When: Wednesday, December 17, 2014 @ 7:00pm
Where: Jackie's house
What to bring: Book suggestion(s), your family's 2015 calendar (so you know when you can host and review), a snack to share
Note: This is the meeting where we each present our book suggestions for next year and plan the hosting and reviewing schedule. Bring your book(s) to the meeting, or a print-out of the cover, to place on the voting table. We'll use the token method again; 12 tokens each person. I'll bring the voting receptacles. Be prepared to introduce your book to us by giving a 30-second summary/synopsis of it.
Leave a comment: Seeing as it is such a busy month and not every book clubber can attend our voting meeting, please leave a comment on this post with the title, author, and a short description of your book(s). Doing this gives those who can't make the meeting next week a chance to vote by proxy.
Thanks everyone! See you in a week!
P.S. Just a reminder that January 2015's book is already picked. We're reading Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker by Jennifer Chiaverini. It looks like Prospector has several copies available for us. Go request one today!
Book Club Thought of the Day
"You cannot open a book without learning something."
Confucius (551-479 BC)
I have three suggestions...
ReplyDeleteThe Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman
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.
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
Here is one suggestion that I'm bringing this week. I reserve the right to add another one. ;)
ReplyDeleteCleopatra's Daughter by Michelle Moran
At the dawn of the Roman Empire, when tyranny ruled, a daughter of Egypt and a son of Rome found each other...
Selene's legendary parents are gone. Her country taken, she has been brought to the city of Rome in chains, with only her twin brother, Alexander, to remind her of home and all she once had.
Living under the watchful eyes of the ruling family, Selene and her brother must quickly learn how to be Roman – and how to be useful to Caesar. She puts her artistry to work, in the hope of staying alive and being allowed to return to Egypt. Before long, however, she is distracted by the young and handsome heir to the empire...
When the elusive ‘Red Eagle' starts calling for the end of slavery, Selene and Alexander are in grave danger. Will this mysterious figure bring their liberation, or their demise?
Here is my suggestion. I unfortunately won't be there tomorrow night.
ReplyDeleteAll the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
Hi Ladies! So I will be there for the last book club of the year, but I wanted to let you know that I won't be adding any suggestions (Jenn, I guess this might mean you're off the hook for Watership Downs! You lucked out!)
ReplyDeleteWith student teaching this spring, I am positive I will be far too busy than I am now, and I don't have much time to read for pleasure as it is. I may visit you all in the summer after school gets out. But I didn't think it would be fair to add books for you to vote on and then not read any body else's or come to very many meetings.
Please keep me updated via email or this blog about book club. I will try to make it when I can, if only to see your pretty faces and hear what you have to say about books I'll read when I retire from teaching. ;)
--Olivia
Ok, I have a late entry for your consideration before tonight's meeting. Hope to see you all there!
ReplyDeleteFlags of our Fathers by James Bradley and Ron Powers
In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima—and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island’s highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag.
Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever.
To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men’s paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific’s most crucial island—an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. The men in the photo—three were killed during the battle—were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley’s father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: “The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn’t come back.”
Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is the story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war.