The "Talking Books" book club meets
monthly on the First Wednesday of the month at noon. The following is the
scheduled book list. Inexpensive copies of the books are available at the
circulation desk.
July 7
Cancelled
August 4
Fashion in Shrouds
First, there is a skeleton in a dinner jacket, then a corpse in a golden
aeroplane. After another body, Albert Campion nearly makes a fourth...Both the
skeleton and the
corpse have died with suspicious convenience for Georgia Wells, a monstrous but
charming actress with a raffish entourage. Georgia's best friend just happens to
be
Valentine, a top couturiere and Campion's sister. In order to protect Valentine,
Campion must unravel a story of blackmail and ruthless murder.
September 1
Suite Francaise
Irene Nemirovsky
Nemirovsky, a young Russian Jewish emigre, became a celebrated novelist in Paris at age 26 in 1929. She wrote eight more novels; then, even though she was certain that she wouldn't survive Germany's occupation of France, she embarked on a grandly symphonic, courageous, and scathing work about France's collaboration with the Nazis. She completed two of five planned movements before she was sent to Auschwitz, a heart-wrenching story meticulously documented in a supplemental section. As for Nemirovsky's masterpiece, it begins with the tumultuous Storm in June, in which diverse Parisians frantically evacuate Paris during the June 1940 German invasion. Nemirovsky's gift for combining the panoramic with the intimate, high emotion with stinging wit, is reminiscent of Turgenev, Babel, and Berberova. Acutely sensitive to class differences, and mordantly scornful of hypocrisy, she orchestrates a veritable carnival of cowardice, lies, larceny, and murder as a panicked populace drops all pretense of civilization. The second movement, Dolce, evokes the eye of the storm in the village of Bussy, where German officers are billeted in French homes, and life and love resume. Suite Francaise is a magnificent novel of the insidious devastation of occupation, and Nemirovsky is brilliant and heroic, summoning up profound empathy for all, including regretful German soldiers. Everything about this transcendent novel is miraculous. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.
October 6
Fahrenheit 451
“Three years ago I wrote a
short novel entitled ‘The Fire Man’ which told the story of a municipal
department in the year 1999 that came to your house to start fires instead of to
put them out.”
- Ray Bradbury, 1953
Fahrenheit 451, the 1953 reincarnation of ‘The Fire Man,’ presents ideas that are far more complex than that brief description indicates. This novel is a soothsayer, warning of a future populated by non-readers and non-thinkers; a lost people with no sense of their history. At the same time it salutes those who dedicate their lives to the preservation and passing on of knowledge, and testifies to the quiet or passionate courage of the rebel with a cause. Fahrenheit also poses questions about the role(s) of government: Should it reflect the will of the people? Should government do the people’s thinking for them?
November 3
Ill Wind
Navada Barr
Anna Pigeon, a park ranger at Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park, is a woman on the mend. She’s a widow, she’s battling alcohol dependence, and she’s recently changed jobs. Despite her pain, she reaches tentatively toward Stacey Meyer, a ranger trainee who has also endured his share of middle-aged pain. Shortly after he mishandles a crisis that results in a child’s death, Stacey himself is found dead. Suicide? Anna thinks it unlikely. Murder? Possibly, but who and why? When the husband of another park employee is killed in a suspicious car wreck, the case takes on broader implications. Through it all, Anna struggles with her middle-aged angst, her alcoholism, and her loneliness, drawing support from long-distance calls to her sister, who serves the functions of both a Dr. Watson and a voice on the other end of a crisis hot-line. This third entry in the acclaimed series is as much a personal journey of self-discovery as it is a mystery. Anna is a flawed but admirable woman struggling daily to determine her values and her value in a harsh world.
An outstanding novel.—Wes Lukowsky from Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
December 1
Thse House at Riverton
Kate Morton
Booklist Review
Grace Bradley is 14 when she goes to work for the Hartfords at Riverton Manor just before the First World War. As the years pass, she becomes attached to the girls, Hannah and Emmeline. The war years take their toll on the family, and then in 1924 a tragedy involving an emerging poet, Robbie Hunter, tears the family apart. Now in 1999, Grace is facing her own mortality. When a young film director decides to make a movie about Robbie’s death, it stirs up a tidal wave of memories and secrets that had lain dormant for decades. In an effort to assuage her guilt, Grace dictates her story into a cassette recorder, ultimately revealing the truth surrounding the death of the poet and the unwitting part she played. Told in flashbacks, Morton’s sweeping novel captures the elegance of the Edwardian era, the pain and trauma of war, and the decline of postwar England. Part mystery and part period drama, Grace’s story is completely engrossing.—Kubisz, Carloyn copyright 2008 Booklist
January 5, 2011
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
Summary
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 illum9nates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.
Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.
I
f you would like to join the book club, please contact Bonnie Seymour at 237-8501, ext. 12 for more information.
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