At the June meeting, there were too many ideas that we decided to take it to the Internet and let all of you that weren't able to make this meeting decide for July. Here are the contenders (all summaries have been pulled from Amazon). Please respond to the poll at the end.
Bossypants by Tina Fey
Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update,"
before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a
recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport
by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she
would be a comedian on TV.
She has seen both these dreams come true.
At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on
Saturday Night Live;
from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her
life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college
romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon -- from the beginning of this
paragraph to this final sentence.
Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War
The Zombie War
came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by
the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the
survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United
States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that
once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and
inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men,
women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or
at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time.
World War Z is
the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so
powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the
ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through
the plague years.
Wonder Boys: A Novel by Michael Chabon
A modern classic, now in a welcome new edition,
Wonder Boys
firmly established Michael Chabon as a force to be reckoned with in
American fiction. At once a deft parody of the American fame factory and
a piercing portrait of young and old desire, this novel introduces two
unforgettable characters: Grady Tripp, a former publishing prodigy now
lost in a fog of pot and passion and stalled in the midst of his endless
second book, and Grady’s student, James Leer, a budding writer obsessed
with Hollywood self-destruction and struggling with his own searching
heart. All those who love Michael Chabon’s
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and his Pulitzer Prize-winning
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay will find the same elegant imagination, bold humor, and undeniable warmth at work in
Wonder Boys.
Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art by Christopher Moore
In July 1890, Vincent van Gogh went into a cornfield and shot himself.
Or did he?
Why would an artist at the height of his creative powers attempt to
take his own life . . . and then walk a mile to a doctor's house for
help? Who was the crooked little "color man" Vincent had claimed was
stalking him across France? And why had the painter recently become
deathly afraid of a certain shade of blue?
These are just a few
of the questions confronting Vincent's friends—baker-turned-painter
Lucien Lessard and bon vivant Henri Toulouse-Lautrec—who vow to discover
the truth about van Gogh's untimely death. Their quest will lead them
on a surreal odyssey and brothel-crawl deep into the art world of late
nineteenth-century Paris.
Oh lÀ lÀ, quelle surprise, and
zut alors!
A delectable confection of intrigue, passion, and art history—with
cancan girls, baguettes, and fine French cognac thrown in for good
measure—
SacrÉ Bleu is another masterpiece of wit and wonder from the one, the only, Christopher Moore.
The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship
bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far
from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of
“insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the
ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into
the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another,
bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other
diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women,
another opens the door to the world of literature. The narrator’s
elusive, beautiful cousin Emily becomes his confidante, allowing him to
see himself “with a distant eye” for the first time, and to feel the
first stirring of desire. Another Cat’s Table denizen, the shadowy Miss
Lasqueti, is perhaps more than what she seems. And very late every
night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and his fate a
galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.
Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir by Nick Flynn
In 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn’s daughter’s birth, his
growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu
Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men
depicted in those photos. Haunted by a history of addiction, a
relationship with his unsteady father, and a longing to connect with his
mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in this memoir
passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his
growing obsession—a questioning of terror, torture, and the political
crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. The
time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for
exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of
profound self-discovery—of being lost and found, of painful family
memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to
embrace it again.
First Comes Love by Marion Winik
When Marion Winik fell in love with Tony Heubach during a wild Mardi
Gras in New Orleans, her friends shook their heads. For starters, she
was straight and he was gay. But Marion and Tony's impossible love
turned out to be true enough to produce a marriage and two beautiful
sons, true enough to weather drug addiction, sexual betrayal, and the
AIDS that would kill Tony at the age of thirty-seven, twelve years after
they met.
In a memoir heartbreaking and hilarious by turns,
Marion Winik tells a story that is all more powerful for the way in
which it defies easy judgments. As it charts the trajectory of a
marriage so impossible that it became inevitable,
First Comes Love reminds us—poignantly indelibly—that every story is a special case.
In One Person: A Novel by John Irving
A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One
Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and
affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy,
the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the
tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a
“sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his
landmark novel of “terminal cases,” The World According to Garp.
His
most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen
Meany, John Irving’s In One Person is a poignant tribute to Billy’s
friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and
convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable
portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to
making himself “worthwhile.”
Please vote here ( http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NGDKMP6 ) for your July book!
