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

“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.

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.

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 !

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.

Quiet Book Club Dinner

Molly hosted...

September 2013 Book Choice

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

" A 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.

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 Emily Chenoweth 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.

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.