AUGUST |
Dear Fellow Bibliophiles, I am happy to hear the meeting went well and I am sorry I was sick and couldn't make it. Next time, it will feel like forever since I've seen some of you. I have a bit of business. I heard the selection was Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. This book is over 1000 pages and I have to wonder if the margaritas didn't have an effect on your decision. Seriously folks, I feel it's just too long for a several reasons. First, I doubt many of those who haven't read it will be able to come close to finishing it (except maybe Jill, smile). Second, I'm concerned that the length alone will turn some folks away. Third, readers would come to the meeting at many different points in the book, which would make discussion cumbersome. Please let me know what you think of my concerns. As we are taking a Holiday break in December, this would be a great book to consider for our November/January selection. I have put together a list of 6 choices below, with some descriptions. Please let me know what you think about changing our selection for this month and give your vote (if you would) on one of the selections below. I put another Ayn Rand selection in that is a bit shorter. If we pick this one, that would, I imagine, decrease the likelihood of our reading her in Winter again so keep that in mind. I hope I am not disturbing any of you in taking this bold step, but I feel pretty strongly that a 1,078 page book is just a bit more than we can handle in a month. So, the below selections were haphazardly chosen. If none grab you, let me know that too, but vote anyway. Ayn Rand - We the Living (around 500 pages) Set in Russia just after the communist revolution of 1917, Ayn Rand's first novel is the story of three idealistic young people who struggle to retain their vision of life against a totalitarian system. Gets very good reviews on Amazon...of course, so do all the others below. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera (348 pages) From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years. In the story of Florentino Ariza, who waits more than half a century to declare his undying love to the beautiful Fermina Daza, whom he lost to Dr. Juvenal Urbino so many years before, García Márquez has created a vividly absorbing fictional world, as lush and dazzling as a dream and as real and immediate as our own deepest longings. Now available for the first time in the Contemporary Classics series! Virginia Woolf - Orlando (333 pages) In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending and way, way before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton, Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car. This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon. Henry James - The Ambassador (513 pages) The Ambassadors, which Henry James considered his best work, is the most exquisite refinement of his favorite theme: the collision of American innocence with European experience. His hyper-refined characters are at their best in dialogue, particularly when they're exchanging morsels of gossip. Astute, funny, and relentlessly intelligent, James amply fulfills his own description of the novelist as a person upon whom nothing is lost. Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier (352 pages) First published in 1915, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier begins, famously and ominously, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." The book then proceeds to confute this pronouncement at every turn, exposing a world less sad than pathetic, and more shot through with hypocrisy and deceit than its incredulous narrator, John Dowell, cares to imagine. Somewhat forgotten as a classic, The Good Soldier has been called everything from the consummate novelist's novel to one of the greatest English works of the century. And although its narrative hook--the philandering of an otherwise noble man--no longer shocks, its unerring cadences and doleful inevitabilities proclaim an enduring appeal. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (336 pages) Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells the story of a teenaged misfit who finds himself floating on a raft down the Mississippi River with an escaping slave, Jim. In the course of their perilous journey, Huck and Jim meet adventure, danger, and a cast of characters who are sometimes menacing and often hilarious. Though some of the situations in Huckleberry Finn are funny in themselves (the cockeyed Shakespeare production in Chapter 21 leaps instantly to mind), this book's humor is found mostly in Huck's unique worldview and his way of expressing himself. Describing his brief sojourn with the Widow Douglas after she adopts him, Huck says: "After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people." Underlying Twain's good humor is a dark subcurrent of Antebellum cruelty and injustice that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a frequently funny book with a serious message. PART TWO Hi, Well, it looks like it's going to be Love in the Time of Cholera. This is, interestingly, the first book from the list on our website. As a tip, Atlas Shrugged is still very much wanting to be read so it is in place as our November selection (to be discussed at the January meeting). I looked back at my notes from our first meeting in January and saw that we thought books over about 500 pages (give or take 100) should probably be saved for the breaks. I am striving to satisfy most of the group, and it seems like this is the best way to do it. I think it's a fine compromise. Thank you to all who provided input in this process and selection. Now, run out and grab up that San Rafael Public Library copy of Cholera before someone else does :) Thanks again to everyone and happy reading!! Michelle HOME SEPTEMBER |
PART ONE |