We Moved!

Please visit http://ircbookclub.wetpaint.com/ to see the latest on the IRC.

-Jay

Current Bookshelf

(Bookshelf now updated as of 4/25/07 .)

CURRENTLY READING (May):

"Angels & Demons", Dan Brown (meeting on Thursday, May 17th)




















COMING ATTRACTIONS:

"The Turn of the Screw", Henry James (June)
"A Salty Piece of Land", Jimmy Buffett (July)
"Lord of the Flies", William Golding (August)

picking order for next 4 books after these: (Paul, Melissa, Sonja, Kim)

CURRENTLY ON THE BOOKSHELF:




"Thirteen Moons", Charles Frazier; (Dale)
“Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community & War”, Nathaniel Philbrick; (Jay)
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", J.K. Rowling; ( Kim)
"A High Wind in Jamaica", Richard Hughes (Sonja)
"Illusions", Richard Bach (Jan)
"The Town & the City", Jack Kerouac (Jay)
"The Last Hurrah", Edwin O'Connor (Sonja)
"What Do You Do All Day?", Amy Scheibe (Kim)
"The Call of the Wild", Jack London (Dale)
"A Long Way Gone", Ishmael Beah (Starbucks)
"The Joy Luck Club", Amy Tan (Cincinnati Public Library's 'on the same page' book selection)
"Postville", Stephen G. Bloom (Melissa)
"The Princess Bride", William Goldman (Paul)
"The Tenth Kingdom", Kathryn Wesley (Melissa)
__________________________(open space - Paul)
"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee", Dee Brown (Jan)

READ SO FAR:

"On the Road" - Jack Kerouac (October 2006) - added by Dale, picked by Sonja
"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" - Carson McCullers (November 2006) -added by Sonja, picked by Kim
"To the Lighthouse" - Virginia Woolf (December 2006) - added by Kim, picked by Jan
"The Magnificent Ambersons" - Booth Tarkington (Jan 2007) -added by Jay, picked by Kathleen
"The Red and the Black" - Stendhal (Feb 2007) - added by Kathleen, picked by Dale
"The Innocent Man" - John Grisham (Mar 2007) - added by Jan, picked by Jay
"Love in the Time of Cholera" - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Apr 2007) - added by Jan, picked by Sonja

Details/descriptions of many of these books are found in the comments to or the posts below.

Kurt Vonnegut Suggestion

Indianapolis has chosen Slaughterhouse-Five as the One City One Book choice for this year. Would anyone be game to read it in addition to the regular book club books and maybe attend one of the discussions about it that will be going on around the city?

Quotes from Love in the Time of Cholera

I'm moving slowly on this book, but wanted to add some quotes that I liked for anyone who might be watching the blog. A lot of the passages that I liked, I liked not because of what they said, but how they said it. A big part of that was the descriptiveness of them - they are all long, so I won't put a lot of them (or none of them) here (I think that's why this book is a slower read and why it's better enjoyed with long periods of reading rather than short bursts).:

Speaking of Dr. Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza - "...they were not capable of living for even an instant without the other, or without thinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased."

And - "...if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer to any good."

And later - "...they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths:...and nothing in this world was more difficult than love."

And finally - "In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divide dbeing, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other's thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say...."

Addiction in "Love in the Time of Cholera"

OK, we were e-mailing about this (the fact that there are several references to chess and to Dr. Juvenal Urbino & Jeremiah de Saint-Amour suffering from an addiction to chess) during the day today, and I was reminded of a quotation... (It’s a long one, bear with me). As a ‘recovering chess addict’ (tournament-free since 9/2005!) I can confirm that chess addiction is no joke. :-)

“When one of us first plays chess, he is like a man who has already caught a dose of microbes of, say, Hong Kong Flu. Such a man walks along the street, and he does not yet know that he is ill. He is healthy, he feels fine, but the microbes are doing their work.
Something similar, though less harmful, occurs in chess. You have just been shown that the knight moves like the Russian letter “L” (actually the Russian letter is an upside down version of our L - but the knight move is the same - Jay), the bishop diagonally, the castle (rook) in a straight line, while the queen likes her own colour. You lose the first game. But at some time, if your father or elder brother or simply an old friend wants to be kind to you, then you win, and as a result feel very proud of yourself. A few days pass, and suddenly you involuntarily begin to sense that, without chess, there is something missing in your life. Then you may rejoice: you belong to that group of people without a natural immunity to the chess disaease…”

Mikhail Tal - “The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal” 1997

Note carefully the wording of the last sentence: one rejoices because he is without immunity…

Mikhail Tal was a famous Soviet Chess Grandmaster from Riga (Latvia) who was World Champion in 1960 & 1961. He was famous among chess professionals for being a bit of a 'party animal' - drinking, smoking, chasing women, i.e. all the good stuff - compared to his contemporaries. (I actually met him briefly in 1988 at the National Open tournament in Chicago, where one of my friends had the honor of playing against him in one of those 'simultaneous exhibitions' - where the master takes on many players at once to ‘even the odds’ - and actually managed to draw the game.)

Extracurricular Reading returns!

Hi All,

Just finished a good book today: Ken Jennings's (remember him from Jeopardy!) "Brainiac - Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs"

I actually bought this book for my dad for his 80th birthday last september (not with the intention of later borrowing it from him, I promise!) and he talked me into borrowing it recently. I breezed through it, since it's such a 'familiar' topic to me. Hearing him describe his Jeopardy! audition brought back memories of my own (it sounds like we even took the same 50-question test on day 2 of the tryouts) summer of 03(?) audition.

He also spends a lot of time in the book talking about other trivia 'enclaves' in the country, not the least of which was the phenomenon of 'pub trivia' and 'NTN' that most of the book club is familiar with from the infamous "BW3's Committee Meetings". All in all an entertaining book. Makes me want to head downtown to BW3s right now for a game...

P.S. I'm about halfway through "The Innocent Man"; quite a page turner. Much easier to get through than some of our other books. Hope everyone else is enjoying it.

-Jay

Call of the Wild

I'll follow suit, Sonja. Here's some stuff about "Call of the Wild", from Wikipedia:

The Call of the Wild is a novella by American writer Jack London. The plot concerns a domesticated dog whose primordial instincts return as he works as a sled dog in the trecherous, frigid Yukon in the search of a yellow metal.
Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is London's most read book and considered one of his best. Because the protagonist is a dog, it is often thought to be particularly suitable for children, but it is dark in tone and contains numerous scenes of cruelty and violence.

Images of death, cruelty, and Darwinian struggle abound. Of the new world Buck enters, London writes "The salient thing of this other world seemed fear."

The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page [1] states that "Jack London's writing was censored in several European dictatorships in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929, Italy banned all cheap editions of his Call of the Wild, and Yugoslavia banned all his works as being 'too radical.' Some of London's works were also burned by the Nazis." (These regimes may have been reacting to Jack London's reputation as an outspoken Socialist rather than to the content of the book, which, unlike some of his other novels, has no overt political message).
In 1960, critic Maxwell Geismar called The Call of the Wild "a beautiful prose poem." Editor Franklin Walker said that it "belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn". E. L. Doctorow called it "a mordant parable... his masterpiece."

Information on The Last Hurrah

Here's some information about The Last Hurrah that I pulled off of the internet (maybe it will help people to decide to pick it in the future if they have an idea what it is about):

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the book:
The story concerns a veteran politician, Frank Skeffington, as seen through the eyes of a nephew whom he invites to accompany him on yet another mayoral reelection campaign - which turns out to be unsuccessful and the end of Skeffington's long career. Skeffington has a gentlemanly manner, lacing his talk with literary quotations. He is slightly corrupt, but delivers service to his constituents. He is an expert at juggling and balancing the claims of the various Boston-area ethnic groups. But his time has past, and he loses the election to a very mediocre and nondescript Irish challenger. While not a target, there are points of similarity between Skeffington and Boston mayor James Michael Curley. (Boston is nowhere explicitly named in the book, which invariably just refers to "the city" - but the location is unmistakable.)

A little more about it:
The Last Hurrah. O'Connor's bestseller shows an Irish American big-city political machine at work in a portrait of Mayor Frank Skeffington, who resembles Boston's James Michael Curley. Despite efforts by Curley to halt production, the novel would be adapted as a successful 1958 film, starring Spencer Tracy. Born in Rhode Island, O'Connor became a radio announcer after graduating from college, an experience that provided the subject for his first novel, The Oracle (1951).

And more:
Edwin O'Connor's prizewinning The Last Hurrah is one of the most entertaining novels ever written about American politics. It evokes the seedy grandeur of Frank Skeffington, last of the great big-city Irish political bosses, making his final race for mayor.
In its praise for the novel, the New York Herald Tribune said, "Above all there is Mayor Skeffington, fighting his last fight to keep the city from 'reverting to Government by Pigmies,' a man of complex character, great charm, wonderful wit, and with much more than Blarney on his tongue. Happy only when running for, or occupying office, [he's] more than a mere footnote to the political and social history of his time.
You hear his voice, you respond to his eloquence, you laugh at his wit, you deplore his demagoguery, and you know you have met a man in these hilarious but penetrating and revealing pages. Frank Skeffington, as portrayed by Edwin O'Connor, is a permanent creation."
"The Irish Catholic world of Boston has never before been explotted with this seriousness, intelligence, and intimate knowledge." -Edmund Wilson
"A resounding success-vigorous, amusing, and brilliantly observed." -Atlantic
"The best American novel about urban politics." -Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Are we all Harry Potter fans?

Hey, I completely forgot until I saw Kim's pick that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be out in July (the 21st, I believe). We could continue with our normal schedule, but we could have a "special extra" meeting to discuss this last HP book? What does everyone think?