Mezzanine Mavens Meeting Wednesday, April 27, 2011

DO NOT FORGET TO SELECT A MEETING DATE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST

We had an excellent book club meeting today, Wednesday, April 27, 2011. We discussed In The Woods by Tana French. One member commented that it was the most animated discussion they ever remembered at a book club meeting. For those of you who could not make it I am sorry the meeting conflicted with the Faculty Meeting.

Now we need to choose the next selection and meeting date. I hope we can meet in the summer. We came up with six titles. Below find a brief synopsis of each and let me know your preference for each.

I will compile the responses and get back to you next week.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom by Amy Chua

Amazon.com

From Publishers Weekly

Chua (Day of Empire) imparts the secret behind the stereotypical Asian child's phenomenal success: the Chinese mother. Chua promotes what has traditionally worked very well in raising children: strict, Old World, uncompromising values--and the parents don't have to be Chinese. What they are, however, are different from what she sees as indulgent and permissive Western parents: stressing academic performance above all, never accepting a mediocre grade, insisting on drilling and practice, and instilling respect for authority. Chua and her Jewish husband (both are professors at Yale Law) raised two girls, and her account of their formative years achieving amazing success in school and music performance proves both a model and a cautionary tale. Sophia, the eldest, was dutiful and diligent, leapfrogging over her peers in academics and as a Suzuki piano student; Lulu was also gifted, but defiant, who excelled at the violin but eventually balked at her mother's pushing. Chua's efforts "not to raise a soft, entitled child" will strike American readers as a little scary--removing her children from school for extra practice, public shaming and insults, equating Western parenting with failure--but the results, she claims somewhat glibly in this frank, unapologetic report card, "were hard to quarrel with." (Jan.)

Freedom : A Novel by Jonathan Franzen

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: "The awful thing about life is this:" says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. "Everyone has his reasons." That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it's very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues--among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock'n'roll--and in some ways can't be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them. --Tom Nissley

I Love Yous Are For White People by Lac Su

From Amazon.com

Moving. . . . Anyone who wonders what obstacles an immigrant must overcome will be fascinated by this assimilation story; Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior complements it nicely. (Library Journal )

Product Description

As a young child, Lac Su made a harrowing escape from the Communists in Vietnam. With a price on his father's head, Lac, with his family, was forced to immigrate in 1979 to seedy West Los Angeles where squalid living conditions and a cultural fabric that refused to thread them in effectively squashed their American Dream. Lac's search for love and acceptance amid poverty—not to mention the psychological turmoil created by a harsh and unrelenting father—turned his young life into a comedy of errors and led him to a dangerous gang experience that threatened to tear his life apart.

Heart-wrenching, irreverent, and ultimately uplifting, I Love Yous Are for White People is memoir at its most affecting, depicting the struggles that countless individuals have faced in their quest to belong and that even more have endured in pursuit of a father's fleeting affection.

Once Upon A Time There Was You by Elizabeth Berg

From Amazon.com

An enchanting and empathic storyteller, Berg delights in the eccentricities that shape complex personalities and excels in decoding the chemistry and paradoxes of relationships. She is also an avid appreciator of the pleasures of food, funny and assuring on the subject of age, and an advocate for kindness. All these elements are at work in her latest comedy of marriage. . . . All is droll and intriguing until Berg swerves, briefly, into the realm of terror, thus dramatically deepening questions about fear, love, family, and what one makes of one’s life. Berg’s tender and wise novels are oases in a harsh world.”—Booklist

Room : A Novel by Emma Donoghue

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010: In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time. --Lynette Mong

The War Horse by Michael Murpurgo

From Booklist

Like Morpurgo's Private Peaceful (2004), this searing World War I novel reveals the unspeakable slaughter of soldiers on all sides fighting against people who are just like them. The story is told by an English farm horse, Joey, and, as in Cynthia Kadahota's Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam (2007), the first-person narrative blends the animal's physical experience with what men say. On the farm, Joey has close ties to Albert, who is too young to join up when his dad first sells Joey to the army. Charging into battle under machine-gun fire, Joey is captured by the Germans, who train him to haul ambulances and guns. His reunion with Albert in battle is sentimental and contrived, but the viewpoint brings close the fury of the thundering guns, the confusion, and the kindness of enemies who come together in No Man's Land to save the wounded horse. Joey's ability to understand the language wherever he is--England, France, Germany--reinforces the novel's antiwar message, and the terse details speak eloquently about peace. Hazel Rochman

Suggested Meeting Times

Wednesday, June 18, 2011

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The time TBD.

Next Meeting April 27, 2011 11:30 AM LRC Mezzanine

THE DATE OF THE NEXT MEETING HAS BEEN CHANGE TO APRIL 27, 2011 11:30 AM IN THE LRC MEZZANINE.

Current Selection: In the Woods by Tana French

First let me apologize for being so tardy getting out the information about our last meeting. We had a great meeting with seven members attending; not everyone was there at the same time but over the course of the hour seven mavens attended. The meeting took place as scheduled Wednesday, February 2^nd. We had a very spirited discussion about Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. It seems you either loved the book or found it boring. Since there was very little middle ground the discussion was quite lively. We all agreed that we learned some new information about this famous woman.

Due to my tardiness and in an effort to give people enough time to read (about 8 weeks) I have taken the liberty of choosing the next book we will read. It is a novel, in the murder mystery genre; In the Woods by Tana French. A brief review is below. I hope you will join us at the next meeting Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 11:30 AM in the LRC Mezzanine. Please bring your lunch; dessert and beverages will be provided.  

FYI the library has ordered 3 copies and they should be available shortly.

From Publishers Weekly

Irish author French expertly walks the line between police procedural and psychological thriller in her debut. When Katy Devlin, a 12-year-old girl from Knocknaree, a Dublin suburb, is found murdered at a local archeological dig, Det. Rob Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, must probe deep into the victim's troubled family history. There are chilling similarities between the Devlin murder and the disappearance 20 years before of two children from the same neighborhood who were Ryan's best friends. Only Maddox knows Ryan was involved in the 1984 case. The plot climaxes with a taut interrogation by Maddox of a potential suspect, and the reader is floored by the eventual identity and motives of the killer. A distracting political subplot involves a pending motorway in Knocknaree, but Ryan and Maddox are empathetic and flawed heroes, whose partnership and friendship elevate the narrative beyond a gory tale of murdered children and repressed childhood trauma. (May)

Next Selection Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Next Meeting: Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 11:30 at the LRC Mezzanine

The next selection the book club will read is Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. This was a unanimous vote.  Shortly there will be a copy available in the library of course you could borrow it from your local library or purchase it. It is too new to be borrowed through Interlibrary Loan. The next meeting of the Mezzanine Mavens will take place Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 11:30 at the LRC Mezzanine. I hope you can join us.

Meeting Notes December 1, 2010

We had 10 members attend Book Club today. The discussion of Angela’s Ashes was animated and all who attended enjoyed the book very much. Suzanne Waddell brought in a Ham & Cheese Puff Tart see recipe below which she generously shared with all. For dessert we had assorted cookies, chocolate covered pretzels and apple turnover. Of course we had coffee, tea and assorted soft drinks.

We are looking for a selection for our next meeting February 2, 2011. Please choose from the choices below. All except Decipher are available in print, kindle and CD. Decipher is only available in print and kindle. Please vote by Friday, December 3^rd. I will send the results of the vote next Monday. Thanks.

Cleopatra: A Life Stacy Schiff

 

Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.

Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and--after his murder--three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.

Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.

The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story  Richard Preston

The dramatic and chilling story of an Ebola virus outbreak in a suburban Washington, D.C. laboratory, with descriptions of frightening historical epidemics of rare and lethal viruses. More hair-raising than anything Hollywood could think of, because it's all true.

Tis: A Memoir Frank McCourt

The appeal of McCourt as a reader of his own memoirs (Angela's Ashes flourished commercially on audio, in both abridged and unabridged formats) lies in his ability to express a sustained sense of wonder at the world around him. Also, his brogue is classic, an Irish species unto itself. Here he takes up where he left off in his last book, arriving in America. He is first guided by an Irish bartender who tells him to go to the New York Public Library and read Samuel Johnson. Thus assimilated, he becomes a supply clerk for the army, stationed in postwar Germany, then a warehouse laborer living in a rooming house, before earning a college degree at NYU and settling down as a teacher at a rowdy vocational high school in Staten Island. Along the way come romance and immigrant's-eye life observations aplenty, and a growing sense of knowingness develops even as McCourt's hopes are dashed against disillusions.

Decipher Stel Pavlou

In British screenwriter Pavlou's adolescent first novel, it's March 2012 and huge storms are raging around the globe, sparked by giant sunspots. The villainous U.S. Rola Corporation, drilling for desperately needed oil off Antarctica, discovers strange crystalline artifacts covered with a precuneiform script, while radiation detected under the antarctic ice portends the awakening of powerful alien forces. An unconvincing gaggle of scientists discovers they have only one unholy Holy Week to ship a nuclear device to Antarctica and bomb the underwater threat to smithereens. Pavlou builds his unlikely crescendo of Bad Things from nearly every major folklore, myth and religion, dizzyingly cutting between eye-popping disasters and eye-glazing capsule summaries of linguistics, geology, chemistry, mathematics, numerology, cryptology, archeology, ESP and Edgar Cayce. Stripped down to comic book proportions for the big screen, with a deafening soundtrack and a teenage audience anesthetized to a vocabulary largely dominated by four-letter cliches, this often gruesome tale might make a middling SF adventure flick. The often ludicrous dialogue and the ham-fisted handling of human relations and motivations, however, make for an unfocused novel, one patched together like Frankenstein, with every stitching line, every unnatural feature, unblushingly exposed to the most casual glance.

Recipe

Ham & Cheese Puff Tart

1 ½ tablespoons all purpose flour, plus more for rolling

2 sheets frozen puff pastry thawed

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 cup whole milk

Coarse salt and ground pepper

Ground nutmeg

6 oz. of thinly sliced deli ham

1 cup grated Gruyère cheese

1 large egg lightly beaten

On a floured work surface, roll each sheet puff pastry to a 10-by-13-inch rectangle. Transfer to two parchment-lined baking sheets and refrigerate. In a small saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Add flour; cook, stirring, until golden, 1 minute. Whisking constantly, add milk and simmer. Stir until thickened, 5 minutes. Season with salt, pepper and pinch of nutmeg. Pour sauce in a bowl and let cool 30 minutes.

Pre-heat oven to 400°F, with rack in lower third.  Arrange ham evenly on 1 pastry sheet, leaving ¾-inch border; top with cheese and sauce. Brush pastry border with egg; top with second pastry sheet. Fold bottom edges over top and press to seal. Brush top with egg and cut vents in tart. Bake until browned and puffed, 30 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

From: Everyday Food, A Martha Stewart Magazine

Next Meeting

The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 11:30 AM in the Mezzanine. The title Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt received the most votes. We have one copy available in the library. It may be possible to ILL in another format, for example in large print or audio. It is most likely available in your local library.

Meeting

We had our first meeting of the 2010/11 academic year Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 11:30 AM in the LRC Mezzanine. The turnout was small. We did receive a few title suggestions at the meeting, via our blog and email. One of our new student members asked what we had read in the past. I explained that by going to the library webpage and selecting Mezzanine Mavens at the bottom you would find our webpage which has links to the previous year’s book lists.

The suggested titles are:

I’d Know You Anywhere  Lippman, Laura

From Publishers Weekly

Near the start of this outstanding novel of psychological suspense from Edgar-winner Lippman (Life Sentences), Eliza Benedict, a 38-year-old married mother of two living in suburban Maryland, receives a letter from Walter Bowman, the man who kidnapped her the summer she was 15 and is now on death row. The narrative shifts between the present and that long ago summer, when Eliza involuntarily became a part of Walter's endless road trip, including the fateful night when he picked up another teenage girl, Holly Tackett. Soon after Walter killed Holly, Eliza was rescued and taken home. Eliza must now balance a need for closure with a desire to protect herself emotionally. Walter wants something specific from her, but she has no idea what, and she's not sure that she wants to know. All the relationships, from the sometimes contentious one between Eliza and her sister, Vonnie, to the significantly stranger one between Walter and Barbara LaFortuny, an advocate for prisoners, provide depth and breadth to this absorbing story.

House Rules  Picoult, Jodi

Amazon Review

They tell me I'm lucky to have a son who's so verbal, who is blisteringly intelligent, who can take apart the broken microwave and have it working again an hour later. They think there is no greater hell than having a son who is locked in his own world, unaware that there's a wider one to explore. But try having a son who is locked in his own world, and still wants to make a connection. A son who tries to be like everyone else, but truly doesn't know how.

Jacob Hunt is a teenage boy with Asperger's syndrome. He's hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, and like many kids with AS, Jacob has a special focus on one subject--in his case, forensic analysis. He's always showing up at crime scenes, thanks to the police scanner he keeps in his room, and telling the cops what they need to do...and he's usually right. But then his town is rocked by a terrible murder and, for a change, the police come to Jacob with questions. All of the hallmark behaviors of Asperger's--not looking someone in the eye, stimulatory tics and twitches, flat affect--can look a lot like guilt to law enforcement personnel. Suddenly, Jacob and his family, who only want to fit in, feel the spotlight shining directly on them. For his mother, Emma, it's a brutal reminder of the intolerance and misunderstanding that always threaten her family. For his brother, Theo, it's another indication of why nothing is normal because of Jacob. And over this small family the soul-searing question looms: Did Jacob commit murder? Emotionally powerful from beginning to end, House Rules looks at what it means to be different in our society, how autism affects a family, and how our legal system works well for people who communicate a certain way--and fails those who don't.

An American Childhood   Dillard, Annie

From Publishers Weekly

Dillard's luminous prose painlessly captures the pain of growing up in this wonderful evocation of childhood. Her memoir is partly a hymn to Pittsburgh, where orange streetcars ran on Penn Avenue in 1953 when she was eight, and where the Pirates were always in the cellar. Dillard's mother, an unstoppable force, had energies too vast for the bridge games and household chores that stymied her. Her father made low-budget horror movies, loved Dixieland jazz, told endless jokes and sight-gags and took lonesome river trips down to New Orleans to get away. From this slightly odd couple, Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk acquired her love of nature and taut sensitivity. The events of childhood often loom larger than life; the magic of Dillard's writing is that she sets down typical childhood happenings with their original immediacy and force.

Angela’s Ashes  McCourt, Frank

From School Library Journal

Despite impoverishing his family because of his alcoholism, McCourt's father passed on to his son a gift for superb storytelling. He told him about the great Irish heroes, the old days in Ireland, the people in their Limerick neighborhood, and the world beyond their shores. McCourt writes in the voice of the child? with no self-pity or review of events? And just retells the tales. He recounts his desperately poor early years, living on public assistance and losing three siblings, but manages to make the book funny and uplifting. Stories of trying on his parents' false teeth and his adventures as a post-office delivery boy will have readers laughing out loud. Young people will recognize the truth in these compelling tales; the emotions expressed; the descriptions of teachers, relatives, neighbors; and the casual cruelty adults show toward children. Readers will enjoy the humor and the music in the language. A vivid, wonderfully readable memoir.?Patricia Noonan, Prince William Public Library, VA

Elizabeth Street Fabiano, Laurie

From Booklist

First novelist Fabiano is dead-on in her portrait of the Italian-American immigrant experience. This engrossing cross-generational saga centers on the experiences of Giovanna Costa, from the small Italian fishing village where she is born to the bustling streets of New York's Lower East Side where she struggles to raise her family and make a living as a midwife after the death of her first husband. In America, the resourceful Giovanna and her second husband eventually open a fruit and vegetable stand, attracting the unwanted attentions of the notorious “Black Hand” crime organization. When Giovanni refuses to meet their demands, her daughter is kidnapped and held for ransom. Basing this story—including the kidnapping—on her own family's immigrant experiences, Fabiano provides a wealth of period detail, infusing the compulsively readable narrative with an authentic sense of time, place, and community.

In the Woods French, Tana

From Publishers Weekly

Irish author French expertly walks the line between police procedural and psychological thriller in her debut. When Katy Devlin, a 12-year-old girl from Knocknaree, a Dublin suburb, is found murdered at a local archeological dig, Det. Rob Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, must probe deep into the victim's troubled family history. There are chilling similarities between the Devlin murder and the disappearance 20 years before of two children from the same neighborhood who were Ryan's best friends. Only Maddox knows Ryan was involved in the 1984 case. The plot climaxes with a taut interrogation by Maddox of a potential suspect, and the reader is floored by the eventual identity and motives of the killer. A distracting political subplot involves a pending motorway in Knocknaree, but Ryan and Maddox are empathetic and flawed heroes, whose partnership and friendship elevate the narrative beyond a gory tale of murdered children and repressed childhood trauma.

Every Last One  Anna Quindlen

From Publishers Weekly

In her latest, Quindlen (Rise and Shine) once again plumbs the searing emotions of ordinary people caught in tragic circumstances. Mary Beth Latham is a happily married woman entirely devoted to her three teenage children. When her talented daughter Ruby casually announces she's breaking up with her boyfriend Kirenan, a former neighbor who's become like family, Mary Beth is slightly alarmed, but soon distracted by her son Max, who's feeling overshadowed by his extroverted, athletic twin brother Alex. Quindlen's novel moves briskly, propelled by the small dramas of summer camp, proms, soccer games and neighbors, until the rejected Kirenan blindsides the Lathams, and the reader, with an incredible act of violence. Left with almost nothing, Mary Beth struggles to cope with loss and guilt, protect what she has left, and regain a sense of meaning. Quindlen is in classic form, with strong characters and precisely cadenced prose that builds in intensity.

Please vote for one title to read for the next meeting. Please cast your vote via email to ambruso@stevenscollege.edu  no later than 12 Noon Monday October 4, 2010 and I will publish the results via email and on our blog.

The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 11:30 AM in the Mezzanine. Thanks.