My three book club choices, in no particular order:
Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner
Just published this year and still in hardcover. 322 pages, $15.40
Winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize (whatever that is). Set in unromanticized arctic Alaska, "captures the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture". I’m only a few chapters into it, but I like it. It is a coming-of-age story told by a boy with two siblings raised by an artist father who has abandoned civilization to live in a sod igloo located a days sled journey away from an Eskimo village. The family lives a more primitive lifestyle than their Eskimo neighbors, and the boy’s brother and sister eventually abandon the tundra for the city. The boy reveres traditional Eskimo ways, loves wolves and an Eskimo girl, but is discriminated against because he is white. It is a story about a boy torn between two cultures, fitting in in neither, who tries to reconcile his wilderness experience with modern society.
The Roaches Have No King by Daniel Evan Weiss
Published in 2001, 249 pages (a quick read), $13.00 paperback
OK, I warned everyone that this book is sexually graphic and politically incorrect. That said, it is also very different from anything we’ve read before. A dark comedy about a society of roaches living in liberal legal aid lawyer Ira Fishblatt’s apartment, told from the point of view of a roach named Numbers. When Ira’s slob girlfriend "The Gypsy" moves out and new girlfriend Ruth moves in, Ira renovates the kitchen and the roaches start to starve. In desperation, Numbers thinks up crazy schemes to break up Ira and Ruth and regain control over the kitchen cabinets. Heather has convinced me that the book has literary merit and lots of things to discuss, in a controversial "what is art anyway?" sort of way.
The Corrections: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen
Published in 2001, 592 pages (whew!), $6.98 hardcover, $13.50 paperback
Haven’t read it, but it’s been on my list for awhile. It appears to be a modern Midwestern family drama. An elderly mother with a soon to be senile husband wants to bring her three dysfunctional adult children home for one last family Christmas together. While it seems to have mixed reviews, Scott recommends it, and Scott’s favorite(?) author David Foster Wallace apparently called it "funny and deeply sad...". Probably my third choice, but only because I haven’t read it yet.
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4 comments:
Since I've read it, I'll vote for the corrections. Increadible wordplay and a sweeping story focusus on family reltaoinships. Second choice the roaches. I'm kind of sick of the outsider fitting in or not fitting in theme and thus i woued prefer not to read the eskimo book.
I vote for Roaches as well.
Roaches overwhelmingly won. Guess we cannot resist a book described as controversial. I ordered the book and hopefully will have it to bring to the meeting next weekend.
Heather suggested that my prior post regarding Roaches' overwhelming victory was confusing as the prior posts did not support such a contention. In addition to the voting conducted on the blog, I also accepted telephonic votes. In total Wolves got zero, Corrections got two, Roaches got five and one member did not vote as she was off island.
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