Happy Friday! Happy Halloween!
We are getting ready to select the next book to read for the Book Club. I can’t believe we are already on book #3, I feel like we just started this club a week ago! It is great to make reading a fun part of your life, even when you feel like there is no time in the day for you to read- trust me, I know! I had to push out our last book discussion a week because I literally had NO time to read with the new puppy and all… but I managed and I loved the last book and I love being a part of such an intellectual conversation about life, happiness, sorrow,love and everything else in between. So, my message to you all -there are millions of books out there…GO READ! …..or better yet, help us choose a book and Read With Us!
Choices with summaries:
Frog Music – Emma Donoghue
Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead.
The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny’s murderer to justice–if he doesn’t track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It’s the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts.
The Goldfinch– Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch is told in retrospective first-person narration by Theodore “Theo” Decker, who recounts the story of his life thus far. As a thirteen-year-old boy in New York City, Theo adores his energetic, beautiful mother — as do many other people in Manhattan. He thinks of his father, who had walked out on them a year earlier, as an alcoholic, abusive thief. Theo’s life is turned upside down when he and his mother visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see an exhibition of Dutch masterpieces, including her favorite painting, Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch. There, he falls in love at first sight with a red-headed girl who is accompanied by an elderly man. But then a terrorist bomb kills his mother and dozens of other art-loving citizens. Selected of 10 Best Books of 2013 NYTimes Review.
Where’d you go, Bernadette? Selected 11/3/14
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle–and people in general–has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.
This is Where I Leave You -Jonathan Tropper
The death of Judd Foxman’s father marks the first time that the entire Foxman clan has congregated in years. There is, however, one conspicuous absence: Judd’s wife, Jen, whose affair with his radio- shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public. Simultaneously mourning the demise of his father and his marriage, Judd joins his dysfunctional family as they reluctantly sit shiva-and spend seven days and nights under the same roof. The week quickly spins out of control as longstanding grudges resurface, secrets are revealed and old passions are reawakened. Then Jen delivers the clincher: she’s pregnant.
This Is Where I Leave You is Jonathan Tropper’s (One Last Thing Before I Go) most accomplished work to date, and a riotously funny, emotionally raw novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind-whether we like it or not.
Book to be selected by next week!
