« Sor Juana's Second Dream | Main | Summer Fall Book Club Picks »
March 23, 2006
Book Club Spring Summer 2006
Here is our new Book Club Schedule:
April 19 – The Cape Ann (Sullivan) at Anne’s
May 17 – Roosevelt (theme) at Anne’s
June 21 – The Seville Communion (Perez-Reverte) at Susan’s
July -- A Country Doctor's Casebook by Roger A. MacDonald (Rosemary's pick) at Meggin's
August -- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon -- at Ruth's
September -- The White by Deborah Larsen. at Sarah's
October 18 – The Painted Drum (Erdrich) at Roberta’s
The rest can be filled in as we go…(see below)
…see you next month…
--Anne
Book Picks / Suggestions
March 22, 2006
Rosemary
A Country Doctor’s Casebook: Tales from the North Woods / Roger A MacDonald
Eggs in the Coffee, Sheep in the Corn / Marjorie Meyers Douglas
Minnesota Goes to War: The Home Front During WWII / Dave Kenney
Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson / William Swanson
John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul 1920-1936 / Paul Maccabee
Roberta
River of Doubt / Candice Millard
Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce / Kent Nerburn
The Painted Drum / Louise Erdrich
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene / Jean-Yves Leloup
The Professor and the Madman / Simon Winchester
Susan
The Red Tent or Good Harbor / Anita Diamant
Poisonwood Bible / Barbara Kingsolver
The Cape Ann / Faith Sullivan
Dreams From My Father/ Barack Obama
The Seville Communion / Arturo Perez-Reverte
Memoirs of a Geisha / Arthur Golden
Anne
Assassination Vacation / Sarah Vowell
Shantaram / Gregory David Roberts
The World is Flat / Thomas Friedman
Themes: Lincoln / Civil War / Roosevelt (Eleanor, FDR, Teddy)
Posted by s-gang at March 23, 2006 01:37 PM | Books
Comments
Hello -- I publish a newsletter for book clubs and happened on your site as I was looking for a club that had read The Cape Ann. Could someone in your group email me? I would love to hear how your discussion went and whether you would recommend the book to other book clubs. I would be happy to send you some sample newsletters!
Thank you Kathleen Curtis
Posted by: Kathleen Curtis at May 24, 2006 07:41 AM
t's the birthday of the novelist who just won the Nobel Prize Doris Lessing, (books by this author) born in Kermanshah, Persia, which is now Iran (1919). Her father moved the family to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he hoped to start a tobacco farm and prospect for gold. They lived in a mud and thatch house, sleeping under mosquito net, and her father's plans to make it rich didn't pan out. He would often stand outside their home shouting that everyone in Africa was mad. Lessing would fall asleep at night to the sound of her mother playing Chopin on their piano, mixed with the thudding of the drums from the village down the hill.
She married a civil servant when she was 19 and became a housewife and mother, giving tea parties and cleaning all the time. But underneath it all, she said, "I thought, what am I doing in this awful country." She began seeking out new friends who talked about politics and read serious books, and for the first time in her life she felt inspired by something. She said, "It was absolute bliss to be able to talk about ideas."
So she decided to be a writer, got divorced, and moved to London after World War II. She was an unemployed single mother, but she didn't worry too much about publishing anything. She said, "I had sticking power, which is just as important as literary talent. ... There are such things as writing animals. I simply have to write." Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, came out in 1950, about a white woman in Southern Rhodesia who has an affair with her African house servant.
But the book that made Lessing famous was The Golden Notebook (1962), about a writer named Anna who keeps four separate writing notebooks: one for her memories, one for her political life, one for her fiction, and one for her thoughts. The novel consists of sections of each of these notebooks interwoven with each other. When it came out in 1962, feminists called it as a masterpiece, because it included so many details of a woman's life that had never been written about so openly before. Doris Lessing said, "The fact is, I don't live anywhere. I never have since I left that first house."
Posted by: Sue Oleson (Meggin's MOM) at October 22, 2007 09:23 PM