Suggestions: October 2009 Book of the Month

[Robert]

Suggestions?

[Robert]

I'm going to suggest Beloved by Toni Morrison.

[Fantasy Moon]

How about William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist? I did a search and didn't find a discussion thread about it here.

[Robert]

Originally Posted by Fantasy Moon

How about William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist? I did a search and didn't find a discussion thread about it here.

Gives me the creeps just thinking about it. Sounds like fun . . .

[MoreCowbell]

I hope four suggestions is ok! I have such a hard time picking just one I want to read or re-read! I'll break it up into two posts to hopefully make it less huge and annoying.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

From Publishers Weekly
Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris (Naked) focuses on the icy patches that mar life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's. Many of the 27 short essays collected here (which appeared originally in the New Yorker, Esquire and elsewhere) deal with his father, Lou, to whom the book is dedicated. Lou is a micromanager who tries to get his uninterested children to form a jazz combo and, when that fails, insists on boosting David's career as a performance artist by heckling him from the audience. Sedaris suggests that his father's punishment for being overly involved in his kids' artistic lives is David's brother Paul, otherwise known as "The Rooster," a half-literate miscreant whose language is outrageously profane. Sedaris also writes here about the time he spent in France and the difficulty of learning another language. After several extended stays in a little Norman village and in Paris, Sedaris had progressed, he observes, "from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. 'Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window." But in English, Sedaris is nothing if not nimble: in one essay he goes from his cat's cremation to his mother's in a way that somehow manages to remain reverent to both of the departed. "Reliable sources" have told Sedaris that he has "tended to exhaust people," and true to form, he will exhaust readers of this new book, too with helpless laughter.

At Risk by Alice Hoffman

From Publishers Weekly
With this moving novel, Hoffman has written a story about a family attacked by tragedy, and has given it a larger relevance by confronting one of the most frightening issues of our times. The Farrells are a middle-class family living in a small New England town. Ivan Farrell is an astronomer, wife Polly a photographer, eight-year-old Charlie a budding biologist and 11-year-old Amanda a talented gymnast. Hoffman has few rivals in depicting domestic scenes: the bickering between siblings, the tension between spouses, and withal, the humor and love that holds families together. Suddenly the Farrells are singled out for grief. Amanda, who has been winning gymnastic meets despite a summer-long malaise, tests positive for AIDS, contracted some five years before when she was transfused with contaminated blood after an appendectomy. In unsensationalized detail, Hoffman depicts the effects of her illness. Too stunned, angry and anguished even to turn to each other, Polly and Ivan retreat into separate worlds. Charlie is abandoned by his best friend and shunned by his schoolmates. Amanda, an average adolescent who loves Madonna records, must come to grips with the process of dying. The hysterical reaction of some members of the community is a further blow. Hoffman's sensitive handling of this material is both matter of fact and heartbreaking. Ivan's friendship with a man he meets through the AIDS hotline, Polly's search for comfort with Amanda's pediatrician, Charlie's stoic bewilderment, Amanda's bond with a young woman who is a medium (the only evidence in this novel of Hoffman's characteristic feeling for the supernatural) are all beautifully portrayed. This will be a book that people will talk about and recommend.

[MoreCowbell]

Boy's Life by Robert McCammon (again, sorry, but it is THAT good!)

From Publishers Weekly
McCammon ( Swan Song ; Mine ) hangs this expertly told episodic tale on the bones of a skeleton that becomes symbolic of evil doings in the quiet waters of small-town life. Twelve-year-old Cory Mackenson is assisting his father, Tom, with predawn milk deliveries when a car shoots across the road and plunges into "bottomless" Lake Saxon. Diving to the rescue, Tom finds a nude, beaten and strangled corpse handcuffed to the steering wheel of the sinking car. Cory glimpses a sinister figure watching from the edge of the woods but discovers only an odd green feather at the spot. The ensuing search for the killer proves to be a rite of passage for both Cory and his father. Set in fictional Zephyr, Ala., in pre-civil rights 1964, this evocative novel is successful on more than one level. The mystery will satisfy the most finicky aficionado; McCammon has also produced a boisterous, poignant travelogue through a stormy season in one boy's life, peopled with the zaniest, most memorable Southern characters since those of Harper Lee.


The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

From Publishers Weekly
In this risky but resoundingly successful novel, Kingsolver leaves the Southwest, the setting of most of her work (The Bean Trees; Animal Dreams) and follows an evangelical Baptist minister's family to the Congo in the late 1950s, entwining their fate with that of the country during three turbulent decades. Nathan Price's determination to convert the natives of the Congo to Christianity is, we gradually discover, both foolhardy and dangerous, unsanctioned by the church administration and doomed from the start by Nathan's self-righteousness. Fanatic and sanctimonious, Nathan is a domestic monster, too, a physically and emotionally abusive, misogynistic husband and father. He refuses to understand how his obsession with river baptism affronts the traditions of the villagers of Kalinga, and his stubborn concept of religious rectitude brings misery and destruction to all. Cleverly, Kingsolver never brings us inside Nathan's head but instead unfolds the tragic story of the Price family through the alternating points of view of Orleanna Price and her four daughters. Cast with her young children into primitive conditions but trained to be obedient to her husband, Orleanna is powerless to mitigate their situation. Meanwhile, each of the four Price daughters reveals herself through first-person narration, and their rich and clearly differentiated self-portraits are small triumphs. Rachel, the eldest, is a self-absorbed teenager who will never outgrow her selfish view of the world or her tendency to commit hilarious malapropisms. Twins Leah and Adah are gifted intellectually but are physically and emotionally separated by Adah's birth injury, which has rendered her hemiplagic. Leah adores her father; Adah, who does not speak, is a shrewd observer of his monumental ego. The musings of five- year-old Ruth May reflect a child's humorous misunderstanding of the exotic world to which she has been transported. By revealing the story through the female victims of Reverend Price's hubris, Kingsolver also charts their maturation as they confront or evade moral and existential issues and, at great cost, accrue wisdom in the crucible of an alien land. It is through their eyes that we come to experience the life of the villagers in an isolated community and the particular ways in which American and African cultures collide. As the girls become acquainted with the villagers, especially the young teacher Anatole, they begin to understand the political situation in the Congo: the brutality of Belgian rule, the nascent nationalism briefly fulfilled in the election of the short-lived Patrice Lumumba government, and the secret involvement of the Eisenhower administration in Lumumba's assassination and the installation of the villainous dictator Mobutu. In the end, Kingsolver delivers a compelling family saga, a sobering picture of the horrors of fanatic fundamentalism and an insightful view of an exploited country crushed by the heel of colonialism and then ruthlessly manipulated by a bastion of democracy. The book is also a marvelous mix of trenchant character portrayal, unflagging narrative thrust and authoritative background detail. The disastrous outcome of the forceful imposition of Christian theology on indigenous natural faith gives the novel its pervasive irony; but humor is pervasive, too, artfully integrated into the children's misapprehensions of their world; and suspense rises inexorably as the Price family's peril and that of the newly independent country of Zaire intersect. Kingsolver moves into new moral terrain in this powerful, convincing and emotionally resonant novel.

[Libra]

I have Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris and Engulfed in Flames on my TBR pile.

I was going to suggest The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer,but reviews say it's "whiny" and I do hate whining.

[Anamnesis]

I second The Exorcist. A good fit for October, plus it's different from most of our recent picks.

[joderu95]

Absurdistan - Gary Shteyngart

[mmyap]

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

Yes, its very short but I thought I would mention it. It sits on my shelf burning for October to arrive.

[Libra]

I recommend The Believers by Zoe Heller.

"In 1962, at a party in London, 18 year-old Audrey Howard meets Joel Litvinoff, a prominent leftist lawyer involved with the civil rights movement who is on a short visit from the United States. Although Litvinoff is a complete stranger and fourteen years her senior, the two feel a mutual attraction, and when Litvinoff, after they have had sex, half-seriously suggests that Audrey follow him to the United States and become his wife, she takes him up on his offer without hesitation as she feels her chance has come to break away from her unexciting life as a typist in suburban London.

Both Joel and Audrey are Jewish but were raised in non-observant families. When they start their own family in Greenwich Village, they pride themselves on being atheists and thus having to fear nothing from death or life thereafter. Audrey bears two girls, Karla and Rosa, and the couple also adopt Lenny,[2] whose mother, a left-wing radical, is serving a long-term prison sentence. Underneath the liberal veneer, however, the Litvinoffs display many of the characteristics of a traditional family: Audrey dedicates her existence to supporting her husband's legal career, turns a blind eye to his many extra-marital affairs, and does not oppose the patriarchal attitudes and behaviour that he exhibits at home. For four decades, their family life develops according to their chosen socialist agenda, which has its foundation in the ambition to fight injustice, help the weak, and, generally, make the world a better place to live...."

[Anamnesis]

I've been wanting to read that (I think I may even have suggested it for one of the earlier discussions).

[Libra]

Originally Posted by Anamnesis

I've been wanting to read that (I think I may even have suggested it for one of the earlier discussions).

Yes you did.I am also thinking Animal Farm as a suggestion.

[Libra]

I am going to second The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

[Fed_Da_Man]

The Exorcist is a cool idea for October. I'd like to throw Rosemary's Baby out there and maybe everyone can decide which of the two they want to vote on.