Book Recommendations for September through December of 2017
Please pick at least four and possibly two alternates (which may also be used for the first two months of 2018 if we so decide). You can either email your choices directly to Peggy (psunlane@yahoo.com) or hand them in to Jean at the May meeting.
FICTION
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony
Doerr. When the last page is turned, Doerr’s
magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly
composed. It rests, historically, during the occupation of France
during WWII, but brief chapters told in alternating voices give the
overall—and long—narrative a swift movement through time and
events. We have two main characters, each one on opposite sides in
the conflagration that is destroying Europe. Marie-Louise is a
sightless girl who lived with her father in Paris before the
occupation; he was a master locksmith for the Museum of Natural
History. When German forces necessitate abandonment of the city,
Marie-Louise’s father, taking with him the museum’s greatest
treasure, removes himself and his daughter and eventually arrives at
his uncle’s house in the coastal city of Saint-Malo. Young German
soldier Werner is sent to Saint-Malo to track Resistance activity
there, and eventually, and inevitably, Marie-Louise’s and Werner’s
paths cross. It is through their individual and intertwined tales
that Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably re-creates the deprived
civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled
lives of the military occupiers.
The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth
Church. In her sweeping debut novel, Elizabeth
J. Church takes us from the World War II years in Chicago to the vast
sun-parched canyons of New Mexico in the 1970s as we follow the
journey of a driven, spirited young woman, Meridian Wallace, whose
scientific ambitions are subverted by the expectations of her era.
Exquisitely capturing the
claustrophobic eras of 1940s and 1950s America, The Atomic Weight of
Love also examines the changing roles of women during the decades
that followed. And in Meridian Wallace we find an unforgettable
heroine whose metamorphosis shows how the women’s movement opened
up the world for a whole generation.
Barkskins by Annie Proulx. In the late seventeenth century two
young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France.
Bound to a feudal lord for three years in exchange for land, they
become wood-cutters—barkskins. René suffers extraordinary
hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is
forced to marry a native woman and their descendants live trapped
between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader,
then sets up a timber business. Annie Proulx tells the stories of the
descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years—their
travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand—the
revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and
cultural annihilation. Over and over, they seize what they can of a
presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to
face with possible ecological collapse.
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett. #1 New York Times Bestseller. The acclaimed, bestselling
author—winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize—tells
the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter
irrevocably changes two families’ lives.
One Sunday afternoon in Southern
California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening
party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s
mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their
marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth
explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of
the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together
in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond
that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the
strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.
When, in her twenties, Franny begins an
affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her
family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their
childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book,
ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their
guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.
Told with equal measures of humor and
heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration,
interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and
tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that
bind us together.
The Dark Circle by Linda Grant. In England, the Second World War is
over, a new decade is beginning but for an East End teenage brother
and sister living on the edge of the law, life has been suspended.
Sent away to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kent to learn the way of
the patient, they find themselves in the company of army and air
force officers, a car salesman, a young university graduate, a
mysterious German woman, a member of the aristocracy and an American
merchant seaman. They discover that a cure is tantalizingly just out
of reach and only by inciting wholesale rebellion can freedom be
snatched.
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfeg. The Christmas season offers little
cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman
trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a
home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a
secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian
horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her
dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big
city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with
shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning
up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright,
beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the
new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to
resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship.
In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls
her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.
Played out against the snowy landscape
of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young
Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now
much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the
tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this
powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the
most original new voices in contemporary literature.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret
Atwood. The seminal work of speculative fiction
from the Booker Prize-winning author, soon to be a Hulu series
starring Elizabeth Moss, Samira Wiley, and Joseph Fiennes.
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of
Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a
day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of
words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on
her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,
because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids
are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the days before,
when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played
with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her
own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now….
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and
altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing
satire, dire warning, and literary tour de force.
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. With courage, grace and powerful
insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama
of World War II and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom
seen: the women's war.The Nightingale tells the stories of two
sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and
circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward
survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France―a
heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the
human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone,
a novel for a lifetime.
A Rising Man by Abir Mukherje. In 1919, Captain Sam Wyndham, former
Scotland Yard detective, is a new arrival to Calcutta. Desperately
seeking a fresh start after his experiences during the Great War,
Wyndham has been recruited to head up a new post in the police force.
But with barely a moment to acclimatize to his new life or to deal
with the ghosts which still haunt him, Wyndham is caught up in a
murder investigation that will take him into the dark underbelly of
the British Raj.
A senior official has been murdered,
and a note left in his mouth warns the British to quit India: or
else. With rising political dissent and the stability of the Raj
under threat, Wyndham and his two new colleagues - arrogant Inspector
Digby and British-educated, but Indian-born Sergeant Banerjee, one of
the few Indians to be recruited into the new CID - embark on an
investigation that will take them from the luxurious parlors of
wealthy British traders to the seedy opium dens of the city.
Swing Time by Zadie Smith. A New York Times bestseller. Finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award for Fiction. An ambitious, exuberant new novel
moving from North West London to West Africa, from the
multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty.
Two brown girls dream of being
dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas:
about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what
constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but
complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early
twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Tracey makes it to the chorus line but
struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old
neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous
singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live. But when Aimee develops grand
philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa,
where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots,
young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the
women dance just like Tracey—the same twists, the same shakes—and
the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant
history, but a present dance to the music of time.
Sycamore Row by John Grisham. John Grisham takes you back to where it
all began. One of the most popular novels of our time, A Time to Kill
established John Grisham as the master of the legal thriller. Now we
return to Ford County as Jake Brigance finds himself embroiled in a
fiercely controversial trial that exposes a tortured history of
racial tension.
Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of
lung cancer. He trusts no one. Before he hangs himself from a
sycamore tree, Hubbard leaves a new, handwritten will. It is an act
that drags his adult children, his black maid, and Jake into a
conflict as riveting and dramatic as the murder trial that made
Brigance one of Ford County’s most notorious citizens, just three
years earlier. The second will raises many more questions than it
answers. Why would Hubbard leave nearly all of his fortune to his
maid? Had chemotherapy and painkillers affected his ability to think
clearly? And what does it all have to do with a piece of land once
known as Sycamore Row?
NONFICTION
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.The phenomenal true story of the black
female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of
America’s greatest achievements in space.
Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female
mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide
rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch
rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a
group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the
brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching
math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called
into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when
America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had
the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot
at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call,
moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of
the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws
required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the
women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped
America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory
over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the
heavens.
Starting in World War II and moving
through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space
Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy
Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four
African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest
successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they
faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change
their own lives, and their country’s future.
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. Winner of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science/Subaru Science Books & Film Prize for
Excellence in Science Book. Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson
Literary Science Writing Award. One of the Best Books of the Year: The
Washington Post, TIME.com, NPR, Slate, Entertainment Weekly, Newsday,
Minneapolis Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews
Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her
life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her
revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also a celebration of
the lifelong curiosity, humility, and passion that drive every
scientist. In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota
childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered play in her father’s
college laboratory. She tells us how she found a sanctuary in
science, learning to perform lab work “with both the heart and the
hands.” She introduces us to Bill, her brilliant, eccentric lab
manager. And she extends the mantle of scientist to each one of her
readers, inviting us to join her in observing and protecting our
environment. Warm, luminous, compulsively readable, Lab Girl vividly
demonstrates the mountains that we can move when love and work come
together.
My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem. To women “of a certain age” – a
euphemism the author of this book would surely abhor – the idea
that Gloria Steinem is a revolutionary thinker, a wonderful writer
and a practical activist is not, perhaps, news. To those who didn’t
know or don’t remember the Steinem story – founding Ms. Magazine,
fighting for reproductive rights, waiting to marry until she was in
her 60s! -- it might be a revelation. Long before Sheryl Sandberg
leaned in at work, Steinem was preaching the gospel of empowered
women by, among other things, travelling the country and the world
listening to people, gathering stories and insights, offering support
of the intellectual and emotional kind. From the very first page –
in which she dedicates her book to the British doctor who ended
Steinem’s pregnancy, illegally, in 1957 – to the tales of a
supposedly shy woman who admitted she wanted to nail their sloppy
husband’s tossed-anywhere underwear to the floor, Steinem recounts
a life well-travelled in every sense. Now 81, the woman who at 40
replied to a compliment about her appearance with “this is what 40
looks like,” Steinem can still raise consciousnesses, including her
own.
The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane
Ackerman. A true story in which the keepers of
the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. After their zoo was bombed, Polish
zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three
hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal
cages. With animal names for these "guests," and human
names for the animals, it's no wonder that the zoo's code name became
"The House Under a Crazy Star." Best-selling naturalist and
acclaimed storyteller Diane Ackerman combines extensive research and
an exuberant writing style to re-create this fascinating, true-life
story―sharing Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife,"
while examining the disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism.
Winner of the 2008 Orion Award. 8 pages of illustrations
