Every child deserves a good book.
Many of you may remember Seattle writer, Matt Ruff from when he joined us for a discussion of his novel and bookstore favorite, Set This House in Order.
As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival.
By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece.For a sneak peek at what the book club descussion may look like, take a look at the New York Times Book Review for Suite Francaise - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/books/review/09gray.html?ei=5088&en=efa79839c42f4089&ex=1302235200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print.
Any early readers out there care to comment?
In THREE CUPS OF TEA: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time, Greg Mortenson, and acclaimed journalist David Oliver Relin, recount the unlikely journey that led Mortenson from a failed attempt to climb Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain, to successfully building schools in some of the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. By replacing guns with pencils, rhetoric with reading, Mortenson combines his unique background with his intimate knowledge of the third-world to fight terrorism with books, not bombs, and successfully bring education and hope to remote villages in central Asia. THREE CUPS OF TEA is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world—one school at a time.
Greg Mortenson with Khanday community school students, Hushe Valley, Karakoram mountains, Pakistan December 2006. Image courtesy Greg Mortenson, Central Asia Institute.
In BOOMSDAY, Buckley hilariously envisions the nation's next great brouhaha-generational warfare between profligate Baby Boomers and younger Americans who don't want to be stuck paying the bill. 
One of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, died yesterday at the age of 84. In that ubiquitous question, “In all of history, what five people would you like to assemble for dinner,” Kurt Vonnegut would be at my table, with Voltaire and Swift and others. But between Voltaire’s French and Swift’s “ye olde(ish) English,” Vonnegut would be the only person I could actually speak with… and that would suit me just fine.
Nathan Glass, a curmudgeonly fifty-nine-year-old retired insurance salesman in recovery from lung cancer, returns to Brooklyn looking for a place to die. The dark premise of Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies belies the humor and surprising mirth Nathan finds upon moving back to his birthplace. Along with his literature-loving, cab-driving nephew Tom and a cast of characters including flamboyant ex-cons, married beauties, a silent nine-year-old, and a lip syncing drag queen, Nathan shows us the joys of modern urban life, the city as a refuge for lost souls, and the rescue a lonely man can feel when he embraces community.
