2006 book choices
Please note that some of these summaries are from amazon etc. and therefore, I take no responsibility for their content:
So this is how voting works:
1) You have three votes, 1 for the summer book and 2 for the rest of the year. Ah, but here's the catch. You may only vote for one of your own books. So choose wisely.
2) January's book is Naima's choice from this year, Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie. This meeting will be held on Monday January 23rd at 7 p.m. Place TBA. Please note, I've now change our meeting day and time to Mondays at 7.
James Baldwin - Going to Meet the Man – 249 pages (1965)
There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.
Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles - 368 pages (1949)
The story centers on Port and Kit Moresby, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by their friend Tunner. The journey, initially an attempt by Port and Kit to resolve their marital difficulties, is quickly made fraught by the travelers' ignorance the dangers that surround them.
Mind of my Mind - Octavia Butler- 224 pages (1994)
For four thousand years, an Immortal has spread the seeds of an evolutionary master race, using the downtrodden of the underclass as his private breeding stock. But now a young ghetto telepath has found the way to awaken -- and rule -- her superhuman kind, igniting a psychic battle from L.A. mansions to South Central slums, as she challenges her creator for the right to free her people...And enslave the Earth.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler- Italo Calvino - 260 pages (1979)
Using shifting structures, a succession of tales, and different points of view, the book probes the nature of change and chance and the interdependence of fiction and reality. The novel, which is nonlinear, begins with a man discovering that the copy of a novel he has recently purchased is defective, a Polish novel having been bound within its pages. He returns to the bookshop the following day and meets a young woman who is on an identical mission. They both profess a preference for the Polish novel. Interposed between the chapters in which the two strangers attempt to authenticate their texts are 10 excerpts that parody genres of contemporary world fiction, such as the Latin-American novel and the political novel of Eastern Europe.
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler - 231 pages (1939)
The Big Sleep reads with tremendous speed and power, creating a portrait of a seamy world ruled by bisexual pornographers, purring hit men, cheap hoods, and enameled dames determined to have their way no matter what--a fascinating collection of everything small and mean and gutter common. At the same time, it also presents a surprising degree of integrity in the midst of the corruption: Marlowe won't sell out, no matter what the bribe, and behind their various masks the hard-bitten Vivien Sternwood, mysterious Mona Mars, and small-time Harry Jones have enough courage, loyalty, and unexpected integrity to win your respect.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem – Joan Didion – 239 pages (1968)
The essays in Joan Didion's first--and groundbreaking--collection are mostly about the phenomena of the 1960's: the hippie world of Haight-Ashbury (the title essay), the politics of the peace movement, a Las Vegas wedding. Now considered a classic, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, introduced Didion's trademark style--cool, cerebral, darkly witty
The Joys of Motherhood - Buchi Emecheta – 224 pages (1979)
Nnu is unable to conceive a child for her husband. Once beaten and given back to her father, she is passed along to her second marriage of instant disappointment. Nnu is able to have several children through this marriage; where she does her best to take care of each one. However, she and Nnaife, her husband, come across a rocky path. Nnaife’s brother dies, leaving Nnaife with the responsibility of tending to his brother’s wives as well. Shortly after, Nnaife is forced to leave his home to fight. This leaves the women with the struggle of supporting both themselves and the children, fighting for food and money. The novel plunges through many turns and obstacles as Nnu battles her way through life. Colonialism is strongly shown throughout the novel as well as the significant impact it had on the native people.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood– Alexandra Fuller – 336 pages – (2003)
A classic is born in this tender, intensely moving and even delightful journey through a white African girl's childhood. Born in England and now living in Wyoming, Fuller was conceived and bred on African soil during the Rhodesian civil war (1971-1979), With a unique and subtle sensitivity to racial issues, Fuller describes her parents' racism and the wartime relationships between blacks and whites through a child's watchful eyes. Curfews and war, mosquitoes, land mines, ambushes and "an abundance of leopards" are the stuff of this childhood. Fuller's world is marked by sudden, drastic changes: the farm is taken away for "land redistribution"; the family constantly sets up house in hostile, desolate environments as they move from Rhodesia to Zambia to Malawi and back to Zambia. But Fuller's remarkable affection for her parents (who are racists) and her homeland (brutal under white and black rule) shines through.
The Swimming-Pool Library - Alan Hollinghurst – 352 pages (1988)
On entering a London public lavatory in blithe pursuit of quick, anonymous sex, beautiful and roguish young aristocrat William Beckwith is confronted instead with an ancient, member of the British House of Lords who, after muttering an incoherent string of polite non sequiturs, promptly keels over at his feet in embarrassed but undeniable coronary arrest. After saving the old man's life, Will is invited to tea by the grateful and slightly senile Lord Nantwich, who, surprised by Will's impressive lineage and appalled at his state of idle unemployment, engages the young man to write the Nantwich life story. Thus begins the unusual relationship that forms the core of this funny, sad and beautifully written novel. The Swimming Pool Library weaves a rich and fascinating tapestry of Britain's gay subculture spanning pre-World War I through the sexually abandoned early '80s, stopping short at the doorstep of AIDS.
Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri – 198 pages – (1999)
The rituals of traditional Indian domesticity, a curry-making, hair-vermilioning, and the characters of Lahiri's elegant first collection mark the measure of these fragile people's dissolution. Frequently finding themselves in Cambridge, Mass., Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history. Displaced to the States by her husband's appointment as a professor of mathematics, Mrs. Sen (in the same-named story) leaves her expensive and extensive collection of saris folded neatly in the drawer. The two things that sustain her, as the little boy she looks after every afternoon notices, are aerograms from home written by family members who so deeply misunderstand the nature of her life that they envy her and the fresh fish she buys to remind her of Calcutta. The arranged marriage of "This Blessed House" mismatches the conservative, self-conscious Sanjeev with ebullient, dramatic Twinkle smoker and drinker who wears leopard-print high heels and takes joy in the plastic Christian paraphernalia she discovers in their new house. In "A Real Durwan," the middle-class occupants of a tenement in post-partition Calcutta tolerate the rantings of the stair-sweeper Boori Ma. Delusions of grandeur and lament for what she's lost "such comforts you cannot even dream them" give her an odd, Chekhovian charm but ultimately do not convince her bourgeois audience that she is a desirable fixture in their up-and-coming property. Lahiri's touch in these nine tales is delicate, but her observations remain damningly accurate, and her bittersweet stories are unhampered by nostalgia.
The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith – Irshad Manji – 240 pages (2004)
Islam is "on very thin ice" with one follower, Canadian broadcaster Manji. Her book will be an unsettling read for most of her fellow Muslims, although they may find themselves agreeing with many points. She describes how childhood days spent at her local mosque left her perplexed and irritated; she complains that the Middle East conflict has consumed Muslim minds. She highlights several grievances many Muslims probably share: what she casts as Saudi Arabia's disproportional and destructive influence on Islam, how the hijab, or veil, has become a litmus test for a Muslim woman's faithfulness, and the need to question the accuracy of hadiths (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). The exclusion of women from Muslim leadership is criticized as well.
Birds of America - Lorrie Moore 291 pages (1999)
Though the characters in these 12 stories are seen in such varied settings as Iowa, Ireland, Maryland, Louisiana and Italy, they are all afflicted with ennui, angst and aimlessness. They can't communicate or connect. The beginning stories deal with women alienated from their own true natures but still living in the quotidian. Aileen in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," is unable to stop grieving over her dog's death, although she has a loving husband and daughter to console her. The collection's two male protagonists, a law professor in "Beautiful Grade" and a housepainter who lives with a blind man in "What You Want to Do Fine," are just as disaffected and lonely in domestic situations. The stories move on, however, to situations in which life itself is askew, where a tumor grows in a baby's body (the detached recitation of "People Like That Are The Only People Here" makes it even more harrowing. In "Real Estate," a woman with cancer after having dealt with squirrels, bats, geese, crows and a hippie intruder in her new house kills a thief whose mind has run as amok as the cells in her body.
Gilead- Marilynne Robinson – 256 pages (2004)
From the first page of her second novel, the voice of Rev. John Ames mesmerizes with his account of his life—and that of his father and grandfather. Ames is 77 years old in 1956, in failing health, with a much younger wife and six-year-old son; as a preacher in the small Iowa town where he spent his entire life, he has produced volumes and volumes of sermons and prayers. But it is in this mesmerizing account—in the form of a letter to his young son, who he imagines reading it when he is grown—that his meditations on creation and existence are fully illumined. Ames details the often harsh conditions of perishing Midwestern prairie towns, the Spanish influenza and two world wars. He relates the death of his first wife and child, and his long years alone attempting to live up to the legacy of his fiery grandfather, a man who saw visions of Christ and became a controversial figure in the Kansas abolitionist movement, and his own father's embittered pacifism. During the course of Ames's writing, he is confronted with one of his most difficult and long-simmering crises of personal resentment when John Ames Boughton (his namesake and son of his best friend) returns to his hometown, trailing with him the actions of a callous past and precarious future. In attempting to find a way to comprehend and forgive, Ames finds that he must face a final comprehension of self—as well as the worth of his life's reflections.
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth -225 pages (1969)
Structurally, Portnoy's Complaint is a continuous monologue as narrated by its eponymous speaker, Alexander Portnoy, to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel. This narration weaves effortlessly through time and describes scenes from each stage in Portnoy's life, with every recollection in some way touching upon Portnoy's central dilemma: his inability to enjoy the fruits of his sexual adventures even as his extreme libidinal urges force him to seek release in ever more creative (and, in his mind, degrading and shameful) acts of eroticism. Roth is not subtle about defining this as the main theme of his book.
On the first page of the novel one finds this clinical definition of "Portnoy's Complaint", as if ripped from the pages of a manual on sexual dysfunction:
Portnoy's Complaint: A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature...
Other topics touched on in the book include the assimilation experiences of American Jews, their relationship to the Jews of Israel, and the pleasures and perils (most prominently, emasculation) inherent in being the son of a Jewish family.
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell – 448 pages (1997)
In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong
Summer Picks (books over 400 pages):
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes - 976 pages (1605)
A retired and impoverished gentleman named Alonzo Quixano lived in the Spanish province of La Mancha. He had read so many romances of chivalry that he decided one day to revive the ancient custom of knight-errantry. Changing his name to Don Quixote de la Mancha, he had himself dubbed a knight by a rascally publican whose miserable inn he mistook for a castle.
The second volume of the novel also includes a long section in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza stay with a duke and a duchess who have read about the pair's famous adventures.
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - 1312 pages (1844)
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas' epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.
.
Magnus - John Fowles - 672 pages (1985)
The novel begins with young Nicholas Urfe as he tries to find a living he can at least take some interest in. He meets a young woman that nearly penetrates his outer shell of dispassionate world-weariness. As a gesture of independence, he lets her get away and he takes a job on a Greek island. There, he gets involved with a strange old man and his associates, and finds himself the victim of manipulative games and masquerades. He resolves to penetrate each and every deceit, and is led on a strange journey beyond his wildest imaginings.
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver- 672 pages (1999)
In 1959, Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist, takes his four young daughters, his wife, and his mission to the Belgian Congo -- a place, he is sure, where he can save needy souls. But the seeds they plant bloom in tragic ways within this complex culture. Set against one of the most dramatic political events of the twentieth century -- the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium and its devastating consequences -- here is New York Times-bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver's beautiful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable epic that chronicles the disintegration of family and a nation.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris - 886 pages (1989)
Seven men in one--naturalist, writer, lover, hunter, cowboy, soldier, and politician, Theodore Roosevelt, by the turn of the century, built himself up from a frail, asthmatic boy to become the youngest and most charismatic president in our history to that time.
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - 552 pages (1980)
children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet.
:
So this is how voting works:
1) You have three votes, 1 for the summer book and 2 for the rest of the year. Ah, but here's the catch. You may only vote for one of your own books. So choose wisely.
2) January's book is Naima's choice from this year, Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie. This meeting will be held on Monday January 23rd at 7 p.m. Place TBA. Please note, I've now change our meeting day and time to Mondays at 7.
James Baldwin - Going to Meet the Man – 249 pages (1965)
There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.
Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles - 368 pages (1949)
The story centers on Port and Kit Moresby, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by their friend Tunner. The journey, initially an attempt by Port and Kit to resolve their marital difficulties, is quickly made fraught by the travelers' ignorance the dangers that surround them.
Mind of my Mind - Octavia Butler- 224 pages (1994)
For four thousand years, an Immortal has spread the seeds of an evolutionary master race, using the downtrodden of the underclass as his private breeding stock. But now a young ghetto telepath has found the way to awaken -- and rule -- her superhuman kind, igniting a psychic battle from L.A. mansions to South Central slums, as she challenges her creator for the right to free her people...And enslave the Earth.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler- Italo Calvino - 260 pages (1979)
Using shifting structures, a succession of tales, and different points of view, the book probes the nature of change and chance and the interdependence of fiction and reality. The novel, which is nonlinear, begins with a man discovering that the copy of a novel he has recently purchased is defective, a Polish novel having been bound within its pages. He returns to the bookshop the following day and meets a young woman who is on an identical mission. They both profess a preference for the Polish novel. Interposed between the chapters in which the two strangers attempt to authenticate their texts are 10 excerpts that parody genres of contemporary world fiction, such as the Latin-American novel and the political novel of Eastern Europe.
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler - 231 pages (1939)
The Big Sleep reads with tremendous speed and power, creating a portrait of a seamy world ruled by bisexual pornographers, purring hit men, cheap hoods, and enameled dames determined to have their way no matter what--a fascinating collection of everything small and mean and gutter common. At the same time, it also presents a surprising degree of integrity in the midst of the corruption: Marlowe won't sell out, no matter what the bribe, and behind their various masks the hard-bitten Vivien Sternwood, mysterious Mona Mars, and small-time Harry Jones have enough courage, loyalty, and unexpected integrity to win your respect.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem – Joan Didion – 239 pages (1968)
The essays in Joan Didion's first--and groundbreaking--collection are mostly about the phenomena of the 1960's: the hippie world of Haight-Ashbury (the title essay), the politics of the peace movement, a Las Vegas wedding. Now considered a classic, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, introduced Didion's trademark style--cool, cerebral, darkly witty
The Joys of Motherhood - Buchi Emecheta – 224 pages (1979)
Nnu is unable to conceive a child for her husband. Once beaten and given back to her father, she is passed along to her second marriage of instant disappointment. Nnu is able to have several children through this marriage; where she does her best to take care of each one. However, she and Nnaife, her husband, come across a rocky path. Nnaife’s brother dies, leaving Nnaife with the responsibility of tending to his brother’s wives as well. Shortly after, Nnaife is forced to leave his home to fight. This leaves the women with the struggle of supporting both themselves and the children, fighting for food and money. The novel plunges through many turns and obstacles as Nnu battles her way through life. Colonialism is strongly shown throughout the novel as well as the significant impact it had on the native people.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood– Alexandra Fuller – 336 pages – (2003)
A classic is born in this tender, intensely moving and even delightful journey through a white African girl's childhood. Born in England and now living in Wyoming, Fuller was conceived and bred on African soil during the Rhodesian civil war (1971-1979), With a unique and subtle sensitivity to racial issues, Fuller describes her parents' racism and the wartime relationships between blacks and whites through a child's watchful eyes. Curfews and war, mosquitoes, land mines, ambushes and "an abundance of leopards" are the stuff of this childhood. Fuller's world is marked by sudden, drastic changes: the farm is taken away for "land redistribution"; the family constantly sets up house in hostile, desolate environments as they move from Rhodesia to Zambia to Malawi and back to Zambia. But Fuller's remarkable affection for her parents (who are racists) and her homeland (brutal under white and black rule) shines through.
The Swimming-Pool Library - Alan Hollinghurst – 352 pages (1988)
On entering a London public lavatory in blithe pursuit of quick, anonymous sex, beautiful and roguish young aristocrat William Beckwith is confronted instead with an ancient, member of the British House of Lords who, after muttering an incoherent string of polite non sequiturs, promptly keels over at his feet in embarrassed but undeniable coronary arrest. After saving the old man's life, Will is invited to tea by the grateful and slightly senile Lord Nantwich, who, surprised by Will's impressive lineage and appalled at his state of idle unemployment, engages the young man to write the Nantwich life story. Thus begins the unusual relationship that forms the core of this funny, sad and beautifully written novel. The Swimming Pool Library weaves a rich and fascinating tapestry of Britain's gay subculture spanning pre-World War I through the sexually abandoned early '80s, stopping short at the doorstep of AIDS.
Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri – 198 pages – (1999)
The rituals of traditional Indian domesticity, a curry-making, hair-vermilioning, and the characters of Lahiri's elegant first collection mark the measure of these fragile people's dissolution. Frequently finding themselves in Cambridge, Mass., Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history. Displaced to the States by her husband's appointment as a professor of mathematics, Mrs. Sen (in the same-named story) leaves her expensive and extensive collection of saris folded neatly in the drawer. The two things that sustain her, as the little boy she looks after every afternoon notices, are aerograms from home written by family members who so deeply misunderstand the nature of her life that they envy her and the fresh fish she buys to remind her of Calcutta. The arranged marriage of "This Blessed House" mismatches the conservative, self-conscious Sanjeev with ebullient, dramatic Twinkle smoker and drinker who wears leopard-print high heels and takes joy in the plastic Christian paraphernalia she discovers in their new house. In "A Real Durwan," the middle-class occupants of a tenement in post-partition Calcutta tolerate the rantings of the stair-sweeper Boori Ma. Delusions of grandeur and lament for what she's lost "such comforts you cannot even dream them" give her an odd, Chekhovian charm but ultimately do not convince her bourgeois audience that she is a desirable fixture in their up-and-coming property. Lahiri's touch in these nine tales is delicate, but her observations remain damningly accurate, and her bittersweet stories are unhampered by nostalgia.
The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith – Irshad Manji – 240 pages (2004)
Islam is "on very thin ice" with one follower, Canadian broadcaster Manji. Her book will be an unsettling read for most of her fellow Muslims, although they may find themselves agreeing with many points. She describes how childhood days spent at her local mosque left her perplexed and irritated; she complains that the Middle East conflict has consumed Muslim minds. She highlights several grievances many Muslims probably share: what she casts as Saudi Arabia's disproportional and destructive influence on Islam, how the hijab, or veil, has become a litmus test for a Muslim woman's faithfulness, and the need to question the accuracy of hadiths (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). The exclusion of women from Muslim leadership is criticized as well.
Birds of America - Lorrie Moore 291 pages (1999)
Though the characters in these 12 stories are seen in such varied settings as Iowa, Ireland, Maryland, Louisiana and Italy, they are all afflicted with ennui, angst and aimlessness. They can't communicate or connect. The beginning stories deal with women alienated from their own true natures but still living in the quotidian. Aileen in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," is unable to stop grieving over her dog's death, although she has a loving husband and daughter to console her. The collection's two male protagonists, a law professor in "Beautiful Grade" and a housepainter who lives with a blind man in "What You Want to Do Fine," are just as disaffected and lonely in domestic situations. The stories move on, however, to situations in which life itself is askew, where a tumor grows in a baby's body (the detached recitation of "People Like That Are The Only People Here" makes it even more harrowing. In "Real Estate," a woman with cancer after having dealt with squirrels, bats, geese, crows and a hippie intruder in her new house kills a thief whose mind has run as amok as the cells in her body.
Gilead- Marilynne Robinson – 256 pages (2004)
From the first page of her second novel, the voice of Rev. John Ames mesmerizes with his account of his life—and that of his father and grandfather. Ames is 77 years old in 1956, in failing health, with a much younger wife and six-year-old son; as a preacher in the small Iowa town where he spent his entire life, he has produced volumes and volumes of sermons and prayers. But it is in this mesmerizing account—in the form of a letter to his young son, who he imagines reading it when he is grown—that his meditations on creation and existence are fully illumined. Ames details the often harsh conditions of perishing Midwestern prairie towns, the Spanish influenza and two world wars. He relates the death of his first wife and child, and his long years alone attempting to live up to the legacy of his fiery grandfather, a man who saw visions of Christ and became a controversial figure in the Kansas abolitionist movement, and his own father's embittered pacifism. During the course of Ames's writing, he is confronted with one of his most difficult and long-simmering crises of personal resentment when John Ames Boughton (his namesake and son of his best friend) returns to his hometown, trailing with him the actions of a callous past and precarious future. In attempting to find a way to comprehend and forgive, Ames finds that he must face a final comprehension of self—as well as the worth of his life's reflections.
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth -225 pages (1969)
Structurally, Portnoy's Complaint is a continuous monologue as narrated by its eponymous speaker, Alexander Portnoy, to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel. This narration weaves effortlessly through time and describes scenes from each stage in Portnoy's life, with every recollection in some way touching upon Portnoy's central dilemma: his inability to enjoy the fruits of his sexual adventures even as his extreme libidinal urges force him to seek release in ever more creative (and, in his mind, degrading and shameful) acts of eroticism. Roth is not subtle about defining this as the main theme of his book.
On the first page of the novel one finds this clinical definition of "Portnoy's Complaint", as if ripped from the pages of a manual on sexual dysfunction:
Portnoy's Complaint: A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature...
Other topics touched on in the book include the assimilation experiences of American Jews, their relationship to the Jews of Israel, and the pleasures and perils (most prominently, emasculation) inherent in being the son of a Jewish family.
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell – 448 pages (1997)
In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong
Summer Picks (books over 400 pages):
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes - 976 pages (1605)
A retired and impoverished gentleman named Alonzo Quixano lived in the Spanish province of La Mancha. He had read so many romances of chivalry that he decided one day to revive the ancient custom of knight-errantry. Changing his name to Don Quixote de la Mancha, he had himself dubbed a knight by a rascally publican whose miserable inn he mistook for a castle.
The second volume of the novel also includes a long section in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza stay with a duke and a duchess who have read about the pair's famous adventures.
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - 1312 pages (1844)
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas' epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.
.
Magnus - John Fowles - 672 pages (1985)
The novel begins with young Nicholas Urfe as he tries to find a living he can at least take some interest in. He meets a young woman that nearly penetrates his outer shell of dispassionate world-weariness. As a gesture of independence, he lets her get away and he takes a job on a Greek island. There, he gets involved with a strange old man and his associates, and finds himself the victim of manipulative games and masquerades. He resolves to penetrate each and every deceit, and is led on a strange journey beyond his wildest imaginings.
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver- 672 pages (1999)
In 1959, Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist, takes his four young daughters, his wife, and his mission to the Belgian Congo -- a place, he is sure, where he can save needy souls. But the seeds they plant bloom in tragic ways within this complex culture. Set against one of the most dramatic political events of the twentieth century -- the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium and its devastating consequences -- here is New York Times-bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver's beautiful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable epic that chronicles the disintegration of family and a nation.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris - 886 pages (1989)
Seven men in one--naturalist, writer, lover, hunter, cowboy, soldier, and politician, Theodore Roosevelt, by the turn of the century, built himself up from a frail, asthmatic boy to become the youngest and most charismatic president in our history to that time.
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - 552 pages (1980)
children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet.
:
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