March's Meeting

March's meeting will be Tuesday, March 25, 2014, at 2:00 pm in room Y-233.

For March we will be reading Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

From Library Journal:

In Moyes’s (The Last Letter from Your Lover) disarmingly moving love story, Louisa Clark leads a routine existence: at 26, she’s dully content with her job at the cafe in her small English town and with Patrick, her boyfriend of six years. But when the cafe closes, a job caring for a recently paralyzed man offers Lou better pay and, despite her lack of experience, she’s hired. Lou’s charge, Will Traynor, suffered a spinal cord injury when hit by a motorcycle and his raw frustration with quadriplegia makes the job almost unbearable for Lou. Will is quick-witted and sardonic, a powerhouse of a man in his former life (motorcycles; sky diving; important career in global business). While the two engage in occasional banter, Lou at first stays on only for the sake of her family, who desperately needs the money. But when she discovers that Will intends to end his own life, Lou makes it her mission to persuade him that life is still worth living. In the process of planning “adventures” like trips to the horse track—some of which illuminate Lou’s own minor failings—Lou begins to understand the extent of Will’s isolation; meanwhile, Will introduces Lou to ideas outside of her small existence. The end result is a lovely novel, both nontraditional and enthralling. Agent: Sheila Crowley, Curtis Brown. (Dec.)

February's Meeting

The meeting for February will be on Tuesday, February 25 at 2:00 pm in Y-233.

The Book for February is Behind the Beautiful Forevers  by Katherine Boo.

From Publisher's Weekly:
A Mumbai slum offers rare insight into the lives and socioeconomic and political realities for some of the disadvantaged riding the coattails (or not) of India’s economic miracle in this deeply researched and brilliantly written account by New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Boo. Divided into four parts, the narrative brings vividly to the page life as it is led today in Annawadi, a squalid and overcrowded migrant settlement of some 3,000 people squatting since 1991 on a half-acre of land owned by the Sahar International Airport. (Boo derives her title from a richly ironic real-world image: a brightly colored ad for floor tiles repeating “Beautiful Forever” across a wall shutting out Annawadi from the view of travelers leaving the airport.) Among her subjects is the fascinating Abdul, a sensitive and cautiously hopeful Muslim teenager tirelessly trading in the trash paid for by recycling firms. Crucially, Boo’s commanding ability to convey an interior world comes balanced by concern for the structural realities of India’s economic liberalization (begun the same year as Annawadi’s settlement), and her account excels at integrating the party politics and policy strategies behind eruptions of deep-seated religious, caste, and gender divides. Boo’s rigorous inquiry and transcendent prose leave an indelible impression of human beings behind the shibboleths of the New India. (Feb.)

January's Meeting

January's meeting will be Tuesday, January 28, 2014, at 2:00 pm in room Y-233.

For January we will be re-visiting a classic, Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

From The Publisher:

Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

First published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 is a classic novel set in the future when books forbidden by a totalitarian regime are burned. The hero, a book burner, suddenly discovers that books are flesh and blood ideas that cry out silently when put to the torch.

November's Book

November's meeting will be Tuesday, December 3, at 2:00 pm in room Y-233.

November's Book will be The Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg.

From Publisher's Weekly:

Erica Falck, a local-girl-makes-good writer from the tiny resort town of Fjallbacka, Sweden, stumbles onto a crime scene involving a close childhood friend. Erica is struggling to meet her publisher's deadline on a biography she no longer finds stimulating when her writer's instinct is piqued by her friend's mysterious death. At various points just about everyone in town is implicated, but Erica's senses keep her on the killer's trail, and the result is an ending that comes out of nowhere. Läckberg clearly has a gift for laying out an intricate plot and building suspense. Her list of characters is long and complex but not overwhelming, and she manages successfully to weave in a variety of subplots. VERDICT The winner of several Swedish writing awards, Läckberg has become the best-selling Swedish novelist on record. More Murder She Wrote than noir, her U.S. debut (and the first entry in a seven-book series) will likely appeal to any lover of more lighthearted mysteries. Readers who enjoy Louise Penny's small-town atmosphere may want to give Läckberg a shot. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ 2/1/10.]—Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR

October's Book

The October Greedy Reader's Meeting will be Tuesday, October 29 at 2:00 in room Y-233.

The October book is The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Steadman.

From Publishers Weekly:
In Stedman’s deftly crafted debut, Tom Sherbourne, seeking constancy after the horrors of WWI, takes a lighthouse keeper’s post on an Australian island, and calls for Isabel, a young woman he met on his travels, to join him there as his wife. In peaceful isolation, their love grows. But four years on the island and several miscarriages bring Isabel’s seemingly boundless spirit to the brink, and leave Tom feeling helpless until a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a living child. Isabel convinces herself—and Tom—that the baby is a gift from God. After two years of maternal bliss for Isabel and alternating waves of joy and guilt for Tom, the family, back on the mainland, is confronted with the mother of their child, very much alive. Stedman grounds what could be a far-fetched premise, setting the stage beautifully to allow for a heart-wrenching moral dilemma to play out, making evident that “Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot ’em both, and then it’s too late.” Most impressive is the subtle yet profound maturation of Isabel and Tom as characters. Agent: Susan Armstrong, Conville & Walsh. (Aug.)

September's Book

The September Greedy Reader meeting will be Tuesday, September 24 in Y-233.

The book for September is The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng.

From Publisher's Weekly:

This remarkable debut saga of intrigue and akido flashes back to a darkly opulent WWII-era Malaya. Phillip Hutton, 72, lives in serene Penang comfort, occasionally training students as an akido master "teacher of teachers." A visit from Michiko Murakami sends him spiraling back into his past, where he grows up the alienated half-British, half-Chinese son of a wealthy Penang trader in the years before WWII. When Hutton's father and three siblings leave him to run the family company one summer, he befriends a mysterious Japanese neighbor named Mr. Endo. Japan is on the opposing side of the coming war, but Endo paradoxically opts to train Hutton in the ways of aikido, in what both men come to see as the fulfillment of a prophecy that has haunted them for several lifetimes. When the Japanese army invades Malaya, chaos reigns, and Phillip makes a secret, very profitable deal. He cannot, however, offset the costs of his friendship with Endo. Eng's characters are as deep and troubled as the time in which the story takes place, and he draws on a rich palette to create a sprawling portrait of a lesser explored corner of the war. Hutton's first-person narration is measured, believable and enthralling. (May)

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July's Book

June's Meeting will be Tuesday, July 23, at 2:00 pm in room Y-233.

June's Book will be Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt

From the Library Journal:
When librarian Esther Hammerhans decides to rent a room in her London flat to Mr. Chartwell, she has no idea what she's allowing into her solitary life. Mr. Chartwell, aka Black Pat, is, you see, a dog—a huge, odiferous, walking, talking physical mess of an animal, who inexplicably exudes a most charming, seductive manner. He has, he confides to Esther, a final job to do at the home of Winston and Clementine Churchill in nearby Kent. History has noted Sir Winston's long battle with depression, his bête noire as he called it, the "black dog" that accompanied him throughout his life. So what does Black Pat now want with Esther? How will she avoid falling prey to his dark, hulking presence? Please, willingly suspend disbelief and allow Hunt's vivid imagination to take you on this exuberant funhouse ride through a week in the lives of Esther, Winston, two matchmakers, the easygoing love interest, and the buttoned-up library director at the House of Commons. VERDICT Already published in Hunt's home country, Great Britain, this debut novel cleverly combines historical detail, a marvelously subtle sense of humor, and the wit of J.K. Rowling to give readers a quirky assortment of characters they can root for with abandon.—Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL