For a classic, we could choose from Marc and Angel's "30 Books Everyone Should Read Before Their 30th Birthday" (which includes For Whom the Bell Tolls). How many have you read?
Our suggestions included (* the ones we chose):
- Amy and Isabelle—Elizabeth Strout (HL)
- The Art of Fielding—Chad Harbach (HL)*
- Blood Meridian—Cormac McCarthy (CY)
- The Bluest Eye—Toni Morrison (IS)
- The Cat’s Table—Michael Ondaatje (JC)
- Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness—Alexandra Fuller (KP)
- Cold Mountain—Charles Frazier (PP)
- Damned Nations—Samantha Nutt (IS)*
- Dispatches From the Edge—Anderson Cooper (PP)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls—Ernest Hemingway (IS)*
- Freedom—Jonathan Franzen (HL)
- Game of Thrones—George R. R. Martin (CY)
- Half Blood Blues—Esi Edugyan (DC)
- The Happiness Project—Gretchen Rubin (IS)
- Hunger—Knut Hamson (IS)*
- Let the Great World Spin—Colum McCann (HC)
- Moby Dick—Herman Melville (HL)
- Monday Mornings—Sanjay Gupta (PP)
- Predictably Irrational—Dan Ariely (CY)
- Prisoner of Tehran—Marina Nehmat (IS)
- The Professor and the Madman—Simon Winchester (PP)
- Quiet—Susan Cain (DC)*
- Sense of an Ending—Julian Barnes (DC)
- State of Wonder—Ann Patchett (HL)
- The Story of a Beautiful Girl—Rachel Simon (HC)
- Thinking, Fast and Slow—Daniel Kahneman (CY)
- Unaccustomed Earth—Jhumpa Lahiri (JC)
- The Vagrants—Yiyun Li (JC)
- What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite—David DiSalvo (CY)
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Ann Frank—Nathan Eglander (IS)
- Wolf Hall—Hilary Mantel (DC)*
- 1984—George Orwell (CY)
Non-Fiction suggestion:
ReplyDeleteThe Happiness Project by Grethchen Rubin
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/The-Happiness-Project-Gretchen-Rubin/9781554682805-item.html?ikwid=the+happiness+project&ikwsec=Home
Non-Fiction Suggestion:
Damned Nations by Samantha Nutthttp://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Damned-Nations-Greed-Guns-Armies-Samantha-Nutt/9780771051456-item.html?ikwid=damned+nations&ikwsec=Home
Classic suggestion:
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/For-Whom-the-Bell-Tolls-Ernest-Hemingway/9780684803357-item.html?ikwid=ernest+hemingway&ikwsec=Books
Some summaries since the links don't appear to be active:
DeleteThe Happiness Project
Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus. "The days are long, but the years are short," she realized. "Time is passing, and I''m not focusing enough on the things that really matter." In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project.
In this lively and compelling account of that year, Rubin carves out her place alongside the authors of bestselling memoirs such as Julie and Julia, The Year of Living Biblically, and Eat, Pray, Love. With humor and insight, she chronicles her adventures during the twelve months she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific research, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier.
Rubin didn''t have the option to uproot herself, nor did she really want to; instead she focused on improving her life as it was. Each month she tackled a new set of resolutions: give proofs of love, ask for help, find more fun, keep a gratitude notebook, forget about results. She immersed herself in principles set forth by all manner of experts, from Epicurus to Thoreau to Oprah to Martin Seligman to the Dalai Lama to see what worked for her?and what didn''t.
Her conclusions are sometimes surprising?she finds that money can buy happiness, when spent wisely; that novelty and challenge are powerful sources of happiness; that "treating" yourself can make you feel worse; that venting bad feelings doesn''t relieve them; that the very smallest of changes can make the biggest difference?and they range from the practical to the profound.
Damned Nations - Summary
DeleteFor readers of Christopher Hedges, Robert Fisk, and Christopher Hitchens, an extraordinary humanitarian gives us a bracing and uncompromising account of her work in some of the most devastated corners of the world -- and a new and provocative vision for changing course on our growing militarization.
In 1995, twenty-five-year-old Samantha Nutt, a recent medical-school graduate and a field volunteer for UNICEF, touched down in Baidoa, Somalia, "the City of Death." What she saw there -- gangs of young men roaming the streets armed with rocket launchers; a woman in a clinic line holding a dead baby; an aid agency working in such an unsafe environment that its workers had to travel with armed escorts high on drugs -- would spur her on to a lifetime of passionate advocacy for children and families in war-torn areas around the world. Damned Nations is the brilliant distillation of Dr. Nutt''s observations over the course of fifteen years providing hands-on care in some of the world''s most violent flashpoints, all the while building the world class non-profit War Child North America. Combining original research with her personal story, it is a deeply thoughtful meditation on war as it is being waged around the world against millions of civilians -- primarily women and children. Nutt''s boundless energy, dedication, and compassion shine through on every page as she lays out real, lasting solutions to these problems and shows how to move beyond outdated notions of charity towards a more progressive, inclusive, and respectful world view
Short Stories
ReplyDeleteWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Ann Frank by Nathan Eglander. Well reviewed all over, including a major endorsement by Matt Galloway, my Metro Morning Sweetheart. http://www.randomhouse.com/book/217135/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-anne-frank-by-nathan-englander
Summary:
DeleteThese eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.
The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.
Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.
Memoir
ReplyDeletePrisoner of Tehran by Marina Nehmat. This book just won't go away. It's been made into a play and was short listed by canada Reads. It's a great book for discussion as the most inetresting character is an Iranian prison guardwho is a torturor and a savior in the same story. http://www.amazon.ca/Prisoner-Tehran-Marina-Nemat/dp/0670066125
Nemat tells of her harrowing experience as a young Iranian girl at the start of the Islamic revolution. In January 1982, the 16-year-old student activist was arrested, jailed in Tehran's infamous Evin prison, tortured and sentenced to death. Ali, one of her interrogators, intervened moments before her execution, having used family connections with Ayatollah Khomeini himself to reduce her sentence to life in prison. The price: she would convert to Islam (she was Christian) and marry him, or he would see to it that her family and her boyfriend, Andre, were jailed or even killed. She remained a political prisoner for two years. Nemat's engaging memoir is rich with complex characters—loved ones lost on both sides of this bloody conflict. Ali, the man who rapes and subjugates her, also saves her life several times—he is assassinated by his own subordinates. His family embraces Nemat with more affection and acceptance than her own, even fighting for her release after his death. Nemat returns home to feel a stranger: "They were terrified of the pain and horror of my past," she writes. She buries her memories for years, eventually escaping to Canada to begin a new life with Andre. Nemat offers her arresting, heartbreaking story of forgiveness, hope and enduring love—a voice for the untold scores silenced by Iran's revolution. (May)
DeleteUnaccustomed Earth by a favourite author Jhumpa Lahiri
ReplyDeletettp://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85301.Unaccustomed_Earth
The story is rich with the author’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is the work of a writer at the peak of her powers.
DeleteWhat about this Pulitzer prize winning bio of Martin Luther King Jr? http://www.amazon.com/Bearing-Cross-Christian-Leadership-Conference/dp/0688166326
ReplyDeleteI ordered this and it arrived after I posted... REMOVE THE SUGGESTION! It is as thick as a phone book!
DeleteFor Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
ReplyDeleteIn 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan''s love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo''s last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author''s previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.
DeleteThe Cat'sTable...by Michael Ondaatje
ReplyDeleteIn the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table” - as far from the Captain’s Table as can be - with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world of literature. The narrator’s elusive, beautiful cousin Emily becomes his confidante, allowing him to see himself “with a distant eye” for the first time, and to feel the first stirring of desire. Another Cat’s Table denizen, the shadowy Miss Lasqueti, is perhaps more than what she seems. And very late every night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and his fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.
As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy’s adult years, it tells a spellbinding story - by turns poignant and electrifying - about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage
Early Toni Morrison book "The Bluest Eye". Morrison won the Nobel prize for literature and is a prolific and wonderful African American author. http://www.amazon.com/The-Bluest-Oprahs-Book-Club/dp/0452282195 This book is about a little Black girl growing up in racist America.
ReplyDeleteIt is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
DeleteFor a classic AND a foreign language pick... Knut Hamson's Hunger. Written in 1890, it is the story of an impoverished writer, literally starving and struggling to survive. I read this book years ago and couldn't belive Hamson's insight into "hunger" until I realized he had been this hungry himself in the early days of his career. The book is a classic and is well worth a read, especially for those of us involved in working with homeless people.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/Hunger-A-Novel-Knut-Hamsun/dp/0374525285
Originally published in 1890, this classic of modern literature follows an impoverished Norwegian writer through the streets of Christiania (now Olso) as he struggles on the edge of starvation. Existing on what little money he makes from selling the occasional article to the local paper, and down to pawning the clothes on his back, the young writer slowly loses control of his reason and begins to slip increasingly into bouts of madness, paranoia, and despair.
DeleteA gripping portrait of an artist struggling for integrity, Hunger mirrors the dire straits of Hamsun's own life when he brought this, his then incomplete first novel, to a publisher in 1888.
The Art of Fielding- In Chad Harbach’s début novel, “The Art of Fielding” (Little, Brown; $25.99), Henry Skrimshander arrives for his first day at Westish College with a beat-up copy of a book called “The Art of Fielding” in his pocket. The book in Henry’s pocket isn’t Harbach’s. Rather, it’s a gathering of numbered koans that form a kind of “The Art of War” for baseball—a guide to action on the field that is, moreover, a guide to being. Henry, an unlikely athletic prodigy, has been recruited to Westish to play shortstop for the Westish Harpooners. Perhaps the most unusual feature of this unusually charming début is the easy, unpretentious way it has of joining a love of baseball with a love of literature. There’s a pattern of Melvillian references that run playfully and purposefully through the novel. The central drama of becoming arises from a wildly errant throw by Henry, which injures a teammate. Henry is suddenly incapable of throwing accurately, undermined by paralytic self-consciousness, or, Harbach seems to be arguing, by the onset of adulthood itself. The difficulty of measuring the size and nature of one’s acts and of choosing whom one will be is at the heart of the struggles that Harbach’s characters confront. Watchers of “Friday Night Lights” will be at home in Harbach’s generously told novel. But there’s also much here to interest readers of the contemporary literary novel, a genre that is clearly a preoccupation of Harbach’s: he is a co-editor of the literary magazine n+1. One of the pleasures of reading “The Art of Fielding” is to see how David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen got Harbach working; there are sly homages to both writers in the book. Yet the main order of business here is to entertain, and in this Harbach succeeds. The dream of perfection deferred allows him to tell a story about our national past-time that manages, as well, to be about our historical present—in other words, a story about fallibility.
DeleteRead more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/09/12/110912crbo_books_mason#ixzz1xPhAFHq7
And for a classic - that we should read before "The Art of Fielding" - Moby Dick.
DeleteFreedom - Jonathan Franzen (too many clubbers may have already read this one.
DeleteJonathan Franzen’s galvanic new novel, “Freedom,” showcases his impressive literary toolkit — every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life. With this book, he’s not only created an unforgettable family, he’s also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters.
It turns out, however, that these farcical sketches are simply meant to show how the Berglunds might be perceived by outsiders, just as Patty’s account of this period of her life, which immediately follows in the book, reflects her own need to filter everything through the prism of her anger and depression.
As the novel proceeds, however, Mr. Franzen delves further into the state of mind of his creations, developing them into fully imagined human beings — not Nietzschean stereotypes easily divided into categories of “hard” (shameless, ambitious brutes) or “soft” (pathetic, sniveling doormats); not bitter patsies fueled by ancient grudges, but confused, searching people capable of change and perhaps even transcendence.
Mr. Franzen’s repeated allusions to “War and Peace,” suggesting that there is some sort of parallel between the Walter-Richard-Patty triangle and the Pierre-Andrei-Natasha triangle in Tolstoy’s great classic, are laughably conceited, but he does an agile job of tracing the constantly evolving relationships among his three main characters, as well the dynamics between Walter and Patty, and their two children, Joey and Jessica. He understands the improvised game of emotional dominoes that can play out in families, and the psychological chutes and ladders that can pop up in their lives out of the blue.
Its title, “Freedom,” announces a theme that runs like a riptide beneath the narrative — lots of talk about what liberty means in terms of being free of familial responsibilities and ideological beliefs, and the rootlessness and dislocation that often follow in its wake.
But it is neither this heavy-handed leitmotif nor the twisty, Dickensian plot (which has Walter and Joey getting involved with a ruthless Halliburton-like company) that lends this novel its narrative heft and hold on the reader. Rather, it is Mr. Franzen’s characters and his David Foster Wallace-esque ability to capture the absurdities of contemporary life — where the planet is “heating up like a toaster oven” and people use credit cards to buy a pack of gum or a single hot dog (“I mean cash is so yesterday”), where rage among liberals and conservatives alike is scorching the country in the George W. Bush years, and intemperate blog entries and Howard Beale-like outbursts are cheered as expressions of a collective distemper.
In the past, Mr. Franzen tended to impose a seemingly cynical, mechanistic view of the world on his characters, threatening to turn them into authorial pawns subject to simple Freudian-Darwinian imperatives. This time, in creating conflicted, contrarian individuals capable of choosing their own fates, Mr. Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet — a novel that turns out to be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times.
If you loved Olive Kitteridge - this one also sounds great!
DeleteIn her stunning first novel, Amy and Isabelle, Elizabeth Strout evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant mother--and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's sexual secrets. In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. And eating, sleeping, and working side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls doesn't help matters. But when Amy is discovered behind the steamed-up windows of a car with her math teacher, the vast and icy distance between mother and daughter becomes unbridgeable.
As news of the scandal reaches every ear, it is Isabelle who suffers from the harsh judgment of Shirley Falls, intensifying her shame about her own secret past. And as Amy seeks comfort elsewhere, she discovers the fragility of human happiness through other dramas, from the horror of a missing child to the trials of Fat Bev, the community peacemaker. Witty and often profound, Amy and Isabelle confirms Elizabeth Strout as a powerful new talent.
"One of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place." --The New York Times Book Review
"Stunning....Every once in a while, a novel comes along that plunges deep into your psyche, leaving you breathless....This year that novel is Amy and Isabelle." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Amy and Isabelle is an impressive debut....with an expansiveness and inventiveness that is the mark of a true storyteller." --The Philadelphia Inquirer
State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
Delete“Expect miracles when you read Ann Patchett’s fiction.”—New York Times Book Review
Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett returns with a provocative and assured novel of morality and miracles, science and sacrifice set in the Amazon rainforest. Infusing the narrative with the same ingenuity and emotional urgency that pervaded her acclaimed previous novels Bel Canto, Taft, Run, The Magician’s Assistant, and The Patron Saint of Liars, Patchett delivers an enthrallingly innovative tale of aspiration, exploration, and attachment in State of Wonder—a gripping adventure story and a profound look at the difficult choices we make in the name of discovery and love.
Book Description
Ann Patchett has dazzled readers with her award-winning books, including The Magician's Assistant and the New York Times bestselling Bel Canto. Now she raises the bar with State of Wonder, a provocative and ambitious novel set deep in the Amazon jungle.
Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug, the development of which has already cost the company a fortune. Nothing about Marina's assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina's research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding her former mentor as well as answers to several troubling questions about her friend's death, the state of her company's future, and her own past.
Once found, Dr. Swenson, now in her seventies, is as ruthless and uncompromising as she ever was back in the days of Grand Rounds at Johns Hopkins. With a combination of science and subterfuge, she dominates her research team and the natives she is studying with the force of an imperial ruler. But while she is as threatening as anything the jungle has to offer, the greatest sacrifices to be made are the ones Dr. Swenson asks of herself, and will ultimately ask of Marina, who finds she may still be unable to live up to her teacher's expectations.
In a narrative replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, and a neighboring tribe of cannibals, State of Wonder is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss. It is a tale that leads the reader into the very heart of darkness, and then shows us what lies on the other side.
Fiction: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, won Man Booker Prize in 2009.
ReplyDeleteA friend read this as part of her bookclub, and everyone in the group really enjoyed it.
Here is a short review...if you google the book you will find more details on the book.
In Wolf Hall, Mantel chronicles a turbulent period of Tudor history through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith's son who rises to become one of the King Henry VIII's most trusted advisers.
Cromwell emerges as a complex character who plays a key role in Britain's Reformation.
A political genius and ruthless in support of his own interests, he is a mover in Henry VIII's court, orchestrating the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn and the break with Rome.
"He was a blacksmith's son who ended up Earl of Essex," Mantel told the BBC. "So how did he do it? That's the question driving the book."
Mantel said she finds the Tudor period fascinating, because it has the stuff of great storytelling.
"It has sex and melodrama, betrayal seduction and violent death. What more could you hope for?" she said.
The judges agreed Mantel caught all those elements in Wolf Hall.
"From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics," the Booker judges said.
"With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage."
Fiction: Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, won Scotiabank Giller Prize
ReplyDeleteHere is a short outline from the back cover of the book;
Paris, 1940. A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again. He is twenty years old. He is a German citizen. And he is black.
Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero's fate. From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris - where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance-Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of the Resistance.
Non-Fiction: THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN, by Simon Winchester
ReplyDeleteThis is the fascinating story of the making of The Oxford English Dictionary.
The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.
Fiction: MONDAY MORNINGS, by Dr. Sanjay Gupta
ReplyDeleteDr. Gupta is the "go-to" medical expert for CNN. Although this book is considered 'fiction', it's based on real life situations he experienced as a surgeon:
Every time surgeons operate, they''re betting their skills are better than the brain tumor, the faulty heart valve, the fractured femur. Sometimes, they''re wrong. At Chelsea General, surgeons answer for bad outcomes at the Morbidity and Mortality conference, known as M & M. This extraordinary peek behind the curtain into what is considered the most secretive meeting in all of medicine is the back drop for the entire book.
Monday Mornings, by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, follows the lives of five surgeons at Chelsea General as they push the limits of their abilities and confront their personal and professional failings, often in front of their peers at M & M. It is on Monday mornings that reflection and introspection occurs, usually in private. It is Monday Mornings that provides a unique look at the real method in which surgeons learn - through their mistakes. It is Monday Mornings when, if you''re lucky, you have a chance at redemption.
Fiction: Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
ReplyDeleteWinner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize
The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes's new novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers.
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian's life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.
Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?
The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting and conflicting book. Even though I read it with another book club I keep returning to it in my mind and would love to re-read it with this group because I think there would be enlightening and lively discussion.
Here's s little bit of a description..
Brilliant and illuminating, this astonishing debut novel by the award-winning writer Yiyun Li is set in China in the late 1970s, when Beijing was rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move China beyond the dark shadow of the Cultural Revolution toward a more enlightened and open society. In this powerful and beautiful story, we follow a group of people in a small town during this dramatic and harrowing time, the era that was a forebear of the Tiananmen Square uprising
Non-Fiction: THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN, by Simon Winchester
ReplyDeleteThis sounds absolutely fascinating!
"The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane."
Sorry...I thought my first post didn't post so I posted it again. :)
DeleteThis is a great book! I read it with another book club - not a lot of discussion but everyone really enjoyed it!
DeleteNon-Fiction: DISPATCHES FROM THE EDGE, by Anderson Cooper
ReplyDeleteFrom my favourite news correspondent!
Few people have witnessed more scenes of chaos and conflict around the world than Anderson Cooper, whose groundbreaking coverage on CNN has changed the way we watch the news. In this gripping, candid, and remarkably powerful memoir, he offers an unstinting, up-close view of the most harrowing crises of our time, and the profound impact they have had on his life.
After growing up on Manhattan''s Upper East Side, Cooper felt a magnetic pull toward the unknown, an attraction to the far corners of the earth. If he could keep moving, and keep exploring, he felt he could stay one step ahead of his past, including the fame surrounding his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the tragic early deaths of his father and older brother. As a reporter, the frenetic pace of filing dispatches from war-torn countries, and the danger that came with it, helped him avoid having to look too closely at the pain and loss that was right in front of him.
But recently, during the course of one extraordinary, tumultuous year, it became impossible for him to continue to separate his work from his life, his family''s troubled history from the suffering people he met all over the world. From the tsunami in Sri Lanka to the war in Iraq to the starvation in Niger and ultimately to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Mississippi, Cooper gives us a firsthand glimpse of the devastation that takes place, both physically and emotionally, when the normal order of things is violently ruptured on such a massive scale. Cooper had been in his share of life-threatening situations before -- ducking fire on the streets of war-torn Sarejevo, traveling on his own to famine-stricken Somalia, witnessing firsthand the genocide in Rwanda -- but he had never seen human misery quite like this. Writing with vivid memories of his childhood and early career as a roving correspondent, Cooper reveals for the first time how deeply affected he has been by the wars, disasters, and tragedies he has witnessed, and why he continues to be drawn to some of the most perilous places on earth.
Striking, heartfelt, and utterly engrossing, Dispatches from the Edge is an unforgettable memoir that takes us behind the scenes of the cataclysmic events of our age and allows us to see them through the eyes of one of America''s most trusted, fearless, and pioneering reporters.
Historical Fiction - COLD MOUNTAIN, by Charles Frazier
ReplyDeleteThe hero of Charles Frazier's beautifully written and deeply-imagined first novel is Inman, a disillusioned Confederate soldier who has failed to die as expected after being seriously wounded in battle during the last days of the Civil War. Rather than waiting to be redeployed to the front, the soul-sick Inman deserts, and embarks on a dangerous and lonely odyssey through the devastated South, heading home to North Carolina, and seeking only to be reunited with his beloved, Ada, who has herself been struggling to maintain the family farm she inherited. Cold Mountain is an unforgettable addition to the literature of one of the most important and transformational periods in American history.
Liked this one.
DeleteHistorical Fiction - Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
ReplyDeleteAn epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
As mesmerizing and shocking as The Road.
Sci-fi - Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
ReplyDeleteLong ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are massing beyond the kingdom’s protective Wall. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the land they were born to. Sweeping from a land of brutal cold to a distant summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, here is a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens.
Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; and a determined woman undertakes the most treacherous of journeys. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.
Non Fiction - Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
ReplyDeleteSelected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 2011
A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title
One of The Economist’s 2011 Books of the Year
One of The Wall Steet Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011
Winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest
Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of our most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many fields—including economics, medicine, and politics—but until now, he has never brought together his many years of research and thinking in one book.
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
Nonfiction - Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
ReplyDelete(original or revised version)
Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?
When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?
In this newly revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrationa
Nonfiction - What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite by David DiSalvo
ReplyDeleteWhy do we routinely choose options that don't meet our short-term needs and undermine our long-term goals? Why do we willingly expose ourselves to temptations that undercut our hard-fought progress to overcome addictions? Why are we prone to assigning meaning to statistically common coincidences? Why do we insist we're right even when evidence contradicts us?
In What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, science writer David DiSalvo reveals a remarkable paradox: what your brain wants is frequently not what your brain needs. In fact, much of what makes our brains "happy" leads to errors, biases, and distortions, which make getting out of our own way extremely difficult. DiSalvo's search includes forays into evolutionary and social psychology, cognitive science, neurology, and even marketing and economics—as well as interviews with many of the top thinkers in psychology and neuroscience today.
From this research-based platform, DiSalvo draws out insights that we can use to identify our brains' foibles and turn our awareness into edifying action. Ultimately, DiSalvo argues, the research does not serve up ready-made answers, but provides us with actionable clues for overcoming the plight of our advanced brains and, consequently, living more fulfilled lives.
More popular evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. Who can't get enough of this stuff?
Classic Fiction - 1984 by George Orwell
ReplyDeleteWinston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent even in the mind. For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101
fiction - The Story of Beauriful Girl by Rachel Simon
ReplyDeleteIt is 1968, Lynnie, a young white woman with a developmental disability, and Homan, an African American deaf man, are locked away in the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, and have been left to languish in the institution, forgotten. deeply in love, they escape and find refuge in the farmhouse of Martha, a retired schoolteacher and widow. but the couple is not alone - Lynie has just given birth to a baby girl. when the authorities catch up with them that same night, Homan escapes into the darkness and Lynnie is caught. before she is forced back into the institution, she whispers two words to Martha: "Hide her."
And so begins the forty-year epic journey of Lynnie, Homan, Martha and baby Julia - lives divided by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, yet drawn together by a secret pact and extraordinary love.
this is a really great book.....I loved it and think you would too. Sorry for the late post. See you on Tuesday
Fiction: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
ReplyDeleteIn the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.
Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.
Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.(less)
Non fiction: Quiet. The Power on Introverts in a World that Can't stop Talking by Susan Cain.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I posted this book earlier but it got deleted...
At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled "quiet," it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society--from van Gogh's sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.
Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so. Taking the reader on a journey from Dale Carnegie's birthplace to Harvard Business School, from a Tony Robbins seminar to an evangelical megachurch, Susan Cain charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal in the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects. She talks to Asian-American students who feel alienated from the brash, backslapping atmosphere of American schools. She questions the dominant values of American business culture, where forced collaboration can stand in the way of innovation, and where the leadership potential of introverts is often overlooked. And she draws on cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to reveal the surprising differences between extroverts and introverts.
Perhaps most inspiring, she introduces us to successful introverts--from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Finally, she offers invaluable advice on everything from how to better negotiate differences in introvert-extrovert relationships to how to empower an introverted child to when it makes sense to be a "pretend extrovert."
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller
ReplyDeleteSelected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year
Alexandra Fuller returns to Africa and the story of her unforgettable family.
In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller returns to Africa and to her unforgettable family. At the heart of this family, and central to the lifeblood of her latest story, is Fuller’s iconically courageous mother, Nicola (or, Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she sometimes prefers to be known). Born on the Scottish Isle of Skye to a warlike clan of highlanders and raised in Kenya's perfect equatorial light, Nicola holds dear the values most likely to get you hurt or killed in Africa: loyalty to blood, passion for land, and a holy belief in the restorative power of all animals. With a lifetime of admiration behind her and after years of interviews and research, Fuller has recaptured her mother's inimitable voice with remarkable precision. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is as funny, exotic, terrifying and unselfconscious as Nicola herself.
We see Nicola as an irrepressible child in western Kenya, then with the man who fell in love with her, Tim Fuller. The young couple begin their life in a lavender colored honeymoon period, when east Africa lies before them with all the promise of its liquid honeyed light, even as the British empire in which they both once believed wanes. But in short order, an accumulation of mishaps and tragedies bump up against history until the Fullers find themselves in a world they hardly recognize. We follow Tim and Nicola as they hopscotch the continent, restlessly trying to establish a home, from Kenya to Rhodesia to Zambia, even returning to England briefly. War, hardship and tragedy seem to follow the family even as Nicola fights to hold onto her children, her land, her sanity. But just when it seems that Nicola has been broken by the continent she loves, it is the African earth - and Tim's acceptance of her love for this earth - that revives and nurtures her.
A story of survival and war, love and madness, loyalty and forgiveness, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is an intimate exploration of the author’s family and of the price of being possessed by this uncompromising, fertile, death-dealing land. In the end we find Nicola and Tim at a table under their Tree of Forgetfulness in the Zambezi Valley on the banana and fish farm where they plan to spend their final days. In local custom, the Tree of Forgetfulness is where villagers meet to resolve disputes and it is here that the family at last find an African kind of peace. Following the ghosts and dreams of memory, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is Alexandra Fuller at her very best.(less)