Re: MAY Book Club

I didnt know ll dent was still open. I would do either them or dave's.

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If everyone is okay with it, I say lets meet at daves at 7. Let me know how many and I can make a reservation.

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I'll be there!

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Looking forward to it!!!

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I plan to be there -- but you neveer know what might happen at the last minute!!

So if I am not in L&D, I will be at Dave's!

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I will definitely be there!!

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I'll be there ~ even though I may not finish the book in time. I just picked it up yesterday




Here is the address in case anyone else needed to map quest it:

1050 Corporate Drive
Westbury 11590

Re: MAY Book Club

I've been trying to get out of a business trip all week but it looks like a no-go I'll be in Philly until Monday night so have a great time and I'm definitely in for June!!

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I used to live there. I love Philadelphia!
Have a good time~

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Suggestions for June: Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck
Amagansett - Mark Mills

Just Food for Thought...!

Message edited 5/21/2007 11:07:50 AM.

Re: MAY Book Club

Either one sounds good to me!

BTW, I will be late - around 7:20 or so, I am working until 7 p.m.

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Re: MAY Book Club

I thought these books looked interesting..

Water for Elephants: A Novel
by Sara Gruen
With its spotlight on elephants, Gruen's romantic page-turner hinges on the human-animal bonds that drove her debut and its sequel (Riding Lessons and Flying Changes)—but without the mass appeal that horses hold. The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression. When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures[...] He also falls in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers—a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for. Despite her often clichéd prose and the predictability of the story's ending, Gruen skillfully humanizes the midgets, drunks, rubes and freaks who populate her book.


Peace Like a River
by Leif Enger
To the list of great American child narrators that includes Huck Finn and Scout Finch, let us now add Reuben "Rube" Land, the asthmatic 11-year-old boy at the center of Leif Enger's remarkable first novel, Peace Like a River. Rube recalls the events of his childhood, in small-town Minnesota circa 1962, in a voice that perfectly captures the poetic, verbal stoicism of the northern Great Plains. "Here's what I saw," Rube warns his readers. "Here's how it went. Make of it what you will." And Rube sees plenty.
In the winter of his 11th year, two schoolyard bullies break into the Lands' house, and Rube's big brother Davy guns them down with a Winchester. Shortly after his arrest, Davy breaks out of jail and goes on the lam. Swede is Rube's younger sister, a precocious writer who crafts rhymed epics of romantic Western outlawry. Shortly after Davy's escape, Rube, Swede, and their father, a widowed school custodian, hit the road too, swerving this way and that across Minnesota and North Dakota, determined to find their lost outlaw Davy. In the end it's not Rube who haunts the reader's imagination, it's his father, torn between love for his outlaw son and the duty to do the right, honest thing. Enger finds something quietly heroic in the bred-in-the-bone Minnesota decency of America's heartland. Peace Like a River opens up a new chapter in Midwestern literature.

A Thread of Grace
by Mary Doria Russell
Mary Doria Russell's extraordinary and complex historical novel, A Thread of Grace, is the kind of book that you will find yourself haunted by long after finishing the last page. It opens with a group of Jewish refugees being escorted to safe-keeping by Italian soldiers. After making the arduous journey over a steep mountain pass, they are welcomed into a small village with warm food and clean beds. They have barely laid their heads to rest when news is received that Mussolini has just surrendered Italy to Hitler, putting them in danger yet again. This opening sequence is a grim foreshadowing of the heart-breaking journey these characters will experience in their struggle for survival.
The rich fictional narrative is woven through the factual military maneuvers and political games at the end of WW II, sharing a little-known story of a group of Italian citizens that sheltered more than 40,000 Jews from grueling work camp executions. Rather than the bleak and hopeless feeling that might be expected, the novel has the opposite effect; it reminds us that just as there will always be war, crime, and death, so too will there be good people who selflessly sacrifice themselves to ease the suffering of others. Perhaps best of all, Russell succinctly opens and closes her writing with short pieces that bookend the story with the force of a freight train. Her moving finale wraps up her narrative in the

Re: MAY Book Club

We read Thread of Grace....

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I DO want to read "Like Water For Elephants"

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OMG, I just re-read this to check the date and realized it is today. OMG. I am an idiot.

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How was it last night?? I was hoping to catch an earlier train back from Philly but I didn't get in until almost 9.

Also wanted to throw out there that Khaled Housseini (The Kite Runner)'s new book just came out - A Thousand Splendid Suns maybe for one of the summer book clubs. Here's the synopsis from the email B&N sent me:

A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller The Kite Runner, returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel of two victimized but courageous Afghan women. Born a generation apart, Mariam and Laila are brought jarringly together by war, loss, and fate. As they endure the ever-escalating dangers around them ? in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul ? they come to form a bond that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a heart-wrenching story of how, from a country's tortured heart, an indestructible love can grow.