Book Club meets the last Tuesday of each month. Join us to discuss a great book, share refreshments and socialize a bit! Each month we hold our meetings at a member’s home. The host provides light refreshments. Members interested in attending should RSVP to the host. Group Coordinator is Julie Connolly 544-8179 .
Next Book Club Meetings:
Books are like “Flying Carpets” taking you out of one place and into another. By taking us into minds other than our own reading can sometimes make better people of us.
Redding READS Huck
Celebrating 100 Years of the Mark Twain Library
Join the RN& N Book Club for Redding READS
Tuesday, September, 30th 2008
7:30 p.m.
At the home of Julie Connolly
jsconn@optonline.net 544-8179
Kicking off our Season with Huck!
FREE copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain are available at the library, town hall and post offices.
May
The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber
Patricia Dolan is alone with a stolen Vermeer painting in an Irish cottage by the sea. How she got here is part of the story she tells; about her father, a Boston cop; the numbing loss of her daughter; and her charming Irish cousin, who has led her to this high-stakes crime.
Historical art expert Patricia Dolan throws herself fully into her work at New York’s Frick Art reference Library to forget her tremendous heartache. The result is a finely crafted first-rate psychological thriller. The author lives in Connecticut and spends part of the year in West Cork, Ireland. She teaches writing at Yale University. (192 pages)
April
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus, 320 pages
One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial "Brides for Indians" program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man's world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time.
March
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A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (384 pages)
AFTER MORE THAN TWO YEARS ON THE BESTSELLER LISTS, KHALED HOSSEINI RETURNS WITH A BEAUTIFUL, RIVETING, AND HAUNTING NOVEL OF ENORMOUS CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE.
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.
February
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (219 pages)
Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award
A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.
January
The Peabody Sisters (624 pages)
Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall
Fascinating, insightful, and wholly engrossing, The Peabody Sisters is a landmark biography of three women who made American intellectual history. Though theirs may not be household names, Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody had an extraordinary influence on the thought of their day, the movement of intense creative ferment known as American Romanticism. Megan Marshall adeptly brings to life the sisters and the men they loved and inspired, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Mann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In a work filled with startling revelations, Marshall presents a vivid and nuanced psychological portrait of a sisterhood rife with shifting loyalties yet founded on enduring affection.
December
A Fine Balance by Frank Wynne, 624 pages; Oprah book club selection
The eagerly awaited novel from the author of the award-winning Such a Long Journey is set in India in the mid-1970s. A "State of Internal Emergency" has been declared, and in the days of bleakness and hope that follow, four disparate people find their lives becoming unexpectedly and inextricably entwined.
Novemeber
I Was Vermeer, by Frank Wynne
Frank Wynne’s remarkable book tells the story of Han van Meegeren, a paranoid, drug-addicted, second-rate painter whose Vermeer forgeries made him a secret superstar of the art world—and along the way; it reveals the collusion and ego that, even today, allow art forgery to thrive. During van Meegeren’s heyday as a forger of Vermeers, he earned 50 million dollars, the acclamation of the world’s press, and the satisfaction of swindling the Nazis. His canvases were so nearly authentic that they would almost certainly be prized among the catalogue of Vermeers if he had not confessed. And, no doubt, he never would have confessed at all if he hadn’t been trapped in a catch-22: he had thrived so noticeably during the war that when it ended, he was quickly arrested as a Nazi collaborator. His only defense was to admit that he himself had painted the remarkable “Vermeers” that had passed through his hands—a confession the public refused to believe; until, in a huge media event, the courts staged the public painting of what would be van Meegeren’s last “Vermeer.” I Was Vermeer is an utterly gripping real-life mystery, capturing both the life of the consummate art forger, phenomenally skilled and yet necessarily unrecognized, and the equally fascinating work of the experts who identify forgeries and track down their perpetrators. Wry, amoral, irreverent, and plotted like a thriller, it is the first major book in forty years on this astonishing episode in history.
October
Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson
On the afternoon of September 2, 1993, Greg Mortenson realized that he had failed in his attempt to climb K2, the world's second-highest mountain. But disappointment was the least of his problems. Emaciated, exhausted, thoroughly disoriented, and suffering from edema, his grip on life was loosening. He was taken in and nursed back to health by the impoverished populace of a remote Pakistani village. Grateful, he promised to return someday to build them a school. Three Cups of Tea is the story of that promise and the story of how one man changed the world, one school at a time.
We welcome anyone who likes to read. Please log on to www.reddingneighborsandnewcomers.org and click on book club for information regarding our group. Short on time consider books on tape, CD and downloads are available to your mp3 or ipod. Copies of Three Cups of Tea are held at the check out desk at the Mark Twain Library for our group.
Book selection for 2007-2008
October 30th 10:00 am Mark Twain Library
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
November 27th 7:30 pm
I was Vermeer by Frank Wynne
December 18th 7:30 pm
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
January 29th 7:30 pm
The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall
February 26th 7:30 pm
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
March 25th 7:30 pm
A Thousand Splendid by Suns Khaled Hosseini
April 29th 7:30 pm
One Thousand White Women by May Dodd
May 27th 7:30 pm
The Music Lesson by Kathrine Weber
June 24rd 7:30 pm
The Emporer's Children by Claire Messud
As always, we welcome new faces to the group!
Previously discussed books include:
The Color of Water, James McBride
Heady Rubbish, Lynn Deming
The Return of Merlin, Deepak Chopra
Tenth Circle, Jodi Picoult
Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl
“Running With Scissors” by Augusten Burroughs
“Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold
My Sisters Keeper by Jodi Picoult
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Peace Like A River by Leif Enger
Breakfast At Tiffany's by Truman Capote
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Corrections by
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Passion of Reverend Nash by Rachel Basch
I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
84 Charring Cross Road by Helene Hanff
I Dream of Africa by Kuki Gallman
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini
Bel Canto by Anne Patchett
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneggar
Number One Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall
Tear of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall
Morality of Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahin
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Stolen Lives by Marka Oufkir
This Much I Know Is True by Wally Lamb
Lucky by Alice Seebold
The Lovely Bones by Alice Seebold
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
The Pick Up by Nadine Gordimar
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Nickled and Dimed in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
One Thousand White Women/The Journal of May Dodd by Jim Fergus
White Oleander by Janet Fitch
The Nanny Diaries
Snow Falling on Cedars
Girl with A Peal Earring by Tracy Chavalier
Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
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