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Huzzah! The Jane Austen onslaught continues into 2008 with PBS's Masterpiece Theater set to air adaptations of all six of her novels, plus a new movie based on her life, entitled Miss Austen Regrets. At the link you can view a sneak preview plus sign up for updates. One could plan 4 months of book group around the shows....
I finally got to see Stardust tonight with my family and I just loved it. It was old-fashioned storytelling with wonderfully inventive touches. And there were so many great performances, from Michelle Pfeifer's evil witch, to Robert DeNiro's prancing pirate, and the two leads, Claire Danes and Charlie Cox were perfectly dreamy.
We went to see it at Chunky's which is one of these new theaters that is a combination movie theater and restaurant. You can order an entire meal (not to mention wine) and you watch the movie from the comfort of a huge chair that you can recline to your liking and move around for the best possible view. Waiters (who are fairly unobtrusive) come and check on you throughout the film to see if there's anything else you'd like (or you can buzz them). The entire experience is pretty fantastic. If there isn't one near where you live, I suggest you start lobbying for one.
Oh, and the preview before the film was for another Neil Gaiman project, Beowulf, due out in November and it looks like it's going to be great as well.
Heather McElhatton, author of Pretty Little Mistakes, first introduced in this blog here and then later here, is offering a signed book as a giveaway! To enter, email me at bookclubgirl AT gmail dot com.
If you haven't checked out her book or her site yet, do it now. This is the perfect book to round out your summer reading.
Mark your calendars for Sunday, September 16th, at 2 pm EDT. Philippa Gregory, author of book club staple The Other Boleyn Girl (also soon to be a major motion picture), will speak to a live audience in England, and her talk will be simultaneously broadcast online. Web "attendees" will be able to submit questions and interact with other fans and book clubs during the live event. Register to participate here.
To tide you over until then, watch this video of Gregory talking about the inspiration for her writing. Her The Boleyn Inheritance, which recounts the lives of Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Jane Rochford, is just out in paperback.
Reading Group Guide and Author Q&A for The Other Boleyn Girl.
Reading Group Guide and Author Q&A for The Boleyn Inheritance.
My book group met last night to discuss The Island by Victoria Hislop. We were a bit of a skeleton crew, what with vacations but a good time was had by all who were there. We also voted for next month's selection. The candidates were Evenings at Five by Gail Godwin, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick (our hostess had just spent a week on the Cape and saw the book everywhere), Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen and The House at Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Water for Elephants came out the winner, in large part because we know it's a reading group favorite that we've yet to read and we want to find out what it's all about. I'm very much looking forward to it.
Most everyone enjoyed The Island and we talked a lot about leprosy and the myths that surrounded it then and that continue to today. What with this book and Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, we've been learning a lot about ailments this year....We talked a lot about the wrenching scenes of children being pulled from their mothers and vice versa and how we couldn't even imagine having to go through something like that with our children.
Here are resources for our upcoming read of Water for Elephants:
Excerpt
Reviews
Sara Gruen's website
Reading Group Guide
Listen to Joyce Carol Oates talk about her reading group favorite The Falls, with The Guardian of London's John Mullan. And here is the reading guide.
For those of you who live in the southesast, you are no doubt familiar with the Books-A-Million bookstore chain. But if you happen to live elsewhere, don't let geography curtail you from taking advantage of a great resource and excellent taste. BAM, as we like to call it, has reading group reommendations on their site that can be browsed (and bought!) by book club girls no matter where you live.
This month's main selection is Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us, which they describe as "a novel [that] shows how the lives of the rich and the poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and vividly captures how the bonds of womanhood and pitted against the divisions of class and culture."
They also choose books along different themes. Their FaithPoint selection for this month is Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers, which is a "retelling of the biblical story of Gomer and Hosea as a tale set against teh romantic backdrop of the California Gold Rush."
Their Teen Book Club book is Bloom, by Elizabeth Scott, a novel about "a girl with decent grades, great friends, and a boyfirend every girl drools over. So why is she unhappy? It takes the arrival of Evan Kirkland in class for Lauren to figure out why."
And their Literary Book Club title for the month is Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a "stunning debut novel [that] unfolds as a syllabus for a college literature course including thirty-six chapters named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost and cluminating in a final exam."
I've added the BAM book club section to the resource list on the right so you can always easily find it.
The Kite Runner (reading guide) has again won the Penguin/Orange Broadband Reader's Prize for for the best reading group book of the year in the UK. The next top five picks, in order, were Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (reading guide), Ian McEwan's Saturday (reading guide), Andrea Levy's Small Island (reading guide), Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise (reading guide) and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife (reading guide). In addition to naming the top reading group books of the year, there is also a prize for the top reading groups. Check out the finalists. The winning group will be announced on 8/28.
Banned books week is Sept 29th to Oct 6th. If your group is meeting that week, why not pick a banned book to read? Many books on the list are also reading group favorites. If only the book banners knew what was going on in our reading groups--such dens of inequity. Here is a list of literature that can apparently, harm you (and may I just say how chilling it is to see how many books by African-Americans, Latinos and women are banned):
Paula by Isabel Allende -- reading guide
How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez -- reading guide
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou -- reading guide
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy
Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver -- reading guide
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver -- reading guide
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee -- reading guide
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy -- reading guide
Beloved, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijiie -- reading guide
Push! by Sapphire -- reading guide
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck -- reading guide
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan -- reading guide
Montana 1948 by Larry Watson -- reading guide
This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Find the complete list of banned and challenged books on the website of the ABFEE (American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression). To buy some of their cool FREADOM merch, visit their store.
It seems amazing that I haven't yet written about Jeanette Walls' compelling memoir The Glass Castle -- a book that has become a reading group staple. Her story of growing up in extreme poverty, struggling to get herself an education and then moving to NY where her parents end up following her and opt to continue to live as squatters is so memorable and highly discussable. While you are reading the book, you can't quite reconcile the world that her mother lives in, so I looked up this video as soon as I heard about it -- to see her and her mother interacting is so fascinating.
Here as well are some other resources for your group:
Reading Group Guide
Excerpt
Praise - I especially love this quote from Francine Prose, reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review: "Memoirs are our modern fairy tales.... The autobiographer is faced with the daunting challenge of attempting to understand, forgive, and even love the witch.... Readers will marvel at the intelligence and resilience of the Walls kids." What a great jumping-off point for a discussion.
For more insights like these from Prose, check out her Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them.
Today I found a cool site that reviews chick lit and women's fiction, with a fab name that's making me yearn for something sweet -- Candy Covered Books. And, they just happen to be linking to my review of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, so thanks for that. They gather reviews of books from all over and give them a "candy covered rating," "so you don't waste valuable time reading anything less than fabulous." I've added them to the book blog list, should be a great resource for picking books for your groups.
I hope you'll forgive the movie flavor of BCG of late, but there are just so many films on the way that are based on beloved reading group books. Coming this fall is the adaptation of The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. Here is the trailer, which completely brought me back to when I read this for my book group. I stayed up nearly all night to finish it and remember weeping quite a lot. The film looks like it's going to be incredible. It's directed by Marc Forster, who also helmed Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland. The script is adapted by Hosseini along with David Benioff, author of The 25th Hour, which was also adapted to film, and who also is married to Amanda Peet, of my favorite, late tv show, Studio 60. Here's the reading guide to Kite Runner, plan your book group excursion now.
With a star studded cast led by Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert DeNiro, Sienna Miller, Peter O'Toole and Claire Danes, the film adaptation of Stardust opens nationwide today and by all accounts, looks terrific.Purists can read the original trade paperback, movie tie-in buffs can pick up the less expensive mass market and teens can read their very own edition (just in package, not in content). A perfect way to banish this rainy day (at least in the northeast). View the trailer here. And here is Neil's great website.
Heather McElhatton has penned a novel that helps you answer just that. In Pretty Little Mistakes, McElhatton has constructed a "do-over novel." On the first page you graduate from high school and must decide whether or not you're going to go to college, or go live with your boyfriend. Depending on the choice you make, you're directed to different sections within the book and the choices continue from there. So it's a book with one beginning, and 150 possible endings. Much like life itself. What a great book to read in a book group, because so many of you will read different stories, with unique outcomes -- which will reveal a lot about each of your personalities! You can see Heather interviewed at a Borders event here and learn how she came to write the book. She also has a great website.
The blog Monsters & Critics (whose aim is "to provide users with a broad source of entertainment news and reviews as well as coverage of world news, technology, sport and science") is launching a book club, and their first pick is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The goal of the club is to help promote classic literature and they'll pick a new classic to feature each month. They're providing reading group questions and have partnered with us on this first one (since yes we do publish Tree) to give away some free copies to people who send them the most well thought-out questions of their own. Here is our reading group guide.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is available with a special P.S. section that includes photos from Betty Smith's daughter as well as a list of what was on Smith's bookshelf when she passed away. Here is an excerpt, and you can listen to an audio excerpt at the book link above.
Keeping the flow of all things Jane Austen coming, the poster for The Jane Austen Book Club has just been revealed. Quite bookish, I think. You can watch the trailer at my first post.
It looks like the tie-in edition will be on sale 8/28 from Plume.
In the meantime, book groups can pick up the regular edition now--read it for your September pick and then go and see the movie together when it comes out on 9/21! Here are some resources:
The reading group guide
Excerpt
Praise
In answer to the latest "controversy" that listening to your book club pick on audio is somehow cheating, I direct you to this response which is, I think, perfectly put.
Introducing a new novel in the Jane Austen genre with an incredibly fresh new take. In Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, Courtney Stone wakes up one morning to find herself, not in her apartment in modern-day LA, but smack dab in the middle of Jane Austen-era London. While she tries to shake off what she assumes to be a very long, very realistic dream (or what she fears could be a mental breakdown) Courtney must find her way in this world she's only read about. But her Austen addiction pays off as she recalls the manners and customs and is able to carry herself like a true Austen heroine. There are some unexpected and unpleasant discoveries--most involving shall we say, one's toilette, and her teeth may never survive the nasty tasting tooth powder. But there are benefits as well--not the least of which is that empire waists are very flattering--as many of us are learning with this summer's fashions.
I loved this book (my confession--I read this on submission and we were not ultimately lucky enough to publish it) and raced through it in one night, I was so eager to find out what would happen, would she stay in this world, would she be found out, could she stay in this world? And I found myself wondering what I would do. The scene where she spies and then semi stalks the real Jane Austen is terrific. There is a book website dedicated to all things Austen and here is a q &a with author Laurie Viera Rigler plus the reading guide.
If we can't all live in a Jane Austen novel I say the next best thing is to go see Becoming Jane opening on Friday and then grab this book, head for your favorite comfortable chair, and immerse yourself. And if, when you're done, you still need a little more, check out the Austen guy's perspective with Darcy's Story.
