We had a great discussion last night about Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and it was nice to see familiar and new faces. We were able to talk about some of the books we'd like to read in upcoming months. I have put together a tentative schedule taking into account all of the suggestions made. Some of the titles could change if they prove harder to get, especially the last two novels since they are very recent releases. All synopsis are from Amazon.com.
August 21
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green
TIME Magazine’s #1 Fiction Book of 2012!
“The Fault in Our Stars is a love story, one of the most genuine and moving ones in recent American fiction, but it’s also an existential tragedy of tremendous intelligence and courage and sadness.” —Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine
Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought
her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter
inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters
suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be
completely rewritten.
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is
award-winning-author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet,
brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive
and in love.
September 18
The Catcher in the Rye
JD Salinger
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye,
Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent."
Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life,
just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy
even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing
you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood
was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all
that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if
you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the
second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told
anything pretty personal about them."
His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from
teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the
essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.
October 16
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky." Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."
The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.
The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams.
Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho's charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.
November 19
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A
LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary
sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate
glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers'
finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in
1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for
various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns
for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane,
Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and
loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to
the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft
sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting,
unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the
mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely
personal search for beauty.
Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her
ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white
and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." She
writes "with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming," said the
NEW YORK TIMES. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel
has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published.
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is Carson McCullers at her most compassionate,
endearing best.
December 17
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel
David Rakoff
From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth century
Through his books and his radio essays for NPR's This
American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the
finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and
tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an
altogether different art form.
LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE; CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff
sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or
brutal.
The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or
cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century
Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the
rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew
a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl
endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from
Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of
1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS
pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the
empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction
between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who
has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an
old box—an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this
brilliantly conceived work.
Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world
raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic once called Rakoff
"magnificent," a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel
in verse.
January 14
The Curiosity
Stephen Kiernan
The Curiosity, Stephen Kiernan’s debut novel, is a
gripping, poignant, and thoroughly original thriller that raises disturbing
questions about the very nature of life and humanity—man as a scientific
subject, as a tabloid plaything, as a living being, as a curiosity.…
Dr. Kate Philo and her scientific exploration team make a breathtaking
discovery in the Arctic: the body of a man buried deep in the ice. Remarkably,
the frozen man is brought back to the lab and successfully reanimated. As the
man begins to regain his memories, the team learns that he was—is—a judge,
Jeremiah Rice, and the last thing he remembers is falling overboard into the
Arctic Ocean in 1906.
Thrown together by circumstances beyond their control, Kate and Jeremiah grow
closer. But the clock is ticking and Jeremiah’s new life is slipping away...and
all too soon, Kate must decide how far she is willing to go to protect the man
she has come to love.
