August's Book

August's Meeting will be Tuesday, August 25 at 2:00 pm.

The book for August is 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman

From Library Journal - Ninety-seven Orchard was an address shared by five immigrant families who lived in one tenement building at different times from the end of the Civil War up to World War II. Ziegelman, who will direct the Culinary Center to open at New York's Tenement Museum, which is the actual 97 Orchard building, documents, in a manner not often found in such social histories, their struggles to adjust to a new way of life in America. Interspersed among the tales of each group are culinary details and specific recipes that add vividly to the flavor and texture of the descriptions of the hardscrabble life these families—German, Irish, Jewish, and Italian—experienced. The multitude of gastronomic details, from the origin of snack shops called delicatessens to the growing popularity of something called macaroni, are painstakingly described. It is an eye-opening exploration of the social and economic history of those who thrived and survived, in spite of significant odds, on New York's Lower East Side. VERDICT Recommended for those seeking up-close and personal—as well as edible—insights into the daily lives of late 19th- and early 20th-century "new Americans."—Claire Franek, MSLS, Brockport, NY


Available from The Alachua County Public Library.

July's Book

July's Meeting will be Tuesday, July 28 at 2:00 pm.

The book for July is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize

From Publishers Weekly - With sensuous prose, a dreamlike style infused with breathtakingly beautiful images and keen insight into human nature, Roy's debut novel charts fresh territory in the genre of magical, prismatic literature. Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol, the cousin of the novel's protagonists, Rahel and her fraternal twin brother, Estha. In a circuitous and suspenseful narrative, Roy reveals the family tensions that led to the twins' behavior on the fateful night that Sophie drowned. Beneath the drama of a family tragedy lies a background of local politics, social taboos and the tide of history - all of which come together in a slip of fate, after which a family is irreparably shattered. Roy captures the children's candid observations but clouded understanding of adults' complex emotional lives. Rahel notices that "at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside." Plangent with a sad wisdom, the children's view is never oversimplified, and the adult characters reveal their frailties (and in one case, a repulsively evil power) in subtle and complex ways. While Roy's powers of description are formidable, she sometimes succumbs to overwriting, forcing every minute detail to symbolize something bigger, and the pace of the story slows. But these lapses are few, and her powers coalesce magnificently in the book's second half. Roy's clarity of vision is remarkable, her voice original, her story beautifully constructed and masterfully told. - Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Available from Santa Fe College and The Alachua County Public Library.

June's Meeting

June's Meeting will be Tuesday, June 30 at 2:00 pm.

The book for June is Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole

From Publisher's Weekly: Brockmole uses letters to tell a remarkable story of two women, their loves, their secrets, and two world wars, cutting to the important matters that letter writers struggle to put into just the right words. In 1912, young poet Mrs. Elspeth Dunn, who has never left Scotland’s Isle of Skye because of her fear of boats, receives her first fan letter from David Graham, a college student in Urbana, Ill. They begin a long correspondence. After Elspeth’s husband goes off to war, she overcomes her fear and crosses to London to meet briefly with David, who is on his way to France to serve in the American Ambulance Field Service. Interspersed with Elspeth and David’s letters are 1940 missives from Margaret, Elspeth’s daughter, to her uncle and her fiancé as she tries to find out about her father, since Elspeth will not talk about her past. The beauty of Scotland, the tragedy of war, the longings of the heart, and the struggles of a family torn apart by disloyalty are brilliantly drawn, leaving just enough blanks to be filled by the reader’s imagination. Agent: Courtney Miller-Callihan, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. (July 2014)

Available from Santa Fe College and The Alachua County Public Library.

May's Book

May's Meeting will be Tuesday, May 26 in room Y-233.

The book for May is The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

From Publisher's Weekly: The only thing that’s “storied” in the life of A.J. Fikry, a curmudgeonly independent bookseller, in this funny, sad novel from Zevin (The Hole We’re In), is his obvious love of literature—particularly short stories. Fikry runs Island Books, located on Alice Island, a fictional version of Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a “persnickety little bookstore,” in the words of Amelia Loman, the new sales rep for Knightley Press. Her first meeting with Fikry does not go well. He’s disgruntled by the state of publishing, and bereft because his beloved wife, Nic, recently died in a car accident. Soon after the meeting, he suffers another loss: a rare first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem Tamerlane (Fikry’s primary retirement asset) goes missing. But then Fikry finds an abandoned toddler in his bookstore with a note saying, “This is Maya. She is twenty-five months old.” Somewhat unbelievably, Maya ends up in his care and, predictably enough, opens the irascible bookseller’s heart. The surprisingly expansive story includes a romance between Fikry and Amelia, and follows Maya to the age of 18 before arriving at a bittersweet denouement. Zevin is a deft writer, clever and witty, and her affection for the book business is obvious. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Apr.)

Available from Santa Fe College and The Alachua County Public Library.

Future Books

June - Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole

July - God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

August - 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman

February's Meeting

February's Meeting will be Tuesday, February 24 at 2:00 pm.

The book for February is The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O'Melveny

From Library Journal: Poet O'Melveny's debut fiction is like a lyrical composite creature--part father/daughter epistolary novel, part aristocratic diary, part adventurer's travelogue, and part compendium of allegorical diseases. When 16th-century Venetian doctor Gabriella Mondini is barred from practicing medicine, she sets off across Europe in search of her father, a respected doctor who left under mysterious circumstances 10 years ago to gather material for his Book of Diseases. As a rare female doctor, Gabriella needs his mentorship, but his letters have grown increasingly incoherent, as she follows his route, she hears disturbing stories about his erratic behavior. Forced to cut off her distinctive red hair, she travels as a man through villages empty of women and girls after mass witch burnings. Her own adventures begin to rival the tales in her father's letters as she encounters suspicion, condescension, respect, and even romance. Gabriella's father continues to elude her, and she must face the possibility that she no longer knows where to find him. Yet she cannot resume her own life until she does. Gabriella's servants Olmina and Lorenzo accompany her and act as a pair of Sancho Panzas, providing mild salt-of-the-earth comic relief when not worn down by a yearning for home. By the time Gabriella reaches Morocco, where she believes her father to be, she too yearns for the comforts of Venice. But she has changed in ways that will greatly complicate her return. Readers will be delighted by O'Melveny's whimsical embellishments, though veterans of historical fiction may balk at the poetic, metaphor-laden prose and fancifully piebald construction. Maps. Agent: Daniel Lazar. Writers House. (Apr.)

January's Meeting

January's Meeting will be Tuesday, January 27 at 2:00 pm.

The Book for January is Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Shadow of the Wind

From Publisher's Weekly:
Ruiz Zafon's novel, a bestseller in his native Spain, takes the satanic touches from Angel Heart and stirs them into a bookish intrigue la Foucault's Pendulum. The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Juli n Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls himself Lain Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a "porcelain gaze," Clara Barcelo; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermin Romero de Torres; his best friend's sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. Officially, Carax's dead body was dumped in an alley in 1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and Fermin are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax's childhood friend. As Daniel's quest continues, frightening parallels between his own life and Carax's begin to emerge. Ruiz Zafon strives for a literary tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and inexact similes and metaphors (snow is "God's dandruff"; servants obey orders with "the efficiency and submissiveness of a body of well-trained insects"). Yet the colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and the straining for effect only give the book the feel of para-literature or the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel. (Apr. 12) Forecast: Appealing packaging (a weathered, antique-look jacket), prepublication bookseller events and an eight-city author tour should give this an early boost, though momentum may flag down the stretch. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Upcoming books:

February - The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O'Melveny

March - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

April - Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz

August's Book

Our next meeting will be Tuesday, August 26 at 2:00 pm in room Y-332.

The book for August is Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French

From Publisher's Weekly: Historian French (Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao) unravels a long-forgotten 1937 murder in this fascinating look at Peking (now Beijing) on the brink of Japanese occupation. The severely mutilated body of 19-year-old Pamela Werner—the adopted daughter of noted Sinologist and longtime Peking resident Edward Werner—was discovered, with many of her organs removed, near the border between the Badlands, a warren of alleyways full of brothels and opium dens, and the Legation Quarter, where Peking’s foreign set resided in luxury. A case immediately fraught with tension was made even trickier when the local detective, Col. Han Shih-ching, was made to work alongside Scotland Yard–trained Richard Dennis, based in Tientsin. The investigation soon stalled: the actual scene of Pamela’s murder could not be found, and leads fizzled out. As China’s attention turned to the looming Japanese occupation, the case was deemed “unsolved.” French painstakingly reconstructs the crime and depicts the suspects—using Werner’s own independent research, conducted after authorities refused to reopen his daughter’s case. Compelling evidence is coupled with a keen grasp of Chinese history in French’s worthy account. (May)