Two more books - May & September 2010

We read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz before the summer break.

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the 2007 novel by author Junot Díaz, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, along with multiple other awards. This modern-day tale of an unlikely hero takes readers on the dark journey of a contemporary immigrant.

The novel's main character, Oscar de Léon, is a "ghetto nerd" from a family of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Plagued by the fukú curse brought upon the aboriginal people of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, Oscar portrays himself as a hero in search of his personal Grail—a "pure and unadulterated love." Obsessed with science fiction and fantasy, Oscar is alienated in his lower-class community. Throughout high school, and into his teaching career, he is the victim of the narrow perspectives of those without his imagination and vision.
Told from the point of view of Oscar’s sister Lola and his best friend Yunior, this tale of the search for redemption leads the reader through the darkest corners of a country under dictatorial control. Lola seeks her own redemption, away from her family and her heritage. She loves only her younger brother Oscar and seeks to protect him from the curse that tragically affects their family.
Yunior, his best friend and college roommate, does not quite understand Oscar, yet loves him just the same and sees that there is something within Oscar that begs to be understood. As the primary narrator of the novel, Yunior provides a loving portrait of a tortured soul within a tortured family. The redemption of Oscar’s “brief wondrous life” comes at a significant, but justified, price."
Courtesy http://www.enotes.com/

Let the Great World Spin was the book pick for September. It was a very unusual book unlike others that we have read before. A great review can be found on NY Times webpage. Here is an excerpt:

"Philippe Petit, the French acrobat who in 1974 walked across a tightrope between the twin towers, wasn’t on the payroll of the Port Authority, but in retrospect he probably should have been. At the time, the newly opened World Trade Center was shaping up as a huge mistake. Not only had the project cost far more than it was supposed to, but a city spiraling toward bankruptcy didn’t exactly need millions more square feet of office space. Worse still, the towers were out of scale and utterly unattractive — “the largest aluminum siding job in the history of the world,” as one critic put it. They were the ugly stepchild of New York’s skyscrapers, seemingly destined to be forever denied a place in the life and lore of the city. But in the span of a single summer morning, Petit gave the towers a history of their own. His stunt represented nothing less than a symbolic passing of the torch: in the remake of “King Kong” two years later, the furious, lovelorn gorilla takes his last stand not astride the Empire State Building but atop the World Trade Center."
To read more, click here.