Library Guild Book Club

We will have our last meeting for this school year on Tuesday, May 20 at noon in the library work room. Bring your own lunch and a drink, and dessert will be provided. This month our selection is Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. Copies of the book are available from Dr. Mandyck in the Media Center at a cost of $9.50, cash or check, please.

About the book:
Horan's ambitious first novel is a fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married and with children, met when Mamah's husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they left their families to live and travel together, going first to Germany, where Mamah found rewarding work doing scholarly translations of Swedish feminist Ellen Key's books. Frank and Mamah eventually settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry press, with tragic repercussions. Horan puts considerable effort into recreating Frank's vibrant, overwhelming personality, but her primary interest is in Mamah, who pursued her intellectual interests and love for Frank at great personal cost.--Publishers Weekly

Posted by Dr. Mandyck at 2:32 PM | Permalink

We will meet on Tuesday, April 22 at noon in the reading room in the media center. Bring your own lunch and a drink, and dessert will be provided. This month our selection is The Same Sweet Girls by Cassandra King. Copies of the book are available from Dr. Mandyck in the Media Center at a cost of $4.75, cash or check, please.

About the book:

None of the Same Sweet Girls are really girls anymore and none of them have actually ever been sweet. But this spirited group of Southern women, who have been holding biannual reunions ever since they were together in college, are nothing short of compelling.

There’s Julia Stovall, the First Lady of Alabama, who despite her public veneer, is a down-to-earth gal who only wants to know who her husband is sneaking out with late at night. There’s Lanier Sanders, whose husband won custody of their children after he found out about her fling with a colleague. Then there’s Astor Deveaux, a former Broadway showgirl who simply can’t keep her flirtations in check. And Corrine Cooper, whose incredible story comes to light as the novel unfolds.

Posted by Dr. Mandyck at 5:28 PM | Permalink

We will meet on Tuesday, March 18 at noon in the reading room in the media center. Bring your own lunch and a drink, and dessert will be provided. This month our selection is Make Lemonade, a Young Adult novel by Virginia Euwer Wolff. Copies of the book are available from Dr. Mandyck in the Media Center at a cost of $4.75, cash or check, please.

About the book:
Jolly is seventeen. She can't really spell. She doesn't have much of a job. And she has two little kids from two different, absent fathers. Jolly knows she can't cope with Jilly and Jeremy all by herself, so she posts a notice on the school bulletin board: BABYSITTER NEEDED BAD. No one replies but Verna LaVaughn, who's only fourteen. How much help can she be? For a while, Jolly, Jilly, Jeremy, and LaVaughn are an extraordinary family. Then LaVaughn takes the first steps toward building her own future, and Jolly begins the long slow process of turning the lemons of her life into lemonade. Written in sixty-six chapters with text lines that break at natural speaking phrases, this is a startling novel by an extraordinary writer.

Posted by Dr. Mandyck at 2:59 PM | Permalink

We will meet on Tuesday, Feb. 19 at noon in the reading room in the media center. Bring your own lunch and a drink, and dessert will be provided. This month our selection is a 2004 Printz Award honor book, A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly. (The Michael L. Printz Award goes to a book or books that exemplify literary excellence in young adult literature.) Copies of the book are available from Dr. Mandyck in the Media Center at a cost of $6.10, cash or check, please.

From the publisher:
Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has big dreams but little hope of seeing them come true. Desperate for money, she takes a job at the Glenmore, where hotel guest Grace Brown entrusts her with the task of burning a secret bundle of letters. But when Grace's drowned body is fished from the lake, Mattie discovers that the letters could reveal the grim truth behind a murder. Set in 1906 against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Jennifer Donnelly's astonishing debut novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly original.

Posted by Dr. Mandyck at 8:48 AM | Permalink

Our next book club meeting will be on Tuesday, Jan. 15 at noon. We are reading The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

From Amazon.com
Any talk of The Namesake--Jhumpa Lahiri's follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies--must begin with a name: Gogol Ganguli. Born to an Indian academic and his wife, Gogol is afflicted from birth with a name that is neither Indian nor American nor even really a first name at all. He is given the name by his father who, before he came to America to study at MIT, was almost killed in a train wreck in India. Rescuers caught sight of the volume of Nikolai Gogol's short stories that he held, and hauled him from the train. Ashoke gives his American-born son the name as a kind of placeholder, and the awkward thing sticks. Awkwardness is Gogol's birthright. He grows up a bright American boy, goes to Yale, has pretty girlfriends, becomes a successful architect, but like many second-generation immigrants, he can never quite find his place in the world. Lahiri documents quiet rebellions and random longings with great sensitivity. There's no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake, just beautifully confident storytelling. Gogol's story is neither comedy nor tragedy; it's simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life.

Posted by Dr. Mandyck at 10:56 AM | Permalink

Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher is our selection for our December meeting. The book is not readily available at bookstores or even from amazon, but Maura has 20 copies for sale ($5.45 cash or check, please). We will meet at noon in the reading room in the media center on Tuesday, Dec. 11 for lunch, the book discussion, and a special Christmas cookie swap!

From Amazon.com
Rosamunde Pilcher's novel, despite its chilly setting, will warm the hearts of her growing army of loyal fans. Winter Solstice has all the familiar trademarks of a Pilcher saga, spun in her inimitable, homey, beguiling style. The story is told, chapter by chapter, from the perspectives of an eclectic array of characters. Former actress Elfrida--not very good by her own admission--leaves London for a geriatric bolthole in the country where she meets retired schoolmaster and organist, Oscar. Meanwhile, Carrie (Elfrida's second cousin), returns to London from Austria where she had a brilliant career in the tourist industry, only to find her niece, 14-year-old Lucy, sadly neglected by her selfish mother and equally spoiled grandmother. Finally, handsome Sam is recalled from New York by his company chairman to revive an ailing Scottish textile mill. As one character after another must learn to live with their losses, they find themselves collectively spirited northwards, from Sussex to Scotland, by way of Cornwall. And, as events unfurl, slowly, surely, but inevitably, those in need find solace in unexpected places. While her characterizations are generally carefully crafted and entirely rounded, Pilcher's greatest strengths lie in her natural, easy narratives of everyday life and her thoroughly researched and captivating descriptions of scenery and surroundings.

Posted by Dr. Mandyck at 12:07 PM | Permalink

Our next book is Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. We will meet at noon in the reading room in the media center on Tuesday, Nov. 13 for lunch (bring your own) and to discuss! Drinks and dessert will be provided.

Here's a review from Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Gilbert (The Last American Man) grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence. First, pleasure: savoring Italy's buffet of delights--the world's best pizza, free-flowing wine and dashing conversation partners--Gilbert consumes la dolce vita as spiritual succor. "I came to Italy pinched and thin," she writes, but soon fills out in waist and soul. Then, prayer and ascetic rigor: seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India, Gilbert emulates the ways of yogis in grueling hours of meditation, struggling to still her churning mind. Finally, a balancing act in Bali, where Gilbert tries for equipoise "betwixt and between" realms, studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry--conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor--as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote and impression.

Posted by Dr. Mandyck at 12:01 PM | Permalink