So after several rounds of voting and some tie-breakers...the following books were chosen.
October 26th--Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lisa S. to host
November 30th--Half the Sky, Meta to host
December (no meeting)
January 25th--Les Miserables, Lisa C. to host
February 29th--Peter and the Starcatchers***, TBA
March 30th--Ella Minnow Pea, Cindy to host
April 27th--People of the Book, Celeste to host
Some that were almost chosen include: Unbroken, Born to Run, A People's History of the United States, The Chosen, and Civil Disobedience (want to read next year close to election time in the late summer or fall).
SUMMARIES:
Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss 209 pages
In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.
Half the Sky by Nikolas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, 320 pages
Two Pulitzer Prize winners expose the most pervasive human rights violation of our era—the oppression of women in the developing world—and tell us what we can do about it. An old Chinese proverb says “Women hold up half the sky.” Then why do the women of Africa and Asia persistently suffer human rights abuses? Continuing their focus on humanitarian issues, journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn take us to Africa and Asia, where many women live in profoundly dire circumstances—and some succeed against all odds.A Cambodian teenager is sold into sex slavery; a formerly illiterate woman becomes a surgeon in Addis Ababa. An Ethiopian woman is left for dead after a difficult birth; a gang rape victim galvanizes the international community and creates schools in Pakistan . An Afghan wife is beaten by her husband and mother-in-law; a former Peace Corps volunteer founds an organization that educates and campaigns for women’s rights in Senegal. Through their powerful true stories, the authors show that the key to progress lies in unleashing women’s potential, that change is possible, and that each of us can play a role in making it happen.
Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, 896 pages (abridged version)
One of the most widely read novels of all time. The story of the peasant Jean Valjean—unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert. As Valjean struggles to redeem his past, we are thrust into the teeming underworld of Paris with all its poverty, ignorance, and suffering. Just as cruel tyranny threatens to extinguish the last vestiges of hope, rebellion sweeps over the land like wildfire, igniting a vast struggle for the democratic ideal in France . A monumental classic dedicated to the oppressed, the underdog, the laborer, the rebel, the orphan, and the misunderstood, Les Misérables is a rich, emotional novel that captures nothing less than the entirety of life in nineteenth-century France .
Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson
In this impossible-to-put-down prequel to J.M. Barrie's classic, the secrets of how a wayward orphan became the magical Peter Pan are revealed. As is the secret of a magical substance that falls from the sky, thanks to Peter's new cohort, the inimitable Molly Aster. Readers will be spellbound by a rich cast of characters including a familiar pirate who calls himself Black Stache.
***NOTE This month we will also be talking about children's literature in general and how to choose great books for kids to read. Feel free to also read a favorite classic such as Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, or The Little Princess.
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, 208 pages
Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina . Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere. *pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet.
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, 372 pages
One of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images, the Sarajevo Haggadah survived centuries of purges and wars thanks to people of all faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. In the hands of Hanna Heath, an impassioned rare-book expert restoring the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo , it yields clues to its guardians and whereabouts: an insect wing, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair. While readers experience crucial moments in the book's history through a series of fascinating, fleshed-out short stories, Hanna pursues its secrets scientifically, and finds that some interests will still risk everything in the name of protecting this treasure. A complex love story, thrilling mystery, vivid history lesson, and celebration of the enduring power of ideas.
