The rest of 2013

We read "Kingdom of Strangers" in September. It was universally liked. Most of us did not realize there had been a second book in the series, "City of Veils," between this book and "Finding Nouf." We all felt that Zoe Ferraris's writing is getting better and better. Her insider's perspective on the life of a Saudi woman is fascinating.

In October we finally discussed "The Orphan Master's Son." Again, everyone thought this was a very good read. The details of life in North Korea under the rule of the beloved leader are mind boggling.

In November the others read "Behind the Beautiful Forevers." I can't tell you what anybody thought because I wasn't there and I didn't read it myself.

We met this weekend to discuss "Valdez is Coming" by Elmore Leonard. The consensus was that because of the spare style one had to read with attention or miss important details. Everyone who had read it would recommend it.

To start off 2014, our next book is "The Flamethrowers" by Rachel Kushner. It is on many "Best of 2013" lists.

Happy New Year and Happy Reading.

Another (Similar) Important Update!!

Because we uncharacteristically chose a very popular book, "The Orphan Master's Son" has been delayed yet again. It is hoped that by October Ann and Tony will have moved up the library queque. In the meantime we will read "Kingdom of Strangers" for September. Stay tuned!

Important Update!!

Due to library availability we have moved "Let the Great World Spin" up to August. "The Orphan Master's Son" is rescheduled to September in hopes that the 112 people who are ahead of Tony and Ann will have read and returned it.

From Now Through November

There were four of us, two of which had read the book. Luckily Janice and I were there early and so could discuss the book without making Tony and Greta feeling left out at all. It was agreed that "One Amazing Thing" is a sweet read. The setting for the various stories is very clever and each story is engaging. We also agreed that the stories don't ring quite true as impromptu confessions and they all have too similar a voice but were so entertaining it didn't hinder enjoyment.

For August:
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson.

September:
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann


October:
Kingdom of Strangers by Zoe Ferraris


November:
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

There was NO problem getting into Delancey Street because so far The America's Cup has failed to draw any crowds. We'll see if things are more lively in August.

May became June and July is soon to follow

Our May meeting was postponed until today when we discussed "River of Smoke." The general opinion was that while the scholarship is impressive the book is a bit of a slog to read.

The book for July is "One Amazing Thing" by Chitra Divakaruni

.

BOOKS WORTH CONSIDERING

One Amazing Thing, Chitra Divakaruni, 240 pages
Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair. When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive. There's little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, "one amazing thing" from their lives, which they have never told anyone before.


Girl Reading, Katie Ward, 368 pages
A young orphan poses for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena. A servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. An eighteenth-century female painter completes a portrait of a deceased poetess for her lover. A Victorian medium poses with a book in one of the first photographic studios. A girl suffering her first heartbreak witnesses intellectual and sexual awakening during the Great War. A young woman reading in a bar catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture. And in the not-so-distant future a woman navigates a cyber-reality that has radically altered the way people experience art and life.


The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh, 352 pages
The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it’s been more useful in communicating mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster-care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings. Now eighteen and emancipated from the system with nowhere to go, Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But an unexpected encounter with a mysterious stranger has her questioning what’s been missing in her life. And when she’s forced to confront a painful secret from her past, she must decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness.


The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller, 416 pages
“At once a scholar’s homage to The Iliad and startlingly original work of art by an incredibly talented new novelist….A book I could not put down.” —Ann Patchett “Mary Renault lives again!” declares Emma Donoghue, author of Room, referring to The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s thrilling, profoundly moving, and utterly unique retelling of the legend of Achilles and the Trojan War. A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed adventure, an epic love story, a marvelously conceived and executed page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel has already earned resounding acclaim from some of contemporary fiction’s brightest lights—and fans of Mary Renault, Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series will delight in this unforgettable journey back to ancient Greece in the Age of Heroes.


La Boutique obscure, Georges Perec, 272 pages
In La Boutique Obscure Perec once again revolutionized literary form, creating the world’s first “nocturnal autobiography.” From 1968 until 1972—the period when he wrote his most well-known works—the beloved French stylist recorded his dreams. But as you might expect, his approach was far from orthodox. Avoiding the hazy psychoanalysis of most dream journals, he challenged himself to translate his visions and subconscious churnings directly into prose. In laying down the nonsensical leaps of the imagination, he finds new ways to express the texture and ambiguity of dreams—those qualities that prove so elusive. Beyond capturing a universal experience for the first time and being a fine document of literary invention, La Boutique Obscure contains the seeds of some of Perec’s most famous books. It is also an intimate portrait of one of the great innovators of modern literature.


The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman, 352 pages
AFTER FOUR HARROWING YEARS ON THE WESTERN Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby. Tom, who keeps meticulous records and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel insists the baby is a “gift from God,” and against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.


The History of Love, Nicole Krauss, 252 pages
The History of Love spans a period of over 60 years and takes readers from Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to present day Brighton Beach. At the center of each main character's psyche is the issue of loneliness, and the need to fill a void left empty by lost love. Leo Gursky is a retired locksmith who immigrates to New York after escaping SS officers in his native Poland, only to spend the last stage of his life terrified that no one will notice when he dies. ("I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even though I'm not thirsty.") Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer vacillates between wanting to memorialize her dead father and finding a way to lift her mother's veil of depression. At the same time, she's trying to save her brother Bird, who is convinced he may be the Messiah, from becoming a 10-year-old social pariah. As the connection between Leo and Alma is slowly unmasked, the desperation, along with the potential for salvation, of this unique pair is also revealed.

MAY BOOK

River of Smoke, Amitav Ghosh, 528 pages
The Ibis, loaded to its gunwales with a cargo of indentured servants, is in the grip of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal; among the dozens flailing for survival are Neel, the pampered raja who has been convicted of embezzlement; Paulette, the French orphan masquerading as a deck-hand; and Deeti, the widowed poppy grower fleeing her homeland with her lover, Kalua. The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, groaning with the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. And the Redruth, a nursery ship, carries Frederick “Fitcher” Penrose, a horticulturist determined to track down the priceless treasures of China that are hidden in plain sight: its plants that have the power to heal, or beautify, or intoxicate. All will converge in Canton’s Fanqui-town, or Foreign Enclave: a tumultuous world unto itself where civilizations clash and sometimes fuse. It is a powder keg awaiting a spark to ignite the Opium Wars. Spectacular coincidences, startling reversals of fortune, and tender love stories abound. But this is much more than an irresistible page-turner. The blind quest for money, the primacy of the drug trade, the concealment of base impulses behind the rhetoric of freedom: in River of Smoke the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries converge, and the result is a consuming historical novel with powerful contemporary resonance. Critics praised Sea of Poppies for its vibrant storytelling, antic humor, and rich narrative scope; now Amitav Ghosh continues the epic that has charmed and compelled readers all over the globe.

April Book

The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich, 352 pages
The unsolved murder of a farm family still haunts the white small town of Pluto, North Dakota, generations after the vengeance exacted and the distortions of fact transformed the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation. Part Ojibwe, part white, Evelina Harp is an ambitious young girl prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina's grandfather, is a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. And Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who bears witness, understands the weight of historical injustice better than anyone. Through the distinct and winning voices of three unforgettable narrators, the collective stories of two interwoven communities ultimately come together to reveal a final wrenching truth.

February and March books, maybe in this order

We chose the next two books. I'm proposing that for February we read "The Outlaw Album" by Daniel Woodrell. It is much shorter, much more appropriate for the short month.













That would leave "The Stranger's Child" by Adam Hollinghurst for March.












This is NOT the order we agreed upon when we met in January so until all have weighed in it's not been determined which is first. So read both very quickly!


FYI: This comment was added to the above post. Sadly, I haven't finished the book so it wasn't made by me.
Ms. G.

I loved this book, even though I had trouble getting into it at first. The structure was a little difficult to follow, especially as young children at the beginning of the novel reappear as adults later in the book. I liked the way the whole idea of genteel Victorian sexual mythology got re-evaluated as the novel moved through the decades to the present era in England. I just finished this novel and am still trying to work out who all the characters were and their relationship to each other. I enjoyed it, though. Any other opinions?

Welcome to 2013

Our book for January 2013 is . . . (drumroll). . .

"On Canaan's Side" by Sebastian Barry.












The rest of the year is still unknown. Where shall we meet? How about Delancey Street Restaurant on Saturday, January 12?