Reading Lolita in Tehran

One of our two books for June 2009 was “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi.  The riots over the election results keeping President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power were happening as we read this book. The passage quoted below from the book struck me as particularly enlightening about Iranian culture.
When reading this book, I thought time and time again [...]

“Shadow Country,” book for January 2009

 
Our book club is reading Peter Matthiessen’s “Shadow Country: A New Rendering of the Watson Legend” for January 2009.
Judges for the National Book Award honored a comeback on November 19, 2008, giving the fiction award to Peter Matthiessen’s “Shadow Country,” a thorough revision of a trilogy of novels from the 1990s. Matthiessen, 81, last won [...]

Discussion about “American Lightning”

                                        What makes a book good?  That’s one of the questions we asked at book club last night (after we’d asked about what was on the menu at Yia Yia’s.)  We’ve asked this same question throughout the more than twenty years I’ve been in this book club, and I’m sure it was one of the [...]

Ghostwalk, the book for December 2008

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. British historian Stott makes a stunning debut with this hypnotic and intelligent thriller, the first fiction release of a new Random House imprint. The mysterious drowning death of Elizabeth Vogelsang, a Cambridge University scholar who was almost finished writing a controversial biography of Isaac Newton, leads her son, Cameron Brown, [...]

“American Lightning,” book for November 2008

The book for November 2008 is “American Lightning” by Howard Blum.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In 1911, Iron Workers Union leaders James and Joseph McNamara plea-bargained in exchange for prison sentences instead of death after bombing the offices of the Los Angeles Times—killing 21 people and wounding many more. The bombing had been part of [...]

Jane Austen

Jane Austen never goes out of style.  Several new books and movies about her and her books have recently appeared.  To help us sort these out, Arti at Ripple Effects has posted two great articles about two Austen biographies and one Austen biographical novel. One is a biography by Carol Shields, called “Jane Austen,” which I’ve read and [...]

“The Little Book”

Here’s a review of “The Little Book” from The Washington Post:  Back to the Future. This is one of our two books for October.
One fun aspect this book for me was that the main character, Wheeler Burden, is descended from Myles Standish, because my sister-in-law Janet is a “nonfiction” descendant of Myles Standish.   The thousands of Standish descendants have [...]

Fisticuffs over Edgar Allan Poe’s Body

Philadelphia and Baltimore Fight Over Edgar Allan Poe’s Body

Edgar Allan Poe.

Edward Pettit, an Edgar Allan Poe Scholar, argues that Poe’s body belongs in Philadelphia where he wrote many of his works not in Baltimore, where he’s buried because he happened to die there — under strange circumstances.  On January 13, Pettit is going to square off against Jeff Jerome, [...]

Guns, Germs and Steel

Our book club read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, which turned out to be one of the books I have recommended the most often to people.  Although I didn’t completely agree with all of Diamond’s points (he has the Pulitzer prize, I don’t), the book is an extremely thought-provoking discussion of the forces that have shaped human [...]