His Dark Materials Movie

A number of us in book club have read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The movie version of the first book, The Golden Compass, is coming out this month and it is stirring up some kind of controversy!

Here's an interesting essay on it, today's post on Conversational Reading.

Sonya's Top 10 Book Club Picks

Okay, so I'm really feeling like a newbie now as I haven't read a lot of the books on the tops of others' lists. I'm including here a couple of my favorite books because the club has read them, even though I wasn't a member at the time. I'm listing the ones that have made the biggest impression on me, even though I don't think I could attempt Shantaram again.

1. The Handmaid's Tale


2. The Poisonwood Bible (didn't read with bookclub)


3. The Red Tent (didn't read with bookclub)


4. Jane Eyre


5. Atonement


6. The Feminine Mistake


7. Shantaram


8. A Thousand Splendid Suns


9. Daughter of Fortune


10. Little Children

Allison's Top 10 Book Club Books

I love making lists! Initially, I wasn't going to rank them but then I decided to think of it as, if I had to read them all over again right now, in what order would I read them.

1. The Time Traveler's Wife
2. East of Eden
3. Atonement
4. Middlesex
5. The Namesake
6. Cold Mountain
7. The Awakening
8. A Girl Named Zippy
9. The Handmaid's Tale
10. The Lovely Bones
    

Dawn's Top 10 Book Club Books

Here are my top 10 (but I reserve the right to change my picks at any time)...

Atonement
Blind Assassin
Eat, Pray, Love
Handmaid's Tale
Middlesex
Persuasion
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Tender is the Night
Under the Banner of Heaven
For the Sake of Elena (my favorite mystery book so far)

10 Years!

2008 will be our tenth year of book club. We're planning some festivities to celebrate our anniversary. I started this blog as a way of honoring our years together. We're also planning a weekend retreat (location as yet undecided) in Fall 2008. I'd like to initiate one other way of observing the decade: top 10 lists! In the entry below I posted my top 10 favorite books from book club, and would love to know what rates highly for others. Count any book on our list, even if you weren't in book club when we read it. Have fun!

Liz's Top 10 Book Club Books

1. East of Eden
2. Atonement
3. Lolita
4. The Time Traveler's Wife
5. The Blind Assassin
6. The Portrait of a Lady
7. The Namesake
8. Jane Eyre
9. Life of Pi
10. Bee Season

2000 Book List

January: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
February: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
March: The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
April: The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan
June: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
July: Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones
August: Beloved by Toni Morrison
September: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
October: Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
November: A Widow for One Year by John Irving

1998-2003: No Book Club Tonight. Must be Tuesday.

For the first 5 years of book club, we didn't meet on Tuesday nights. Tuesday was Buffy night for Dawn, Katie, Liz and Tajhia. Once Buffy was off the air, scheduling was a lot easier. We have met on the third Tuesday of the month since fall 2003.

November 1999: "Does it ever stop, the wanting?"

Success! We recruited two new members in November 1999, with a third on the way. How did we do it?



By picking a sweaty, violent, time-travel romance novel! New members Sarah (Liz's college friend) and Laura M. (Liz's office mate's girlfriend) joined. Laura's roommate Tajhia picked up Outlander as soon as Laura put it down. She joined the book club in January 2000. Along with Dawn, Katie, Liz and Sutapa, that made a total of 7 members!

"Does it ever stop, the wanting?" was one of the choice phrases offered by 16th century Scot Jamie Fraser to his true love, post-WWII nurse Claire Randall, right before he ravished her. This book has plenty of cringe-worthy moments, but it is a fabulous escape.

October 1999: Lolita

Lo. Lee. Ta. We discussed this book so long ago, but it still resonates with me. The writing is simultaneously breathtakingly beautiful and uproariously funny. But the subject is so horrifying that as a reader, you can never relax into the prose or the story. Whenever I really think about it, I'm awestruck.

We had a great discussion on this book but it occurred at a time when our book club was the smallest - only Dawn, Katie and Liz made it to this meeting. We even tried to drum up excitement by serving only desserts. Still only the three of us came. I'd love to know what our current members think of this book.

Hmm . . . maybe I'll pick another Nabokov when it's my turn next! Perhaps Ada, or Ardor. It's supposed to be pretty steamy. (Just look at the cover!) Which leads me to my next post . . .

March 1999: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Every women's book club should read a female bonding book every now and then. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is one of these. It's good for stimulating discussions about your mother and your oldest friends.

February 1999: Angela's Ashes

Angela's Ashes started a bit of a Frank McCourt following. He came to Durham for a reading and we went and got our books signed, after standing in line for about an hour! Most of us read the follow-up, 'Tis, when it came out. I think we went to see the movie Angela's Ashes together as well.

1999 Book List

January: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
Februrary: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
March: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
April: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
July: Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
October: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
November: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

November 1998: The First Meeting

Our first meeting was at Dawn and Katie’s apartment in Chapel Hill. The book was What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage. There were lots of girls there, and they were all statisticians! Four current members, Dawn, Katie, Liz and Sutapa were in attendance at this seminal meeting.

September 25, 1998: Sutapa’s Party

Sutapa had a cook-out party at the pool of her apartment complex in Chapel Hill on the same night Celine Dion played the Dean Dome. I left work late at 7 and expected to get to the party at 7:30. Maybe I was going to go home and change first, I don’t remember. Having recently moved to the Triangle, I had no friends and was desperate to meet new people. But because of Celine and her throbbing, heart shaped stage, it took THREE HOURS to get to Sutapa’s party from RTP. There I sat, on I-40 surrounded by women of all ages crammed into SUVs and minivans, rocking out to “My Heart (throbbing, surely)Will Go On.” I remember rolling down the window at one point and yelling at another driver, “May I please pass you to exit right out of this traffic? I promise I’m not going to Celine Dion!” As she was a Celine Dion fan, all about love and yummy goodness, probably from some nice town down east like Wilson or Mt. Olive, she let me pass. (Thank you, lady!)

Finally, at 10:30 I got to the party. I had missed the food, some of the drinking, and an appearance by the genuine Carolina ram, but fortunately Dawn and Katie were there. I’m not sure how we met, but here’s what I remember about the conversation between three of us, Dawn, Sutapa, and Liz:

Dawn: “I watch Buffy! Angel is awesome!”
Liz: “Me too!”
Sutapa: “Oprah has a book club, I think it would be really cool to be in one!”
Dawn and Liz: “We do too!”

One of the great things about Sutapa is that when she has conversations like this, she actually follows up! A month later we had our first meeting.