February Selection 2007
February Selection 2007
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting.
Books for February Meeting 2007
The View from Castle Rock
A powerful new collection from one of our most beloved, admired, and honored writers.
In stories that are more personal than any that she’s written before, Alice Munro pieces her family’s history into gloriously imagined fiction. A young boy is taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. In stories that follow, as the dream becomes a reality, two sisters-in-law experience very different kinds of passion on the long voyage to the New World; a baby is lost and magically reappears on a journey from an Illinois homestead to the Canadian border.
Other stories take place in more familiar Munro territory, the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, where the past shows through the present like the traces of a glacier on the landscape and strong emotions stir just beneath the surface of ordinary comings and goings. First love flowers under the apple tree, while a stronger emotion presents itself in the barn. A girl hired as summer help, and uneasy about her “place” in the fancy resort world she’s come to, is transformed by her employer’s perceptive parting gift. A father whose early expectations of success at fox farming have been dashed finds strange comfort in a routine night job at an iron foundry. A clever girl escapes to college and marriage.
Evocative, gripping, sexy, unexpected—these stories reflect a depth and richness of experience. The View from Castle Rock is a brilliant achievement from one of the finest writers of our time.
From the Book Jacket
Reading Munro, I often feel like that little girl, my mother, shivering in her dew-drenched nightgown, determinedly searching for an elusive, valuable thing. And that thing is the secret to Munro's prose. There are no pyrotechnics in it, very little poetry. The few similes are apt but not dazzlingly so. There is suspense, but it is contrived without resort to any obvious devices. In short, Munro is the illusionist whose trick can never be exposed. And that is because there is no smoke, there are no mirrors. Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.
The Washington Post, Geraldine Brooks
Reading some of these stories gives the feeling of wearing unfamiliar bifocals, needing to angle the head awkwardly so as to bring the fields of vision into alignment. Alice Munro starts with stories that are embroiderings of her family's history, then follows them with more personal pieces, where details are freely changed, but faith is kept with a core of memoir.
The Observer (UK), Adam Mars-Jones
All the narratives exhibit Munro's keen eye for realistic details and her ability to illuminate the depths of seemingly mundane lives and relationships. Highly recommended.
Library Journal
A Spot of Bother
Haddon's acclaimed debut novel, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," brilliantly imagined the inner world of an autistic teen-ager. Here the hero is similarly uncommunicative and detached, this time because of a stiff upper lip. George, recently retired, thinks talking is "overrated" and greets the death of a friend with relief "that they would not be playing squash again." Obsessed with his own mortality, he barely registers the dramas around him: his wife is having an affair, his daughter is marrying a man she's not sure she loves, and his son is afraid to bring his boyfriend to the wedding. Haddon has a deft comic touch, but he pushes his characters too hard toward epiphanies, and in the end this antic farce is merely affable, without surprises.
The New Yorker
.......George, the retired hero of Mark Haddon's second novel, is in 'a spot of bother' because he doesn't believe in talking - 'Talking was, in George's opinion, overrated' - and because his wife is having an affair, two things, Haddon intimates, that are obviously related, but not in an obvious way.Talking cuts both ways. After seeing his wife and an old colleague having sex, George 'did not want to find the words. If he described it to another human being, he would never be free of the picture. And with this realisation came a kind of release'. George, in other words, knows a lot about talking; that it makes things more real than we want them to be, that is, as real as they really are. Not talking is only a kind of release, the kind that, as George finds to his cost, imprisons him.
The Observer, Adam Phillips
[Haddon's] so wondrously articulate, so rigorous in thinking through his characters' mind-sets, that A Spot of Bother serves as a fine example of why novels exist. Really, does any other art form do nuance so well, or the telling detail (“the pig-shaped notepad on the phone table”) or the internal monologue?
New York Times Book Review, David Kamp
An exceptionally assured and versatile writer, Haddon artfully guides the Halls -- and the reader -- toward light at the end of a complicated domestic tunnel. His craftsmanship is dazzling, his sense of character profound, his kindness toward his creations that of a consummate caregiver. Humorous, occasionally heart-rending and always enthralling, A Spot of Bother is a wonder and a joy.
Chicago Sun - Times, Carlo Wolff
[Haddon's] dry, nimble style is pitch perfect, capturing the hectic anxieties of a family constantly teetering on the edge between respectability and humiliation; his restraint balances the excesses of the family high jinks. It's a style that, like the Halls, operates by omission and understatement.
New York Observer, Louisa Thomas
Some useful book club links (external links: open in a new window)
- Reader's Area of this site
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities