales of family/work adventures from the summer and the food was varied and as delicious as the talk!

September 2012 book choice

September's Book Choice

"The World to Come"

by Dara Horn

Entertainment Weekly Editor's Choice

New York Times Editor's Choice

A Book-of-the Month Club Smart Readers Selection

A Book Sense Top 20 Pick

Winner of the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction

Winner of the 2007 Harold U. Ribalow Prize

Best of Young American Novelists 2007 - Granta



Prize-winning author Dara Horn interweaves mystery, romance, folklore, theology, history, and scripture into a spellbinding modern tale. She brings us on a breathtaking collision course of past, present, and future -- revealing both the ordinariness and the beauty of "the world to come." Nestling stories within stories, this is a novel of remarkable clarity and deep inner meaning.

August Bookgroup Dinner

Our end of summer group meeting was held at Lori's book-filled villa, a grand jolly time was had by one and all. The book made for interesting discussions regarding surgery, body parts and how much of "us" belongs to us? What about the needs of the scientific community and humanity? Is one persons freedom to much to sacrifice for the better of many?

Caught Reading

To Fly | Steve McCurry

Photographer Steve McCurry catches people reading around the globe

August Book Club Choice

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is our August 2012 book choice.
Here is what NY Times Sunday Book Review writer Lisa Margonelli had to say about this book in Feb 2010-

"In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot introduces us to the “real live woman,” the children who survived her, and the interplay of race, poverty, science and one of the most important medical discoveries of the last 100 years. Skloot narrates the science lucidly, tracks the racial politics of medicine thoughtfully and tells the Lacks family’s often painful history with grace. She also confronts the spookiness of the cells themselves, intrepidly crossing into the spiritual plane on which the family has come to understand their mother’s continued presence in the world. Science writing is often just about “the facts.” ­Skloot’s book, her first, is far deeper, braver and more wonderful.

Skloot traces the family’s emotional ordeal, the changing ethics and law around tissue collections, and the inadvertently careless journalists and researchers who violated the family’s privacy by publishing everything from Henrietta’s medical records to the family’s genetic information. She tacks between the perspective of the scientists and the family evenly and fairly..."

Lisa Margonelli is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of “Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank.”

Video link with the author:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vow1ePzuqo

July Book Club Meeting

The July Book Club Meeting was held at newest member, Michele's festively artistic abode complete with hen house and young chicks.

There was an incredible assortment of mountain/country and Italian foods plus a Freeport Cake in celebration of Miss Rory's birthday day. Much laughter as we dinned outside, talking about the book  characters and planning our next few reads.

We may have stayed tooooo long but the night still felt young even if we didn't when our heads hit the pillow well after midnight.

June/July Book Club choice

Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani was our June/July summer reading choice.

For a little insight here is the 2000 Publishers Weekly Book Review -

"Trigiani's story of a middle-aged spinster finding love and a sense of self in a small Virginia coal town is a lot like a cold soda on a hot summer day: light and refreshing, if just a little too sweet. Trigiani, a playwright, filmmaker and former writer for The Cosby Show, has a Southern voice that perfectly embodies her main character, the embattled Ave Maria Mulligan. Ave Maria, who's satisfied if not exactly happy in her role as the town pharmacist, begins questioning her quiet, country life after a posthumous letter from her mother reveals a jarring secret. Ave Maria soon faces a crisis of identity, the advances of a surprising suitor and the threat of her acerbic, money-grubbing Aunt Alice. From the suitor, who points out his brand-new pickup truck during a marriage proposal, to the town temptress, who dispenses romantic advice from her bookmobile, Trigiani brings the story alive with her flexible vocal inventions. Fans of true love stories and happy endings certainly won't be disappointed. "

May Book Club Brunch on a June day

The May book club meeting was held on the first Sunday of June at Jane's colorful family cottage, and in attendance was honorary Southern Belle Mary Helen Kennedy.

Yummy food and spirited conversation flowed freely as the guests dinned in the most informal garden setting. The Southern Gothic novel takes place in Florida and Beth brought gator jerky and Judy brought a gator head and some Mississippi Mud to sip (if you dare).

May Book Club Choice

Our May Book choice was "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell. The meeting will be an early June brunch.
Here is what the NY Times reviewer  Emma Donoghue had to say about this book-

"In 2006, Zoetrope published a story by a 24-year-old writer, Karen Russell. That story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” featured a lusciously strange setting (an alligator theme park in the Everglades) and a tough young heroine with a dead mother and an absent father, as well as a weird problem: how to save her resented-yet-beloved older sister from eloping with a ghost. A few months later, Russell’s first story collection, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” with “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” leading a crazy procession of nine other Florida swampland stories, won her wide acclaim, and last year she was chosen one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” top fiction writers.

Now her fans can sink their teeth into her first novel, “Swamplandia!,” a sort of expansion of and sequel to that alligator story. Vividly worded, exuberant in characterization, the novel is a wild ride: Russell has style in spades.

The setting and the sisters (Ava and Osceola, a k a Ossie) are the same, but they now benefit from a full back story. It’s easier to care about the pleasures and miseries of life in a failing gator park when we know how the father (the self-proclaimed Chief Bigtree) and his family ended up there, and are led to understand what goes into the routine of putting on death-defying shows every day. If Russell’s style is a North American take on magical realism, then her commitment to life’s nitty-gritties anchors the magic; we are more inclined to suspend disbelief at the moments that verge on the paranormal because she has turned “Swamplandia!” into a credible world.

Ava is a highly appealing narrator who has many talents beyond swimming with gators or taping their jaws shut. If protagonists (especially of first novels) typically bewail the mundanity of their small towns, the exotic is normal to Ava. Her first-person narration is not a transcription of a 13-year-old voice, but an evocation, in adult language, of a barely adolescent mind-set. This allows for a dazzling level of linguistic invention. Here Russell as Ava describes the dozen houses on pilings that make up the abandoned outpost of Stiltsville: “dawn light screaming through the doorways that hung on their hinges, the broken windows that birds could fly through, the plank lace, the cheesed metals.” "

Interesting to note this reviewer is the author of a previous Beehive book-Room

April 2012 Book Club Meeting

Betsy hosted the April meeting in her Sunset magazine like back garden.

We celebrated spring, the great book and Beth's birthday with a Beehive cake.

It was a most pleasant spring evening made even more lovely with wonderful friends, great discussions and many yummy foods and treats.

http://www.bookbrowse.com/

Fun site for book lovers...browse

April Book Club Choice

April book choice: Daughter of Fortune by  Isabel Allende

Here is the book jacket summary:
Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaquín takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him.

So begins Isabel Allende's enchanting new novel, Daughter of Fortune, her most ambitious work of fiction yet. As we follow her spirited heroine on a perilous journey north in the hold of a ship to the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco and northern California, we enter a world whose newly arrived inhabitants are driven mad by gold fever. A society of single men and prostitutes among whom Eliza moves--with the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chien--California opens the door to a new life of freedom and independence for the young Chilean. Her search for the elusive Joaquín gradually turns into another kind of journey that transforms her over time, and what began as a search for love ends up as the conquest of personal freedom. By the time she finally hears news of him, Eliza must decide who her true love really is.
Daughter of Fortune is a sweeping portrait of an era, a story rich in character, history, violence, and compassion. In Eliza, Allende has created one of her most appealing heroines, an adventurous, independent-minded, and highly unconventional young woman who has the courage to reinvent herself and to create her own destiny in a new country. A marvel of storytelling, Daughter of Fortune confirms once again Isabel Allende's extraordinary gift for fiction and her place as one of the world's leading writers.

Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

From the Boston Globe:
"An intricate novel by a fine storyteller....Once the reader submits to her wizardry, a florid, detailed universe of hopes and lust, of class struggle and quarreling individual identities, unfolds."

March Book Club Meeting

Our March get together was held at Molly's lovely home. The book Room had limited food references but many chose to go with the comfort aspect with such foods as macaroni and cheese . Some of our most interesting questions and discussion involving childhood, parenting and survival were inspired by this book.