Choose Your Book
Welcome ladies to the first post from the Femi-Literate book club!
Our first meeting will be on Thursday 2nd of July 8pm-10pm at Lindy and Jo’s place at 2 Violet St, Bronte
This is what we plan to do:
- we will meet at the pre-determined spot
- there we will talk about The Book we have just read
- we will drink wine
- we will eat cheese and other nice foods
- we will laugh and sometimes shriek
- we may talk a bit about men
- we will talk about other books we may have read
- we will talk about the next book we should all read
- we will go home happy
Vote – Read – Talk – Drink!
The main purpose of this post is to present you with some reading options for the First Book to be discussed at our July meeting.
Have a read through the options below and register your vote at the bottom.
Voting will close midday this coming Monday (1st June) – check the website for the result!
If you feel moved to post a comment at any time, you are encouraged to do so at the bottom of the page.
Your book options are (drumroll…)
Home
by Marilynne Robinson (325 pages)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Gilead” pens a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations.
‘So finely wrought as to make the work of her more productive contemporaries seem tawdry by comparison… The cadences of her prose have a resonant authority more like that of a great music rather than language. The effect is utterly haunting. The bad news is that is makes all other writing seem jejune for ages afterwards’ Jane Shilling, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
This is certainly a novel about faith and love. However, it is also a meditation on doubt and fear… There is both a subtlety and a simplicity about her most powerful themes. She asserts the elusiveness of perfection, the foolishness of sever self-judgement and the unavoidable necessity of having to suffer in order to love… The beauty of HOME is that it does not offer the counterfeit currency of certainty but proffers the under-valued coin of hope. That is its glory, too’ HERALD
Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls
by Danielle Wood (276 pages)
Taking her cues from the Brothers Grimm and Scheherazade, Rosie – a thoroughly modern Little Red Riding Hood – tell us her stories of love and desire, men and women, heartache and happiness.
Rosie knows better than most that some men are wolves at heart, that the snake in the grass is to be avoided, that women who live purely for their men are little better than plastic mannequins, and that fairy tale endings are, often, in the end, only fairy tales.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini (384 pages)
Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, who is thirty years her senior. Nearly two decades later, in a climate of growing unrest, tragedy strikes fifteen-year-old Laila, who must leave her home and join Mariam’s unhappy household. Laila and Mariam are to find consolation in each other, their friendship to grow as deep as the bond between sisters, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter.
With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs, life a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear, the women’s endurance tested beyond their worst imaginings.
Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. In the end it is love that triumphs over death and destruction. A Thousand Splendid Suns is an unforgettable portrait of a wounded country and a deeply moving story of family and friendship. It is a beautiful, heart-wrenching story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely bond and an indestructible love.
The Lieutenant
by Kate Grenville (320 pages)
As a boy, Daniel Rooke was always an outsider. At school, he learned to hide his clever thoughts from his cruel peers; at home, his parents were bemused by their bookish son. Daniel could only hope – against all the evidence – that he would one day find his place in life.
By 1788, Daniel has become Lieutenant Rooke, astronomer with the First Fleet as it lands on the unknown shores of New South Wales. As the newcomers struggle to establish a settlement for themselves and their cargo of convicts, and attempts are made to communicate with those who already inhabit this land, Rooke sets up his observatory to chart the stars. But the place where they have landed will prove far more revelatory than the night sky.
Out on his isolated point, Rooke comes to know the local Aboriginal people, and forges a remarkable connection with one child, which will change his life in ways he never imagined.
The New York Trilogy: City of Glass/Ghosts/The Locked Room
by Paul Auster (371 pages)
Comnbining dark humor, Hitchcock-like suspense, and film-noir prose, these three unique novels–united–form a powerful and thought-provoking puzzle.
Ostensibly presented as detective fiction, the stories of The New York Trilogy have been described as “meta-detective-fiction”, “anti-detective fiction”, “mysteries about mysteries”, a “strangely humorous working of the detective novel”, “very soft-boiled”, a “metamystery” and a “mixture between the detective story and the nouveau roman”.
This may classify Auster as a postmodern writer whose works are influenced by the “classical literary movement” of American postmodernism through the 1960s and 70s.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
by Lisa See (269 pages)
In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (”women’s writing”). Some girls were paired with laotongs, “old sames,” in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.
With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become “old sames” at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha (the book rather than the film obviously…), this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.