We have picked Something Borrowed, by Emily Giffin as our book for January. The meeting is on January 7th hosted by Amy Knudsen. Check your email inbox for an Evite soon.
Happy Holidays!!
Monday, December 8, 2008
January '09 Book Pick
We have picked Something Borrowed, by Emily Giffin as our book for January. The meeting is on January 7th hosted by Amy Knudsen. Check your email inbox for an Evite soon.
Happy Holidays!!
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Jeanette Walls Video
I just finished reading The Glass Castle and am totally fascinated with the story. I googled the author and I found this really great video. The video also has Jeanette's mother. I always wondered what her paintings looked like and this video does answer that question.
Another video that I found absolutely amazing is an interview with Gill Deacon. To view the video click here.
See you all tonight.
Another video that I found absolutely amazing is an interview with Gill Deacon. To view the video click here.
See you all tonight.
NY Times - 100 Notable Books for 2008
I was online this morning chceking out the NY Times website and I came across a list of 100 Notable Books for 2008. I think it is a good list for future club picks. To get to the page click here.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Swap books for free
Hi Ladies,
I recently joined Swaptree: http://www.swaptree.com, and thought I'd share. You easily post what books and music CDs you have that you don't want anymore and then create a list of books and music that you want. The website automatically matches you with someone who has what you want and is willing to exchange for what you have.
For example, I posted 20 books that I am willing to swap. Out of those, 4 of them were already on other peoples' "want list" and i can choose from a list of over 1500 books or music CDs (and even a few DVDs) that people are willing to trade for my books. There is a 1 to 1 ratio so whether you post a CD, DVD, or book, you must be willing to trade it for 1 item. I haven't posted a "want" list yet but it's nice knowing i could have my choice of all those books.
I thought it would take a long time to enter all my books in but you just type in the ISBN number next to the barcode on the book (or the barcode number on a CD/DVD) and the website finds the cover for you. It took me 5 minutes to enter 20 books.
All you pay is shipping (media mail is cheap) to send your book and you can swap books and CDs. I heard about it on Today Show a while ago but just got around to making an account. I thought this would be great especially among the group if anyone has books they want to swap. We could also consider swapping books within our group if anyone's interested.
Hope you're having a good week.
I recently joined Swaptree: http://www.swaptree.com, and thought I'd share. You easily post what books and music CDs you have that you don't want anymore and then create a list of books and music that you want. The website automatically matches you with someone who has what you want and is willing to exchange for what you have.
For example, I posted 20 books that I am willing to swap. Out of those, 4 of them were already on other peoples' "want list" and i can choose from a list of over 1500 books or music CDs (and even a few DVDs) that people are willing to trade for my books. There is a 1 to 1 ratio so whether you post a CD, DVD, or book, you must be willing to trade it for 1 item. I haven't posted a "want" list yet but it's nice knowing i could have my choice of all those books.
I thought it would take a long time to enter all my books in but you just type in the ISBN number next to the barcode on the book (or the barcode number on a CD/DVD) and the website finds the cover for you. It took me 5 minutes to enter 20 books.
All you pay is shipping (media mail is cheap) to send your book and you can swap books and CDs. I heard about it on Today Show a while ago but just got around to making an account. I thought this would be great especially among the group if anyone has books they want to swap. We could also consider swapping books within our group if anyone's interested.
Hope you're having a good week.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
December 2008 Book Pick
First of all I would like to thank everyone for coming over last night. I hope you had a good time.
We have picked The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls as our book for December. The meeting is on December 3rd and Mikie is hosting. This should be an interesting book for the club since it's a memoir and so far we have only read fiction. So look out for an Evite and hope to see everyone next month. Also, the following is an editorial review for The Glass Castle from Amazon.com. I thought it was pretty interesting and I hope you will too. Happy Reading!
Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's child rearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis
We have picked The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls as our book for December. The meeting is on December 3rd and Mikie is hosting. This should be an interesting book for the club since it's a memoir and so far we have only read fiction. So look out for an Evite and hope to see everyone next month. Also, the following is an editorial review for The Glass Castle from Amazon.com. I thought it was pretty interesting and I hope you will too. Happy Reading!
Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's child rearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis
Friday, October 24, 2008
Chelsea Handler!
I have been planning to read this book for a while and I just started reading it on my trip. It is hilarious. There are a series of short essays (possibly true stories) addressing everything from trips she takes with her Dad to hilarious incidents at a girls night out. If anyone wants to borrow this book for a laugh - let me know! Shephalli
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Richard Yates Bio
Just thought I'd post this since I came across it and in case anyone is interested in knowing about this month's author....
Author: Richard Yates (1926-1992)
Born: February 3, 1926; New York, New York
Died: November 7, 1992; Birmingham, Alabama
Principal Works
long fiction
The Stepdaughter, 1976
Great Granny Webster, 1977
The Fate of Mary Rose, 1981
Corrigan, 1984
miscellaneous
For All That I Found There, 1973
nonfiction
On the Perimeter, 1984
In the Pink: Caroline Blackwood on Hunting, 1987
The Last of the Duchess, 1995
nonfiction (cookbook; with Anna Haycraft)
Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble, 1980
short fiction
Liars in Love, 1981
Richard Yates was born on February 3, 1926, in Yonkers, New York. After graduation from a private school in Connecticut in 1944, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served two years in Europe at the end of World War II. He was married and divorced twice, and had three daughters by his first wife.
Yates held a series of writing and teaching jobs until 1961, when his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was published, to immediate critical praise. Nominated for a National Book Award, it also helped Yates win a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. The next year, Yates's first story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: Short Stories, solidified his literary reputation. What followed was hardly the standard script for writers, however. None of the books he wrote in the next twenty-five years, neither his multiple novels nor another collection of short stories, lived up to the high expectations established by his first two works.
Yates struggled to earn a living. He worked as a speech writer for Robert Kennedy (1963), and as a screenwriter in Hollywood (he earned shared writing credit for the screenplay of A Bridge at Remagen, 1969). For some years after 1964, he taught at the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He was also the editor of Stories for the Sixties (1963), and wrote William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness: A Screenplay (1985).
Yates's life was further plagued by alcoholism and bouts of mental illness, and he was hospitalized several times. When he died from the complications of emphysema in a Birmingham Veterans’ Administration hospital, on November 7, 1992, he was on a one-year teaching appointment at the University of Alabama. When The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2001) was published posthumously a decade later, however, the reviews were consistently high, a final recognition of Yates's particular literary talents.
Yates's stories had appeared over his career in some of the best vehicles for short fiction (e.g., Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post), and the comparisons in the reviews of his work were often to F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, John Updike, Joseph Heller, and the other great American realists of the twentieth century. Yates was a “writers’ writer,” a novelist and short-story writer absolutely dedicated to the craft of his fiction, which explains the praise from other writers (such as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Dorothy Parker, and Tennessee Williams) and his good grades as a writing teacher. Yates's best fiction (such as Revolutionary Road, or the often anthologized short story “A Really Good Jazz Piano”) reveals a remarkable level of intensity and sophistication. His themes are often sadness, desperation, disillusionment, or isolation, his characters often average Americans otherwise invisible, but his fiction holds a power few other American writers have achieved.
Essay by: David Peck
Author: Richard Yates (1926-1992)
Born: February 3, 1926; New York, New York
Died: November 7, 1992; Birmingham, Alabama
Principal Works
long fiction
The Stepdaughter, 1976
Great Granny Webster, 1977
The Fate of Mary Rose, 1981
Corrigan, 1984
miscellaneous
For All That I Found There, 1973
nonfiction
On the Perimeter, 1984
In the Pink: Caroline Blackwood on Hunting, 1987
The Last of the Duchess, 1995
nonfiction (cookbook; with Anna Haycraft)
Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble, 1980
short fiction
Liars in Love, 1981
Richard Yates was born on February 3, 1926, in Yonkers, New York. After graduation from a private school in Connecticut in 1944, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served two years in Europe at the end of World War II. He was married and divorced twice, and had three daughters by his first wife.
Yates held a series of writing and teaching jobs until 1961, when his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was published, to immediate critical praise. Nominated for a National Book Award, it also helped Yates win a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. The next year, Yates's first story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: Short Stories, solidified his literary reputation. What followed was hardly the standard script for writers, however. None of the books he wrote in the next twenty-five years, neither his multiple novels nor another collection of short stories, lived up to the high expectations established by his first two works.
Yates struggled to earn a living. He worked as a speech writer for Robert Kennedy (1963), and as a screenwriter in Hollywood (he earned shared writing credit for the screenplay of A Bridge at Remagen, 1969). For some years after 1964, he taught at the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He was also the editor of Stories for the Sixties (1963), and wrote William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness: A Screenplay (1985).
Yates's life was further plagued by alcoholism and bouts of mental illness, and he was hospitalized several times. When he died from the complications of emphysema in a Birmingham Veterans’ Administration hospital, on November 7, 1992, he was on a one-year teaching appointment at the University of Alabama. When The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2001) was published posthumously a decade later, however, the reviews were consistently high, a final recognition of Yates's particular literary talents.
Yates's stories had appeared over his career in some of the best vehicles for short fiction (e.g., Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post), and the comparisons in the reviews of his work were often to F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, John Updike, Joseph Heller, and the other great American realists of the twentieth century. Yates was a “writers’ writer,” a novelist and short-story writer absolutely dedicated to the craft of his fiction, which explains the praise from other writers (such as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Dorothy Parker, and Tennessee Williams) and his good grades as a writing teacher. Yates's best fiction (such as Revolutionary Road, or the often anthologized short story “A Really Good Jazz Piano”) reveals a remarkable level of intensity and sophistication. His themes are often sadness, desperation, disillusionment, or isolation, his characters often average Americans otherwise invisible, but his fiction holds a power few other American writers have achieved.
Essay by: David Peck
Friday, October 17, 2008
A Tardy Thank you
I just wanted to thank everyone who came to the last meeting at my house. I enjoyed having you all here and thought we had a great discussion. Leo also appreciates you putting up with him.
In case you're interested, the book I was recommending if you want a good laugh is Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, by Fannie Flagg. It was a real hoot. http://www.amazon.com/Daisy-Fay-Miracle-Fannie-Flagg/dp/0446394521
In addition to the book club book, I'm rereading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey. I just felt like I could use the refresher, as it's been at least a decade since I first read it, and my life is so different now. It's been really enlightening!
Please, as Shephalli said, feel free to share what other things you're reading or anything that's going on that might be useful to the rest of the club. I enjoy hearing about neighborhood stuff or area stuff since I'm new here and feel like I'm often out of the loop.
See y'all around!
Saturday, October 11, 2008
November 2008 Book Pick
Hi Everyone. We will be reading Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates. The meeting is on November 5th. Look out for an evite soon!
Monday, October 6, 2008
Welcome!!
Hi Everyone,
I decided to create this blog when I realized that a lot of us do read the book but cannot make it to the meeting for one reason or another. So I thought this would be a good place to voice your opinions about the book, or post a discussion topic about something that you felt strongly about. It would also be a good place to write about something when you are reading the book - rather than wait for the next meeting. Check your emails for an invite and follow the link to become an author of this blog. I think you might have to create a Google account to write a new post but everyone can post comments without signing in. We are all super busy but this is a good way to keep everyone up to date! Also, don't hesitate to write about books other than the one we are reading for the club. Thanks and Happy Reading!!
October 2008 - The Secret Life Of Bees
We are currently reading The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd.
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