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PREVIOUS READING LISTS

JANUARY: At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon. We start the new year off on a light note with Karon’s depiction of small-town life. The story revolves around Father Timothy, following his trials and tribulations of ministering to his Mitford parish. Exceedingly popular, Karon’s book is a quick read and all-around "feel good" story full of rich description and wonderful characters. 

FEBRUARY: Mating by Norman Rush. A National Book Award winner, Mating is an intellectual romance. Set in Africa, the novel follows a female anthropologist and pH candidate as she searches for love, a dissertation topic, and the experimental utopian society of Tsau. A meaty read, not for the faint of heart.

MARCH: The Cider House Rules by John Irving. Set in nineteenth-century New England, The Cider House Rules has been called a mature epic "somewhere between Trollope and Twain ." As in his other novels Irving creates believable, lovable, and quirky characters as he explores personal dilemmas and moral concerns. Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany was one of the club’s favorite reads of last year and this promises to be just as much fun.

APRIL: The Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. This witty novel won the Booker Prize in 1986. It is the story of Edith Hope, a romance novelist. When Edith’s life begins to resemble the plots of her novels she flees to the Hotel du Lac in Switzerland in search of peace, quiet, and sanity. Instead Edith finds herself surrounded by a cast of characters all or whom are recovering from their own bouts of love. Edith also encounters a worldly, enigmatic man who seems determined to introduce Edith to her own sense of freedom. The Hotel du Lac is a wonderful character study and examination of the question: "Why love?" 

MAY: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson. This novel begins in the womb. Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of her conception and she continues on taking the reader through a trip through the Twentieth Century as seen through her eyes. Throughout her life Ruby is determined to learn the many secrets hidden within her family. At turns funny and poignant, Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the British Whitbread award for literature. Meets May 4 @ 7:00 p.m.

JUNE: The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells. This is the follow-up to Wells’ highly successful novel, Little Altars Everywhere. In her first book Wells introduces the reader to the hilarious escapades of the Walker clan, Vivvie Walker in particular. Now Vivvie’s daughter, Siddalee, is on her own; having left Thornton Louisiana she takes up residence in the Puget Sound area as she attempts to chronicle the secret lives of the women who helped raise her: The Ya Ya Sisterhood. Meets June 8 @ 7:00 p.m.

JULY: Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. Published to international acclaim, Birdsong is an intensly romantic epic. Spanning three generations beginning with the interim between WWI and WWII and reaching into the present, it is authentic and compassionate with the poignancy of A Farewell to Arms and the sensuousness of The English Patient. Meets July 6 @ 7:00 p.m.

AUGUST: The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace. Deemed "hilarious," "enigmatic," and "odd," The Broom of the System tells the story if a hapless switchboard operator named Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The mysterious disappearance of her great-grandmother and 25 other inmates from a Shaker Heights nursing home has left Lenore emotionally stranded on the edge of the Great Ohio Desert. That is only one of the many problems Lenore has to face, add to it her affair with boss Rick Vigorous; and the impending stardom of her talking cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler. All of this adds up to incredible weirdness and humor. Meets August 3 @ 7:00 p.m.

SEPTEMBER: Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald. Offshore won Britain’s Booker Prize for 1997, and three of her other novels—The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring, and The Gate of Angels—have made the Booker shortlist. Offshore revolves around a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric people who live on houseboats on the Battersea Reach of the Thames. Rising and falling with the great river’s tides they belong to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another in a motley yet kindly society. Nenna, a faithful, loving, but abandoned wife, the mother of two young girls running wild in the waterfront streets. It is her predicament that draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns. This is a strong and graceful book. Meets September ? (It falls on Labor Day and so we must adjust our schedule).

OCTOBER: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. The main character of this captivating novel is one of the most notorious and misunderstood women of the 19^th Century: Grace Marks. As the story begins Marks has been convicted for the participation in the murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery his housekeeper and mistress. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders. Grace is put under the care of Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the immature field of mental illness. Through calm reassurance Dr. Jordan brings Grace closer and closer to the memory of the day of the murders. What will she finally remember? Is she a fiend, a bloodthirsty femme fatale; or is she the victim of circumstance? A novel of sly wit and insight. Meets October 5 @ 7:00 p.m.

NOVEMBER: Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord by Louis De Bernieres. De Bernieres again transports the reader to an unknown territory, a land of his own making. It is a South American country of eccentricity, gargantuan corruption, and terrifying violence, where the ordinary machinery of government has rusted and the only thing that works is magic. When Dionisio Vivo, a young lecturer in philosophy, bombards the newspapers with denunciations of the cocaine Mafia, he becomes a hero and a target. Senor Vivo soon becomes familiar with the Mafia’s strong-arm tactics, so familiar and adept at surviving assassination attempts he acquires a reputation for supernatural invulnerability—as well as a following of young women who are fiercely determined to bear his child. Alas, the Senor’s protection does not extend to those he loves. And what began as a farce turns into a novel of tragic love and macabre revenge, filled with characters of outsized vitality and prose that sings. Meets November 2 @ 7:00 p.m.

DECEMBER:Merry Christmas everyone! My gift to you is the second book in Jan Karon’s Mitford series. These High Green Hills continues the trials and tribulations of Father Tim of the little town of Mitford. Look   for an intensified relationship between Father Tim and his beautiful next door neighbor. Meets December 7 (a day of infamy) @ 7:00 p.m.

BARNES AND NOBLE CLASSICS BOOK CLUB

1998 READING SCHEDULE

JANUARY: The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass. This has been hailed as the greatest German novel since the war.

FEBRUARY: Second half of The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass.

MARCH: The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton.

APRIL: Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner. Some critics consider this novel to be the beginning of the Southern literature genre.

MAY: the moonstone by Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone, a spectacular yellow diamond stolen from a shrine in India, is given to Rachel Verinder as an eighteenth birthday present. On the same night she receives the diamond it is stolen from her room. Suspicion falls on one character after another, all with reason to steal the valuable gem. Collins’ artful character development and intricate plot line makes this a classic British mystery. T.S. Eliot described The Moonstone as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels." Meets May 11 @ 7:00 PM.

JUNE: Castle to Castle by Celine. It is Germany near the end of WWII, the Allies have landed and members of the Vichy French government have been sequestered in a labyrinthine castle, replete with secret passages and subterranean hide-aways. The group of 1400 terrified officials, their wives, mistresses, flunkies, and Nazi "protectors"—including Celine, his wife, their cat, and an actor friend—attempt to postpone the postwar reckoning under the constant threat of air raids and starvation. With an undercurrent of sexual excitement, Celine paints an almost unbearably vivid picture of human society and the human condition. Meets June 8 @ 7:00 PM.

JULY: Villette by Charlotte Bronte. This was Charlotte’s final novel; some critics even consider it to be the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853 this deeply felt work eclipsed even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There, she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginevra Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette. This first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life’s journey—a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman’s consciousness in English literature. Meets July 13 @ 7:00 PM.

AUGUST: Amerika by Franz Kafka. Kafka’s first and funniest novel tells the story of a young immigrant named Karl Rossmann who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures. Meets August 10 @ 7:00 PM.

SEPTEMBER: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. This is the story of a pretty small-town girl who comes to the big city filled with vague ambitions, but no direction. She both uses men and is used by them as she struggles to become a successful Broadway actress, while George Hurstwood, the married man who has run away with her, loses his grip on life and descends into beggary and worse. Sister Carrie is considered the first masterpiece of the American naturalistic movement with its grittily factual presentation of the ups and downs of urban life. Meets September 14 @ 7:00pm.

OCTOBER: the Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Just in time for Halloween, this is a moral fantasy novel exploring the depths of mankind’s evil. Published in 1890 for Lippincott’s Magazine the novel had six additional chapters when it appeared in book form. Dorian Gray a seemingly young, handsome Englishman has actually fallen into a life of dissipation and crime. Despite his unhealthy behavior, his physical appearance remains youthful and unmarked. Instead, a portrait of him catalogues every evil deed by turning his handsome features into a hideous mask. A classic scary novel for a Halloween treat. Meets October 12, @ 7:00 PM.

NOVEMBER: Trilby by George Du Maurier. The novel tells the story of Trilby O’Ferrall, an artist’s model in Paris, who falls under the spell of the compelling svengali, a musician who trains her voice through hypnosis and turns her into s singing star. The pair travel throughout Europe on successful concert tours, Trilby as La Svengali, the famous singer, and Svengali as the accompanying orchestra conductor. The story of Trilby’s total subjugation to Svengali has passed into the realm of mythology. Meets November 16 @ 7:00 PM.

DECEMBER: The Italian by Ann Radcliffe. The full title of this novel is The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents. A Romance. Originally published in three volumes, the main plot of the sto0ry concerns the attempts of various characters to prevent the marriage of Vincento di Vivaldi, a gallant and persistent nobleman, to Ellena di Rosalba, a fair maiden of unknown ancestry. Although Radcliffe avoided supernatural elements in the work, its romantic story line and dramatic suspense are typical of the gothic genre. When we read Northanger Abbey last year, the main character in the novel (Catherine) fell under the spell of such gothic novels as The Italian. Meets December 14 @ 7:00 p.m.

JANUARY: The Rainy City by Earl Emerson. Emerson is a local author; this is his first book of his "Thomas Black" series. Meets January 26 @ 7:00 PM.

FEBRUARY: New Orleans Mourning by Julie Smith. This is the first in her "Skip Langdon" series. Smith paints a rich portrait of New Orleans life and its people. Meets February 23 @ 7:00 PM.

MARCH: The Sculptress by Minette Walters. This Edgar award winner was recently adapted for television and appeared on PBS. Meets March 23 @ 7:00 PM.

APRIL: Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor by Stephanie Baron. This is a delightful mystery with Jane Austen as the sleuth! Meets April 27 @ 7:00 PM.

MAY: Mallory’s Oracle by Carol O’Connell. This is the story of a tangled web of unsolved serial murders and the woman who makes them her obsession—New York City police sergeant Kathleen Mallory. It is dark, suspenseful, and a totally unforgettable mystery. Meets May 18 @ 7:00 PM.

JUNE: Bookman’s Wake by John Dunning. Cliff Janeway, a Denver cop-turned-book-dealer, is lured by an excop acquaintance into a job in Seattle. The objective is to bring back a fugitive wanted for assault, burglary, and the possible theft of a priceless edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. The fugitive turns out to be a young woman who calls herself Eleanor Rigby, who happens to be a gifted book scout. Intrigued both by Eleanor and the mystery of the rare book Janeway takes on a series of deadly stalkers all trying to find the book and the fugitive, When Eleanor disappears Janeway realizes he must untangle a web of secrets surrounding the book and its maker in order to find her. A finely crafted mystery set in the familiar streets of Seattle, Issaquah, and North Bend. Meets June 22 @ 7:00 PM.

JULY: The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman. Mrs. Virgil Pollifax (Emily), a little gray-haired widow from New Jersey, has children who are married with families of their own who don’t need her anymore. Tired of going to her Garden Club meetings, Emily wanted to do something new, different, exciting; so, naturally she became a CIA agent. Join us for this playful mystery with a woman so smart and so wily she puts Jessica Fletcher to shame. Meets July 27 @ 7:00 PM.

AUGUST: The Scold’s Bridle by Minette Walters. This novel precedes March’s pick The Sculptress, but it is just as complex and satisfying. Meets August 24 @ 7:00.

SEPTEMBER: Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin. Once John Rebus served in Britain’s elite SAS. Now he’s an Edinburgh cop who hides from his memories, misses promotions and ignores a series of crank letters. But as the killings mount and the tabloid headlines scream, Rebus cannot stop the feverish shrieks from his own mind. Because he isn’t just one cop trying to catch a killer, he’s the man who’s got all the pieces of the puzzle. John Rebus is a tormented hero and his story is compelling from the first page. This is just the first "John Rebus" mystery, a detective who is comparable to Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, Meets September 28 @ 7:00 PM.

OCTOBER: Revenge of the Cootie Girls by Sparkle Hayter. As the executive producer of Special Reports, Robin Hudson is feeling (relatively) settled. Okay, she’s bored. But it’s Halloween, and she has invited her innocent intern, Kathy, along on a Girls’ Night Out—a semiregular frenzy of female bonding meant to alleviate Robin’s goilfriends’ (sic) love crises and her own ennui. When Kathy doesn’t show—but telephones from a strange man’s closet—Robin and her pals set off on a girlhunt through one long night of murder, costumes, mayhem, and men who are not what they seem (are they ever?). This is just a romp of a read, smart and funny. Janet Evanovich calls it "Sexy, irreverent, and wacky." Meets October 26 @ 7:00 PM.

NOVEMBER: Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. This is an absolute classic mystery and is one of my favorites. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III, which bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history. Could such a sensitive, noble face actually belong to one of the world’s most heinous villains—a venomous hunchback who allegedly killed his beloved brother’s children to make his crown secure? Or could Richard have been the victim, turned into a monster by the usurpers of England’s throne? With the help of the British Museum and Brent Carradine, an American scholar, Grant determines to find out once and for all what kind of man Richard Plantagenet really was and who killed the Little Princes in the Tower. Meets November 23 @ 7:00.

DECEMBER: Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen. This is my Christmas gift to you. This is one of the funniest novels I’ve read. Hiaasen, a reporter for the Miami Herald, writes of the perils of being a tourist in Florida and the rapidly diminishing countryside that is falling prey to unscrupulous developers. It is laugh out loud funny. Meets December 28 @ 7:00 PM.