The Classics I Forgot to Read Book Club

May 2011--Mrs. Dalloway

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by Virginia Woolf

April 2011--Under the Volcano

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by Malcolm Lowry

March 2011--Wuthering Heights

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by Emily Bronte

February 2011--My Antonia

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by Willa Cather

January 2010--The Sun Also Rises

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by Ernest Hemingway

November 2010--The Mayor of Casterbridge

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by Thomas Hardy

October 2010--Frankenstein

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by Mary Shelley

September 2010--Revolutionary Road

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by Richard Yates

August 2010--Middlemarch

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by George Eliot

July 2010--Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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by James Joyce

Joyce was of course wildly controversial during his lifetime, with his work often banned as obscene.
Now, of course, we don't worry too much about the obscenity, but his obscurity frequently provokes heated discussion in classrooms and book groups. Compared to the challenges of Ulysses or the stylish impenetrability of Finnegan's Wake, this autobiographical novel, with its straightforward narrative and clear theme of artistic awakening, is almost tame. Still, the reader feels Joyce's inventive passion for language swirling the currents of the tale, and the result is an intensely felt rendering of his time and place, as well as his timeless drive to create.

June 2010--The Moonstone

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by Wilkie Collins

Perhaps 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.

May 2010--Ficciones

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by Jorge Luis Borges

It feels insufficient to call these short fictional pieces "stories." Crammed with obscure facts and imaginings, with strange ideas and exotic characters, with philosophical riddles and unanswerable questions, they are more in the nature of dreams or experiments, or some hybrid of the two. Fabulous mysteries and mythic conflicts are sketched precisely, with little emotion. From ancient Babylon to modern Buenos Aires, scholars and soldiers and priests struggle to make sense of a cryptic universe. The nature of time and death and knowledge come into question again and again, and while there are no clear answers (how could there be?), the reader is left with a fascinating set of possiblities.

April 2010--Zuleika Dobson

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by Max Beerbohm

This satirical romance, written in 1911, doesn't seem to be well known today, but it ranks #59 on the Modern Library's list of the best 20th-century novels in the English language. Beerbohm, a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, was primarily an essayist and caricaturist. Zuleika Dobson, his only novel, is the story of a devastatingly beautiful and brilliant young woman who takes Oxford University by storm, wreaking havoc on its community of rich, respectable, and generally very stupid young men.

March 2010--Maus

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by Art Spiegelman

This is arguably the book that put graphic novels on the literary map and showed that they could handle serious topics (does it get much more serious than the Holocaust?) in a powerful, creative way. Spiegelman recounts his father's experiences in the years leading up to his imprisonment in Auschwitz--the gradual tightening of the Nazi grip on the Jewish community. (A second volume deals with his father's stay in the concentration camp itself). By framing the Holocaust story within the story of the postwar father-son relationship, he shows us the lifelong effects of the ordeal and explores the nature and cost of survival.

February 2010--The Picture of Dorian Gray

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by Oscar Wilde

The premise of this novel is by now so familiar that it no longer holds its original shock value. What does perhaps come as a surprise for modern readers is that Wilde wasn't really playing for the shock value in the first place. The book's gimmick, if you want to call it a gimmick, is deployed gradually, and Dorian Gray's fatal trajectory is easy enough to foresee. Rather than plot twists and reversals, the emphasis is on ideas and aesthetics. Beauty (in various guises--youth, physical beauty, fashion sense, artistic sensibility, intellectual vigor) is the ultimate imperative for Wilde's protagonists, and yet the single-minded pursuit of beauty leads to dissipation and decay. The paradox is in the end insoluble, and perhaps that's the enduring appeal of the novel--it speaks to our fascination with beauty, to our uneasy knowledge that the fascination is dangerous, and to our willingness to be fascinated anyhow.

January 2010--The Wings of the Dove

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by Henry James

At many of our book club meetings, there comes a moment when someone who has been rather quiet blurts out "Why is this book a classic?" The easy answer is "because Penguin (or Oxford, or the Modern Library) says it is," but of course that's not really sufficient, particularly if the book is an unusually difficult or dated one.

The Wings of the Dove is inarguably difficult, with its often murky diction, its sprawling sentences, and its microscopic attention to the nuances of thought and feeling. While the basic story and characters are interesting enough--a ruthless woman induces her impecunious fiance to woo a dying heiress--it feels as though the essential drama is smothered by an avalanche of psychological analysis. It's clear that James can write sharp dialogue and crisp, evocative description, because he does it in places... just not in very many places.

What's hard to appreciate for the modern reader, accustomed to a more streamlined narrative and a more economical survey of character interiors, is that in James's time few writers were inclined to explore the complexities of thought and emotion in any rigorous way. While his exhaustive analysis can be merely exhausting for some of us, his relentlessly honest and inquisitive probing was a new dimension in literature. In some ways it prefigured the more artful stream-of-consciousness narratives of writers like Joyce and Woolf, and in its own way was a brilliant unveiling of the complexities of the mind.

December 2009--no meeting!

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Since December is Crazy Time in the book business, we skip this month. But because the month off gives everyone a little more time to read, our pick for January is something a little bit longer and more difficult than usual... Read on!

November 2009--A Sentimental Education

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by Gustave Flaubert

Revolutions often seem to head in unexpected directions. It's doubtful that the workers and petit-bourgeois who toppled the last Bourbon king of France in 1848 had any notion that they were preparing the way for Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew to take power as Emperor Napoleon III. By the late 1860s, when Flaubert wrote A Sentimental Education, the democratic ideals of 1848 must have seemed like a sad, foolish dream to the veterans of the revolution.

In writing what he referred to as the moral history of his generation, Flaubert is relentless in cataloguing their foibles and flaws. He follows an assorted cast of young men (and a few of their women) through the revolution's buildup, climax, and aftermath. Political passion is a wavering, inconstant flame in these young businessmen, artists, intellectuals, and workers; their commitment is so often pushed aside by greed, lust and vanity that the revolution's initial success seems more surprising than its later downfall. It's to the author's credit, no doubt, that he makes the hero of this autobiographical novel as weak and venal as most of the other characters; a foreshadowing, it seems, of twentieth-century literature's antiheroes. In hindsight, though, perhaps he should have given his generation a little more credit--only a few years after the publication of A Sentimental Education, democracy returned to France for good.

October 2009--Tender Is the Night

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by F. Scott Fitzgerald

For most readers, The Great Gatsby stands as Fitzgerald's greatest accomplishment. But Tender is the Night, the story of a failed marriage between American expatriates in Europe, has a scope and richness that make it resonate more deeply than Gatsby. The characters are unique and three-dimensional--they are, of course, essentially Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, and though they treat each other rather better here than they did in real life, they have the same aura of doomed glamor. The writing is lush and lyrical, and if some of the dialogue sounds dated, it's only by contrast to the extraordinary grace of the narration. This might just be the Great American Novel, despite the fact that most of it is set in France.

September 2009--The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

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by John Le Carre

A brilliant, subtly layered examination of the Cold War espionage game in all its amoral complexity. George Smiley, the quietly ruthless spymaster, uses a ruined British agent to run a daring operation against the kingpin of East Germany intelligence. Reversals and betrayals lurk around every corner of a relentlessly tense narrative. With this book, Le Carre captured the essence of the Cold War and took the espionage novel to a new level of seriousness.

August 2009--Persuasion

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by Jane Austen

Austen's last novel reflects a more sober, thoughtful view of love than her earlier work. The passions of her characters seem more subdued, the trademark wit darker and in places even bitter. Anne Elliot, the lone reasonable member of a prideful, silly family, gets a second chance at love when the naval officer she rejected eight years earlier returns to her life. Will the two of them find a way to get together? Of course they will, but as they wend their way to the inevitable happy reunion Anne has ample time to ponder their earlier mistakes and the treacherous nature of the marriage market. Austen herself, of course, never got her second chance at love, but perhaps in Persuasion she gives herself the happy ending she couldn't have in real life.

July 2009--The Master & Margarita

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by Mikhail Bulgakov

A brilliant satire, written in the 1930s but long suppressed, in which the Devil visits the Soviet Union and is chagrined to discover that no one believes in him. Bulgakov weaves wildly disparate threads--scathing social commentary, blasphemous theology, romance, and a Faustian drama of guilt and redemption--into a weird but somehow complete whole. Probably the most fantastic and challenging classic we've read, and one that seems ever more impressive as you look deeper into it.

June 2009--Eugenie Grandet

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by Honore de Balzac

Set in post-Napoleonic France, this is a straightforward, crisply told tale about a provincial miser and the suffering he visits on his family. Monsieur Grandet is a self-made millionaire but allows himself, his wife, and his daughter no luxuries. The daughter, a miraculously sweet and pious girl, naturally becomes the target of suitors looking to marry into the Grandet fortune. Unfortunately for them and herself, she falls for her decadent, spendthrift Parisian cousin, setting the stage for general disappointment and unhappiness. One of the two or three best known of the hundred or so novels that make up Balzac's great cycle, The Human Comedy, this is a grim but compelling look at the corrosive effect of the bourgeois values then taking hold in France.

May 2009--The House of Mirth

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by Edith Wharton

Lily Bart is beautiful, fashionable, refined, and well-mannered--but at twenty-nine, she is slightly long in the tooth for the New York marriage market of the early twentieth century. She can't bring herself to marry just for money, but she can't bring herself to marry just for love either. Despite the help of less conflicted friends--a plain but sweet cousin, an attractive lawyer who's not quite rich enough for Lily, a woman who makes a living guiding the nouveau riche into high society--her refusal to yield to reality draws her deeper and deeper into trouble. What's perhaps most remarkable about the novel is that Wharton makes this narcissistic character deeply sympathetic, and uses her to paint a devastating portrait of a heartless society, as seen from its central point--the intersection between love and money.

April 2009--Good-bye to All That

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by Robert Graves

Before he was a famous poet, translator, and novelist (the author of I, Claudius), Robert Graves was an infantry officer on the Western Front in World War I, and took part in some of the most horrific battles of the war. This memoir is one of the essential accounts of the conflict. But it's also an artful, understated masterpiece, full of irony and thoughtful digression; a poignant testament to the destruction of a generation and a way of life.

March 2009--The Bell Jar

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by Sylvia Plath

Few writers have so darkly glamorous a reputation as Sylvia Plath: young, brilliant, fiercely talented, beautiful, a little crazy, and ultimately a suicide for love. The cynical might say that her death inflated her reputation. It's been known to happen. But there's undeniable power in her dark, sometimes cryptic poetry. The Bell Jar, a short autobiographical novel published shortly before her death, has the same emotional intensity in a clearer, more accessible voice.

February 2009--Passing

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by Nella Larsen

If you could have a better life by pretending to be someone you're not, would you do it? That's one of the questions posed by this tense, elegant novella. As an African-American woman writing during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Nella Larsen struggled with the issue of racial identity--its value, its liabilities, its ironies and tragedies. In Passing, two childhood friends meet after many years. Both seem to be thriving, one within the black community, the other as the supposedly white wife of a white man. As their lives and their roles become entangled, both women are put at risk. It's a simple enough plot, handled so deftly and elliptically that the reader comes away not with pat answers, but with a real sense of the contradictions and dilemmas that faced such women.

January 2009--The Razor's Edge

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by Somerset Maugham

Novels that ponder the meaning of existence are inherently dangerous for their authors--once you've raised the question, you either have to answer it (not easy) or find some very artful way of evading it. In this tale of a young American whose World War I experiences lead him to reject love and success in favor of spiritual searching, Maugham moves smoothly in and out of his characters' lives, probing their motives and their choices. While there's little overt drama, the gradual unfolding of their full selves makes for an absorbing narrative, and if by the end we haven't learned the meaning of existence, we've at least learned something about the meaning of the search for meaning.

November 2008--The Warden

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by Anthony Trollope

Tradition and idealism clash in the first volume of the celebrated Barsetshire Chronicles, one of the great achievements of Victorian fiction. A young reformer attempts to shake up the comfortable cronyism of a provincial city's religious establishment, but his campaign is complicated by the fact that he's in love with the daughter of the cleric he's targeted. Trollope combines the wit of Jane Austen and the conscience of George Eliot to create a novel that's colorful, sweet, and wise.

October 2008--Catch-22

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by Joseph Heller

From page 247 of the American Heritage Dictionary (Second College Edition):

Catch-22, n., A difficult situation or problem whose seemingly alternative solutions are logically invalid.

You can make a case, I'm sure, for The Naked and the Dead or From Here to Eternity as the great American World War II novel, but neither of them has achieved proverbial status. This darkly comic tale of an American airman trying to use madness to opt out of the madness is an emphatic statement about the horrors of war and bureaucracy. Yossarian, the justifiably paranoid antihero of the story, is not a pacifist, and in fact he's a pretty formidable soldier when he heeds to be. He just insists on being treated as an individual with his own rights and desires, rather than a cog in a machine functioning for the benefit of a few. While aspects of Heller's critique may no longer seem fresh, it's only because so many people have repeated what he was among the first to say.

September 2008--Breakfast at Tiffany's

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Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.

A unique portrait of life in mid-century New York, as experienced by the charming, trendy, and slightly reprehensible Holly Golightly. The novel's narrator, a young writer who is one of Holly's many male admirers, never advances his own prospects very far, but he bears witness to a remarkable string of failed relationships and unfortunate incidents. Among other accomplishments, Holly fends off a loutish heir and a pitiful ex-husband, gets dangerously entangled with a mobster, and tries to settle down with a smooth-talking Brazilian diplomat. If it isn't always clear whether she's looking for love or just for cash, that may be because Holly doesn't know herself. But despite her fundamental coarseness and her questionable morals, she has a very American innocence and energy that make her irresistible. And if this doesn't sound quite like the character Audrey Hepburn played in the film, it's not--Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role.

August 2008-- Anna Karenina

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by Leo Tolstoy

If there is a "Greatest Novels" list that doesn't include Anna Karenina, we haven't seen it. Just as a love story, a dramatic tale of passion and adultery, it's rich and subtle, full of ecstasy and (more often) angst. But so much more is packed into its 800+ pages--a wealth of detail about 19th-century Russia, from its farms to its palaces; withering satire of society's hypocrisies; political and religious commentary, and even a second love affair, which ends more happily than that of the title character.

A few of the questions we pondered at our book club meeting:

Why did Tolstoy give Anna's husband and her lover the same first name?

Of the three characters in the central romantic triangle, which (if any) is portrayed most sympathetically?

After Anna's suicide, the book continues for another sixty pages. What do those final chapters accomplish, and is Levin's religious conversion presented effectively?

We learn very little in the novel about Anna's early life and her reasons for marrying her husband. How does this omission affect our understanding of her?

Why does Tolstoy relate one scene from the point of view of Laska, Levin's hunting dog?

July 2008--The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

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by Carson McCullers

A bleak, understated study of loneliness, racism, and family dysfunction in a small Southern town. Using the viewpoints of five isolated, painfully sensitive characters--a deaf mute, a would-be labor organizer, a restaurant owner, a black doctor, and a young girl with dreams of music and love--McCullers brilliantly unites the personal with the political. There is very little plot per se, but the delicate interplay between the characters, each with his or her own strengths and fatal flaws, and the gradually rising conflict between their hopes and their realities, make this an intriguing read.

June 2008--Cheri and The Last of Cheri

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by Colette

You can almost smell the powder and perfume in Collette’s charming novels of Belle Epoque Paris. She tells the tale of Lea, a middle-aged courtesan just beginning to see the fading of her renowned beauty, and Cheri, her shockingly young lover. Delicate as a flower, Cheri is petulant and spoiled, but still manages to charm everyone around him. When the time comes for Cheri to marry a woman his own age, Lea lets him go without argument, but the loss hits her harder than she will admit. In The Last of Cheri, the title character returns from WWI to a society that has moved on without him and longs again for the comfort of Lea, his former love. But she has comes to terms with the passing of time while Cheri cannot. Witty and poignant, these novels transport the reader to the eccentric, rose-colored world of the 1920s and into the heart of Colette's often deluded, but deeply affecting characters.

Two Years Already?

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It doesn't seem that long ago... but our June meeting (6/25, 7:30 p.m.) will be the second anniversary of the Classics I Forgot to Read Book Club. We've been visited by crazy people (imagine our disappointment when a very vocal participant announced that Wednesday nights really weren't very good for her), displaced by construction projects (but graciously taken in by Squat & Gobble), preempted by author signings (no hard feelings... and again, thanks to Squat & Gobble)... but mostly we've had great discussions about great books. We've brought in regular customers, old friends who don't even shop here, tourists passing through, and folks who just showed up to root for a book they loved.

One or two of our classics have been mildly disappointing. I guess I shouldn't name names. But others have been very pleasant surprises. I'll never again assume that Turgenev is turgid, or that Virginia Woolf is incomprehensible (cryptic, yes, but all the more meaningful for that.) We've read comic novels, mysteries, sci fi, horror, and a Babel Tower of nationalities--English, French, American, Czech, Russian, Colombian. Granted, there are a lot of bases we haven't touched yet... but give us another decade or two and we should have things fully under control. Fortunately we can read 'em faster than the authors can write 'em.

May 2008-- Strangers on a Train

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by Patricia Highsmith

While Patricia Highsmith has never been as revered in the States as she has in Europe for her meticulously crafted thrillers, her breakthrough novel, Strangers on a Train, enjoyed mainstream popularity when Alfred Hitchcock adapted it in 1951. The film, however, never plumbed the depths of the novel's deeply unsettling pathology or its homoeroticism. The plot is simple enough: Guy Haines, a young architect on his way up the ladder of success, is travelling back to his shrewish wife to beg for a divorce so he can marry the golden girl of his dreams. Charles Bruno is a crass, warped rich kid who loathes his father and unfortunately latches on to Guy during their train trip. In a drunken stupor, Bruno reveals his ingenious idea to exchange murders; Bruno will kill Guy's wife and Guy will murder Bruno's father. Without a discernible motive, the police would never be able to tie them to each other's crimes. Guy makes the mistake of writing off Bruno as a nut only to realize how serious he is when his wife turns up strangled. The novel grows more sinister as Guy is drawn inevitably into murder, both attracted and repelled by the evil that has seeped into his orderly life. Highsmith's portrait of a psychotic partnership that descends into chaos gets under your skin and stays there.

April 2008--The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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by Milan Kundera

Love, philosophy, and politics intersect in this innovative, challenging novel, set in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet era. Tomas, a doctor and prolific womanizer, falls unwillingly in love with the passionate (and monogamous) Tereza. Against the backdrop of the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Soviet invasion, their story intertwines with that of Sabina, one of Tomas's other lovers, and one of her other lovers, as the four of them struggle with the burdens and rewards of intimacy. But Kundera reminds us, in so many words, that all the characters are his inventions, mere aspects of his own personality; his riffs on Beethoven, Nietzsche, totalitarianism, and love make this a uniquely revealing experiment in fiction.

March 2008--North & South

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by Elizabeth Gaskell

Though it originally appeared as twenty two magazine installments in 1854-55, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South is more subtle than one might expect from a serialized Victorian novel. The protagonist, Margaret Hale, is forced to leave her beloved country home in the south of England and travel north with her mother and father to the city of Milton. Margaret’s shock at the effects of mechanized labour, poverty and sickness rings true, perhaps because Gaskell herself worked among the poor in Manchester. Yet Margaret also experiences genuine kindness and integrity among Milton’s inhabitants, and she is forced to overcome her own intolerance especially with regard to John Thornton, a local mill owner with whom she has fallen in love. More than a romance between two passionate, stubborn and intelligent individuals, Gaskell illustrates the conflict between the pastoral and the urban in the growing shadow of the industrial revolution.

--Corrie

February 2008--The Secret Agent

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by Joseph Conrad

With a character that walks around wearing a bomb ready to detonate any moment, I expected Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent to be primarily a political drama. And while Conrad assembles a group of so-called anarchists led by his main protagonist, Verloc, in 1890s London, they are the sorriest bunch of radicals one is likely to meet. We follow Verloc as he attempts to prove his mettle as a double agent, but it is his wife, Winnie, and her mentally handicapped brother, Stevie, who become the heart of the story. When Stevie is unwittingly drawn into Verloc’s terrorist plot, Winnie’s safe, domestic world is shattered. Conrad’s only novel set in London, it is laced with enough irony and plot turns to keep the reader curious until the final page.

--Corrie

January 2008--The Pursuit of Love

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by Nancy Mitford

This fondly satirical (and more or less autobiographical) view of aristocratic country life in England between the wars follows the misadventures of the Radlett family--a deranged, tyrannical, but highly amusing father; a vaguely concerned mother; and eight brilliant, spirited, fractious children. The early chapters are pure fun. But as Linda, the most glamorous of the Radlett girls, endures the trials of upper-class courtship and marriage (and divorce, and remarriage...), the tone darkens and the humor takes on a wicked edge. For Linda as for so many, the coming of the Second World War is a brutal upheaval, and the book's final twists and turns raise thought-provoking questions about love, loss, and family.

--Tom

November 2007--Brideshead Revisited

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by Evelyn Waugh

Told in flashback, Brideshead Revisited is a meditation on love and regret, class and religion. Containing some of the most beautiful prose in the English language, the early chapters where the narrator Charles Ryder recalls his days at Oxford exqusitely capture the languor and beauty of being young. It is there he meets his first love, the fragile and charismatic Sebastian Flyte, and is drawn into Sebastian’s enigmatic family, who will alter the course of Charles’ life. Those idyllic summers at Brideshead, Sebastian’s palatial family home, continue to haunt Charles as he watches his friend disintegrate over the years and eventually falls in love with his sister, Julia. A defiant atheist, Charles battles against the Flytes' Catholicism, which leads to the novel’s somewhat unlikely conclusion. Yet, Waugh’s portrait of lost youth and England between the wars shows a writer at the top of his form, and leaves an indelible impression.

--Corrie

October 2007--The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

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by Anne Bronte

Despite the praise heaped upon her more celebrated sisters, Emily and Charlotte, it was Anne Bronte who achieved the most success and caused the most scandal during her short lifetime. Tenant is considered one of the first feminist novels of its age. Its narrator, Gilbert Markham, falls wildly in love with the beautiful and aloof Helen Huntingdon, who in turn gives him her diary to reveal what she cannot tell him face to face: the story of how, trapped in a humiliating and abusive marriage, she defied all social convention and left with her young son to seek refuge in the decrepit Wildfell Hall. Painfully sincere at times, but also strangely modern, the novel gives us the remarkable Helen, a devoutly humble, but unapologetic heroine. To her critics who condemned the book for its fearless portrait of a tragic marriage, Anne simply said “I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral.”

--Corrie

September 2007--Fathers and Sons

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by Ivan Turgenev

For those who think of Russian literature as gloomy and oppressive, I would offer Fathers & Sons as the antidote. Turgenev’s novel of generational conflict in late 19th century Russia is most definitely political, but there is such generosity of warmth and humor in this novel, despite its tragic moments, that one wishes it were actually longer than its relatively short 200 pages. Episodic rather than plot-driven, the story revolves around two young men, home from university. There is Bazarov, the nihilist poseur, who believes only in science and yet still manages to fall in love with a beautiful, intelligent older woman even more terrified of romantic attachment than Bazarov himself. And there is Arkady, a more gentle soul, who idolizes his friend but still cannot reject his traditional, landowner father because he loves him too much. It is a masterpiece of social commentary, but the author has too much tenderness for his characters to allow them to become mere symbols. In fact, you will come to know them intimately just as the author intended, as Turgenev peels away their pretences to reveal the longing, fear and humanity beneath.

--Corrie

August 2007--Love in the Time of Cholera

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by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We didn't know we were so influential--Oprah's Book Club has now followed in our footsteps and made this book their latest selection. Garcia Marquez is known, of course, as one of the foremost adepts of magical realism, but here he sticks mostly to the factually plausible. The lifelong romantic triangle between the beautiful, elegant Fermina Daza and the two very different men who love her serves as a platform for a thoughtful yet passionate examination of love's many phases and aspects. Is love a kind of disease, and if so should one fight it or surrender to it? Is sexual passion the soul of love, or merely a pleasant fringe benefit? Is marriage the union of two hearts, or just a socially useful arrangement? Garcia Marquez is eloquent in posing the questions, but leaves ample room for the reader to make his or her own decisions.

--Tom

July 2007--The Quiet American

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by Graham Greene

A short, bittersweet masterpiece about a young American spy and the havoc his idealism creates in Vietnam. Set in Saigon in the waning days of the French colonial regime, and told by a world-weary, obstinately uninvolved British journalism, the novel follows an American spy's ham-handed attempts to create a Third Force in Vietnam, juxtaposed with the love triangle between him, the journalist, and a Vietnamese woman. Greene combines the tension of a thriller with the depth and weight of classical tragedy. The Quiet American is timeless in its exploration of the costs of emotional alienation. Sadly, it's also once again timely in its expose of thoughtless U.S. foreign policy (though the current crop of Quiet Americans seems less innocent than Greene's.)

--Tom

June 2007--Dracula

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by Bram Stoker

There's a lot to be said for going back to the source. Despite the ubiquity of vampire images in modern culture, Bram Stoker's Dracula is surprisingly fresh and intriguing. Count Dracula himself seems creepier--older and more alien--than a modern reader might expect, and the chases, stalkings, and bloody confrontations are artfully staged and vigorously executed. The book's team of heroes--a quartet of manly men aided by an aging intellectual and a clever woman--is delightfully Victorian in their virtue and grandiloquence. And the heart of the thing, the simultaneous fascination with and dread of violation, is remarkably powerful. One shudders, all these years later, as the heroes decide that if the heroine is herself turned into a vampire by Count Dracula, they will, unfortunately, have to drive a stake through her heart and chop off her head.

--Tom

May 2007--The Long Goodbye

2007-08-03T18:19:00.000-07:00

by Raymond Chandler

From its memorable first line ("The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox, he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers") to its haunting close, Chandler's masterpiece is full of tense confrontations, lyrical descriptions, startling action, and witty repartee. Private eye Philip Marlowe, investigating a murder in an exclusive Southern California community, finds that not only are the barbarians at the gate, they're inside as well. What raises The Long Goodbye from the status of genre fun to serious novel is its cynical (and yet strangely romantic) view of post-war America.

--Tom

April 2007--The Sheltering Sky

2007-08-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

by Paul Bowles

A husband and wife who are friends at best, a traveling companion whom neither of them much likes, the staggering landscape of the Sahara, the indifference of its inhabitants--hardly a promising combination. From the start, one guesses that things won't go well for Port and Kit, two Americans whose search for meaning pulls them apart as much as it unites them. North Africa, beautiful and squalid by turns, provides the perfect crucible for their personal alchemy, and their insipid friend Tunner is the catalyst for a startling cascade of misfortunes. While the reader may often be thankful that he or she isn't sharing the adventure, nonetheless this is a fascinating read: a beautifully told tragedy, and an unsettling exploration of loneliness and obsession.

--Tom

March 2007--To the Lighthouse

2007-08-01T21:16:00.000-07:00

by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse is arguably the most challenging of the classics we've read so far. With sparse dialogue and no conventional plot, the novel is set upon the Isle of Skye in the early 1900s and follows the fortunes of the Ramsey family and their friends. The discursive narrative allows the readers into the inner lives of the characters, shifting from child to mother to outsider and back again in just a few pages. Like James Joyce, Woolf explores consciousness and the passing of time with effortless artistry. Haunting and transcendent, this novel argues that only art will endure the impermanence of life.

--Corrie

February 2007--A Passage to India

2007-07-31T18:18:00.000-07:00

by E.M. Forster

In this masterful, understated novel, Forster teases out the layers of conflict and contradiction in British India. A young woman travels to the Raj to visit her fiance, a provincial official, only to discover that she has no desire whatever to marry him. When she claims to have been assaulted by an Indian friend, the fragile balance among races and religions is shattered, and all those involved find their loyalties, their friendships, and their beliefs put at hazard. As a political critique, the novel is beautifully balanced and unpolemical; as a psychological drama, it's complex and absorbing; as a portrait of a time and place, it's exquisite.

--Tom

January 2007--Sense & Sensibility

2007-07-30T21:15:00.000-07:00

by Jane Austen

Austen’s first novel may be less widely read than Pride & Prejudice, but is no less satisfying; perhaps even a bit more because its heroines are so endearingly flawed. When they are left without a home after the death of their father, Marianne & Elinor Dashwood must make a new life with their mother and younger sister in more modest surroundings. The tempestuous Marianne is a poetry-quoting free spirit who falls in love with the handsome, seemingly perfect Mr. Willoughby, while the wise and restrained Elinor becomes deeply attached to a man whose family disapproves of her inferior social status. Both sisters must navigate the expectations and obstacles of 19th-century England as they struggle to find their place in the world.

--Corrie

November 2006--Cold Comfort Farm

2007-07-29T18:06:00.000-07:00

by Stella Gibbons

In its sly parody of the literary excesses of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, this beloved comic jewel is considered a classic of modern British literature. It also features one of my favourite protagonists of all time. Flora Poste, a recently orphaned young woman in 1920s London, decides to go to live with her provincial relatives, the Starkadders. Flora sets out to change things for the better on their dilapidated farm, ruled by the reclusive Aunt Ada Doom, who has not left the house in twenty years. With her impeccable taste and common sense, Flora brings light and order to the chaos of Cold Comfort Farm and its odd but lovable inhabitants.

--Corrie

October 2006--Lady Chatterley's Lover

2007-07-28T18:12:00.000-07:00

by D.H. Lawrence

The scandal that has followed Lady Chatterley’s Lover over the years is as much for its depiction of a sexual relationship between an aristocratic married woman and her lower-class gamekeeper as for its supposed obscenity. Connie Chatterley is a restless young woman whose husband has been rendered impotent by paralysis. She falls into an unlikely affair that leads to a genuine passion as well as a personal awakening. Not merely a love story, this novel explores the conflicts of the cerebral with the physical, shame with desire, and industrialization with nature.

--Corrie

September 2006--Fahrenheit 451

2007-07-27T18:12:00.000-07:00

by Ray Bradbury

In a sterile, regimented future, the state's power is monstrous, people rely on projected images for emotional sustenance, and books are considered so subversive that "firemen" burn them. If Bradbury's vision seems a little unsurprising now, it's perhaps because so much of it has come true. Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 is a devastating critique of Cold War paranoia, conformism, and anti-intellectualism. It tells the story of one fireman who comes to question the accepted social reality and his own part in it. As he does, he discovers a hidden network of dissenters, dedicated to preserving the treasures of literature that society is bent on destroying.

--Tom

August 2006--The Age of Innocence

2007-07-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

by Edith Wharton

No other American author managed to create a more immediate sense of time and place than did Edith Wharton in her dissection of turn-of-the-century New York in The Age of Innocence. The reader feels as if she has been transported to the world of Newland Archer, an intelligent young man who is all ready to settle into a proper if soulless life, married to the lovely May Welland. But when he falls passionately in love with May’s socially ostracized cousin, Ellen, Newland comes to understand the unforgiving brutality of New York society. Wharton, who had a firsthand knowledge of the upper classes, has constructed a blistering social commentary and a love story that is difficult to forget.

--Corrie

July 2006--The Plague

2007-07-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

by Albert Camus

When dead rats begin to appear in the streets of the Algerian city of Oran, some of its citizens are upset, others indifferent. Dr. Bernard Rieux is one of the first to realize what's happening.
And as an epidemic of bubonic plague grips the city, again, reactions differ. Some are stoic, some are terrified, some search for a way to profit. Camus recounts the city's ordeal in an artfully simple, unemotional style, much the same way that Rieux goes about the frightful work of tending the sick and dying. In tracing the paths of his characters, Camus creates a surprisingly uplifting exemplar of everyday existentialism. One is alone; one sees suffering and death; how does one act? Camus, who fought in the French Resistance during World War II, knew a little about resisting evil, and shares it movingly in The Plague.

--Tom

June 2006--Lolita

2007-07-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

by Vladimir Nabokov

This is the classic that we chose to kick off our book club last year, with the hope it would provoke heated discussion--which it certainly did. Is Humbert Humbert a monster in his pursuit of the twelve-year-old “nymphet” Lolita? Or is he a victim of his own obsessions? How much of Lolita do we really know, since the story is told entirely from Humbert’s point of view? This is probably the most unusual and incendiary love story of the 20th century; Nabokov’s unsurpassed wit and style leave the reader dazzled. But underneath the beauty of the writing and his sardonic take on 1950s America lies a devastating tragedy. This tale of the theft of innocence and identity is as unsettling now as it was when it was first published fifty years ago.

--Corrie