1999
at The Church Street
Book Group
Here you can find out about what we are reading right now, as well as what we will read for the rest of this year.


Also take a look at what we read in our first year 1998




We have set this up so that there are lots of links about the Authors and reviews of the books. Clicking on the Authors Name takes you to a selected interview or Biographical information, Clicking on the TITLE takes you to a selected review of that work and clicking on the COVER of the book will take you to a list of links on that work, author and also to some related info.





What We Are Reading Now

-

cover February

  • The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

    ********************
    The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by their own desires--from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.

    "This is the sleazy side of Hollywood, the wouldbes, the neverwases, the hopefuls, and the pretenders. . . . The shames, the deceits and the lies by which they all live are here. . . . It packs a knockout punch." -- Chicago Tribune

    -

    -


    March


    cover

  • Little Alters Everywhere by Rebecca Wells

    ********************
    A somewhat disjointed but appealing first novel--winner of the 1992 Western States Book Award for Fiction--set in the early 60's and 90's in small-town Louisiana. The story is narrated in turn by members of a curiously likable family--of terrible parents and unstrung kids--and by a pair of depressingly noble black servants. After a 1991 erotic dream tribute to Mama Viviane by daughter Siddalee, Part I begins with Siddalee, in 1963, telling of the Girl Scout camping weekend led by Mama and one of her ``Ya-Ya'' chums. (The Ya-Yas drink bourbon and branch water, play a kind of poker and shout and drink again, and call everyone ``Dahling'' like their idol Tallulah.) Meanwhile, those moments that ``came and went,'' the chances to be kind and set things right, are on the mind of Daddy, ``Big Shep,'' in his story. Both parents are awash in self- pity, feel threatened, and, to make things worse, Big Shep is not really one of the Old Boys, being Baptist (he talks to ``Old Podnah'' in the fields) and a farmer. Viviane feels no one knows what she really is and hates Siddalee's love of books: ``Life is not a book. You can't just walk away from it when it gets boring and you get tired.'' The parents drink away the silences within, while the children see all but don't really know all--until Part II and 1991, when they remember and examine their memories with hatred, bitterness, and, crazily, adult love. The servants disclose terrible cruelty; one son discloses sexual abuse; and another son pays witty tribute to the homeland and people in bitter cynicism and true affection. Wells's people pop with life, but it's quite a stretch from a sour mash Auntie Mame to an abusive Mommie Dearest without some fictional coherence; here, violence seems grafted rather than grown. But Wells's view of Mama Vivi and a Ya-Ya, bagged to the ears and rocketing down the road, is memorable.

    -

    -

    -


    April

    cover

  • Lewis Carroll

  • Alice in Wonderland &
    Through the Looking Glass     by Lewis Carroll

    ********************
    That Alice. When she's not traipsing after a rabbit into Wonderland, she's gallivanting off into the topsy-turvy world behind the drawing-room looking glass. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's masterful and zany sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she makes more eccentric acquaintances, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, and a somewhat grumpy Humpty Dumpty. Through a giant and elaborate chess game, Alice explores this odd country, where one must eat dry biscuits to quench thirst, and run like the wind to stay in one place. As in life, Alice must stay on her toes to learn the rules of this game. Through the Looking Glass immediately took its rightful place beside its partner on the shelf of eternal classics.

    -

    -

    -



    cover May

  • Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

    ********************
    Birds of America, especially its three final stories, will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.

    The New York Review of Books, Julian Barnes

    -

    -


    June


    cover

  • Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

    ********************
    Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatraites, liasons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing imagination, and he creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion.



    cover

    &



  • By the Light of My Father's Smile by Alice Walker

    • ********************
    It is the conceit of By the Light of My Father's Smile that angels have complete access to the consciousness of the living beings they observe. One of the book's very first scenes involves the ebullient lovemaking of Susannah and her partner, Pauline, reported in sweaty detail by the angelic paternal voyeur. Highly explicit, this set piece is a kind of guerrilla assault on our sensibilities, preparing us to receive Walker's urgent message--that sexuality and spirituality are inextricable, that denying one causes the other to atrophy as well. The blessings of fathers are, according to this canon, essential to the sexual flowering and spiritual maturity of their female offspring. It is in the loss, the conferring, and the claiming of these blessings that the novel finds its narrative thrust.

    By the Light of My Father's Smile is intended perhaps less as a story than as a parable presenting Walker's cosmology for the new millennium--one that synthesizes ancient and modern wisdoms in a way that's as artistically daring as it is politically correct: Sex is good, repression is evil.


    -

    • -

    July

    cover

  • Blindness
    by Jose Saramago

    ********************
    Excerpted from Blindness : A Novel by Jose Saramago and Giovanni Pontiero. Copyright © 1998. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
    The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called. The motorists kept an impatient foot on the clutch, leaving their cars at the ready, advancing, retreating like nervous horses that can sense the whiplash about to be inflicted. The pedestrians have just finished crossing but the sign allowing the cars to go will be delayed for some seconds, some people maintain that this delay, while apparently so insignificant, has only to be multiplied by the thousands of traffic lights that exist in the city and by the successive changes of their three colours to produce one of the most serious causes of traffic jams or bottlenecks, to use the more current term.

    The green light came on at last, the cars moved off briskly, but then it became clear that not all of them were equally quick off the mark. The car at the head of the middle lane has stopped, there must be some mechanical fault, a loose accelerator pedal, a gear lever that has stuck, problem with the suspension, jammed brakes, breakdown in the electric circuit, unless he has simply run out of gas, it would not be the first time such a thing has happened. The next group of pedestrians to gather at the crossing see the driver of the stationary car wave his arms behind the windshield, while the cars behind him frantically sound their horns. Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, first to one side then the other, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, not one word but three, as turns out to be the case when someone finally manages to open the door, I am blind.

    -

    -

    -



    cover August

  • A Beautiful Mind : A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. by Sylvia Nasar

    ********************
    Nasar, an economics correspondent for the New York Times, opens her book with the spectral image of John Forbes Nash Jr., who haunted the Princeton University campus where he had once been a promising graduate student. Nash, the son of conservative southern parents, rose rapidly through the ranks of equally brilliant mathematicians during the 1950s. Then, at the age of 31 and at the height of his career, Nash experienced the first of many breakdowns and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nasar attempts to write an ambitious biography. It is, on one level, an in-depth look at this mysterious figure and his milieu and, on another level, a meditation on the nature of genius and madness.

    -

    -


    September


    cover

  • Jane Eyre byCharlotte Bronte

    ********************
    With her 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte created one of the most unforgettable heroines of all time. Not only is this the classic story of unforgettable love, but it is also the memorable tale of one woman's fight to claim her independence and respect in a society that seems to have no place for her.

    -

    -

    -


    October

    cover

  • Neuromancer
     by William Gibson

    ********************
    William Gibson-Neuromancer - Neuromancer by William Gibson William Gibson's debut novel, is perhaps the most famous cyberpunk novel of all the time. It has won three major science fiction awards, and is regarded as one of the breakthrough novels of the eighties.

    -

    -

    -


    November


    cover by Arunndhati Roy

  • The God of Small Things

    • ********************
    In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry.

    -

    -

    -


    December

    cover

  • Harry Potter Trilogy
     by JK Rowlings

    ********************
    Harry Potter has lived a miserable life since his parents' death. Left to survive with his horrible aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, and their spoiled son Dudley, Harry has been forced to live in a spider-ridden closet under the stairs. But as his eleventh birthday approaches, all this is about to change. A mysterious letter arrives by owl messanger, inviting him to attend Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry is astonished to learn the truth about his parents - that they were wizards of the highest renown - and that he is destined to become one too. At Hogwarts, Harry finds friends and becomes an expert in Quidditch, an aerial sport played on broomsticks. But soon he becomes involved in a life-threatening struggle against the forces of darkness, and finds himself fighting for survival against those who would rather see him dead before he can come into his full powers.

    -

    -

    Y2K

    cover

  • At Home With the Marquis de Sade: A Life
    by Francine du Plessix Gray

    ********************
    Despite his manic promiscuities and a conspicuous gift forgenerating catastrophe, the Marquis de Sade was, according to Gray, a happily married man. Gray is a woman of already substantial reputation as a novelist and journalist who doesnt claim to offer fresh discoveries. However, she can claim to offer fresh insight. The angle of vision she develops in her version of his life is that of Sade's relationship with his devoted and loving and interestingly ordinary wife, Plagie, and their family. For his part, Sade seems also to have been devoted to Plagie, in his own odd way. Often prosecuted and publicly vilified for his sexual excesses (which are not nearly so bad as those he depicts in his fiction, but which remain sufficiently disgusting), Sade could always count on the support of his Plagie. Plagie's energetic husband will not win many admirers, but his life makes quite a story. Gray's sharp and vivid prose, together with her skills as a storyteller, give this biography its edge over the scholars whose works have preceded it. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates

    -

    -

    -




    1