Literary Fiction

Anticipated Erotic Literature – My Education by Susan Choi

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Susan Choi

One of the most anticipated books of 2013 is My Education by Susan Choi.  Susan is the author of three previous novels.  Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award.   American Woman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and A Person of Interest was a finalist for the PEN/Faulker Award.

My Education is a steamy, but very well-written book.  It’s about Regina, a graduate student, who is warned about a notorious professor who sleeps with students.  She becomes his teaching assistant and, in a surprising twist, has an affair with the professor’s wife.  The story spans fifteen years of Regina’s misadventures that are both erotic and catastrophic.

This novel is Amazon’s best book of the month – July 2013.  It has received rave reviews from many sources, including Publishers Weekly, Kirkus,  the Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

Available at the Cheshire Library.

Note:  For sensitive readers, this book contains profanity, sexual references and overt sexual scenes.

Top Ten Classics For Book Clubs

/ Jenn / Leave a comment

Classics are classic for a reason. Whether it be because they have timeless stories, epic characters, or are just classically awful (and that does happen!), we continue to read the “classics”. They have something to tell us about ourselves, because really, we’re still the same people at heart that our ancestors were one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago.

I run the classics book club here at the Cheshire Public Library, and from the moment it started, it was an instant hit. To this day, almost three years later, it’s still my most popular book group. If you run a book club, consider adding in a classic once a year. Just about anyone can read Gone Girl (and let me tell you – they have, ad nauseum), but it’s more of a challenge to read classics. And you sound smarter, too.

So here’s a list of my top ten classics for book club:

  1. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. See my post about why this is my favorite book – it explains everything!
  2. Persuasion by Jane Austen. Some people will argue with me about this, but Persuasion is my favorite Jane Austen book. Austen is at her best in her final completed

    Persuasion by Jane Austen

    novel with a story of love lost and love regained. Second chances are possible in this memorable book. And while you’re at it, watch the recent Masterpiece Classics movie they did several years back. All I can say is: yummy!

  3. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. I read this book first in high school and thought it was *ok*. Both of my parents loved this book, and at the time, as a junior in high school, I couldn’t appreciate it. Having a little more life experience as a sophomore in college, re-reading it, I could finally see why they loved this book so much.
  4. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. During this 50th anniversary of Plath’s death, this book is especially appropriate for book clubs to entertain. I heard grumblings from some members about how “depressing” they thought this book was, but as a group we had excellent conversations on mental illness, gender roles, and the 1950’s Read my review of the book.
  5. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. I read this for the mystery book club I used to run here at the library and it

    The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

    would definitely count as a classic. If you’re looking for something that’s full of ambiance, setting, and great characters, Maltese Falcon is perfect. Short, easy to read, and a good mystery to boot. Hammett set the standard for noir fiction and mysteries. And how can you think of Sam Spade without thinking of Humphrey Bogart???

  6. My Antonia by Willa Cather. For everyone who has ever read or watched Little House on the Prairie before, you’ll love this book. My Antonia is beautiful in its descriptions of the people, the time, and especially the land. A majority of Americans can say that somewhere in their history is an immigrant story, and My Antonia speaks to our shared history on being newcomers in the “New World.”
  7. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Now, this is an ambitious book for a book club, not meant to be read over a period of just one month. You’d have to

    The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

    give this at least three months or meetings for everyone to get through this lengthy, but well worth-it epic. This is the ultimate read on revenge. Dumas weaves an intricate story that by the end, will leave you going, “Holy smokes!”. For being a book written in the 1800’s, The Count of Monte Cristo is readable, especially compared to some of his other works. Like the show Revenge? It’s the Count of Monte Cristo updated.

  8. 1984 by George Orwell. It’s been years (10!) since I read this for senior year summer reading in high school, and I can still remember the impact this book had on me. Who hasn’t heard of the term “Big Brother”? Yup, it came from 1984. Orwell was a man ahead of his time, correctly guessing how we as a society would develop, as well as the implications of Communism. This book has garnered a lot of press time recently with the whole Snowden/NSA episode, so if just for curiosity, this book is well worth your time.

    Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

  9. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte. Ok, so you’re probably wondering, “What about Wuthering Heights? Or Jane Eyre?”. Wuthering Heights, frankly, is terrible. And Jane Eyre is scores better, and would definitely make another “Top 10 Classics List” were I to write another. Agnes Grey is a gem, a diamond in the rough. So much time is spent reading her sister’s books, that Anne is often overlooked. And I would argue that she is the true heroine of the Bronte sisters. What takes Emily and Charlotte more than 400 pages to describe, Anne takes less than 300 hundred to tell a fabulous story of perseverance and responsibility.
  10. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Ok, so admittedly I’m not a Hemingway fan. He, along with so many other male writers of his time, writes women one dimensionally and usually with obvious disdain and dislike. However… of the three Hemingway books I’ve read is the most tolerable, and therefore, the only one I’d recommend. Some of the comments in classics club were that it was just a bunch of people sitting around, doing nothing with their lives. And in truth, yes, that’s what they were doing. However, I thought The Sun Also Rises had a lot more to say about the period and the consequences of World War I than anything else. With the 100th anniversary of WWI next year, The Sun Also Rises is a treatise on how war changes everything.

A Soldier’s Sacrifice : Memorial Day Reads

/ cheshirelib / Leave a comment

To many of us,  Memorial Day weekend has come to mean parades, barbecues, or maybe just the kickoff of summer. But the true meaning behind Memorial Day is to commemorate our military men & women who have lost their lives in service to America. After that barbecue, why not check out one of these books that pay tribute to those who’ve served?

Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley. The story behind the raising of the U.S. flag on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945, made famous by the photo on the cover. The men in the photo—three were killed during the battle—were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley’s father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: “The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn’t come back.” (This book was also adapted for film by Clint Eastwood.)

Jarhead : a Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battlesby Anthony Swofford. The author weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man.

Where Men Win Glory : the Odyssey of Pat Tillman by John Krakauer. Irrepressible individualist and iconoclast Pat Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract in May 2002 to enlist in the United States Army. Deeply troubled by 9/11, he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in Afghanistan. Biographer Krakauer draws on his journals and letters, interviews with his wife and friends, and conversations with the soldiers who served alongside him to tell this story.

The Things They Carried by Tom O’Brien. A fictional story of the war in Vietnam, The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. This critically acclaimed novel is a meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

Top Twenty Book Club Picks

/ Linda / 1 Comment

book clubBelow is a list of the top 20 favorite books for book clubs.  How many has your club read?

  1.  The Help – Kathryn Stockett
  2. Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen
  3. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer
  4. Sarah’s Key – Tatiana de Rosnay
  5. Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn
  6. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
  7. The Art of Racing In The Rain – Garth Stein
  8. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
  9. The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls
  10.  Hotel On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet – Jami Ford
  11.  Snow Flower and the Secret Fan – Lisa See
  12.  The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
  13.  The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern
  14.  Little Bee – Chris Cleave
  15.  Cutting for Stone – Abraham Verghese
  16.  Life of Pi – Yann Martel
  17.  The Memory Keepers Daughter – Kim Edwards
  18.  The Paris Wife – Paula McCain
  19.  Still Alice – Lisa Genova
  20.  The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

BOOK REVIEW: All You Could Ask For by Mike Greenberg

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Is it possible for the anchor of a highly popular ESPN sports show to write believable women’s fiction?  The answer is YES!

mike greenbergMike Greenberg joined ESPN in September 1996 as an anchor for ESPNEWS.  He is  usually seen each Monday evening on SportsCenter.   He was named co-host of Mike & Mike in the Morning (along with Mike Golic), a weekday morning drivetime show, in 1999.  He has various other responsibilities within ESPN that include play-by-play for Arena Football League games, various hosting duties, and TV specials.  He is a New York Times Best Sellers author and was nominated for a Quill Award.  He is married with two children, and lives in Connecticut.

All You Could Ask For is about three woman traveling different paths who become connected when each is diagnosed with cancer.  Brooke is happily married to her college sweetheart, Samantha finds out on the second day of her honeymoon that her husband is cheating on her, and Katherine is 40, single, and has a high-power job and salary in New York City.  The book is written in the first person and in two parts.  The first part sets the stage to allow you to learn about these three women.  Part two delves into how these women deal with their cancer diagnosis and life around them.

The format of the book may not be to everyone’s liking, and you probably think a man could not write such a sensitive story from a woman’s perspective, but the author delivers this novel with grace, humor, compassion and insight.

Mr. Greenberg was inspired to write this book after a friend of his wife, Stacy, was diagnosed with breast cancer.  He watched in amazement at the depth to which her circle of friends gathered around to support, love and nurture this woman.  Mike and Stacy have created a foundation called Heidi’s Angels to honor Stacy’s friend.  All of the profits from this book will be donated to The V Foundation for Cancer Research to combat breast cancer.