November - Book Pick & Date

Based on the poll sent out last month, November's book pick is the perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. It is a YA book, to go with our theme of BookIt!

The book discussion will be on December 1st at Joe Squared in Village (I know you were expecting Pizza Hut, but Joe Squared is amazing). Please let me know your RSVP for the discussion no later than November 26, so I can finalize it with them.



There will be BookIt! swag handed out for those of you who attend. Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in November! 

 

October - Discussion Questions

Here are some discussion questions to keep in mind for our meeting tonight. As always, please come with additional questions if you have them!

Questions for Discussion

1. The theme of this month's book was "scary/horror." Why do you think that this book won the most votes versus the other, more traditional horror novels?
   
2. Cormac McCarthy has a distinct style of writing. Did you like it or not? Did you think that his style lent to the story that was being told?
   
3. How did you feel about the main characters never being named? Why do you think McCarthy made this choice?
   
4. There is a lot of symbolism in this book. What does the road mean to the characters? To you?
   
5. What does "the fire [inside]" mean to the characters? To you? Do you believe that we all have the fire inside now, without trial?
   
6. There is a distinction for the boy about who the "good guys" and the "bad guys" are in this book. Do you believe that keeping this idea of "them" versus "us" is helpful or hurtful for their survival?
   
7. Has anyone seen the movie (released in 2009)? What did you think of it in comparison to the written work?

Thank you for participating again this month! I look forward to seeing you for the discussion and ghost walk.

Choose Your Own Adventure - November

The theme for November is Book It! We will be reading books related to adolescence and hosting our discussion at a pizza place, with great prizes. Please vote by October 19.

Here are the contenders, in no particular order (all summaries have been pulled from Amazon & Google Books). Please respond to the poll at the end. Thank you!


School Days by Patrick Chamoiseau 

Through the eyes of the boy Chamoiseau, we meet his severe, Francophile teacher, a man intent upon banishing all remnants of Creole from his students’ speech. This domineering man is succeeded by an equally autocratic teacher, an Africanist and proponent of “Negritude.” Along the way we are also introduced to Big Bellybutton, the class scapegoat, whose tales of Creole heroes and heroines, magic, zombies, and fantastic animals provide a fertile contrast to the imported French fairy tales told in school.

In prose punctuated by Creolisms and ribald humor, Chamoiseau infuses the universal terrors, joys, and disappointments of a child’s early school days with the unique experiences of a Creole boy forced to confront the dominant culture in a colonial school.

 

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn’t grown up. He’s now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but deeply disturbed student named James Leer. During one lost weekend at a writing festival with Leer and debauched editor Terry Crabtree, Tripp must finally confront the wreckage made of his past decisions. Mordant but humane, Wonder Boys features characters as loveably flawed as any in American fiction.

 

the perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective…but there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. 

since its publication, stephen chbosky’s haunting debut novel has received critical acclaim, provoked discussion and debate, grown into a cult phenomenon with over a million copies in print, and inspired a major motion picture.

the perks of being a wallflower is a story about what it’s like to travel that strange course through the uncharted territory of high school. the world of first dates, family dramas, and new friends. of sex, drugs, and the rocky horror picture show. of those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.

Looking for Alaska by John Green
Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then. . . . After. Nothing is ever the same.

About a Boy by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby's second bestselling novel is about sex, manliness and fatherhood. Will is thirty-six, comfortable and child-free. And he's discovered a brilliant new way of meeting women - through single-parent groups. Marcus is twelve and a little bitnerdish: he's got the kind of mother who made him listen to Joni Mitchell rather than Nirvana. Perhaps they can help each other out a little bit, and both can start to act their age.

 

Please vote on the online poll (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WMBB55H) by October 19. Thank you!

October - Book Pick & Date

Based on the poll sent out last month, October's book pick is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It is a dark, post-apocalyptic book to go with the theme of gloomy and dreary for the month.

Our meeting will be on October 26th and, like last month, it will be a two-part meeting. When you RSVP, please be sure to let me know if you are going to one event or both. 

The book discussion will be at Alexander’s Tavern (not one of the haunted pubs, but a good one nonetheless) starting at 6:00pm. I know this is early for a Friday, but the tour is at 7:30pm and I want to make sure we’ll have enough time. Please let me know your RSVP for the discussion no later than October 22, so I can finalize it with them.

Then, for those that want to come, we will be going on the Fells Point Haunted Pub Ghost Tour, beginning at 7:30pm. Please be aware that the ghost tour is $20 and you should buy your reservation ahead of time. I am a little worried about them selling out (they've already sold out of a few), so please buy your tickets as soon as you can, if you think you can go. This tour is really fun and you'll have somewhere between 4-6 beers while you're out, so also make sure you have a DD (we can discuss carpooling if needed).

 

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in October!

September - Discussion Questions

Again, this post is coming out a little later than originally planned, but I hope most of you have had a chance to look at the reader's guide, because most of the questions are lifted from there. These questions are to prompt discussion for the meeting this weekend to start the conversation. Please come with additional questions if you have them!


Questions for discussion

1. How did you like the style of the book (with four different perspectives)? Would you have liked it more "traditionally" written, or did you like hearing different stories?
2. What effect do the constant confrontation of war and occupation have on each narrator? Do suffering, violence, and loss ever become the norm? Further - what resources, both physical and mental, are the four characters in the book using to help them survive?
3. What effect does music have on Sarajevo and the lives of the characters? Did you have a chance to listen to the Adagio? Did it have the same effect on you?
4. Are the characters in the book courageous?
5. Each one of the characters does something to create a sense of "normalcy" in this time of chaos. What do you think about this? Was it all for naught?
6. What was your favorite part of the book? Your least favorite part?
7. What does this book convey about war and humanity?
8. Let's construct at least one question to ask Steven Galloway about his book. What would you like to ask him?

Thank you to all participating this month, and I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow at 10am!

Recap: The Book Thief

I am outrageously late on writing this up and for that, I hope you can forgive me. We had a really great discussion last month at the Kegs & Corks festival (and thanks so much to everyone for coming out in the rain!). Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, although a lengthy book, was a good fit for the book club, as everyone really seemed to enjoy it and had much to say on it.

Again, please note that this post may include spoilers, and please be aware of that as you continue to read.

Going into The Book Thief, one must know that this book was meant to be written as a book for adults, but the publishers decided to market it toward children. It has won multiple Young Adult/Childrens' book awards, but some people still think that it is too "adult"-themed for children (and in some international countries, it is still marketed as an adult book). We all agreed that the book definitely reads as young adult (the word choice and syntax), its font and style (specifically with the asterisks and drawings), and a lot of its adult themes are presented in a YA-style, such as a main protagonist who defies authority and is smarter than the adults in the story. The main difference that we noticed is that this book doesn't dumb it down for children, but instead offers heavy topics in a way that isn't too overwhelming. We did note that this novel doesn't actually explain the Holocaust outright and in that way, children may be at a disadvantage if they are fairly unaware of the historical content. Despite this, The Book Thief works hard to show that not all Germans in Nazi Germany were practicing members of the Nazi Party, which is a story not told often.

While The Book Thief has a much more traditional writing style than the other books that we have read in the book club so far, the narrator of the book is Death, and as such, there are quite a few implications of this, such as Death telling us ahead of time that a character will die, or giving us a closer view into certain character's pasts that we may not have gotten otherwise. Our book club really felt like knowing that Death is the narrator really set the tone for this novel up front: there will be a lot of dying in this book. Even so, most readers enjoyed Death as a narrator, and Stephanie said that it gives this book a "unique, different voice" than it would otherwise have had.

Another unique part of The Book Thief is that a lot of the book's story is interspersed with German words. Both Stephanie and I speak German, but the rest of the book club does not. Leanne said that she enjoyed that the German words broke up the reading, and that a lot of the time she caught herself pronouncing the words aloud. Leanne also said that the story felt "more effective with the German words." Anthony enjoyed that the author helped translate the words in a creative (non-textbook) style each time. Stephanie and I both agreed that the translations were good approximations of the German word, which shouldn't be surprising, as the author speaks fluent German.

This story is about a book-loving German girl, Liesel, living in World War II, mostly in a neutral stance (her parents were not political, and neither was she), until her father, Hans, is called upon for a favor; their family is asked to take in a Jewish man, Max, and he lives hidden in their basement. Something that was noticed by the readers is that this book is about one family, doing one small thing. It is "not a sob story," and they are not trying to save all the Jews in Nazi Germany. Each character has a way of rebelling in such a strict world; Liesel's family hides Max, Max reads Hilter's Mein Kampf to stay safe, Rudy wants to be Jesse Owens.

We all really enjoyed that a main theme in this novel was reading, writing, and loving books in general. Liesel feels as if she needs to write, to commemorate, as an escape, as a relationship builder. Written words save her life in more than one way multiple times throughout the book. As for Max, he ironically reads Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") to flee under the radar, and eventually paints over the pages of Mein Kampf and writes his own story. The symbolism of creating one's own story and rewriting one's history was not lost on our group. Stephanie addressed the question of why Liesel picked up the book at her brother's funeral. Anthony answered, "the book is an artifact [in this case], not reading material." I enjoyed the juxtaposition of how sentimental and emotional that book was to Liesel in contrast to the grave digger that it belonged to, who just used it for work. Additionally, as time goes on and the mass killings become more rampant in Germany, a grave digger's book is irrelevant. 

Like some of the other books that we've read, there are talks of turning The Book Thief into a full-length motion picture. We all discussed if they will still use Death as the narrator (we hope so!), and what he would look like. We all agreed that Death would have to be very attractive (or as Jenny said, "Death is sexy as hell.") and Anthony brainstormed that Death would simply be a character in each scene, and would be in charge of carrying the dead away. Either way, we did agree that the book will translate well to screen.

Our final word on the book was the theme in only one sentence.
Anthony: "Seductive Truth."
Ann Marie: "Human nature surprises even death."
Stephanie: "Survival and the duality of human nature."

If you enjoyed the book, or have any comments on our comments, please feel free to continue the conversation below. I look forward to seeing your feedback!

Thanks again for making this book club a success!

Choose Your Own Adventure - October Edition

We had positive feedback from posting September's book early, so I'm going to try to do the same for October. The theme for October is horror/thriller/mystery which means a lot of different things to different people (which you'll see by the nominations). Please vote by September 14.

Here are the contenders, in no particular order (all summaries have been pulled from Amazon). Please respond to the poll at the end. Thank you!


Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem
Think of it as the vacation resort of the collective unconscious. The Deadfall Hotel is where our nightmares go, it’s where the dead pause to rest between worlds, and it’s where Richard Carter and his daughter Serena go to rediscover life — if the things at the hotel don’t kill them first.
With the powerful prose that has earned him awards and accolades, Steve Rasnic Tem explores the roots of fear and society’s fascination with things horrific, using the many-layered metaphor of the Deadfall Hotel. Drawing inspiration from literary touchstones John Gardner and Peter Straub, Tem elegantly delves into the dark corners of the human spirit. There he finds not only our fears, but ultimately our hopes.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The searing, post-apocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
Aging death-metal rock legend Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre: a cookbook for cannibals...a used hangman's noose...a snuff film. But nothing he possesses is as unique or as dreadful as his latest purchase off the Internet: a one-of-a-kind curiosity that arrives at his door in a black heart-shaped box...a musty dead man's suit still inhabited by the spirit of its late owner. And now everywhere Judas Coyne goes, the old man is there—watching, waiting, dangling a razor blade on a chain from his bony hand.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.

The Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation he discovers an ominous thread: the presence at the death scenes of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant, or “culling song.” This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction–and once it lodges in Streator's brain he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle–who specializes in selling haunted (or “distressed”) houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before–for a cross-country odyssey to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family.


Please complete the poll by September 14th! http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P8Q7FNL