As Scott is in Dallas he asked me to post his book selections. I have linked to the blurbs and reviews for Amazon and Barnes & Noble for each, just click the link.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace. Amazon. Barnes & Noble. Scott's comment: Yes it's non fiction and essays but it is the best example of David Foster Wallace's prose and wit!
Saturday by Ian McEwan. Amazon. Barnes & Noble.
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. Amazon. Barnes & Noble.
1984 by George Orwell. Amazon. Barnes & Noble.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Rachelle's Book Selections
1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BESTSELLERPULITZER PRIZE WINNERNational Book Critic's Circle Award FinalistA New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the YearThe Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington PostThe searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
2. Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.
Chuck Palahniuk, author of the dangerously brilliant Fight Club, pulls no punches in his latest novel, Choke. Once again, Palahniuk invites us to experience the underground, church-basement-dwelling world of the 12-step program. Only this time we're not in for testicular, bone, or skin cancer; this time we're dealing with sexual addiction. Not that former med student Victor Mancini has a problem, 'cause he doesn't. But when it comes to getting a little action, where better to go?
In Choke, as in all of Palahniuk's work, we hear the echoes of writers as diverse as Jonathan Swift, Don DeLillo, George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bret Easton Ellis. But Palahniuk's voice is so unique, and his perspective so specific and fresh, one can hardly call his fiction derivative. Brazenly addressing our sexual excesses, our obsession with death, and our yearning for love, Palahniuk paints a horrific but ultimately fascinating portrait of the 21st-century psyche whose effect is much like bearing witness to an accident: Gruesome as it is, it is impossible not to look. (Cary Goldstein)
3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to The Kite Runner does not disappoint. Set like its predecessor in war-torn Afghanistan, A Thousand Splendid Suns uses that tumultuous backdrop to render the heroic plight of two women of different generations married to the same savagely abusive male. Born out of wedlock, Mariam was forced to marry 40-year-old Rasheed when she was only 15. Then, 18 years later, her still childless husband angrily takes an even younger wife. Hosseini renders the story of Mariam and her "sister/daughter," Laila, with persuasive detail and consummate humanity. Their abject situation leaves them no emotional space for idle philosophizing; their resistance is from the very core of their being. Truly must-read fiction.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years -- from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding -- that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives -- the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness -- are inextricable from the history playing out around them.
Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once a remarkable chronicle of three decades of Afghan history and a deeply moving account of family and friendship. It is a striking, heart-wrenching novel of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love -- a stunning accomplishment.
NATIONAL BESTSELLERPULITZER PRIZE WINNERNational Book Critic's Circle Award FinalistA New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the YearThe Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington PostThe searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
2. Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.
Chuck Palahniuk, author of the dangerously brilliant Fight Club, pulls no punches in his latest novel, Choke. Once again, Palahniuk invites us to experience the underground, church-basement-dwelling world of the 12-step program. Only this time we're not in for testicular, bone, or skin cancer; this time we're dealing with sexual addiction. Not that former med student Victor Mancini has a problem, 'cause he doesn't. But when it comes to getting a little action, where better to go?
In Choke, as in all of Palahniuk's work, we hear the echoes of writers as diverse as Jonathan Swift, Don DeLillo, George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bret Easton Ellis. But Palahniuk's voice is so unique, and his perspective so specific and fresh, one can hardly call his fiction derivative. Brazenly addressing our sexual excesses, our obsession with death, and our yearning for love, Palahniuk paints a horrific but ultimately fascinating portrait of the 21st-century psyche whose effect is much like bearing witness to an accident: Gruesome as it is, it is impossible not to look. (Cary Goldstein)
3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to The Kite Runner does not disappoint. Set like its predecessor in war-torn Afghanistan, A Thousand Splendid Suns uses that tumultuous backdrop to render the heroic plight of two women of different generations married to the same savagely abusive male. Born out of wedlock, Mariam was forced to marry 40-year-old Rasheed when she was only 15. Then, 18 years later, her still childless husband angrily takes an even younger wife. Hosseini renders the story of Mariam and her "sister/daughter," Laila, with persuasive detail and consummate humanity. Their abject situation leaves them no emotional space for idle philosophizing; their resistance is from the very core of their being. Truly must-read fiction.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years -- from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding -- that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives -- the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness -- are inextricable from the history playing out around them.
Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once a remarkable chronicle of three decades of Afghan history and a deeply moving account of family and friendship. It is a striking, heart-wrenching novel of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love -- a stunning accomplishment.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
October 9, 2008
Next meeting is Thursday October 9, 2008 at Jamila's house to discuss Jamila's book, the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Rachelle will present her book selections and I will deliver copies of the Polished Hoe.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Jamila's Book Selections
Shadow of the Wind
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.
Customer Review By Gregory Baird
Meet Oscar de León. Once upon a time, in elementary school, Oscar was a slick Dominican kid who seemed to have a typical life ahead of him. Then, around the time he hit puberty, Oscar gained a whole lot of weight, became awkward both physically and socially, and got deeply interested in things that made him an outcast among his peers (sci-fi novels, comics, Dungeons & Dragons, writing novels, etc.). A particularly unfortunate Dr. Who Halloween costume earns him the nickname Oscar Wao for the costume's resemblance to another Oscar: playwright Oscar Wilde (Wao being a Dominican spin on the surname). His few friends are embarrassed by him, girls want nothing to do with him, and everywhere he goes Oscar finds nothing but derision and hostility. And he's not the only person in his family suffering through life: his mother, a former beauty, has been ravaged by illness, bad love affairs, and worry regarding her two children; and his sister Lola, another intense beauty, has been cursed with a nomadic soul and her mother's poor taste in men. The kicker about the de León family? They just may be the victims of a bona fide curse (a particularly nasty one at that, called a fukú) as a result of their history with Rafael Trujillo, a former dictator of the Dominican Republic renowned for his brutality, and whose enemies uniformly met with disastrous ends one way or another (historical details about Trujillo and the history of his reign are scattered throughout the novel, a tidbit that may turn some off of the book, but rest assured that Díaz is so utterly entertaining a writer that they are a joy to read). The de Leóns are on a collision course with disaster, but can they break the curse before it's too late?
Product Details
Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
First Sentence:
IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
The illustrious and meticulous Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his proud, stately wife Fermina Daza, respectively past 80 and 70, are in the autumn of their solid marriage as the drama opens on the suicide of the doctor's chess partner. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, a disabled photographer of children, chooses death over the indignities of old age, revealing in a letter a clandestine love affair, on the "fringes of a closed society's prejudices." This scenario not only heralds Urbino's demise soon afterwhen he falls out of a mango tree in an attempt to catch an escaped parrotbut brilliantly presages the novel's central themes, which are as concerned with the renewing capacity of age as with an anatomy of love. We meet Florentino Ariza, more antihero than hero, a mock Don Juan with an undertaker's demeanor, at once pathetic, grotesque and endearing, when he seizes the memorably unseemly occasion of Urbino's funeral to reiterate to Fermina the vow of love he first uttered more than 50 years before. With the fine detailing of a Victorian novel, the narrative plunges backward in time to reenact their earlier, youthful courtship of furtive letters and glances, frustrated when Fermina, in the light of awaking maturity, realizes Florentino is an adolescent obsession, and rejects him. With his uncanny ability to unearth the extraordinary in the commonplace, Garcia Marquez smoothly interweaves Fermina's and Florentino's subsequent histories. Enmeshed in a bizarre string of affairs with ill-fated widows while vicariously conducting the liaisons of others via love poems composed on request, Florentino feverishly tries to fill the void of his unrequited passion. Meanwhile, Fermina's marriage suffers vicissitudes but endures, affirming that marital love can be as much the product of art as is romantic love. When circumstances both comic and mystical offer Fermina and Florentino a second chance, during a time in their lives that is often regarded as promising only inevitable degeneration toward death, Garcia Marquez beautifully reveals true love's soil not in the convention of marriage but in the simple, timeless rituals that are its cement.
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Author), Lucia Graves (Translator)
First Sentence:
A SECRET'S WORTH DEPENDS ON THE PEOPLE FROM WHOM IT MUST BE KEPT.
From Publishers Weekly and Wikipedia
The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 11 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. As Daniel begins investigating the life and death of Carax, this mysterious figure confronts and threatens Daniel. Terrified, Daniel returns the book to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books but continues to seek out the story of the elusive author. In doing so Daniel becomes entangled in an age old conflict that began with the author himself.
The Shadow of the Wind is a coming-of-age tale of a young boy who, through the magic of a single book, finds a purpose greater than himself and a hero in a man he's never met. With the passion of García Márquez, the irony of Dickens, and the necromancy of Poe, Carlos Ruiz Zafón spins a web of intrigue so thick that it ensnares the reader from the very first line. The Shadow of the Wind is an ode to the art of reading, but it is also the perfect example of the all-encompassing power of a well-told story. http://us.penguingroup.com
Product Details
- Paperback: 487 pages
- Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (January 25, 2005)
- Language: Originally in Spanish, translated into English
- ISBN-10: 0143034901
- ISBN-13: 978-0143034902
The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao (Hardcover only- sorry!)
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.
Customer Review By Gregory Baird
Meet Oscar de León. Once upon a time, in elementary school, Oscar was a slick Dominican kid who seemed to have a typical life ahead of him. Then, around the time he hit puberty, Oscar gained a whole lot of weight, became awkward both physically and socially, and got deeply interested in things that made him an outcast among his peers (sci-fi novels, comics, Dungeons & Dragons, writing novels, etc.). A particularly unfortunate Dr. Who Halloween costume earns him the nickname Oscar Wao for the costume's resemblance to another Oscar: playwright Oscar Wilde (Wao being a Dominican spin on the surname). His few friends are embarrassed by him, girls want nothing to do with him, and everywhere he goes Oscar finds nothing but derision and hostility. And he's not the only person in his family suffering through life: his mother, a former beauty, has been ravaged by illness, bad love affairs, and worry regarding her two children; and his sister Lola, another intense beauty, has been cursed with a nomadic soul and her mother's poor taste in men. The kicker about the de León family? They just may be the victims of a bona fide curse (a particularly nasty one at that, called a fukú) as a result of their history with Rafael Trujillo, a former dictator of the Dominican Republic renowned for his brutality, and whose enemies uniformly met with disastrous ends one way or another (historical details about Trujillo and the history of his reign are scattered throughout the novel, a tidbit that may turn some off of the book, but rest assured that Díaz is so utterly entertaining a writer that they are a joy to read). The de Leóns are on a collision course with disaster, but can they break the curse before it's too late?
Product Details
- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (September 6, 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1594489580
- ISBN-13: 978-1594489587
Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
First Sentence:
IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
The illustrious and meticulous Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his proud, stately wife Fermina Daza, respectively past 80 and 70, are in the autumn of their solid marriage as the drama opens on the suicide of the doctor's chess partner. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, a disabled photographer of children, chooses death over the indignities of old age, revealing in a letter a clandestine love affair, on the "fringes of a closed society's prejudices." This scenario not only heralds Urbino's demise soon afterwhen he falls out of a mango tree in an attempt to catch an escaped parrotbut brilliantly presages the novel's central themes, which are as concerned with the renewing capacity of age as with an anatomy of love. We meet Florentino Ariza, more antihero than hero, a mock Don Juan with an undertaker's demeanor, at once pathetic, grotesque and endearing, when he seizes the memorably unseemly occasion of Urbino's funeral to reiterate to Fermina the vow of love he first uttered more than 50 years before. With the fine detailing of a Victorian novel, the narrative plunges backward in time to reenact their earlier, youthful courtship of furtive letters and glances, frustrated when Fermina, in the light of awaking maturity, realizes Florentino is an adolescent obsession, and rejects him. With his uncanny ability to unearth the extraordinary in the commonplace, Garcia Marquez smoothly interweaves Fermina's and Florentino's subsequent histories. Enmeshed in a bizarre string of affairs with ill-fated widows while vicariously conducting the liaisons of others via love poems composed on request, Florentino feverishly tries to fill the void of his unrequited passion. Meanwhile, Fermina's marriage suffers vicissitudes but endures, affirming that marital love can be as much the product of art as is romantic love. When circumstances both comic and mystical offer Fermina and Florentino a second chance, during a time in their lives that is often regarded as promising only inevitable degeneration toward death, Garcia Marquez beautifully reveals true love's soil not in the convention of marriage but in the simple, timeless rituals that are its cement.
- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Books (October 30, 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0307387143
- ISBN-13: 978-0307387141
Monday, June 16, 2008
Stacey's Book Picks
Everyone
Hope the Summer is going well. I am really excited about posting possible books for us to read (ohhh the power of book assignments! In the summer even; I feel the makings of the dreaded English department thoughtpolice who make up the summer reading list!!).
My suggestions are
The Human Stain by Phillip Roth
Coleman Silk, at 71 a distinguished professor at a small New England college, has been harried from his position because of what has been perceived as a racist slur. His life is ruined: his wife succumbs under the strain, his friends are forsaking him, and he is reduced to an affair with 34-year-old Faunia Farley, the somber and illiterate janitor at the college. It is at this point that Zuckerman, Roth's novelist alter ego, gets to know and like Silk and to begin to see something of the personal and sexual liberation wrought in him by the unlikely affair with Faunia. It is also the point at which Faunia's estranged husband Les Farley, a Vietnam vet disabled by stress, drugs and drink, begins to take an interest in the relationship. So far this is highly intelligent, literate entertainment, with a rising tension. Will Les do something violent? Will Delphine Roux, the young French professor Silk had hired, who has come to hate him, escalate the college's campaign against him? Yes, but she now wants to make something of his Faunia relationship too. Then, in a dazzling coup, Roth turns all expectations on their heads, and begins to show Silk in a new and astounding light, as someone who has lived a huge lie all his life, making the fuss over his alleged racism even more surreal. The book continues to unfold layer after layer of meaning. There is a tragedy, as foretold, and an exquisitely imagined ending in which Zuckerman himself comes to feel both threatened and a threat. Roth is working here at the peak of his imaginative skills, creating many scenes at once sharply observed and moving: Faunia's affinity for the self-contained remoteness of crows, Farley's profane longing for a cessation to the tumult in his head, Zuckerman delightedly dancing with Silk to the big band tunes of their youth. He even brings off virtuoso passages that are superfluous but highly impressive, like his dissection of the French professor's lonely anguish in the States. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inchttp://www.amazon.com/Human-Stain-Novel-Philip-Roth/dp/0375726349/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213654373&sr=1-1
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. He eventually reaches America, but finds his quest for safety, community and fulfillment in many ways even more difficult there than in the camps: he recalls, for instance, being robbed, beaten and held captive in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers's limpid prose gives Valentino an unaffected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical. The result is a horrific account of the Sudanese tragedy, but also an emblematic saga of modernity-of the search for home and self in a world of unending upheaval. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reservedhttp://www.amazon.com/What-Vintage-Dave-Eggers/dp/0307385906/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213654251&sr=1-2
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat's father and uncle chose very different paths: the former struggled to make a new life for himself in America, while the latter remained in the homeland he paradoxically loved. In following their lives and their impact on future generations, Danticat's powerful family memoir explores how the private and the political, the past and the present, intersect. The most poignant section focuses on Joseph's tragic trip to the United States at age 81, but Danticat also tells a wider story about family and exile, the Haitian diaspora, the Duvalier regime, and post-9/11 immigration policy. Emotionally resonant and exceptionally clear-eyed, Brother, I'm Dying offers insight into a talented writer, her family history, and the injustices of the modern world.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. http://www.amazon.com/Brother-Im-Dying-Edwidge-Danticat/dp/1400041155/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213653670&sr=1-1
Hope the Summer is going well. I am really excited about posting possible books for us to read (ohhh the power of book assignments! In the summer even; I feel the makings of the dreaded English department thoughtpolice who make up the summer reading list!!).
My suggestions are
The Human Stain by Phillip Roth
Coleman Silk, at 71 a distinguished professor at a small New England college, has been harried from his position because of what has been perceived as a racist slur. His life is ruined: his wife succumbs under the strain, his friends are forsaking him, and he is reduced to an affair with 34-year-old Faunia Farley, the somber and illiterate janitor at the college. It is at this point that Zuckerman, Roth's novelist alter ego, gets to know and like Silk and to begin to see something of the personal and sexual liberation wrought in him by the unlikely affair with Faunia. It is also the point at which Faunia's estranged husband Les Farley, a Vietnam vet disabled by stress, drugs and drink, begins to take an interest in the relationship. So far this is highly intelligent, literate entertainment, with a rising tension. Will Les do something violent? Will Delphine Roux, the young French professor Silk had hired, who has come to hate him, escalate the college's campaign against him? Yes, but she now wants to make something of his Faunia relationship too. Then, in a dazzling coup, Roth turns all expectations on their heads, and begins to show Silk in a new and astounding light, as someone who has lived a huge lie all his life, making the fuss over his alleged racism even more surreal. The book continues to unfold layer after layer of meaning. There is a tragedy, as foretold, and an exquisitely imagined ending in which Zuckerman himself comes to feel both threatened and a threat. Roth is working here at the peak of his imaginative skills, creating many scenes at once sharply observed and moving: Faunia's affinity for the self-contained remoteness of crows, Farley's profane longing for a cessation to the tumult in his head, Zuckerman delightedly dancing with Silk to the big band tunes of their youth. He even brings off virtuoso passages that are superfluous but highly impressive, like his dissection of the French professor's lonely anguish in the States. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inchttp://www.amazon.com/Human-Stain-Novel-Philip-Roth/dp/0375726349/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213654373&sr=1-1
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. He eventually reaches America, but finds his quest for safety, community and fulfillment in many ways even more difficult there than in the camps: he recalls, for instance, being robbed, beaten and held captive in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers's limpid prose gives Valentino an unaffected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical. The result is a horrific account of the Sudanese tragedy, but also an emblematic saga of modernity-of the search for home and self in a world of unending upheaval. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reservedhttp://www.amazon.com/What-Vintage-Dave-Eggers/dp/0307385906/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213654251&sr=1-2
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat's father and uncle chose very different paths: the former struggled to make a new life for himself in America, while the latter remained in the homeland he paradoxically loved. In following their lives and their impact on future generations, Danticat's powerful family memoir explores how the private and the political, the past and the present, intersect. The most poignant section focuses on Joseph's tragic trip to the United States at age 81, but Danticat also tells a wider story about family and exile, the Haitian diaspora, the Duvalier regime, and post-9/11 immigration policy. Emotionally resonant and exceptionally clear-eyed, Brother, I'm Dying offers insight into a talented writer, her family history, and the injustices of the modern world.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. http://www.amazon.com/Brother-Im-Dying-Edwidge-Danticat/dp/1400041155/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213653670&sr=1-1
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Extra-curricular Activities
I had promised that I would provide ideas for extra-curricular activities since we are not meeting until June 19, 2007. Here are some thoughts.
If some people want to actually get together you could:
Each member could:
Here are the book related questions and I am sure you could come up with many more:
What was the first book you remember reading/being read?
What is your favorite book of all time?
What is the best book you have read in the past year?
Who is your favorite author?
Which book have you disliked but has left a lasting impression on you?
Which book have you read most frequently?
What book are you currently reading(exclusive of book club books) or have most recently completed reading?
Name one book/author that you really can't stand.
What type of books do you like reading most?
If you were given $50 to spend on a book, what book would you buy today?
Where's your favorite place to read?
Which character in a book is your favorite hero/heroine?
Which book, if any, do you think you should read, intend to read, but have been unable to read?
If you were stranded on a deserted island and could only have one book with you, what would it be?
Which setting or location in a book, fictional or real, would you most like to visit?
Which character in a book is your favorite villain?
Which character in a book would you most like to be?
Which is your favorite non-human character in a book?
What book do you plan to read next?
Which literary character would you most like to have in your family?
Which author, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with?
If some people want to actually get together you could:
- watch a movie of one of the books we have read - just of the top of my head there is No Country for Old Men, Kite Runner, Name of the Rose, Atonement, Namesake, Perfume to name a few.
- get together and every person could tell the group about a non-book club book that they had read.
- get together, answer some basic questions (see below) about your reading habits and then have the group guess which person gave which answer. We did this many years ago and it was lots of fun plus we learned a lot about each other.
Each member could:
- post a review of a book that they have read that they enjoyed
- post the answers to the questions about your reading habits or if someone was willing to act as facilitator, send the answers to the facilitator who would then post the answers on the blog and let people guess which person goes with which answer.
- post about interesting reading/book related web sites that others in the group might enjoy
- post about anything related to reading. Scott could post about his excitement about e- books for example.
Here are the book related questions and I am sure you could come up with many more:
What was the first book you remember reading/being read?
What is your favorite book of all time?
What is the best book you have read in the past year?
Who is your favorite author?
Which book have you disliked but has left a lasting impression on you?
Which book have you read most frequently?
What book are you currently reading(exclusive of book club books) or have most recently completed reading?
Name one book/author that you really can't stand.
What type of books do you like reading most?
If you were given $50 to spend on a book, what book would you buy today?
Where's your favorite place to read?
Which character in a book is your favorite hero/heroine?
Which book, if any, do you think you should read, intend to read, but have been unable to read?
If you were stranded on a deserted island and could only have one book with you, what would it be?
Which setting or location in a book, fictional or real, would you most like to visit?
Which character in a book is your favorite villain?
Which character in a book would you most like to be?
Which is your favorite non-human character in a book?
What book do you plan to read next?
Which literary character would you most like to have in your family?
Which author, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with?
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Sunni's Book Selections
For April 10, 2008 Meeting here are my following choices:
1. 19 Minutes, Jodi Picoult
Jodi Picoult, bestselling author of My Sister's Keeper and The Tenth Circle, pens her most riveting book yet, with a startling and poignant story about the devastating aftermath of a small-town tragedy.
Sterling is an ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens--until the day its complacency is shattered by an act of violence. Josie Cormier, the daughter of the judge sitting on the case, should be the state's best witness, but she can't remember what happened before her very own eyes--or can she? As the trial progresses, fault lines between the high school and the adult community begin to show--destroying the closest of friendships and families. Nineteen Minutes asks what it means to be different in our society, who has the right to judge someone else, and whether anyone is ever really who they seem to be.For reviews on this book please click here.
2. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival.
For reviews on this book please click here.
3. The God of Animals, Aryn Kyle
When her older sister runs away to marry a rodeo cowboy, Alice Winston is left to bear the brunt of her family's troubles -- a depressed, bedridden mother; a reticent, overworked father; and a run-down horse ranch. As the hottest summer in fifteen years unfolds and bills pile up, Alice is torn between dreams of escaping the loneliness of her duty-filled life and a longing to help her father mend their family and the ranch.
To make ends meet, the Winstons board the pampered horses of rich neighbors, and for the first time Alice confronts the power and security that class and wealth provide. As her family and their well-being become intertwined with the lives of their clients, Alice is drawn into an adult world of secrets and hard truths, and soon discovers that people -- including herself -- can be cruel, can lie and cheat, and every once in a while, can do something heartbreaking and selfless. Ultimately, Alice and her family must weather a devastating betrayal and a shocking, violent series of events that will test their love and prove the power of forgiveness.
A wise and astonishing novel about the different guises of love and the often steep tolls on the road to adulthood, The God of Animals is a haunting, unforgettable debut.
For reviews of this book please click here.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Cybook Ebook Reader
Here is the book reader from show and tell called the Cybook Gen III by Booken.
Not another ebook reader is the buying group Scott got it from and they will ship here via USPS.
You can buy new books at mobipocket as well as other sites like ebooks.com.
You can also download lots of free ebooks at sites like Project Guttenberg, Feedbooks or Many Books.
Not another ebook reader is the buying group Scott got it from and they will ship here via USPS.
You can buy new books at mobipocket as well as other sites like ebooks.com.
You can also download lots of free ebooks at sites like Project Guttenberg, Feedbooks or Many Books.
Monday, March 03, 2008
Melissa McCall's Book Selections
A Gracious Plenty
Sherri Reynolds
About this Book
Badly burned in a household accident when she was a child, Finch Nobles grows into a courageous and feisty loner who eschews the pity of her hometown and discovers that she can hear the voices of the people buried in her father's cemetery. Finally, when she speaks to them, they answer, telling their stories in a remarkable chorus of regrets, expla-nations, and insights. A Gracious Plenty is like an extraordinary amalgam of Steinbeck and Faulkner, Spoon River Anthology and Our Town. It is a reading experience that you will not soon forget.
Review Quotes
"Reynolds is a wonderful storyteller and master of pastoral Imagery."--New York Times Book Review"
Mesmerizing . . . Reynolds's earthly insights make for a redemptive finale--but not before some satisfying storms of retribution."--Entertainment Weekly"
A Gracious Plenty is a triumph of story, voice, and character. The afflicted and unforgettable Finch, whose longings inspire in equal measure love and awe and pity who seeks to understand the difference between the kind of suffering brought upon us and the kind we bring upon ourselves, defies mortality.
Stunning and authentic . . . this is a beautiful book."--Janet Peery, Author of The River Beyond "--an imaginative tour de force--. Pushing beyond the boundaries of her earlier work, Ms. Reynolds has created a life-affirming novel that gathers the joy and pain of. living into a celebration of what it means to behuman."--Richmond Times Dispatch
The Space Between Us
Thrity Umrigar
Artists know very well that a good way to depict overwhelming social problems is to tell the story of an individual who represents many others. One set of political circumstances might blur into another on the large scale, while the human story, well told, will be long remembered. India's complex struggle with poverty, class and overpopulation amid political change poses special challenges in this regard, but Thrity Umrigar has created two wonderfully sympathetic characters who do much to make that country's complex nature comprehensible.
Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi, lives a privileged, urban life, but her comforts largely depend upon her domestic servant, Bhima, who arrives every day to cook and clean for her. Bhima (based on a real-life Bombay housekeeper known to Umrigar when the latter was a child) lives in extreme poverty, under appalling circumstances in a city slum. She needs the job to survive. The lives of the two women are parallel in striking ways, but it is Bhima who quickly takes over the emotional thread of the story. Although she lives in a crowded, stinking place where fresh water is scarce and there are abysmal, communal toilets and open drains, what Bhima allows herself to want is, on the surface, simple: a better life for her beloved granddaughter, Maya.
This is a story intimately and compassionately told against the sensuous background of everyday life in Bombay. Against terrible odds, Bhima must find the strength and the will to keep going. The tragedy is that there is so little to hope for. Which brings us to the implicit, pivotal question raised at the beginning and end of the book: Why survive at all in the face of continuous despair? The life of the privileged is harshly measured against the life of the powerless, but empathy and compassion are evoked by both strong women, each of whom is forced to make a separate choice. Umrigar is a skilled storyteller, and her memorable characters will live on for a long time.
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The ironic vision and luminous evocation of South America that have distinguished Garcia Marquez's Nobel Prize-winning fiction since his landmark work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, persist in this turn-of-the-century chronicle of a unique love triangle. It is a fully mature novel in scope and perspective, flawlessly translated, as rich in ideas as in humanity.
The illustrious and meticulous Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his proud, stately wife Fermina Daza, respectively past 80 and 70, are in the autumn of their solid marriage as the drama opens on the suicide of the doctor's chess partner. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, a disabled photographer of children, chooses death over the indignities of old age, revealing in a letter a clandestine love affair, on the "fringes of a closed society's prejudices." This scenario not only heralds Urbino's demise soon afterwhen he falls out of a mango tree in an attempt to catch an escaped parrotbut brilliantly presages the novel's central themes, which are as concerned with the renewing capacity of age as with an anatomy of love. We meet Florentino Ariza, more antihero than hero, a mock Don Juan with an undertaker's demeanor, at once pathetic, grotesque and endearing, when he seizes the memorably unseemly occasion of Urbino's funeral to reiterate to Fermina the vow of love he first uttered more than 50 years before. With the fine detailing of a Victorian novel, the narrative plunges backward in time to reenact their earlier, youthful courtship of furtive letters and glances, frustrated when Fermina, in the light of awaking maturity, realizes Florentino is an adolescent obsession, and rejects him.
With his uncanny ability to unearth the extraordinary in the commonplace, Garcia Marquez smoothly interweaves Fermina's and Florentino's subsequent histories. Enmeshed in a bizarre string of affairs with ill-fated widows while vicariously conducting the liaisons of others via love poems composed on request, Florentino feverishly tries to fill the void of his unrequited passion. Meanwhile, Fermina's marriage suffers vicissitudes but endures, affirming that marital love can be as much the product of art as is romantic love. When circumstances both comic and mystical offer Fermina and Florentino a second chance, during a time in their lives that is often regarded as promising only inevitable degeneration toward death, Garcia Marquez beautifully reveals true love's soil not in the convention of marriage but in the simple, timeless rituals that are its cement.
Sherri Reynolds
About this Book
Badly burned in a household accident when she was a child, Finch Nobles grows into a courageous and feisty loner who eschews the pity of her hometown and discovers that she can hear the voices of the people buried in her father's cemetery. Finally, when she speaks to them, they answer, telling their stories in a remarkable chorus of regrets, expla-nations, and insights. A Gracious Plenty is like an extraordinary amalgam of Steinbeck and Faulkner, Spoon River Anthology and Our Town. It is a reading experience that you will not soon forget.
Review Quotes
"Reynolds is a wonderful storyteller and master of pastoral Imagery."--New York Times Book Review"
Mesmerizing . . . Reynolds's earthly insights make for a redemptive finale--but not before some satisfying storms of retribution."--Entertainment Weekly"
A Gracious Plenty is a triumph of story, voice, and character. The afflicted and unforgettable Finch, whose longings inspire in equal measure love and awe and pity who seeks to understand the difference between the kind of suffering brought upon us and the kind we bring upon ourselves, defies mortality.
Stunning and authentic . . . this is a beautiful book."--Janet Peery, Author of The River Beyond "--an imaginative tour de force--. Pushing beyond the boundaries of her earlier work, Ms. Reynolds has created a life-affirming novel that gathers the joy and pain of. living into a celebration of what it means to behuman."--Richmond Times Dispatch
The Space Between Us
Thrity Umrigar
Artists know very well that a good way to depict overwhelming social problems is to tell the story of an individual who represents many others. One set of political circumstances might blur into another on the large scale, while the human story, well told, will be long remembered. India's complex struggle with poverty, class and overpopulation amid political change poses special challenges in this regard, but Thrity Umrigar has created two wonderfully sympathetic characters who do much to make that country's complex nature comprehensible.
Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi, lives a privileged, urban life, but her comforts largely depend upon her domestic servant, Bhima, who arrives every day to cook and clean for her. Bhima (based on a real-life Bombay housekeeper known to Umrigar when the latter was a child) lives in extreme poverty, under appalling circumstances in a city slum. She needs the job to survive. The lives of the two women are parallel in striking ways, but it is Bhima who quickly takes over the emotional thread of the story. Although she lives in a crowded, stinking place where fresh water is scarce and there are abysmal, communal toilets and open drains, what Bhima allows herself to want is, on the surface, simple: a better life for her beloved granddaughter, Maya.
This is a story intimately and compassionately told against the sensuous background of everyday life in Bombay. Against terrible odds, Bhima must find the strength and the will to keep going. The tragedy is that there is so little to hope for. Which brings us to the implicit, pivotal question raised at the beginning and end of the book: Why survive at all in the face of continuous despair? The life of the privileged is harshly measured against the life of the powerless, but empathy and compassion are evoked by both strong women, each of whom is forced to make a separate choice. Umrigar is a skilled storyteller, and her memorable characters will live on for a long time.
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The ironic vision and luminous evocation of South America that have distinguished Garcia Marquez's Nobel Prize-winning fiction since his landmark work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, persist in this turn-of-the-century chronicle of a unique love triangle. It is a fully mature novel in scope and perspective, flawlessly translated, as rich in ideas as in humanity.
The illustrious and meticulous Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his proud, stately wife Fermina Daza, respectively past 80 and 70, are in the autumn of their solid marriage as the drama opens on the suicide of the doctor's chess partner. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, a disabled photographer of children, chooses death over the indignities of old age, revealing in a letter a clandestine love affair, on the "fringes of a closed society's prejudices." This scenario not only heralds Urbino's demise soon afterwhen he falls out of a mango tree in an attempt to catch an escaped parrotbut brilliantly presages the novel's central themes, which are as concerned with the renewing capacity of age as with an anatomy of love. We meet Florentino Ariza, more antihero than hero, a mock Don Juan with an undertaker's demeanor, at once pathetic, grotesque and endearing, when he seizes the memorably unseemly occasion of Urbino's funeral to reiterate to Fermina the vow of love he first uttered more than 50 years before. With the fine detailing of a Victorian novel, the narrative plunges backward in time to reenact their earlier, youthful courtship of furtive letters and glances, frustrated when Fermina, in the light of awaking maturity, realizes Florentino is an adolescent obsession, and rejects him.
With his uncanny ability to unearth the extraordinary in the commonplace, Garcia Marquez smoothly interweaves Fermina's and Florentino's subsequent histories. Enmeshed in a bizarre string of affairs with ill-fated widows while vicariously conducting the liaisons of others via love poems composed on request, Florentino feverishly tries to fill the void of his unrequited passion. Meanwhile, Fermina's marriage suffers vicissitudes but endures, affirming that marital love can be as much the product of art as is romantic love. When circumstances both comic and mystical offer Fermina and Florentino a second chance, during a time in their lives that is often regarded as promising only inevitable degeneration toward death, Garcia Marquez beautifully reveals true love's soil not in the convention of marriage but in the simple, timeless rituals that are its cement.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in podcast form
First off, thanks everyone for coming by last night! That book was like George Bush-- it united us in opposition and anger. It made for a fun book club.
I'm not sure that anyone will avail themselves of the opportunity, but just in case, podcasts of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the text of the book are available here. The guy has a pretty good voice.
Also, I was keeping it a secret until now, but my favorite books are Black Boy by Richard Wright and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu.
I'm not sure that anyone will avail themselves of the opportunity, but just in case, podcasts of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the text of the book are available here. The guy has a pretty good voice.
Also, I was keeping it a secret until now, but my favorite books are Black Boy by Richard Wright and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Wayne's Book Picks
A little strange, a big brother, and a slap in the face.
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk (272 Pages)
New York Times Review
Chuck Palahniuk's impressively febrile imagination now yields Lullaby, the story of a sweet-sounding weapon of mass destruction. ...with this fourth novel Mr. Palahniuk further refines his ability to create parables that are as substantial as they are off-the-wall. Janet Maslin
Kirkus Reviews
The latest comic outrage from Palahniuk (Choke, 2001, etc.) concerns a lethal African poem, an unwitting serial killer, a haunted-house broker, and a frozen baby. In other words, the usual Palahniuk fare. Carl Streator is a grizzled City Desk reporter whose outlook on life has a lot to do with years of interviewing grief-stricken parents, spouses, children, victims, and survivors. His latest investigation is a series of crib deaths. A very good reporter, one thing he's got is an eye for detail, and he notices that there's always a copy of the same book (Poems and Rhymes Around the World) at the scene of these deaths. In fact, more often than not, the book is open to an African nursery rhyme called a "culling chant." A deadly lullaby? It sounds crazy, but Carl discovers that simply by thinking about someone while reciting the poem he can knock him off in no time at all. First, his editor dies. Then an annoying radio host named Dr. Sara. It's too much to be a coincidence: Carl needs help-and fast, before he kills off everyone he knows. He investigates the book and finds that it was published in a small edition now mainly held in public libraries, so he begins by tracking down everyone known to have checked the book out. This brings him to the office of Helen Hoover Boyle, a realtor who makes a good living selling haunted houses-and reselling them a few months later after the owners move out. A son of Helen's died of crib death about 20 years ago, and she's reluctant to talk to Carl until he gains the confidence of her Wiccan secretary, Mona Sabbat. Together, Carl, Helen, Mona, and Mona's ecoterrorist/scam-artist boyfriend Oyster set out across the country to find and destroy every one ofthe 200-plus remaining copies of Poems and Rhymes. But can Carl (and Helen) forget the chant themselves? Pandora never did manage to get her box shut, after all. Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you'd expect from Palahniuk.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (288 Pages)
Just a brief review as we all should have read this years ago. If you didn't just think "1984" only bettter.
Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come. theirs.
'Blood Meridian,' by Cormac McCarthy (327 Pages)
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk (272 Pages)
New York Times Review
Chuck Palahniuk's impressively febrile imagination now yields Lullaby, the story of a sweet-sounding weapon of mass destruction. ...with this fourth novel Mr. Palahniuk further refines his ability to create parables that are as substantial as they are off-the-wall. Janet Maslin
Kirkus Reviews
The latest comic outrage from Palahniuk (Choke, 2001, etc.) concerns a lethal African poem, an unwitting serial killer, a haunted-house broker, and a frozen baby. In other words, the usual Palahniuk fare. Carl Streator is a grizzled City Desk reporter whose outlook on life has a lot to do with years of interviewing grief-stricken parents, spouses, children, victims, and survivors. His latest investigation is a series of crib deaths. A very good reporter, one thing he's got is an eye for detail, and he notices that there's always a copy of the same book (Poems and Rhymes Around the World) at the scene of these deaths. In fact, more often than not, the book is open to an African nursery rhyme called a "culling chant." A deadly lullaby? It sounds crazy, but Carl discovers that simply by thinking about someone while reciting the poem he can knock him off in no time at all. First, his editor dies. Then an annoying radio host named Dr. Sara. It's too much to be a coincidence: Carl needs help-and fast, before he kills off everyone he knows. He investigates the book and finds that it was published in a small edition now mainly held in public libraries, so he begins by tracking down everyone known to have checked the book out. This brings him to the office of Helen Hoover Boyle, a realtor who makes a good living selling haunted houses-and reselling them a few months later after the owners move out. A son of Helen's died of crib death about 20 years ago, and she's reluctant to talk to Carl until he gains the confidence of her Wiccan secretary, Mona Sabbat. Together, Carl, Helen, Mona, and Mona's ecoterrorist/scam-artist boyfriend Oyster set out across the country to find and destroy every one ofthe 200-plus remaining copies of Poems and Rhymes. But can Carl (and Helen) forget the chant themselves? Pandora never did manage to get her box shut, after all. Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you'd expect from Palahniuk.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (288 Pages)
Just a brief review as we all should have read this years ago. If you didn't just think "1984" only bettter.
Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come. theirs.
'Blood Meridian,' by Cormac McCarthy (327 Pages)
Review by CARYN JAMES NY Times
Published: April 28, 1985
"BLOOD MERIDIAN'' comes at the reader like a slap in the face, an affront that asks us to endure a vision of the Old West full of charred human skulls, blood-soaked scalps, a tree hung with the bodies of dead infants. But while Cormac McCarthy's fifth novel is hard to get through, it is harder to ignore. Any page of his work reveals his originality, a passionate voice given equally to ugliness and lyricism. Over the past 20 years the brutality of his subjects may have kept readers away, but the power of his writing has earned high critical repute. Three early novels, in fact - ''The Orchard Keeper,'' ''Outer Dark'' and ''Child of God'' - have been reissued in the Ecco Press series, ''Neglected Works of the Twentieth Century.''
BLOOD MERIDIAN Or The Evening Redness in the West, By Cormac McCarthy. This latest book is his most important, for it puts in perspective the Faulknerian language and unprovoked violence running through the previous works, which were often viewed as exercises in style or studies of evil. ''Blood Meridian'' makes it clear that all along Mr. McCarthy has asked us to witness evil not in order to understand it but to affirm its inexplicable reality; his elaborate language invents a world hinged between the real and surreal, jolting us out of complacency.
Loosely based on historical events, the novel follows a fictitious 14-year-old called only ''the kid'' - born in 1833, exactly 100 years before the author - as he drifts through the Southwest. He soon joins an outlaw band of Indian hunters who have been hired by a Mexican governor to return Apache scalps at $100 apiece. These misfits - including an ex-priest, a man with initials tattooed on his forehead and a mysterious, erudite judge named Holden - have a taste for blood and death that Mr. McCarthy seems to revel in.
Grotesque descriptions are alleviated by scenes that might have come off a movie screen. Indians pass through the novel like extras in a Fellini film, ''wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery . . . one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a blood stained weddingveil.'' The kid's terseness is a mild parody of B-movie westerns. Looking at a severed head, ''he spat and wiped his mouth. He aint no kin to me, he said.'' The horrifying details stick in our minds, however, while the surreal elements melt away. That imbalance is a problem, for Mr. McCarthy's emphasis is not on the violent set pieces but on the characters' reactions to them. The kid recedes into the background as the judge comes forward, in scene after scene sounding the novel's major themes and hinting at the author's strategy. Half-naked, the judge sits among the others by the fire ''like an icon'' and pontificates. One who observed a conflict between two enemies ''expressed the very nature of the witness and . . . was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?'' Pointing to the surrounding Indian ruins he announces, ''Here are the dead fathers'' against whom their descendants define themselves.
The kid and the judge are our own dead fathers, whom Mr. McCarthy resurrects for us to witness. He distances us not only from the historical past, not only from our cowboy-and-Indian images of it, but also from revisionist theories that make white men the villains and Indians the victims. All men are unremittingly bloodthirsty here, poised at a peak of violence, the ''meridian'' from which their civilization will quickly fall. War is a civilized ritual beyond morality for the judge, but not for Mr. McCarthy, who positions his readers to evaluate the characters' moral and philosophical stances. The kid frequently responds to the judge's grandiose speeches by saying, ''You're crazy'' - a notion so plausible that it effectively undermines the judge's authority.
Mr. McCarthy carefully builds this dialectic only to let us down with a stylistically dazzling but facile conclusion. Years later, in a saloon where a bear dances on stage, the kid encounters the judge, who calls himself a ''true dancer'' of history, one who recognizes ''the sanctity of blood.'' There is a hint that he kills the kid. Last seen as a towering figure on stage, the judge is ''naked, dancing . . . He says that he will never die.'' H E is denied the last word, though. Mr. McCarthy's half-page epilogue presents a man crossing the plain making holes in the ground, blindly followed by other men who search for meaning in this pattern of holes. The judge's enigmatic dance and the long ordeal of the novel's violence demand more than this easy ambiguity. There are, of course, no answers to the life-and-death issues Mr. McCarthy raises, but there are more rigorous, coherent ways to frame the questions.
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