Here are some books that Deb Okray's group will be reading next year...suggestions from their group. Some looked quite interesting. I have
Water for Elephant on tape and have gotten 1/2 way thru it.. not a lot of driving time here to get all the way so far...will take it with me for colorado driving.
I also have Eat Pray Love, but haven't started it, but hear its great. I did read Memory Keeper's Daughter..
count of Mortenson's incredible accomplishments in a region where Americans are often feared and hated. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. But his success speaks for itself. At last count, his Central Asia Institute had built fifty-five schools. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world — one school at a time.
Water for Elephants
SARA GRUEN
An atmospheric, gritty, and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932, by the bestselling author of Riding Lessons.
When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.
Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
KIM EDWARDS
Award-winning writer Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted, completely riveting family drama that explores every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child, and she grew up without you?
On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter is born, he sees immediately that she has Down's syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. But Caroline, the nurse, cannot leave the infant. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a century — in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by David Henry's fateful decision that long-ago winter night. Rich, compulsively readable, and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper's Daughter captures the way life takes unexpected turns, and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that hold a occurs when long-buried secrets burst into the open. It is an astonishing tale of redemptive love.
A Fine Balance
ROHINTON MISTRY
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.
Eat Pray Love
ELIZABETH GILBERT
A celebrated writer's irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.
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.
My Hands Came Away Red
LISA MCKAY
'In this fast-paced, thought-provoking debut novel, McKay, a psychologist who works with humanitarian relief, explores injustice, religious reconciliation, suffering and faith through the eyes of an 18-year-old girl whose mission trip goes tragically awry. For Cori and a team of Christian teens, building a church in Indonesia sounds like a fun project. After an overly long prologue, McKay describes how they journey to the island of Seram and bond with the Indonesian villagers. However, even as they put the finishing touches on the newly built church, Muslim and Christian tensions flare, culminating in a horrific tragedy witnessed by Cori and her friends. They flee through the mountainous jungle, hoping to escape the escalating hostilities. McKay's carefully chosen words, devoid of unnecessary sentiment, lend power to her story. The external hardships the characters face on their trek are secondary to the internal struggles they battle over how a loving God could let terrible things happen; and why their sacrificial choice to give up a summer to help others would cost them more than they ever dreamed. While written from a Christian perspective, McKay gives an evenhanded treatment to Muslims, showing that violence and hatred transcend religious boundaries. This is one of Christian fiction's best novels of the year. (Sept.)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Within weeks of arriving in Indonesia on a mission trip, religious conflicts flame to life with deadly results. The church building the team had constructed is in ashes and the group is stranded in a foreign land. One girls emotional quest to rediscover hope proves just as arduous as the physical journey home.
Half of a Yellow Sun
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI DICHIE
A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by the Washington Post Book World as 'the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,' Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.
With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor's beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna's twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.
Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race — and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.
miren's
The Club Dumas
ARTURO PEREZ REVERTE
Lucas Corso is a book detective, a mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found hanged, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named after a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris in pursuit of a sinister and seemingly omniscient killer.
Boy in the Striped Pajamas
JOHN BOYNE
The author describes this book as a fable, the name given to a simple story with a mesage to impart - like “Slow and steady wins the race.” But this book is not so simple, although written in a beautifully simple style. The cover blurb warns that it is best to start this story without knowing what it is about, and there is some wisdom in that. It is also a story whose whole point could be missed if you don’t know a bit of the background.
Bruno is a boy of nine (but the book is not for nine year olds) and he is taken away from his beautiful home in Berlin during World War II when his father is given a very important job. Now he must live in a lonely place with just his family. Yet Bruno is an explorer and one day he finds a fence and a friend.
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture
MARVIN HARRIS
his book explains Marvin Harris' theory of "Cultural Materialism".
Basically societies will develop (mostly not consiously) ways of coping
with survival issues with taboos and other beliefs and behaviors which
may not seem to have a survival purpose at first glance. The examples from the books
title:
Cows - In India, cows provide a major source of farm labor,
milk, cooking fuel, etc. If you're short of food, eating your cow will
mean that you've lost one of your key supports.
Pigs - In the Middle
East, raising pigs is a much less than ideal use of a society's resource. So having a taboo against eating them means agriculture can focus on other
better choices for the climate. In the Pacific islands it's an ideal
environment for raising pigs and very efficient, hence pigs are
considered the preferred source of meat and rituals revolve around them.
Wars - When a population is
too dense for their current resources, war is more likely. Many different examples are included to point out the correlation. The wars
not only potentially annex new resources, but they also reduce the populations of both warring groups.
Witches - Reducing the number of
women kept the birth rate down to a more manageable level for the
resources available at the time.
All of these reasons are not
necessarily a conscious decision by the societies, but are explanations when looking from the outside. It can also assist in predicting consequences (although not specific ones) when the population density is not supported by the
resources a society has available.
Harris' theories have many in the field that agree as well as disagree with him.
karine's
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
KIM EDWARDS
Kafka on the shore
H.MURAKAMI
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
A MC CALL SMITH
The Women Warrior
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
Siddharta
HERMAN HESS
The Curious Incident of...
M HADDON
Tales of a City
A MAUPIN
raheleh's
diane's
lily's
valerie's
