December Book Choices!

Susan will be hosting the final meeting of 2009! We previously agreed on Dec. 20th instead of the 27th. Is that still the consensus? Can everyone make it on the 20th? Here are the book choices for December:

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
Paperback, 336 pages

May and Pearl, two sisters living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, are beautiful, sophisticated, and well-educated, but their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Hoping to improve their social standing, May and Pearl’s parents arrange for their daughters to marry “Gold Mountain men” who have come from Los Angeles to find brides. But when the sisters leave China and arrive at Angel’s Island (the Ellis Island of the West)—where they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months—they feel the harsh reality of leaving home. And when May discovers she’s pregnant the situation becomes even more desperate. The sisters make a pact that no one can ever know.

A novel about two sisters, two cultures, and the struggle to find a new life in America while bound to the old, Shanghai Girls is a fresh, fascinating adventure from beloved and bestselling author Lisa See.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova
Paperback, 320 pages

Still Alice is a compelling debut novel about a 50-year-old woman's sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer's disease, written by first-time author Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph. D in neuroscience from Harvard University.

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind...

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Paperback, 304 pages

The Namesake is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates this acclaimed author's signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations.

The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With empathy and penetrating insight, Lahiri explores the expectations bestowed on us by our parents and the means by which we come to define who we are.

Vote for the one you think sounds best!

1 Month Left in the Fall Challenge!

If you're participating in the Fall Challenge, you have 1 month left to complete your 3 books! How are you doing?

I've only finished 1/3 so far. I finished A Wedding in December last month and just started Lucky Man. I have a lot of reading to do if I'm going to finish Gone With the Wind too!





Also, only 1 week left until Little House on the Prairie the Musical!

Saturday Spotlight

Today's author is Alice Munro.


1. She is a Canadian author born July 10, 1931 in Wingham, Ontario.
2. She published her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," while a student at the University of Western Ontario in 1950.
3. Her first story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, Canada’s highest literary prize.


4. Her collection of related stories, Who Do You Think You Are?, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for a second time.


5. Through the 1980s and 1990s, she published a short-story collection every few years.
6. She has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Man Booker International Prize, and others.
7. Her latest collection, Too Much Happiness, was published in August 2009.



Have you read anything by Alice Munro? What do you recommend?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) by Maya Angelou.

In this first of many volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."

The title of the book comes from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar:

Sympathy

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting--
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings--
I know why the caged bird sings!

Search inside the book here.

If you've read it, take a quiz to test your memory.

Have you read this classic or any of the other Maya Angelou memoirs?

Thoughts for Thursday

Which one of your favorite books would you like to see made into a movie? Which actors would play each of the main characters?

I would love if Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult was made into a movie (if it stayed true to the novel).

Peter Houghton: Michael Cera


Josie Cormier: Dakota Fanning


Alex Cormier: Diane Lane


Patrick Ducharme: Dennis Quaid


Lacy Houghton: Julianne Moore


Lewis Houghton: Nicolas Cage


Matt Royston: Chace Crawford, although a little old


Jordan McAfee: Matt Damon


Selena McAfee: Zoe Saldana