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, 2009
Brooklyn
By Colm Tóibín
Tóibín’s brief novel, following his bravura rendering of the life of Henry James in “The Master,” seems modest at first. A diligent young woman with few opportunities in nineteen-fifties Ireland is packed off by her family to Brooklyn, where she works in a department store, goes to church and night school, and acquires a boyfriend, before a family crisis presents her with a stark choice between her new life and her old one. Within these confines, Tóibín creates a narrative of remarkable power, writing with a spareness and intensity that give the minutest shades of feeling immense emotional impact. Seen through his protagonist’s cautious eyes, even hackneyed tropes of Brooklyn life, such as trips to Ebbets Field and Coney Island, take on a subtle strangeness. Purging the immigrant novel of all swagger and sentimentality, Tóibín leaves us with a renewed understanding that to emigrate is to become a foreigner in two places at once.
The New Yorker
A classical coming-of-age story, pure, unsensationalized, quietly profound.
O, the Oprah Magazine
A beautifully rendered portrait of Brooklyn and provincial Ireland in the 1950s ... Toibin writes about women more convincingly, I think, than any other living, male novelist.
Zoe Heller, author
A compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds ... A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín's ever-increasing skills and range.
Booklist (starred review)
[A] masterly tale ... There is not a sentence or a thought out of place.
Irish Times
Colm Toibin leads a generation of Irish novelists ... His generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power.
Los Angeles Times
Toibin's prose is as elegant in its simplicity as it is complex in the emotions it evokes.
The New York Times Magazine
Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect.
The Times Literary Supplement
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
By Stieg Larsson
Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden's dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption—at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman. Larsson died in 2004, shortly after handing in the manuscripts for what will be his legacy.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Just when I was thinking there wasn't anything new on the horizon, along comes Stieg Larsson with this wonderfully unique story. I was completely absorbed.
Michael Connelly, author
An exceptional effort for a first-time crime novelist. In fact, a fine effort for any crime novelist ... This book is meticulously plotted, beautifully paced, and features a cast of two indelible sleuths and many juicy suspects.
Boston Globe
Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson’s first novel.
The New York Times
It’s like a blast of cold, fresh air to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ... It features at its center two unique and fascinating characters: a disgraced financial journalist and the absolutely marvelous 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander–a computer-hacking Pippi Longstocking with pierced eyebrows and a survival instinct that should scare anyone who gets in her way.
Chicago Tribune
The biggest Swedish phenom since ABBA.
People
A whip-smart heroine and a hunky guy who needs her help? This sexy, addictive thriller is everything you never knew you could get from a crime novel.
Glamour
Is the hype justified? Yes ... This complex, multilayered tale grabs the reader from the first page.”
Library Journal
I doubt you will read a better book this year.
Val McDermid, author
The ballyhoo is fully justified ... The novel scores on every front–character, story, atmosphere, and the translation.
The Times
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
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- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities