Castlebar Book Club
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. (Previous Book Club selections)
Books for July meeting, 2008
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 an dhis first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A good School, the Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.
From the moment of its publication in 1961, Revolutionary Road was hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs. It's the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
From the Publisher
American literature often throws up mordant chroniclers of soured dreams but few have bettered the emotional acuit of the unjustly neglected Richard yales. His full-blooded Fifties essay on doomed middle-class relationships, Revolutionary Road, makes everything since seem anaemic.
The Times
(Richard Yates is) one of the United States' finest post-war novelists and short-story writers. He wrote some of the best fiction of his generation; it continues to give pleasure to all those readers who are fortunate enough to discover it.
Independent
Richard Yates is a writer of commanding gifts. His prose is urbane yet sensitive, with passion and irony held deftly in balance. And he provides unexpected pleasures in a flood of freshly minted phrases and in the thrust of sudden insight, precise notation of feeling, and mordant unsentimental perseptions
Saturday Review
The Great Gatsby of my time...one of the best books by a member of my generation.
Kurt Vonnegut
A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic." William StyronReview:"Beautifully crafted...a remarkable and deeply troubling book." Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesReview:"It is reminiscent of the popular film American Beauty in its depiction of white-collar life as fraught with discontent. Others have picked up on this theme since, but Yates remains a solid read.
Library Journal
The First Verse by Barry McCrea
Barry McCrea was born in 1974 and grew up in Dalky, Co. Dublin. He was educated at Gonzaga College, and Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied French and Spanish literature. He received a Ph.D from Princeton University in 2004, He currently teaches comparative literature at Yale University. The First Verse, which won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction, is his first novel.
Independent
This memorable debut novel explores Dublin’s every corner through the eyes of a young man seduced by a secret society’s ancient reading rituals, based on the sortes virgilianae. In brilliant prose, author Barry McCrea gives readers a psychologically gripping tale set within the intertwining worlds of literature and the living.
When freshman Niall Lenihan moves to Trinity College, he dives into unfamiliar social scenes, quickly becoming fascinated by a reclusive pair of students—literary “mystics” who let signs and symbols from books determine their actions. Reluctantly, they admit him to their private sessions, and what begins as an intriguing game for Niall becomes increasingly esoteric, dramatic, and addictive. As Niall discovers the true nature of the pursuits in which he has become entangled, The First Verse traces a young man’s search for identity, companionship, and a cult’s shadowy origins in the pages of literature and the people of a city. Fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley will be mesmerised by the strange, page-turning world of this astonishing first novel from a dazzling new literary voice.
McCrea's characters are hip, vibrant and youthful, on the cusp of societal achievement, but they are also conflicted and tortured by this sinister world they have unwittingly discovered. A book lover's delight, The First Verse is a darkly ironic tribute to the world of literature and also to the insular world of academia.
www.curled.com
The First Verse should come with a warning sticker: this novel will make your head spin, then tick in your brain like a question-clock and stick, like a childhood song. As addictive as the rituals it describes, the First Verse is an audacious, kaleidoscopic blast. One of the hallmarks of Barry McCrea’s confidence is that he allows the reader plenty of interpretive space. His story operates on numerous levels, plays several games, delights in its own intelligence and repeatedly comments on itself. It’s a postmodern novel about postmodern novels, a coming-of-age narrative about coming-of-age narratives, a literary thriller about literary thrillers, jammed with implicit and explicit references to Irish writers, from Ross O’Carroll-Kelly to Flann O’Brien. Though McCrea doesn’t quite reawaken the ‘‘whole graveyard of all human thought ever’’, he does conjure up an ocean of echoes and associations, invoking the spirit of 1,001 other novels.
archives.tcm.ie
Some useful book club links (external links: open 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