November AND December Book Club Pick!

So-- while Pillars of the Earth and Poisonwood Bible seem ike amazing books, they seem a little too heavy for holiday season busyness!

So--- take 2 months to read this one, and then come back fresh in January ready to go back to one book per month!

I hope you'll read this with us!

The Happiness Project :

or why I spent a year trying to sing in the morning, clean my closets, fight right, read Aristotle, and generally have more fun 

 

 

by Gretchen Craft Rubin

 

 

November Pick: The Poisonwood Bible or Pillars of the Earth?

Please vote!

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

The Pillars of the Earth is a historical novel by Ken Follett published in 1989 about the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England. It is set in the middle of the 12th century, primarily during the Anarchy, between the time of the sinking of the White Ship and the murder of Thomas Becket. The book traces the development of Gothic architecture out of the preceding Romanesque architecture, and the fortunes of the Kingsbridge priory and village against the backdrop of historical events of the time.    The novel explores themes of intrigue and conspiracy against historical events. It explores the development of medieval architecture, the civil war, secular/religious conflicts, and shifting political loyalties.

October Pick: Middlesex

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal."

So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

 "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:

http://www.amazon.com/Middlesex-Novel-Oprahs-Book-Club/dp/0312427735

Sept. Book Pick: The Leftovers

The Leftovers by Tom Perotta

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 2011

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011

A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book for 2011

A USA Today 10 Books We Loved Reading in 2011 Title

One of NPR’s 10 Best Novels of 2011

What if—whoosh, right now, with no explanation—a number of us simply vanished?  Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down?

That’s what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has been the same since it happened—not marriages, not friendships, not even the relationships between parents and children. 
Kevin Garvey, Mapleton’s new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized community. Kevin’s own family has fallen apart in the wake of the disaster: his wife, Laurie, has left to join the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence;

his son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet named Holy Wayne.  Only Kevin’s teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she’s definitely not the sweet “A” student she used to be.



 

Kevin wants to help her, but he’s distracted by his growing relationship with Nora Durst, a woman who lost her entire family on October 14th and is still reeling from the tragedy, even as she struggles to move beyond it and make a new start.
With heart, intelligence and a rare ability to illuminate the struggles inherent in ordinary lives, Tom Perrotta has written a startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection and loss.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Leftovers-Tom-Perrotta/dp/0312358342

Book Picks: May, June, July, August

MAY:
BEYOND THE SLING by Mayim Bialik
(We kicked off this book club in May 2011 with a parenting book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother", so it'll be fun to debate this one!)
Drawing on both her experience as a mother and her scientific background, Mayim presents the major tenets of attachment parenting.

JUNE:
 THE PARIS WIFE by Paula McLain
  A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.

JULY:
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, by E. L. James. 
An inexperienced college student falls in love with a tortured man who has particular sexual tastes; the first book in a trilogy.

AUGUST:
WILD,  by Cheryl Strayed
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.

Get on the wait list now--- it is a looong list! 

~~

April Pick: Lift AND The Hunger Games (surprise!)

Yep--that's right-- TWO BOOKS!

"But, why?", you ask.

Well, I really like the sound of "Lift" for us--but we haven't done a non-fiction book in almost a year (in May 2011 we did "Cinderella Ate My Daughter"), and I know many of you have said you prefer fiction-- plus it's WAY short.

I have also heard the buzzing around The Hunger Games-- in fact, one of our DBC members, Lesly,  suggested a fieldtrip to the movie.  (Comes out in March 2012)

So we'll have one fiction and one non-fiction.

"But, why not save one for May?" you ask.

Because one is 96 pages and one is a young adult book!  Combined, still the average length of our books.

Read more about them below.

Here is how we'll work it... we'll start Book Club at 8:30 that month and do 45 mins of each book.  :)

Written as a letter to her children, Kelly Corrigan's Lift is a tender, intimate, and robust portrait of risk and love; a touchstone for anyone who wants to live more fully. In Lift, Corrigan weaves together three true and unforgettable stories of adults willing to experience emotional hazards in exchange for the gratifications of raising children.
Lift takes its name from hang gliding, a pursuit that requires flying directly into rough air, because turbulence saves a glider from "sinking out." For Corrigan, this wisdom--that to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages--becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors, particularly the great flight that is parenting.
Corrigan serves it up straight--how mundanely and fiercely her children have been loved, how close most lives occasionally come to disaster, and how often we fall short as mothers and fathers. Lift is for everyone who has been caught off guard by the pace and vulnerability of raising children, to remind us that our work is important and our time limited.

"Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games." The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed. When her sister is chosen by lottery, Katniss steps up to go in her place."