April 30 - Choose books for next three months

Brunch and Books. Come with your ideas - great books you have read or want to read.

Egg and I (Leetsdale and Holly) at 10:30 am.

Jan 26-LOVE & EVIL; Feb 26-THE HELP; Mar 26-NEVER LET ME GO

January 26 - LOVE AND EVIL by anne rice (2010, 192 pages)
“I dreamed a dream of angels. I saw them and heard them in a great and endless galactic night. I saw the lights that were these angels, flying here and there, in streaks of irresistible brilliance . . . I felt love around me in this vast and seamless realm of sound and light . . . And something akin to sadness swept me up and mingled my very essence with the voices who sang, because the voices were singing of me . . . ”

Thus begins Anne Rice’s lyrical, haunting new novel, a metaphysical thriller of angels and assassins that once again summons up dark and dangerous worlds set in times past. Anne Rice takes us to other realms, this time to the world of fifteenth-century Rome, a city of domes and rooftop gardens, rising towers and crosses beneath an ever-shifting layer of clouds; familiar hills and tall pines . . . of Michelangelo and Raphael, of the Holy Inquisition and of Leo X, second son of a Medici, holding forth from the papal throne . . .
O’Dare soon discovers himself in the midst of dark plots and counterplots surrounded by a darker and more dangerous threat as the veil of ecclesiastical terror closes in around him. As he embarks on a powerful journey of atonement, O’Dare is reconnected with his own past, with matters light and dark, fierce and tender, with the promise of salvation and with a deeper and richer vision of love.

February 26 - THE HELP by kathryn stockett (2009, 464 pages)
Currently the One-Book-One-Denver selection
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed. In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women—mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends—view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.

March 26 - NEVER LET ME GO by kazuo Ishiguro (2005, 302 pages)
The elegance of Ishiguro's prose and the pitch-perfect voice of his narrator conspire to usher readers convincingly into the remembered world of Hailsham, a British boarding school for special students. The reminiscence is told from the point of view of Kathy H., now 31, whose evocation of the sheltered estate's sunlit rolling hills, guardians, dormitories, and sports pavilions is imbued with undercurrents of muted tension and foreboding that presage a darker reality. As an adult, Kathy re-engages in lapsed friendships with classmates Ruth and Tommy, examining the details of their shared youth and revisiting with growing awareness the clues and anecdotal evidence apparent to them even as youngsters that they were different from everyone outside. Ishiguro conveys with exquisite sensitivity the emotional texture of the threesome's relationship, their bonds of personal loyalty that overcome fractures of trust, the palpable boundaries of hope, and the human capacity for forgiveness.

Dec 22 - Choose books for next three months

No December book, but come meet with us to decide what books to read in the new year. Bring your ideas - books you've read, are reading, want to read. Some suggestions on the right of this page.

Sept 22: RAT. Oct 27: THE ACCIDENTAL. Nov 24: DEEP RIVER.

* * * * SELECTIONS FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS * * * *

Sept 22, discussing RAT by Fernanda Eberstadt
"Eberstadt is an expert, sensual, and at times truly breathtaking conjurer...(New York Observer).” With Rat, Eberstadt has found a new setting she knows well, the South of France, and the story she tells is original, powerful, and heartrending—about a child’s search for a father she has never known. Rat is fifteen-year-old Celia Bonnet, who lives with her unmarried mother, Vanessa, a free-spirited local beauty, in a farmhouse compound with other single-parent families in the Pyrénées Orientales, a gorgeous but forlorn Mediterranean no-man’s-land just north of the Spanish Catalan border. Rat is the result of a one-night encounter between Vanessa and Gillem, the son of a London model from the 1960s, who used to spend summers in the area and whom Rat has never spoken to or met. But when Vanessa’s current boyfriend starts preying on Morgan, the orphaned nine-year-old who is Rat’s adopted brother, she decides to take Morgan and run away to her father in London. As the novel unfolds, the two children undertake a difficult journey to find the man who might finally explain to Rat who she is and where she belongs. This is an enthralling novel with a luminous sense of place—both physical and emotional—and, at its core, a bold, engaging young heroine for our times.
Oct 27, discussing THE ACCIDENTAL
The Accidental is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family’s summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people. Each of the Smarts–parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid–encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to se their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith’s exhilarating facility with language, her narrative freedom, and her chromatic wordplay propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion. Ali Smith’s acclaimed novel won the prestigious Whitbread Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Nov 24, discussing DEEP RIVER by shusaku endo
A trip to India becomes a journey of discovery for a group of Japanese tourists playing out their "individual dramas of the soul." Isobe searches for his reincarnated wife, while Kiguchi relives the wartime horror that ultimately saved his life. Alienated by middle age, Mitsuko follows Otsu, a failed priest, to the holy city of Varanas, hoping that the murky Ganges holds the secret to the "difference between being alive and truly living." Looking for absolutes, each character confronts instead the moral ambiguity of India's complex culture, in which good and evil are seen as a whole as indifferent to distinction as the Ganges River, which washes the living and transports the dead. This novel is a fascinating study of cultural truths revealed through a rich and varied cast. Endo, one of Japan's leading writers, skillfully depicts the small details of life, investing them with universal significance.

Previous Books Discussed

Joe Eszterhas, Crossbearer

Dannielle Trussoni, Angelology

Anne Rice, Angel Time
Paul Wilkes, In Due Season
Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Anne Lamott, Grace Eventually
Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
Anne Rice, Called Out of Darkness
Piers Paul Read, The Death of a Pope
Veronica Chater, Waiting for the Apocalypse
Marilynne Robinson, Home
Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea
Ron Hansen, Exiles

John Grogan, The Longest Trip Home

Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

Fred Singer, Spiritually Dysfunctional

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

Julie Mars, A Month of Sundays
Charles Chaput, Render Unto Caesar
Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book
Niall Williams, John: A Novel
William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Anne Rice, The Road to Cana

Beryl Bissell, The Scent of God

Shusaku Endo, Silence

Douglas Preston, Blasphemy

Maile Meloy, Liars and Saints

Nick Arvin, Articles of War

Michael Flynn, Eifelheim

Annie Dillard, The Maytrees

Immaculee Ilibagiza, Left To Tell: Discovering God

Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Frederick Buechner, Godric

Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Française

Dean Koontz, Brother Odd

Sigrid Undset, The Axe

Morris West, The Devil's Advocate

Alice McDermott, After This

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter

G.K. Cherterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Clare Asquith, Shadowplay

Michael O’Brien, Sophia House
Evelyn Waugh, Helena

Anne Rice, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

and The Magician’s Nephew
Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
Michael Gruber, Valley of Bones
Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
Charlotte Bronte, Villette
Tim Powers, Declare
Peter Abelard, The History of My Misfortunes
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisted