Have a great holiday season!

Thank you.

Let's try something different - please nominate books written by women! Only women. (Not trying to be sexist here, but we seem to have a glut of men.)

Thanks! Voting soon!
Best,
Cara

Yellow Jack

by Josh Russell

The Moviegoer was a close second. I have to say, Yellow Jack was my choice! I can't wait to start. The discussion will begin on October 17th. Happy Reading!

Thank you,
Cara

Thank you.

Here are the nominations for the October 17th Discussion:

[Voting is below book descriptions. You can only vote once. Voting will close Tuesday, September 13th. Thank you!]

Choice #1: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole’s hero is one, “huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans’ lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures” (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times). Ignatius J. Reilly is a flatulent frustrated scholar deeply learned in Medieval philosophy and American junk food, a brainy mammoth misfit imprisoned in a trashy world of Greyhound Buses and Doris Day movies. He is in violent revolt against the entire modern age.

A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece that outswifts Swift, whose poem gives the book its title. Set in New Orleans, the novel bursts into life on Canal Street under the clock at D. H. Holmes department store. The characters leave the city and literature forever marked by their presences — Ignatius and his mother; Mrs. Reilly’s matchmaking friend, Santa Battaglia; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levy Pants; inept, bemused Patrolman Mancuso; Jones, the jivecat in spaceage dark glasses. Juvenal, Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Swift, Dickens — their spirits are all here. Filled with unforgettable characters and unbelievable plot twists, shimmering with intelligence, and dazzling in its originality, Toole’s comic classic just keeps getting better year after year.

Choice #2: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
When The Moviegoer was first published in 1961, it won the National Book Award and established Walker Percy as one of the supplest and most deftly modulated new voices in Southern literature. In his portrait of a boyish New Orleans stockbroker wavering between ennui and the longing for redemption, Percy managed to combine Bourbon Street elegance with the spiritual urgency of a Russian novel.

On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is adrift. He occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from this real life. But one fateful Mardi gras, Binx embarks on a quest — a harebrained search for authenticity that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin, Kate, and sends him reeling through the gaudy chaos of the French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.

Choice #3: In the Land of Dreamy Dreams
by Ellen Gilchrist
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams is Ellen Gilchrist's fabled first collection of stories, the book that won her acclaim in 1981 and to which each of her subsequent works has been compared. Peopled largely with young southern females who chafe against the restrictions of their upper-class lives, these stories convey the humor and tragedy to be found wherever retreat into imagination is preferred over reality. Introduced here are Nora Jane Whittington, Rhoda Manning, and other recurring Gilchrist characters beloved for their failures, tenacity, and all-too-human hope in the face of frustrated love.

Choice #4: Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place.

In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.

Choice #5: Yellow Jack by Josh Russell
Yellow Jack is a ribald, picaresque trip through an 1840s New Orleans saturated with sex, drugs, death, and corruption. It is the story of Claude Marchand, an apprentice to Louis Daguerre, who discovers the magic art of photography when he hides a broken thermometer in a cabinet and finds that the mercury fumes bring out images etched by the sun in metal plates. After a falling-out with Daguerre, Marchand flees from Paris to New Orleans where he becomes the first daguerrotypist in America and he gets hopelessly entangled with both a voodoo-adept octoroon mistress and the erotically precocious daughter of a prominent New Orleans family. As the city is ravaged each summer by yellow fever (yellow jack), Marchand's miraculous art is tested by death, politics, and jealousy. Mercury drives him mad, but his work will nevertheless make him immortal, after a fashion.

Choice #6: Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone
Rheinhardt, a disk jockey and failed musician, rolls into New Orleans looking for work and another chance in life. What he finds is a woman physically and psychically damaged by the men in her past and a job that entangles him in a right-wing political movement. Peopled with civil rights activists, fanatical Christians, corrupt politicians, and demented Hollywood stars, A Hall of Mirrors vividly depicts the dark side of America that erupted in the sixties. To quote Wallace Stegner, "Stone writes like a bird, like an angel, like a circus barker, like a con man, like someone so high on pot that he is scraping his shoes on the stars."

[All of the book links lead to Powells, which has more information, including links to reviews.]

Voting has closed. Thank you!

Leave your nominations for the book you'd like to discuss in October in the comments on this post. At the end of the week, I will put up a poll for voting with four or five choices.

So give me your titles everyone!
Thanks,
Cara

Nancy
My Blog The Beekeeper's Granddaughter

I've posted the suggested reading schedule for DQ - but please know that since this is a BIG book with LOTS going on - feel free to post questions or links or discussion points any time along the way. I'll be posting some starting links in the next week or two.

For August 15th - Part I
For September 12th - Part II

Good luck! I look forward to reading with you!
Best,
Cara

This site is great and I'm loving every minute of surfing around and reading all the entries.

I am currently reading "Time Travelers Wife" and Laurie Notaro's "I Love Everyone (and other atrocious lies)" both are fantastic. I'm really looking forward to participating in this group.

Thanks for having me :-)

I'm always on the lookout for interesting books, and I look forward to participating in this group.

Vera's Crafty Blog is my Knitting/Crocheting Blog.

I will be reading the Edith Grossman translation - linked above - which has just been issued in paperback.

I'm thinking we'll meet a few times over the Summer - details to come! Hope you'll take the journey with me!

Best,
Cara

If you can read only one book this entire year, The Kite Runner needs to be that book. (I know that this is such a cliche saying, but I just know that you all would love this book as immensely as I have.)

Before purchasing the book, I was concerned about the setting. What do I know about Afghanistan? Nothing much. My ignorance didn't matter one bit when I started to read. Khaled Hosseini does a beautiful job of describing anything that the reader may not understand, but nothing in this book is difficult to grasp. This book isn't about the politics of Afghanistan. This book is about life. It's about social stigmas, childhood friends, betrayal, guilt, love, and passion.

This amazing story begins with a phone-call. It's an old friend calling our narrator, Amir, who is now 38. The old friend is giving Amir a chance to make himself good again, but he must go back to Afghanistan to do it. Our journey doesn't begin on an airplane, though. First, Amir brings us back in time to his childhood. He pulls us into a world foreign to our own, but into a life that we can relate to. We learn about Amir and his childhood friend Hassan, who loves Amir unconditionally. Hassan always takes up for Amir and protects him from childhood bullies even though he is a year younger than Amir. They are nearly inseparable, until one day when Amir's courage doesn't match up to his friend's. Their lives are changed forever.

The story comes full circle when Amir comes back around to the present time, and the story feels like it has only just begun. The author does not rush an ending, as I’ve seen many other authors do in the past. He takes his time and tells the story as only he knows how, in the most amazing way.

This book is a journey that I will never forget. I absolutely love Hosseini's writing style and the unforgettable imagery he used. I've never used the word 'powerful' to describe a book, but now I truely understand how powerful and moving a book can be. Hosseini's characters were more than well-rounded. They really came to life for me. This book has a resonance that will be with me for the rest of my life. If you can only read one book this year, let it be The Kite Runner.

This is a wonderful essay written by Hosseini regarding his own trip back to Afghanistan after 27 years. You can get a feel for his writing style and some familiarization with The Kite Runner, without any spoilers.

~atouria
www.yarnyoga.com

I'd love to read Don Quixote - it's the 400th Anniversary of the book and Edith Grossman's acclaimed translation is now in paperback. Or maybe East of Eden? Bleak House? The Brothers Karamazov?

Tell me what you think of the idea and we'll make this a classic summer. Leave a comment, or send me an email.

Oh and yeah, the May discussion of The Time Traveler's Wife has begun. Thank you!

I'm a knitter, and I love to read. I live in NYC, the borough of Queens, and escort my 8yo dd every weekday to Manhattan where she attends a public school for musically gifted children. I do a lot of knitting and reading on the subway.

I'm in the middle of reading L. M. Krauss' The Physics of Star Trek and recently finished Cod by Mark Kurlansky. Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife is in my pile of books to read, but alas, I doubt I'll be finished with it by Monday.

I keep a blog/website about my dd here: Kate's Progress
an on-line knitting album here: Patti's Knitting Album
and a knitting and personal blog here: The Dumping Ground

I'm looking forward to participating in discussions and reading new books with you all!