Allende's Island Beneath the Sea

It was the consensus of the group that we all learned a great deal about why Haiti is the way it is today. Some of the complex history of New Orleans and Cuba were included. Many well developed characters. Overall, Allende continues to be a great read.

November meeting shifted to December 3, 2015

Our November Book Club meeting has been shifted to December 3 (a Thursday) since our original date fell on the day before Thanksgiving.

The book is Allende's Island Beneath the Sea.

From iTunes preview:

Description

Born on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité—known as Tété—is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and the voodoo loa she discovers through her fellow slaves.

When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his trunks and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. Although Valmorain purchases young Tété for his bride, it is he who will become dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.

Suggestions for next group of books

Please send me a list of a dozen books you would like to see considered for this next year. Send them to mstrobbe@san.rr.com

Ackerman, The Human Age

Adichie, Americanah

Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.

Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia

Aptowicz, Dr. Mütters Marvels –

Atkinson, Life after Life

Azlan, Zealot,

Baggott, Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders

Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

Berkham,West with the Night

Bird, The Good Spy

Bohjallian, The Light in the Ruins

Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

Brokaw, Boom: Voices of the 60s

Bryson, One Summer

Buckley, The Deepest Secret

Bulawayo, We Need New Names

Bushnell, One Fifth Avenue

Cain, Quiet

Catton, The Luminaries

Cela, Family of Pascual Duarte.

Christie, Gutenberg’s Apprentice

Ciezadlo, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War

Coelho, Adultery

Coetzee, Disgrace: A Novel.

Cullen, Mrs. Poe

Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

Dedman and Newell, Empty Mansions

Delinsky, Sweet Salt Air

Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Doctrow, Andrew’s Brain

Dodds, The Wall in my Backyard

Doig, The Bartender's Tale

Donenfield-Vernous, Cave Dreams

Donoghue, The Sealed Letter

Durrell, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

English, Havana Nocturne

Eugenides, Middlesex

Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

Faulks, Birdsong

Fishman, Shock of Gray

Fo, The Pope’s Daughter.

Ford, Lay of the Land

Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Franzen, Purity

Gable, A Paris Apartment

Galbraith, End of Normal

George, The Little Paris Bookshop

Glass, Three Junes

Gopnik, Paris to the Moon

Gordimer, Occasion for Loving.

Gottleib, Best Boy

Grass, Crabwalk.

Green, Fault in Our Stars

Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Hall, Speak (SciFi)

Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Hannah, The Nightingale

Harris, An Officer and a Spy

Haruf, Our Souls at Night.

Hazleton, The First Muslim

Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites.

Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things

Horan, Loving Frank

Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky

Hussey, Paris, the Secret History

Ibrahim, Yellow Crocus

Irving, In One Person

Jelinek, The Piano Teacher.

Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

Jones, The Known World

Jong, Fear of Dying

Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Kertesz, Fiasco.

Kingsolver, The Prodigal Summer

Kulanski, Salt: A World History

Kurlansky, Salt:A World History

Le Clézio, The Prospector.

Lee, The Ugly Renaissance

Lessing, The Golden Notebook.

Llosa, The Discreet Hero.

Maclean, Berlin

Mahfouz, Midaq Alley.

Mandel, Station Eleven

Mantel, Wolfe Hall

Maya, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War

Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife,

McBride, The Color of Water

McDermott, Someone

McDonald,The Dervish House

McEwan, The Children Act  

McLain, The Paris Wife

Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

Messud, Emperor's Children

Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

Modiano, Honeymoon or Missing Person.

Moehringer, Sutton

Morrell, Murder is a Fine Art

Morton, Forgotten Garden

Moyes, Me Before You

Müller, The Fox was Ever the Hunter.

Munro, The Moons of Jupiter or Runaway (short stories).

Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru and his year of Pilgrimage

Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose

Nádas, Parallel Stories

Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

Naipaul, The Loss of Eldorado.

Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise

Nguyen, The Sympathizer

O’Reilly, Killing Kennedy

Oates, Gravedigger's Daughter

Ozeki, A Tale For the Time Being

Pamuk, My Name is Red.

Patterson, Out Stealing Horses

Pavone, The Expats

Paz, In Light of India.

Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Essex

Pinter, Betrayal.

Richman, The Lost Wife

Robinson, Gilead

Robinson, Lila

Roth, Patrimony (autobiog)

Roth, The Human Stain

Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Saramago, Skylight.

Schiff, Vera

Shakar, Luminarium

Shapiro, Contested Will (Who wrote Shakespeare)

Shreve, All He Ever Wanted

Smith, How to be Both

Smith, White Teeth

Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

Stein, A Sudden Light

Steinbach, Without Reservations

Steinhauer, All the Old Knives

Steinhauer, The Cairo Affair,

Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,

Strayed, Wild

Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces.

Thompson, The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

Trigiani, The Shoemakerk's Wife

Truman, Where the Buck Stops

Turnbull, Almost French

Turner, Spice - The History of a Temptation

Vreeland, Luncheon of the Boating Party

Walter, Beautiful Ruins

Waters, The Paying Guests

Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

White, My Lives

Wilson, The Company of Strangers

Xingjian, One Man’s Bible.

Yan, Mo Life and Death are wearing me out .

October 2015: Paris, the Novel

"From Edward Rutherfurd, the grand master of the historical novel, comes a dazzling epic about the magnificent city of Paris. Moving back and forth in time, the story unfolds through intimate and thrilling tales of self-discovery, divided loyalty, and long-kept secrets. As various characters come of age, seek their fortunes, and fall in and out of love, the novel follows nobles who claim descent from the hero of the celebrated poem The Song of Roland; a humble family that embodies the ideals of the French Revolution; a pair of brothers from the slums behind Montmartre, one of whom works on the Eiffel Tower as the other joins the underworld near the Moulin Rouge; and merchants who lose everything during the reign of Louis XV, rise again in the age of Napoleon, and help establish Paris as the great center of art and culture that it is today. With Rutherfurd’s unrivaled blend of impeccable research and narrative verve, this bold novel brings the sights, scents, and tastes of the City of Light to brilliant life." From Amazon.com

Evening with the Author: Erica Miner

"Julia Kogan, a brilliant young violinist, teams up with opera-loving cop Larry Somers to solve the high profile murder of a famous opera conductor. In the process, Julia and Larry discover an opera house rife with with a dangerous web of secrets, intrigue, lethal rivalries, and danger." from Amazon.com

Last evening, October 7 the U Club Book Club hosted an evening with local author, Erica Miner. We heard Erica interviewed by Jill Easton (an author, herself).  Erica is a charming, delightful speaker and those of us who had not yet read her book went home with an autographed one to read.

Expo 58

From Google:
"London, 1958: unassuming civil servant Thomas Foley is plucked from his desk at the Central Office of Information and sent on a six-month trip to Brussels. His task: to keep an eye on The Brittania, a brand new pub which will form the heart of the British presence at Expo 58 - the biggest World's Fair of the century, and the first to be held since the Second World War. As soon as he arrives at the site, Thomas feels that he has escaped a repressed, backward-looking country and fallen headlong into an era of modernity and optimism. But his new-found sense of freedom comes at a price: the Cold War is at its height and the mischievous Belgians have placed the American and Soviet pavilions right next to each other."




Reading this novel reminds one of Our Man in Havanna.

A Spy Among Friends - August 2015 book

From Amazon:

Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.
 
But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow—and not just Elliott’s words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.
 
Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, A Spy Among Friends is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.


I found this book hard to put down and look forward to our discussion next month.

All the Light We Cannot See Discussion

This was a lively discussion. Not everyone enjoyed the book. We all wondered who selects the Pulitzer Prize nominees and does the final vote. Anyone know?

The style of switching time and characters was not a style that most enjoyed.

All the Light We Cannot See July 2015's Book

From Amazon:
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.


Looking forward to discussing this best seller.

Another good read

I rarely pick up a book that includes the topic of slavery to read. This for some reason I started and could not put down.  We may want to include this book in our next list for Book Club.

From Amazon:
Moments after Lisbeth is born, she’s taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. Thus begins an intense relationship that will shape both of their lives for decades to come. Though Lisbeth leads a life of privilege, she finds nothing but loneliness in the company of her overwhelmed mother and her distant, slave-owning father.

A Good Read

Good Read! Some insight into women's roles prior to being able to vote. The story is about the woman for whom Frank Lloyd Wright left his wife and children. Introduced me to Ellen Keys, a Swedish feminist I had not heard of previously.

Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War

Click on the highlighted word Amazon and you will find yourself on the page full of praise for this novel. At the end there are several pages of recipes. I plan to try at least one.  This is our selection for June 24th.


This is one of the best books I have read.  Chef Gunter outdid himself with a salad and entree from the recipes in the book. Yum! Wish the salad was available on the regular menu.

A good read...Under the Wide and Starry Sky

This historical novel, Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan was a  Today Show Book Club selection and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post.

It is the story of  Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne,  the American wife of author Robert Louis Stevenson. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it highly. Great potential for a book club discussion.

Recent reads

Just finished Girl on the Train  by Paula Hawkins which is a quick read. It reminded me of Gone Girl.

Another book that at times I needed a break and other times I could not put it down was The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. At times riveting. This is one I would like to discuss with others.

May - The Patriarch

From Amazon: "In this pioneering new work, celebrated historian David Nasaw examines the life of Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder of the twentieth century's most famous political dynasty. Drawing on never-before-published materials from archives on three continents and interviews with Kennedy family members and friends, Nasaw tells the story of a man who participated in the major events of his times: the booms and busts, the Depression and the New Deal, two world wars and the Cold War, and the birth of the New Frontier. In studying Kennedy's life, we relive the history of the American century. "Riveting...The Patriarch is a book hard to put down...As his son indelibly put it some months before his father was struck down: 'Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your county.' One wonders what was going through the mind of the patriarch, sitting a few feet away listening to that soaring sentiment as a fourth-generation Kennedy became president of the United States. After coming to know him over the course of this brilliant, compelling book, the reader might suspect that he was thinking he had done more than enough for his country. But the gods would demand even more." - New York Times Book Review"

A very thick book but worth the effort. Again, like The Candy Bombers, I learned a great deal about historical events.

April - The Cuckoo's Calling

From Amazon: "Feb 25, 2013 – In a rare feat, the pseudonymous Galbraith combines a complex and compelling sleuth and an equally well-formed and unlikely assistant with a baffling crime in his stellar debut. When office temp Robin Ellacott reports for work, she’s unprepared for the shabby office or the rude greeting she receives from London PI Cormoran Strike. Soon after, John Bristow arrives and asks Strike to look into the putative suicide of his adopted, mixed-race sister, supermodel Lula Landry. Strike reluctantly agrees, even though the police have concluded a high-profile investigation. A decorated Afghan vet with an artificial lower leg, Strike begins a meticulous reinvestigation that leads him into a world of celebrities and wannabes, as well as deep into Landry’s sad rollercoaster life. The methodical Strike and the curious Ellacott work their way through a host of vividly drawn suspects and witnesses toward an elegant solution. Readers will hope to see a lot more of this memorable sleuthing team. 

© Publishers Weekly"

As you may know, Galbraith is a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling. 

Special Event

The evening of April 1 we were treated to two authors: Susan Vreeland and Robin Oliviera. Susan did a spectacular job of interviewing Robin.

Light snacks and wine was served. A fun event and one we will repeat with other authors.

Robin Oliviera

Susan Vreeland

March - The Candy Bombers

From Amazon: "The Candy Bombers is the true tale of the ill- assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat. By feeding and supplying West Berlin by air for nearly a year, these brave men won the hearts of America's defeated enemies, and inspired people around the world to believe in America's fundamental goodness. Their valor and kind acts helped the country avoid World War III, and won the greatest battle of the Cold War-without firing a shot."

What a great book and discussion we had.

February's City of Thieves

Do not recall who recommended this book, but I am glad they did. It is not one I would have read had it not been the selection. It is one of those novels that the writing is great and the story stays with you.

Here is what Amazon has to say about it:
"From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival — and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.

During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use in his daughter’s wedding cake. In a city cut off from all supplies and suffering unbelievable deprivation, Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and behind enemy lines to find the impossible."