Sunni's Book Selections

John Jakes, On Secret Service
The author of the bestselling North and South trilogy remains in familiar territory as his latest sweeping historical novel retells the story of the Civil War, and also examines specific aspects of espionage, the development of the Secret Service and the controversies surrounding the Lincoln presidency and assassination. The chaos and drama of romantic love, also figure in the saga, centering on two young couples: Lon Price, a fledgling member of the newly founded Pinkerton agency, encounters beautiful actress Margaret Miller while investigating the secessionist movement, and Confederate lieutenant Frederick Dasher suffers a largely unrequited love for Miller's friend Hanna Siegel, also an actress and a secessionist. The Price/Miller pairing is by far the more interesting of the two, especially as Jakes explores the evolution of Pinkerton's secret service and how it linked with and diverged from the government's efforts to infiltrate the Confederate Army. Most of the scenes take place in and around Washington, and Jakes spreads himself a bit thin by covering the entire war rather than focusing exclusively on a smaller number of clandestine campaigns. The author saves the best for last in dealing with Lincoln's assassination, bringing the drama to life by giving each of his protagonists a crucial role as the conspiracy unfolds with expert pacing and suspense. In On Secret Service, Jakes uncovers the little-known history of espionage and counterespionage during the War Between the States with his signature combination of meticulous research and epic narrative, once again proving himself the foremost historical novelist of our national conflict in a title marking his 50th year as a professional writer.

Lawrence Sanders, The First Deadly Sin

The unltimate psychosexual thriller and one of the greatest suspense novels of all time. A well-dressed man stalks the high-class neighborhoods of New York City. He is armed with an ice ax. His victims are strangers. And one cop, Captain Ed Delaney, must solve a series of bizarre murders that defy logic.

Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

Running with Scissors is the story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules; there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock-therapy machine under the stairs that could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing, and bestselling account of an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances. Running with Scissors is hilarious, freaky-deaky, berserk, controlled, transcendent, touching, affectionate, vengeful, and all-embracing.

The Name of the Rose

Here are some links for Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose which we will discuss at the October 6, 2005 meeting.

About the book.

About the author.

A site devoted to Umberto Eco.

Another site devoted to Umberto Eco.

An interview with Umberto Eco.

See you at the meeting.

Rachel's Book Selections

The Voyage

by Philip Caputo

In the tradition of great seafaring adventures, The Voyage is an intricately plotted, superbly detailed, and gripping story of adventure and courage. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Caputo has written a timeless novel about the dangerous reverberating effects of long held family secrets.
On a June morning in 1901, Cyrus Braithwaite orders his three sons to set sail from their Maine home aboard the family's forty-six-foot schooner and not return until September. Though confused and hurt by their father's cold-blooded actions, the three brothers soon rise to the occasion and embark on a breathtakingly perilous journey down the East Coast, headed for the Florida Keys.
Almost one hundred years later, Cyrus's great-granddaughter Sybil sets out to uncover the events that transpired on the voyage. Her discoveries about the Braithwaite family and the America they lived in unfolds into a stunning tale of intrigue, murder, lies and deceit.

What Barnes and Noble , and Amazon had to say about the Voyage.

Gilead

A Novelby Marilynne Robinson

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

What Barnes & Nobles, and Amazon had to say about Gilead.

Unless

by Carol Shields

I'm not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I've had a look, and there's nothing down that road. Well now! What about the ripping sound behind my eyes, the starchy tearing of fabric, end to end; what about the need I have to curl up my knees when I sleep?For all of her life, 44 year old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light 'summertime' fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads 'GOODNESS.' Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope.Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in Shields' remarkably supple prose. Unless, a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proves her mastery of extraordinary fictions about ordinary life.

What Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, had to say about Unless.

Fountainhead

Here are some interesting links about the Fountainhead and Ayn Rand.

A good intro to Ayn Rand

Official Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand Institute and All About Ayn Rand.

The Altasphere - a dating site. Some of you single folks have to check it out. Plus its got interesting other stuff like Celebrity Rand fans.

An Ayn Rand fan and his blog.

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

The Objectivist Center.

Reason Magazine with many articles on Rand.

Okay - that's enough. There is more Rand stuff on the web than any one person could possibly read. Let me know if you find anything else especially fun.

Guilty Pleasures

Here are the selections for the next meeting. Please vote as soon as you can so I can order them and hand them out at the July 28 meeting. Assuming there is not a landslide vote for one, we will have a run off vote between the two most popular.

Scott defined a guilty pleasure as: "Something that has literary merit, but that might not be deemed “book club worthy” under normal circumstances. Not something so low as the house of curl, but not as highbrow as the soul mountain im still climbing. A Scott Turow book might be an example – great summer read, and has some literary merit, but not necessarily book club worthy."

Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco (Scott)
There are many opinions of this book, which is both rare and wonderful for a work basically so young. Its fanbase is very large, and includes mystery buffs, classical lit professors, postmodern fiction enthusiasts, science fiction and fantasy fans, mathematicians and linguists – rarely does one encounter a contemporary work with a readership so diverse. Some know it only from the film version with Sean Connery and Christian Slater; a decent movie, but as a faithful rendition of the novel, it is not without serious flaws. Some consider it an historical mystery, a literary whodunit touching on everything from God to toxicology, and to others it plays like a supernatural novel of the occult, filled with arcane references and sinister monks brooding in the shadow of the Apocalypse.

Eco, an Italian philosopher and best-selling novelist, is a great polymathic fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce, and Borges. The Name of the Rose, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, is an experimental medieval whodunit set in a monastic library. In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate heresy among the monks in an Italian abbey; a series of bizarre murders overshadows the mission. Within the mystery is a tale of books, librarians, patrons, censorship, and the search for truth in a period of tension between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire.

Link to B&N
Link to Amazon

Feddy and Fredericka - Mark Helprin (Sunni)
The new novel from the masterful author of A Soldier of the Great War is a wildly inventive fantasia in which a Prince and Princess of Wales who can't stop embarrassing the royal family are packed off on an odyssey through the strangest kingdom of all: 21st-century America. Book clubs will delight in Mark Helprin's story, which encompasses both cutting satire and a surprisingly moving portrait of a most unusual married couple.

Note - New Release Only Available in Hardcover (currently 20% discount)
Link to B&N
Link to Amazon

Witching Hour - Anne Rice (Christine)
From the author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles comes a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries. Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches—a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking . . . and The Witching Hour begins.
Link to B&N
Link to Amazon

Sandstorm - James Rollins (Rachel)
An inexplicable explosion rocks the antiquities collection of a London museum -- a devastating blast that sets off alarms in clandestine organizations around the world, as the race begins to determine how it happened, why it happened, and what it means.
Lady Kara Kensington's family paid a high price in money and blood to found the gallery that now lies in ruins. And her search for answers is about to lead Kara and her friend Safia al-Maaz, the gallery's brilliant and beautiful curator, into a world they never dreamed actually existed. For new evidence exposed by the tragedy suggests that Ubar, a lost city buried beneath the Arabian desert, is more than mere legend ... and that something astonishing is waiting there.
Two extraordinary women and their guide, the international adventurer Omaha Dunn, are not the only ones being drawn to the desert. Former U.S. Navy SEAL Painter Crowe, a covert government operative and head of an elite counterespionage team, is hunting down a dangerous turncoat, Crowe's onetime partner, to retrieve the vital information she has stolen. And the trail is pointing him toward Ubar.
But the many perils inherent in a death-defying trek deep into the savage heart of the Arabian Peninsula pale before the nightmarish secrets to be unearthed at journey's end. What is hidden below the sand is more than a valuable relic of ancient history. It is an ageless power that lives and breathes -- an awesome force that could create a utopia or tear down everything humankind has built during millennia of civilization. Many lives have already been destroyed by ruthless agencies dedicated to guarding its mysteries and harnessing its might. And now the end may be at hand for Safia, for Kara, for Crowe, and for all the interlopers who wish to expose its mysteries, as it prepares to unleash the most terrible storm of all ...
Link to B&N
Link to Amazon

Club Duma - Arturo Perez-Reverte (Linda)
The story begins with the hiring of professional "book- hunter" Lucas Corso by Boris Balkan, a translator and collector who seeks authentication of a handwritten manuscript chapter of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers that has fortuitously, as they say, come into his possession. Traveling back and forth between Paris and Madrid, Corso matches wits with Liana Taillefer, whose husband's suicide was somehow connected with his ownership of the Delomelanicon, an illustrated medieval volume said to contain secret instructions for summoning the devil, and of which only two other copies are known to exist. Corso is soon involved in a byzantine international intrigue carried on by those who want, or have information about, the Dumas chapter and the infernal Delomelanicon, including: urbane and ruthless bookseller Varo Borja; an aged German baroness; a threatening man with a facial scar whom his quarry Corso bemusedly nicknames "Rochefort" (after Dumas); and a preternaturally self-possessed teenaged girl who says she's Irene Adler (this being the name of Sherlock Holmes's most infamous mystery woman). Pérez-Reverte plaits all these teasing strands together with imperturbable skill, leaving the reader wondering until almost the final pages about the significance of his seductive title, and the allegation that Alexandre Dumas's narrative genius was the result of his pact with Satan.
Link to B&N
Link to Amazon

Straight Man - Richard Russo (Chris)
Picture this: William Henry (Hank) Devereaux Jr., tenured professor at a second-rank college in Pennsylvania, where he is chairman of the fractious English Department, faces TV cameras wearing a false nose and glasses, brandishing a goose over his head and threatening to kill a duck a day until he gets a budget. It's a vintage Russo scene, and there are others like it in this hilarious, wise and compassionate novel. Pushing 50, Hank is suffering a midlife crisis he will not acknowledge. After his miserable childhood as the son of a chilly mother and a downright icy father--a renowned professor, literary critic and adulterer--Hank has avoided confrontation with his emotions. He jokes about his mediocre job, his lack of self-esteem (his one novel, 20 years ago, got good reviews but didn't sell) and his role as goad and gadfly to his friends and enemies. During the course of the novel, which begins with the burial of one dog and ends with the interment of another, Hank manages to get himself in continuous trouble, in jail, in a ladies room (where he attempts to divest himself of the pants, shoe and sock he has peed in), in the hospital and out of a job. Meanwhile, Russo concocts an inspired send-up of academia's infighting and petty intrigues that ranks with the best of David Lodge, as we follow Hank's progress from perverse mockery to insight and acceptance. Readers who do not laugh uncontrollably during this raucous, witty and touching work are seriously impaired.
Link to B&N
Link to Amazon

Fierce Invalids Links

Here are some Tom Robbins and Fierce Invalids links in no particular order.

A site dedicated to Robbins
Interview on Amazon about Fierce Invalids
Bookpage interview about Fierce Invalids
January Magazine Interview
High Times Interview
Seattle Weekly Interview
Salon article about Tom Robbins
Spank the Monkey article about Fierce Invalids
Another page about Robbins
For those interested in Our Lady of Fatima
The Third Prophecy of Fatima released by the Vatican three weeks after Fierce Invalids published.
Rimbaud's Season in Hell - go to the Bad Blood poem for the source of the title "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates".

May 12, 2005 Meeting

We will be meeting May 12, 2005 to discuss my selection, Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. Heather will also present her selection for the next book. Chris will anounce the location of the meeting. Stay tuned to the blog for further information.

Scott's Book Selections

Hello Everyone - Scott posted his book selections in a comment to the March 31 meeting notice. Unfortunately blogger won't let you use links in a comment, only a post, so here is a copy of Scott's comment with functional links.

Well, it is tax season (boo hiss) and I am swamped. I have five suggestions, two of which I have not had time to read yet. In no particular order they are:

1) The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen I loved this book - really well written, great "navel gazing" as Linda puts it story of the dissolution sort of of the american family. I thought the writing was superb and the fact he dissed Operah was just a bonus. It is long however, just over 500 pages.

2) Deception - Denise Mina I am not sure whether this is book club worthy or whether it will merit much discussion, but it was a great read. Its the story of a man whose wife is convicted of murder. As he searches through her things for evidence to help her case on appeal, he discovers more than he bargained for. Told from the point of view of his diaries - really well written, very "David Lynchian" in its portrayal of the underbelly of middle class life. Only in hardcover at the moment I think.

3) Disgrace - J.M. Coetze Picked this booker prize winner up on trip to NY and have not had time to read it. It's short !!!! Barnes and Noble says "Another incident in the great campaign of redistribution," mutters the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, as he discovers that his house has been ransacked and looted during a long absence. This incidental muttering, almost an afterthought, lies at the thematic and emotional center of this short but powerful novel. As with all of Coetzee's work, the new South Africa is a looming presence, both literally, as the story's setting, and thematically, as its characters struggle to adapt to a culture that has been remade, often violently, from the bottom up. And while Disgrace offers a lot on the larger themes of power, redistribution, reformation, forgiveness, and more, it is at heart a finely tuned and often bleak portrayal of one man who realizes that he has become outmoded and outdated.Maybe a bit too south african after Christine's lets not go to the dogs tonight, but on the other hand has lots of themes for discussion, must be well written for the booker, and is again short!!!

4) Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell Havent read it yet, but I really want to. Once again, long = 500 pages. But it sounds amazing. Mitchell’s virtuosic novel presents six narratives that evoke an array of genres, from Melvillean high-seas drama to California noir and dystopian fantasy. There is a naïve clerk on a nineteenth-century Polynesian voyage; an aspiring composer who insinuates himself into the home of a syphilitic genius; a journalist investigating a nuclear plant; a publisher with a dangerous best-seller on his hands; and a cloned human being created for slave labor. These five stories are bisected and arranged around a sixth, the oral history of a post-apocalyptic island, which forms the heart of the novel. Only after this do the second halves of the stories fall into place, pulling the novel’s themes into focus: the ease with which one group enslaves another, and the constant rewriting of the past by those who control the present. Against such forces, Mitchell’s characters reveal a quiet tenacity. When the clerk is told that his life amounts to “no more than one drop in a limitless ocean,” he asks, “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”I'm really intrigued by this. Probably too long.

5) The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand This should be read by every human being and committed to memory as absolute truth. Philosophically debunks the myths of socialism and communism for what they are. Seriously though, a classic, a great read, and it certainly will gernerate a lot of discussion. May have been read too many times by too many people.

Okay, discuss amongst yourselves and I'll see you at book club.

March 31 Meeting

Hello Everyone,
We will be meeting to discuss the Crying of Lot 49 at Christine's house at 6:30 pm on Thursday March 31. Scott will present his selection for May. Hopefully Tanisha will be able to rejoin us as the bar exam is now over. Please save the date. Food assignments and directions will follow.

Liz's Southwest Sausage Bake

Liz's Southwest Sausage Bake has been such a hit at brunch meetings and has generated so many requests for the recipe that I thought we might as well post it to the blog.

6 flour tortillas (10 inches), cut into ½ inch strips
4 cans (4 oz each) chopped green chilies, drained
1 lb. bulk pork sausage, cooked and drained
2 cups (8 oz.) Shredded Monterey Jack cheese
10 eggs
½ cup milk
½ tsp. each salt, garlic salt, onion salt, pepper and ground cumin
paprika
2 medium tomatoes sliced
Serve with sour cream and salsa

In a greased 13in. x 9in. x 2in. baking dish layer half of the tortilla strips, chilies, sausage and cheese. Repeat layers. In a bowl, beat the eggs, milk, and seasonings; pour over cheese. Sprinkle with paprika. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Remove from the refrigerator 30 minutes before baking. Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees for 50 minutes. Arrange tomato slices over the top. Bake 10-15 minutes longer or until knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Let stand for 10 minutes before cutting. Serve with sour cream and salsa. Makes 12 servings.

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February 6 Meeting

The meeting has been rescheduled for Sunday February 6, 2005 at Liz's house.

January Meeting Postponed

Unfortunatley the January 16 meeting must be postponed. The available Sundays to meet at Liz's house and discuss Liz's book Atonement are January 30 and February 6. Please vote in the comments whether or not you are available on those dates. Unless the February date is better for people, the next meeting will be January 30. Please follow the blog for notification of the determined date.