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As booksellers, we often overhear customers lamenting that they've always meant to read “that other Jane Austen novel,” or Graham Greene, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but just never found the time. We've tried to remedy that with our Classics I Forgot to Read Book Club by providing motivation and a welcoming space to share your thoughts.
In choosing our ‘classics’ over the past few years, we've tried to select titles that had some visibility among readers, but were not necessarily included in the standard high school English class. We've also sampled a range of genres, from mystery (The Long Goodbye) to comedy (Cold Comfort Farm) to stream-of-consciousness (To the Lighthouse). So, whether our picks are already gathering dust on your bookshelves or this is your first encounter with the literary canon, we encourage you to join us on the last Wednesday evening of every month for conversation about the classics.
June 2010--The Moonstone
by Wilkie CollinsPerhaps not the first mystery novel ever written--opinions vary--but certainly one of the earliest, and still, more than a century later, intriguing and compelling. Multiple narrators tell the story of the Moonstone, a huge yellow diamond stolen from an Indian temple and then maliciously bequeathed, along with its curse, to a young heiress. Its theft from her bedroom creates a complex web of suspicion and jealousy, and Collins is adept at baffling the reader with seemingly impossible contradictions. He also reveals a sneaky sense of social conscience, as many of the comfortable prejudices of Victorian Britain turn out to be less than reliable.
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