NOVEMBER 2010 - The White Masai

 

HOSTESS: Monica
REASON CHOSEN: "I chose this book because it's different than anything we have read and I found the passion that this woman had that allowed her to endure tremendous cultural differences was fascinating."

The runaway international bestseller is now an American must-read for lovers of adventure, travel writing, and romance. Corinne Hofmann tells how she falls in love with an African warrior while on holiday in Kenya. After overcoming severe obstacles, she moves into a tiny hut with him and his mother, and spends four years in his Kenyan village. Slowly but surely, the dream starts to crumble, and she hatches a plan to return home with her daughter, a baby born of the seemingly indestructible love between a white European woman and a Masai. Compulsively readable, The White Masai is at once a hopelessly romantic love story, a gripping adventure yarn, and a fine piece of meticulously observed social anthropology.

Buy it on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/White-Masai-Corinne-Hofmann/dp/0061131520

OCTOBER 2010 - The Bell Jar

HOSTESS: Kami
REASON CHOSEN: "A few people I know have read it and I thought it was a great book."

Sylvia Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel which was first published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The Bell Jar has become a classic of American literature.  The book is based on her own experience yet one has to be careful not to confuse this novel with an autobiography, it has been written with a certain audience and effect in mind, 10 years after the actual events.

Esther, an A-student from Boston who has won a guest editorship on a national magazine, finds a bewildering new world at her feet. Her New York life is crowded with possibilities, so that the choice of future is overwhelming, but she can no longer retreat into the safety of her past. Deciding she wants to be a writer above all else, Esther is also struggling with the perennial problems of morality, behaviour and identity. In this compelling autobiographical novel, a milestone in contemporary literature, Sylvia Plath chronicles her teenage years - her disappointments, anger, depression and eventual breakdown and treatment - with stunning wit and devastating honesty.

It's Going to be made into a Movie!  Julia Stiles will play Esther Greenwood.  Check it out: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844467/

Buy it on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Bell-Jar-Novel-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060930187

SEPTEMBER 2010 - The Witch of Portobello

 

HOSTESS: Meagan
REASON CHOSEN: "It's author wrote one of my favorite books. The Alchemist.  His writing style is one that makes you look deeper into what you are reading to find the true meaning of his books.

Paulo Coelho of international fame for his book The Alchemist has here in The Witch of Portobello has woven a very unique and compelling tale. Part of what draws the reader in is the story itself and part is the very unique way it is written. Rather than a straight forward narrative, or a dialogue or even a series of letters this is a unique narrative technique. It is written as a series of first person accounts of individuals interactions with our unusual heroine Athena aka the Witch of Portobello.

These stories, taped interviews and letters have been compiled by a narrator we do not know until the end of the story. He has decided to let Athena's story be told as other's tell it, through their own words, and with all of their emotions, anger, support, respect or disgust. What we learn from these accounts is not only is Athena a bit of an enigma, from these accounts we could almost assume that almost every person encountered a different Athena, an Athena of the making in their own mind. The way the 'biography' is written it allows us to draw our own conclusions, rather than a traditionally researched biography that is colored by the lenses that cloud the vision of the biographer. Much as each of us look at the world through a series of lenses of our experiences, and cultural biases.

Athena is a young woman who tries to fill the spaces, the silences in her life. The more she tries to fill them the more dissatisfied she becomes. Until she learns that it is the silences between the notes that make the music so powerful. When she learns to embrace the silence, the spaces, she finds a power an energy. She becomes a spiritual leader, some see her as a saint and some see her as a sinner. She is both revered and feared. A saint and a demon. The compiled documents help us to see Athena for who she was.

Buy it on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Witch-Portobello-Paulo-Coelho/dp/006133880X

AUGUST 2010 - The Heart of the Matter

HOSTESS: Michelle
REASON CHOSEN: "I like the author's previous books, so I hope this one is as good!"

Emily Giffin's Heart of the Matter is delightfully packed with many of the requisite elements of a good chick-lit novel: A handsome husband (Nick) who has an impressive job (pediatric plastic surgeon); a smart, good-looking wife (Tessa) with an Ivy League education; a house in a tony suburb of a sophisticated city – in this case Wellesley, outside of Boston.

Tessa once taught at Wellesley College, but she has given that up to be a stay-at-home mom, where she surrounds herself with tennis-playing mom-friends who obsess about such matters as what sort of healthy snack is acceptable when you're the class mom in charge of that duty for the day.

Tessa begins to wonder if she's made the right decision to stay at home. Her marriage to Nick becomes strained as she starts to feel less certain about herself and her choices. Nick spends so much time at work that she starts to feel he has abandoned his role in co-parenting.

This is the stuff of tried-and-true chick-lit. But Giffin has always been more ambitious than many writers of the genre. Her first novel, Something Borrowed (2004), was about two just-30 friends, one of whom begins an affair with the other's fiancé. Giffin's second book, Something Blue (2005), told the exact same story from the point of view of the other woman in that triangle.

In Heart of the Matter, Giffin delivers her best book yet. Once again she plays with the idea of point of view, but this time she wraps it into a single, tightly written narrative that creates an addictive page-turning sense of tension.

Giffin starts the first chapter with Tessa's story, narrating in the first-person. But in the next chapter, she introduces us to a second character, Valerie, delivering Valerie's story in the third-person. The novel continues in this fashion, alternating between Tessa and Valerie.

Valerie is just as smart and well-educated as Tessa. She also lives in Wellesley, and her only child attends a private school with the children of Tessa's friends. But Valerie has a tad bit less of a storybook life. She doesn't really fit in with many of the Wellesley moms, but her adorable son Charlie seems to be doing fine in school – until he suffers severe burns while attending a classmate's birthday party. He needs plastic surgery on his hand and face.

Enter handsome doctor Nick. Do you see where this is going?

The plot is not terribly complicated or surprising, but what makes this novel special are the emotional depths to which Giffin takes her readers. You know the story cannot end completely happily ever after for either woman – just as Charlie will always have scars from his burns, the fabric of these two families' lives will forever bear the patterns of the rips and tears of this emotional hurricane. The question of what the aftermath can possibly look like for these two likable characters is what keeps readers glued to Giffin's engaging tale.

Buy it on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Matter-Emily-Giffin/dp/0312554168

JULY 2010 - Best Friends Forever

HOSTESS: Gina
REASON CHOSEN: "Jennifer Weiner is my favorite author and I thought it would be a fun summer read!"

Addie Downs and Valerie Adler will be best friends forever. That's what Addie believes after Valerie moves across the street when they're both nine years old. But in the wake of betrayal during their teenage years, Val is swept into the popular crowd, while mousy, sullen Addie becomes her school's scapegoat.

Flash-forward fifteen years. Valerie Adler has found a measure of fame and fortune working as the weathergirl at the local TV station. Addie Downs lives alone in her parents' house in their small hometown of Pleasant Ridge, Illinois, caring for a troubled brother and trying to meet Prince Charming on the Internet. She's just returned from Bad Date #6 when she opens her door to find her long-gone best friend standing there, a terrified look on her face and blood on the sleeve of her coat. "Something horrible has happened," Val tells Addie, "and you're the only one who can help."

Best Friends Forever is a grand, hilarious, edge-of-your-seat adventure; a story about betrayal and loyalty, family history and small-town secrets. It's about living through tragedy, finding love where you least expect it, and the ties that keep best friends together.

Buy it on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Friends-Forever-Jennifer-Weiner/dp/0743294297

MAY 2010 - Eat Pray Love

 

HOSTESS: Laura
REASON CHOSEN: "Because there will be a movie out this summer and Julia Roberts is on of my favorite actresses!"

Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want—a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be.

To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world—all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. Her aim was to visit three places where she could examine one aspect of her own nature set against the backdrop of a culture that has traditionally done that one thing very well. In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure, learning to speak Italian and gaining the twenty-three happiest pounds of her life. India was for the art of devotion, and with the help of a native guru and a surprisingly wise cowboy from Texas, she embarked on four uninterrupted months of spiritual exploration. In Bali, she studied the art of balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She became the pupil of an elderly medicine man and also fell in love the best way—unexpectedly.

An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals. It is certain to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.

Buy it on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Pray-Love-Everything-Indonesia/dp/0670034711

APRIL 2010 - The Post Birthday World

 

HOSTESS: Rachel
REASON CHOSEN: "I got it as a gift for my birthday!"

In this eagerly awaited new novel, Lionel Shriver, the Orange Prize-winning author of the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, delivers an imaginative and entertaining look at the implications, large and small, of whom we choose to love. Using a playful parallel-universe structure, The Post-Birthday World follows one woman's future as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men.

Children's book illustrator Irina McGovern enjoys a quiet and settled life in London with her partner, fellow American expatriate Lawrence Trainer, a smart, loyal, disciplined intellectual at a prestigious think tank. To their small circle of friends, their relationship is rock solid. Until the night Irina unaccountably finds herself dying to kiss another man: their old friend from South London, the stylish, extravagant, passionate top-ranking snooker player Ramsey Acton. The decision to give in to temptation will have consequences for her career, her relationships with family and friends, and perhaps most importantly the texture of her daily life.

Hinging on a single kiss, this enchanting work of fiction depicts Irina's alternating futures with two men temperamentally worlds apart yet equally honorable. With which true love Irina is better off is neither obvious nor easy to determine, but Shriver's exploration of the two destinies is memorable and gripping. Poignant and deeply honest, written with the subtlety and wit that are the hallmarks of Shriver's work, The Post-Birthday World appeals to the what-if in us all.

Buy it at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Post-Birthday-World-Lionel-Shriver/dp/0061187844