Book Club News for April & May 2010
Dear Readers,
Due to an unforeseen shortage of books, we are changing the April book club selection. Instead of reading Big Machine by Victor Lavalle for the April 27th meeting, we’ll read The Missing by Tim Gautreaux which was the second-highest voted title at this past Tuesday’s meeting.
Copies of Big Machine will be available again by mid-April, so we will just move that back to the May bookclub meeting (May 25th), and have voting for the June meeting (June 22nd). This way we will keep selecting books well enough ahead for people to plan. Voting will end on Friday, April 2nd at noon.
If you had already pre-ordered Big Machine, we will still hold a copy for you when they arrive unless we hear otherwise from you, and we will also save a copy of The Missing for you when they arrive (next week).
If you already voted for the May selection, please feel free to vote again (either send an email, stop in for a paper ballot, or vote using the form on our website). We will add two additional books to the ballot from the last vote: How to Paint a Dead Man and Land of Marvels.
I apologize for any confusion, and hope that you’ll be patient with us as we continue to work out how to run a book club! Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.
Thanks again to all who came to the first meeting this past Tuesday. I had a wonderful time chatting with all of you, and hope to see you again soon.
Best,
Ariana
Last night was the first meeting of our book club, and we think it went swimmingly. Thanks to all who showed up and made it such a success!
The attendees requested that we pick books further ahead of the meeting date, so their votes selected the pick for April: Big Machine by Victor Lavalle (we’ll soon have a separate post with full information about this book). We sold out of copies last night, but will have more in soon.
SORRY! WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET PAPERBACK COPIES OF BIG MACHINE IN AGAIN UNTIL MID-APRIL. HARDCOVER IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW.
Our next meeting will be Tuesday, April 27th at 7pm
Thus, the voting is now for the June pick, and voting starts NOW! You can vote by filling out the form below, stopping in at the store to fill out a ballot, or by emailing your choice to countrybookshelf@gmail.com.
Here are the contenders:
In “Wish Her Safe at Home,” Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam’s oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own. ♦
2. The Appointment by Herta Muller
2009 Nobel Prize in Literature
From the winner of the IMPAC Award, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman’s discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life“I’ve been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp.” Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu’s totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy. “Marry me,” the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.
As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.
Herta Muller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, “The Appointment” confirms her standing as one of Europe’s greatest writers.
♦
3. This Is How by M. J. Hyland
Longlisted for Orange Prize
M. J. Hyland is the award winning and Man Booker shortlisted author of “Carry Me Down.” Her third novel, “This Is How,” is a psychologically probing and deeply moving account of a man at odds with the world. Patrick Oxtoby is a perpetual outsider longing to find his niche. When his fiance breaks off their engagement, Patrick leaves home and moves to a remote seaside village. In spite of his hopes for a new and better life, Patrick struggles to fit in or make the right impression. He can’t shake the feeling that his new friends are con-spiring against him, further fracturing his already fragile personality and prompting him to take a course of action that permanently alters the course of his life.
“This Is How” is a mesmerizing and meticulously drawn portrait of a man whose unease in the world as it is leads to his tragic undoing. With breathtaking wisdom and astute insight into the human mind, Hyland’s latest is a masterpiece that arouses horror and sympathy in equal measure. ♦
4. Secret Son by Laila Lalami
Longlisted for Orange Prize
Raised by his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki has always had big dreams of living another life in another world. Suddenly his dreams are within reach when he discovers that his father-whom he’d been led to believe was dead-is very much alive. A wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him back to the streets and his childhood friends. Trapped once again by his class and painfully aware of the limitations of his prospects, he becomes easy prey for a fringe Islamic group.
In the spirit of “The Inheritance of Loss “and “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Laila Lalami’s debut novel looks at the struggle for identity, the need for love and family, and the desperation that grips ordinary lives in a world divided by class, politics, and religion. ♦
5. The Missing by Tim Gautreaux – NOW THE APRIL PICK!
Edgar Award nominee
A masterful novel set in 1920s Louisiana, “The Missing “is the story of Sam Simoneaux, a floorwalker at a New Orleans department store. When a little girl is kidnapped on Sam’s watch he is haunted by guilt, grief, and ghosts from his own troubled past. Determined to find her, Sam sets out on a journey through a world of music and violence, where riverboats teem with drinking and dancing, and where dark swamplands conceal those who choose to live by their own laws. With the fate of the stolen child looming, “The Missing “vividly depicts an America lurching away from war, where civilization is only beginning to penetrate the hinterlands, and a man must choose between compassion and vengeance.
6. How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall (Harper Perennial $14.99)
Booker Prize Finalist
From Sarah Hall, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Daughters of the North and The Electric Michelangelo comes the Harper Perennial paperback original novel How to Paint a Dead Man, a daringly imaginative tale in which multiple lives are woven together through the prism of a still life painting. Moving from Italy to England, spanning nearly half a century, and bringing together the lives of four disparate characters, How to Paint a Dead Man is Hall’s fierce and brilliant study of art and its place in our lives. The lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator—intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power. With How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall, “one of the most significant and exciting of Britain’s young novelists” (The Guardian), delivers “a maddeningly enticing read . . . an amazing feat of literary engineering” (The Independent on Sunday).
Date: March 24th, 2010 @ 14:44
Categories: news