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 March meeting, 2008
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . . Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist – books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau. This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul.
From the Publishers
The suggestion that 40 million people died because of the power of words might seem trite until one recalls the mendacious blabberings of the leaders of a war we are still fighting. The Book Thief depends too much on unnecessary devices to be a great novel, but it is certainly extraordinary, resonant and relevant, beautiful and angry
Daily Telegraph - Lisa Hilton
This is a moving work which will make many eyes brim. Zusak shows us how small defiances and unexpectedly courageous acts remind us of our humanity. It isn't only Death who is touched. Liesel steals our hearts too.
The Independent - Marianne Brace
Writing fiction about the Holocaust is a risky endeavor. Most children learn about it in history class, or through nonfiction narratives like Eli Wiesel's Night. Zusak has done a useful thing by hanging the story on the experience of a German civilian, not a camp survivor, and humanizing the choices that ordinary people had to make in the face of the Führer.
San Francisco Chronicle, Reyhan Harmanci
The Book Thief will be appreciated for Mr. Zusak's audacity, also on display in his earlier I Am the Messenger. It will be widely read and admired because it tells a story in which books become treasures.
New York Times, Janet Maslin
The Book Thief is unsettling and unsentimental, yet ultimately poetic. Its grimness and tragedy run through the reader's mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of life. Zusak may not have lived under Nazi domination, but The Book Thief deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night. It seems poised to become a classic.USA Today, Carol Memmott On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan On Chesil Beach tells of the honeymoon night in 1962 for Florence and Edward in a hotel near Chesil Beach. It's a night of anticipation and fear for the two of them. Edward is a historian originally from the countryside, marrying up in class when choosing Florence. The few moments of near intimacy for these two virgins that they've already shared have been unsettling moments. Edward is eager to finally take his bride, but she's in desperate fear of intercourse. They share an unappetizing meal before retiring to their room, both of them dancing around the anticipated wedding night during an era where any talk or knowledge of sexual difficulties is rare. Ian McEwan's novel has received mostly positive reviews with The Independent saying, "I can't reveal more of the plot, because it all hinges on this wedding night. But it is a fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret." bookbrowse.com
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
On Chesil Beach is more a novella than a novel, weighing in at around 40,000 words, but like those other books it is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest -- innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected -- and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment.
Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley, 2007
When you first dip into the opening pages of Ian McEwan's new novel, you're likely to find it surprisingly low-key. Here is a quiet middle-class couple's wedding night in a Dorset hotel at the beginning of the 1960s, described in a style that is very leisurely for such a short novel. .........This is McEwan's mature style, one we have come to recognise from Atonement and Saturday. It is a polished, civilised style, and very distant from the shock tactics of his early work.
The Guardian, Natasha Walter
Subtle, witty, rueful and sometimes heartrending, On Chesil Beach coalesces these perceptions into a novel that is a master feat of concentration in both senses of the word.
London Times, Peter Kemp
Few novelists have Ian McEwan's acuity in dissecting the true nature of relationships. On Chesil Beach, set in the pre-liberation Sixties, is no exception
The Observer, Tim Adams
McEwan makes the case that, for all the tattiness of an overly eroticised modern culture, the sexual revolution brought some benefits. Ignorance can give rise to brutality. Set a handful of years later, On Chesil Beach would have told a less wrenchingly elegiac but far happier story.
Telegraph, Lionel Shriver
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