Book Club choices for July and August
I love the diversity of these choices. Have your votes to me by May 23rd:
Eliza's Choices:
1) Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk (278 pages)
Palahniuk's grotesque romp aims to skewer the ruthless superficiality of the fashion world and winds up with a tale as savagely glib as what it derides. Narrator Shannon McFarland, once a gorgeous fashion model, has been hideously disfigured in a mysterious drive-by shooting. Her jaw has been shot off, leaving her not only bereft of a career and boyfriend, but suddenly invisible to the world. Along comes no-nonsense, pill-popping diva Brandy Alexander, a resplendent, sassy, transgendered chick, who has modeled her body rearrangementAthe breast implants, the hair, the figureAon what Shannon used to look like. Brandy suggests veils, high camp and no self-pity. Shannon wants revenge: first on her supposedly best friend Evie, who has been squeezing her size nine body into Shannon's size six wardrobe, then on her fianc?, Manus Kelly, who has been running around with Evie. Since Shannon now believes that Manus and Evie orchestrated her "accident," Shannon rustles up a few arson/kidnapping "accidents" of her own.
2) Generation X by Douglas Coupland (192 pages) -1991
"Generation X," the post-baby boomers who must endure "legislated nostalgia (to force a body of people to have memories they do not actually own)" and who indulge in "knee-jerk irony (the tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course . . . )." These are just two of the many terse, bitterly on-target observations and cartoons that season the margins of the text. The plot frames a loose Decameron -style collection of "bedtime stories" told by three friends, Dag, Andy and Claire, who have fled society for the relative tranquility of Palm Springs. They fantasize about nuclear Armageddon and the mythical but drab Texlahoma, located on an asteroid, where it is forever 1974. The true stories they relate are no less strange: Dag tells a particularly haunting tale about a Japanese businessman whose most prized possession, tragically, is a photo of Marilyn Monroe flashing. These stories, alternatively touching and hilarious, reveal the pain beneath the kitschy veneer of 1940s mementos and taxidermied chickens.
3) Zami (A New Spelling of My Name) by Audre Lorde (256 pages) -1983
"Zami" begins with the young Audre and her parents, a Black immigrant couple who had settled in New York City. Lorde writes in detail of her cultural heritage from the Caribbean island of Grenada. From her childhood in Harlem to her young adulthood, the book is full of fascinating episodes and poetic language. Lorde's description of using her mother's traditional mortar and pestle to grind spices in the Caribbean style is a particular tour-de-force of sensuous language.
Lorde describes the roots of her life as a poet. She also vividly recalls what it was like to be a young Black lesbian in the 1950s.
Sam's Choices:
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 304 pages
Somewhere in this book, Wharton observes that clever
liars always come up with good stories to back up
their fabrications, but that really clever liars don't
bother to explain anything at all. This is the kind of
insight that makes The Age of Innocence so
indispensable. Wharton's story of the upper classes of
Old New York, and Newland Archer's impossible love for
the disgraced Countess Olenska, is a perfectly wrought
book about an era when upper-class culture in this
country was still a mixture of American and European
extracts, and when "society" had rules as rigid as any
in history
My Dark Places by James Ellroy 427 pages-1995
Crime novelist Ellroy was 10 in 1958 when his mother,
a divorced nurse and closet alcoholic, was found
strangled to death in a deserted schoolyard in
California's San Gabriel Valley. The case was still
unsolved in 1994, when Ellroy hired retired L.A.
homicide detective Bill Stoner to investigate. In this
emotionally raw, hypnotic memoir, Ellroy ventures into
the murky, Oedipal depths of his lifelong obsession
with sex crimes and police work, setting his mother's
murder against a grisly backdrop of similar L.A.
homicides.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin -320
pages-1969
The story is innovative: Genly Ai, an envoy from The
Ekumen, is assigned the task of getting the planet
Gethen to join with this consortium of planets. The
purpose isn't trade--distances are so great that only
the transmission of ideas is possible. Messages can
travel great than light speed by virtue of the
Ansible, a device that simultaneously transfers
information.
The Gethenians are unique among the sentient beings of
the known planets; they are monosexual, undergoing a
kind of estrus or heat once a month where they morph
into female or male, completely by chance. Gethen is
called Winter because it is perennially cold. The
cold, and the ambiguous sexuality of the Gethenians
makes for a hostile, foreign yet alluring environment.
Eliza's Choices:
1) Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk (278 pages)
Palahniuk's grotesque romp aims to skewer the ruthless superficiality of the fashion world and winds up with a tale as savagely glib as what it derides. Narrator Shannon McFarland, once a gorgeous fashion model, has been hideously disfigured in a mysterious drive-by shooting. Her jaw has been shot off, leaving her not only bereft of a career and boyfriend, but suddenly invisible to the world. Along comes no-nonsense, pill-popping diva Brandy Alexander, a resplendent, sassy, transgendered chick, who has modeled her body rearrangementAthe breast implants, the hair, the figureAon what Shannon used to look like. Brandy suggests veils, high camp and no self-pity. Shannon wants revenge: first on her supposedly best friend Evie, who has been squeezing her size nine body into Shannon's size six wardrobe, then on her fianc?, Manus Kelly, who has been running around with Evie. Since Shannon now believes that Manus and Evie orchestrated her "accident," Shannon rustles up a few arson/kidnapping "accidents" of her own.
2) Generation X by Douglas Coupland (192 pages) -1991
"Generation X," the post-baby boomers who must endure "legislated nostalgia (to force a body of people to have memories they do not actually own)" and who indulge in "knee-jerk irony (the tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course . . . )." These are just two of the many terse, bitterly on-target observations and cartoons that season the margins of the text. The plot frames a loose Decameron -style collection of "bedtime stories" told by three friends, Dag, Andy and Claire, who have fled society for the relative tranquility of Palm Springs. They fantasize about nuclear Armageddon and the mythical but drab Texlahoma, located on an asteroid, where it is forever 1974. The true stories they relate are no less strange: Dag tells a particularly haunting tale about a Japanese businessman whose most prized possession, tragically, is a photo of Marilyn Monroe flashing. These stories, alternatively touching and hilarious, reveal the pain beneath the kitschy veneer of 1940s mementos and taxidermied chickens.
3) Zami (A New Spelling of My Name) by Audre Lorde (256 pages) -1983
"Zami" begins with the young Audre and her parents, a Black immigrant couple who had settled in New York City. Lorde writes in detail of her cultural heritage from the Caribbean island of Grenada. From her childhood in Harlem to her young adulthood, the book is full of fascinating episodes and poetic language. Lorde's description of using her mother's traditional mortar and pestle to grind spices in the Caribbean style is a particular tour-de-force of sensuous language.
Lorde describes the roots of her life as a poet. She also vividly recalls what it was like to be a young Black lesbian in the 1950s.
Sam's Choices:
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 304 pages
Somewhere in this book, Wharton observes that clever
liars always come up with good stories to back up
their fabrications, but that really clever liars don't
bother to explain anything at all. This is the kind of
insight that makes The Age of Innocence so
indispensable. Wharton's story of the upper classes of
Old New York, and Newland Archer's impossible love for
the disgraced Countess Olenska, is a perfectly wrought
book about an era when upper-class culture in this
country was still a mixture of American and European
extracts, and when "society" had rules as rigid as any
in history
My Dark Places by James Ellroy 427 pages-1995
Crime novelist Ellroy was 10 in 1958 when his mother,
a divorced nurse and closet alcoholic, was found
strangled to death in a deserted schoolyard in
California's San Gabriel Valley. The case was still
unsolved in 1994, when Ellroy hired retired L.A.
homicide detective Bill Stoner to investigate. In this
emotionally raw, hypnotic memoir, Ellroy ventures into
the murky, Oedipal depths of his lifelong obsession
with sex crimes and police work, setting his mother's
murder against a grisly backdrop of similar L.A.
homicides.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin -320
pages-1969
The story is innovative: Genly Ai, an envoy from The
Ekumen, is assigned the task of getting the planet
Gethen to join with this consortium of planets. The
purpose isn't trade--distances are so great that only
the transmission of ideas is possible. Messages can
travel great than light speed by virtue of the
Ansible, a device that simultaneously transfers
information.
The Gethenians are unique among the sentient beings of
the known planets; they are monosexual, undergoing a
kind of estrus or heat once a month where they morph
into female or male, completely by chance. Gethen is
called Winter because it is perennially cold. The
cold, and the ambiguous sexuality of the Gethenians
makes for a hostile, foreign yet alluring environment.
posted by Greycats | 6:09 PM
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