poor jeanette's parents could have been characters in a kerouac novel. did anyone else get the "on the road" vibe? I love that despite everything she recalls most of her childhood with fondness. She never sounds like she's whining. I'm really enjoying reading so far.
I will say, at points I have a hard time believing that her parents were such intelligent, artistic, and resourceful nomads (example, the scene at the public zoo). Does anyone else have trouble buying her story? I suppose many of my older memories are romantisized. Another memoir was recently recommended to me; it's about growing up on an unsuccessful commune with parents who took acid all day, every day. I wonder if the stories would be similar?
I like her writing style...not to wordy or fluffy. She doesn't make herself out to be the hero or the martyr which was something that worried me going into the book. I loved the chapters about the Joshua tree, The Prospector, and all of the rocks and creatures she discovers as a 6-7 year old. Her recollections remind me of my own childhood wonderment in the woods behind my house.
Danielle just started reading. She says that she hopes the story becomes more plot driven and less like a list of events that make the point, "my parents are so crazy!" I completely argree. Does anyone else find themselves frustrated at the lack of plot/over arching conflict? Still, I've been thinking about the author and why she might have chosen to write this book; if you had such an incredible story, wouldn't you want someone else to hear it? After going through so much it probably just feels good to tell everyone, to make it real. I wonder if she feels horribly exposed or if she feels like an enormous weight has been lifted off of her shoulders. I just pray that we don't have another "A Child Called IT" situation on our hands and find out later that she grew up in a nice house in the burbs and that her dad died in a car crash when she was 4 or something. I would definitly feel duped.
Thoughts?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
To catch us up...
So, just wondering where everyone is at in the book and if there are any preliminary likes/dislikes?
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Wine suggestions for this month!
Wine is the natural accomplice of literature so it seemed appropriate to unite the two in our virtual book club. That said, not everyone is going to like the same thing, so we'll include a couple of alternatives every month for our different palettes.
Our first selection:
Woop Woop's Shiraz is a dry red wine from Australia, here are the stats according to the winery: "It’s deep in colour with great intensity, bursting with blackberry fruit juice, blueberry jam and masses of clean varietal Shiraz fruit. It’s well balanced with black liquorice, pepper and spice giving tremendous flavour and length. It weighs in at 15% alcohol! This wine was matured in French and American oak." This wine should retail at $12.00 a bottle. I've been waiting to try this one for months, I'm glad to have an excuse!
And the second:
Il Prosecco is a white sparkling wine, the tasting notes read: "Clear, almost watery pale with a glint of gold, this lightly sparkling non-vintage wine froths in the glass, but the bubbles dissipate quickly. Its pleasant, delicate peachy aroma invites a taste, and the flavor shows peaches as well, yeasty and crisp, bubbles tickling the tongue even if they're not evident in the glass." I found this sparkling wine for $11.00 a bottle so it should be around that price at your liquor store too. Try adding some fruit for a little extra flair--strawberries will of course work, but why not try blueberries or peaches for a new spin!
All the wines we try here will be available for $15.00 or less, and should be easy to find at any relatively well stocked liquor store. So if we try one--or both--on our own time (while reading this month's book!) and share our thoughts then after a few months we'll all have a better idea of what to bring out with us (or, really, stay home with)!
Our first selection:
Woop Woop's Shiraz is a dry red wine from Australia, here are the stats according to the winery: "It’s deep in colour with great intensity, bursting with blackberry fruit juice, blueberry jam and masses of clean varietal Shiraz fruit. It’s well balanced with black liquorice, pepper and spice giving tremendous flavour and length. It weighs in at 15% alcohol! This wine was matured in French and American oak." This wine should retail at $12.00 a bottle. I've been waiting to try this one for months, I'm glad to have an excuse!
And the second:
Il Prosecco is a white sparkling wine, the tasting notes read: "Clear, almost watery pale with a glint of gold, this lightly sparkling non-vintage wine froths in the glass, but the bubbles dissipate quickly. Its pleasant, delicate peachy aroma invites a taste, and the flavor shows peaches as well, yeasty and crisp, bubbles tickling the tongue even if they're not evident in the glass." I found this sparkling wine for $11.00 a bottle so it should be around that price at your liquor store too. Try adding some fruit for a little extra flair--strawberries will of course work, but why not try blueberries or peaches for a new spin!
All the wines we try here will be available for $15.00 or less, and should be easy to find at any relatively well stocked liquor store. So if we try one--or both--on our own time (while reading this month's book!) and share our thoughts then after a few months we'll all have a better idea of what to bring out with us (or, really, stay home with)!
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Winner!
I'm not entirely sure who's voted (nine people, wow!) but The Glass Castle seems to be the winner! I'm very excited. The Thirteenth Tale took second place; maybe we will read that next month? Does anyone have any suggestions for pacing? Should we just post our thoughts as we read? What about spoilers? How soon can everyone buy their book? Reviews of The Glass Castle:
Publishers Weekly
With a fantastic storytelling knack... Walls doesn't pull her punches.
Kirkus Reviews
Walls's journalistic bare-bones style makes for a chilling, wrenching, incredible testimony of childhood neglect. A pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story.
Booklist - Stephanie Zvirin (starred review)
Shocking, sad, and occasionally bitter, this gracefully written account speaks candidly, yet with surprising affection, about parents and about the strength of family ties--for both good and ill.
The New York Times - Francine Prose
The Glass Castle falls short of being art, but it's a very good memoir. At one point, describing her early literary tastes, Walls mentions that ''my favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.'' And she has succeeded in doing what most writers set out to do -- to write the kind of book they themselves most want to read.
Publishers Weekly With a fantastic storytelling knack... Walls doesn't pull her punches.
Kirkus Reviews Walls's journalistic bare-bones style makes for a chilling, wrenching, incredible testimony of childhood neglect. A pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story.
Booklist - Stephanie Zvirin (starred review) Shocking, sad, and occasionally bitter, this gracefully written account speaks candidly, yet with surprising affection, about parents and about the strength of family ties--for both good and ill.
The New York Times - Francine Prose The Glass Castle falls short of being art, but it's a very good memoir. At one point, describing her early literary tastes, Walls mentions that ''my favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.'' And she has succeeded in doing what most writers set out to do -- to write the kind of book they themselves most want to read.
Monday, April 13, 2009
For the love of sharing...
Hello! We're voting on our first book on the left! Please vote and then post a comment to this blog so that everyone knows who's reading. I like the idea of having a new book monthly. Does this suit everyone else? I've discovered a way to add authors to this blog (authors can post to this blog but cannot make changes to it's settings, layout, etc.). If anyone feels that they'll want to blog about the book we're reading and would like to added as an author let me know! We'll use this blog much like a forum to talk about the book. Those of us on twitter can update on our progress there as well! The twitter-to-blog page application is busted so we've posted a link for now. Below are the books we're voting on and a short synopsis of each:
Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices...
See's engrossing novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong, or "old sames") Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While granting immediacy to Lily's voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly transmits historical background in graceful prose. Her in-depth research into women's ceremonies and duties in China's rural interior brings fascinating revelations about arranged marriages, women's inferior status in both their natal and married homes, and the Confucian proverbs and myriad superstitions that informed daily life...
While delivering a message to her father, Florentino Ariza spots the barely pubescent Fermina Daza and immediately falls in love. What follows is the story of a passion that extends over 50 years, as Fermina is courted solely by letter, decisively rejects her suitor when he first speaks, and then joins the urbane Dr. Juvenal Urbino, much above her station, in a marriage initially loveless but ultimately remarkable in its strength. Florentino remains faithful in his fashion; paralleling the tale of the marriage is that of his numerous liaisons, all ultimately without the depth of love he again declares at Urbino's death. In substance and style not as fantastical, as mythologizing, as the previous works, this is a compelling exploration of the myths we make of love.
Christina Schwarz's suspenseful debut pivots on two of the lost "virtues" of the past: silence and stoicism. Drowning Ruth opens in 1919, on the heels of the influenza epidemic that followed the First World War. Although there were telephones and motor cars and dance halls in the small towns of Wisconsin in those years, the townspeople remained rigid and forbidding. As a young woman, Amanda Starkey, a Lutheran farmer's daughter, had been firmly discouraged from an inappropriate marriage with a neighboring Catholic boy. A few years later, as a nurse in Milwaukee, she is seduced by a dishonorable man. Her shame sends her into a nervous breakdown, and she returns to the family farm....
Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings. She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle's twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children's caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she's a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That's where the comparisons end, but Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, offers graceful storytelling that has its own pleasures.
Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices...
See's engrossing novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong, or "old sames") Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While granting immediacy to Lily's voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly transmits historical background in graceful prose. Her in-depth research into women's ceremonies and duties in China's rural interior brings fascinating revelations about arranged marriages, women's inferior status in both their natal and married homes, and the Confucian proverbs and myriad superstitions that informed daily life...While delivering a message to her father, Florentino Ariza spots the barely pubescent Fermina Daza and immediately falls in love. What follows is the story of a passion that extends over 50 years, as Fermina is courted solely by letter, decisively rejects her suitor when he first speaks, and then joins the urbane Dr. Juvenal Urbino, much above her station, in a marriage initially loveless but ultimately remarkable in its strength. Florentino remains faithful in his fashion; paralleling the tale of the marriage is that of his numerous liaisons, all ultimately without the depth of love he again declares at Urbino's death. In substance and style not as fantastical, as mythologizing, as the previous works, this is a compelling exploration of the myths we make of love.
Christina Schwarz's suspenseful debut pivots on two of the lost "virtues" of the past: silence and stoicism. Drowning Ruth opens in 1919, on the heels of the influenza epidemic that followed the First World War. Although there were telephones and motor cars and dance halls in the small towns of Wisconsin in those years, the townspeople remained rigid and forbidding. As a young woman, Amanda Starkey, a Lutheran farmer's daughter, had been firmly discouraged from an inappropriate marriage with a neighboring Catholic boy. A few years later, as a nurse in Milwaukee, she is seduced by a dishonorable man. Her shame sends her into a nervous breakdown, and she returns to the family farm....
Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings. She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle's twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children's caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she's a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That's where the comparisons end, but Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, offers graceful storytelling that has its own pleasures.
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