November Selection 2006
November Selection 2006
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 November Meeting, 2006
The Jane Austen Book Club
On its surface, ''The Jane Austen Book Club'' is a tidy number, a perfectly cut and polished little gem with just enough facets. But that's not the half of it. This exquisite novel is bigger and more ambitious than it appears. It's that rare book that reminds us what reading is all about.
In her portrait of a California reading group, Karen Joy Fowler turns a mirror on the gawking, voyeuristic presence that lurks in every story: the reader. What results is Fowler's shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel. You don't have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either. At the end are plot synopses of all six Austen novels for the benefit of the forgetful, the uninitiated or the nostalgic.
The action takes place over several months in a university town near Sacramento (it sounds a lot like Davis, where Fowler lives), and the book club comprises five women and one man. It's clear from the beginning that in each of the six chapters, a different character will officiate, more or less, over a discussion of a different novel. Six chapters, six characters, six novels: an ingenious structure, and a reassuring one. But don't be lulled into the predictable assumption, that each chapter will be ''Persuasion'' or ''Mansfield Park'' in miniature, the respective characters and plots and life lessons presented in neat parallel universes.
Nothing here is obvious, though we're lured into thinking otherwise early on. Fowler plants the bait at the very first meeting of the ''all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club,'' as the members gather on a cool March evening to discuss ''Emma.'' Their hostess, Jocelyn, is a ''control freak'' who has not only organized the club, picked the members and chosen the first book but is also a breeder of aristocratic show dogs and (lest we miss the point) a notorious matchmaker. Remind you of anyone?
The club meetings are peppered with the requisite literary patter (''Why isn't Knightley more appealing?'' or ''Her heroes tend to be actively nondescript''). But most of each chapter is about the members themselves, their stories told in detours and digressions. As we soon find, they're a varied bunch.
The New York Times, Patricia T. O'Connor
"I love this book! I haven't read Austen for years, Fowler's story worked like a charm."
Sue Grafton
"A luxuriant pleasure!"
Alice Sebold
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury, published in October of 1929, was Faulkner's fourth novel--and clearly his first work of genius. Now considered to be one of the strongest American contributions to the fiction of high modernism, it has generated countless critical interpretations. In writing the novel, Faulkner experienced a creative absorption and passion that he was never to forget; he said of The Sound and the Fury, "It's the book I feel tenderest towards. I couldn't leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I'd probably fail again."
The novel tells the story, from four different perspectives, of the disintegration of a Southern family. The father is cynical and passive, and though he clearly loves his children, he drinks himself to death; the invalid mother has no love for her children and continuously demands that she herself be taken care of; Benjy, the mentally retarded son of whom his mother is ashamed, is castrated after he begins to exhibit sexual behavior; Quentin, the neurotic and romantic son, goes off to Harvard to fulfill his mother's lifelong wish and commits suicide there; Caddy, the only daughter, becomes pregnant while still a teenager and quickly marries a man who turns her out of the house when he discovers that their child is not his; Jason, his mother's favorite, loses his chance at a lucrative job when Caddy's marriage fails and is reduced to supporting the family by working in a general store. Caddy's daughter--named after her brother Quentin--is brought up in the unhappy Compson household although everyone is forbidden to speak her mother's name. She has her revenge upon her uncle Jason when she steals the $7000 he has amassed by embezzling from his mother and from funds sent to Quentin by Caddy. The family is supported and cared for by a family of black servants, led and held together by the matriarch Dilsey.
Because of its experimental style, The Sound and the Fury presents a daunting challenge for readers. By 1929 Faulkner had given up trying to please publishers and reviewers, and, as the critic Albert J. Guerard has noted, now seemed "to write only for himself and a happy few." Traditional aspects of the novel like exposition, plot, and character development are cast aside in the attempt to find a narrative form that could represent the realities of mental chaos, the fluidity of time and memory, and the painful interweaving of separate selves in family life. Though at times Faulkner's material may seem so inchoate as to be barely containable within language at all, The Sound and the Fury attains heights and depths of expression that are truly breathtaking: it is an unforgettable work that richly rewards the reader's efforts.
randomhouse.com
Flannery O'Connor's nickname for Faulkner was the "Dixie Limited". She didn't mean it entirely kindly: His huge talent and towering ambition made him a literary freight train that other southern writers were often forced to dodge. Both qualities are on full display in The Sound and the Fury, which describes the bitter, incestuous dealings of a Mississippi family fallen on hard times. A formal and stylistic tour de force (in other words, a tough but profoundly rewarding read), the book unfolds in four sections, centered in turn on each of the three Compson brothers—Benjy, a mentally disabled man; Quentin, a depressed, neurotic Harvard student; and Jason, an avaricious jerk—as well as on a black servant named Dilsey. All the brothers are obsessed with the dishonored Caddy, the slutty Compson sister, and with the family honor (and the family fortune) that the Compsons have frittered away. From these ruined fragments and damaged spare parts. Faulkner builds a brutally moving epic of love, lust and endurance.
time.com
Some useful book club links (external links: open in 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