January -

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
By Carlos Eire

Noted religion scholar Carlos Eire's idyllic and privileged childhood in Havana came to an end in the wake of Castro's revolution. In this memoir, he reveals an exotic, magical Cuba and an eccentric family: his father - a municipal judge and art collector - believed that in a past life he had been King Louis XVI.

In 1962, Carlos Eire's world changed forever when he and his brother were among the 14,000 children airlifted off the island, their parents left behind. In chronicling his life before and after his arrival in America, Mr. Eire's personal story is also a meditation on loss and suffering, redemption and rebirth.


Host/Discussion Leader: Laura
Discussion Meeting: Sunday Jan 20th
Time/Location: TBD

Nuevo Nombre Para El Book Club?

Somehow the Haloween season has brought some inpiration to change our book club name to:

"Las Brujas Book Club."

Let's think and comment some reasons and/or other potential names and we will vote next meeting.

December -

La casa de los espíritus

By Isabel Allende

Esta historia narra la saga de una poderosa familia de terratenientes latinoamericanos. El despótico patriarca Esteban Trueba ha construido, con mano de hierro, un imperio privado que empieza a tambalearse a raíz del paso del tiempo y de un entorno social explosivo. Finalmente, la decadencia personal del patriarca arrastrará a los Trueba a una dolorosa desintegración. Atrapados en unas dramáticas relaciones familiares, los personajes de esta portentosa novela encarnan las tensiones sociales y espirituales de una época que abarca gran parte de este siglo.

Host/Discussion Leader: Amy
Discussion Meeting: Sunday Dec 2nd

Time/Location: TBD

October -

Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories
by Sandra Cisneros (192 pages)

Woman Hollering Creek" describes the lives of Mexicans who have crossed the border to live on ''el otro lado''— the other side—in the American Southwest. Cleofilas is trapped in a constricting, culturally assigned gender role due to her linguistic isolation, violent marriage, and poverty.

Weaving in allusions to women of Mexican history and folklore, making it clear that women across the centuries have suffered the same alienation and victimization, Cisneros presents a woman who struggles to prevail over romantic notions of domestic bliss by leaving her husband, thus awakening the power within her.

Host/Discussion Leader: Pati
Discussion Meeting: Sunday Oct 21st - 6pm

Time/Location: Pati's Home (Downtown Evanston)

September -

Demian

by Hermann Hesse (176 pages)

In Demian, one of the great writers of the twentieth century tells the dramatic story of young, docile Emil Sinclair's descent--led by precocious shoolmate Max Demian--into a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention and eventual awakening to selfhood.

Hesse presents a compelling portrait of an individual who finds within himself the means to resolve anxiety and inner conflicts and to perceive in the turmoil of his world the promise of a new, enlightened order.

Host/Discussion Leader: Gaby

Discussion Meeting: Sunday Sept 23rd
Time/Location: TBD

Summer Reading -

The Shadow of the Wind: A Novel

by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (496 pages)

Barcelona, 1945—A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and a boy mourningthe loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax's other books, it begins to dawn on him, to his horror, that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book the man has ever written. Soon the boy realizes that The Shadow of the Wind is as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget, for the mystery of its author's identity holds the key to an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love that someone will go to any lengths to keep secret.

May -

Como Agua Para Chocolate
Novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores, y Remedios Caseros.

- By Laura Esquivel (256 pages)

The novel follows the story of a young girl named Tita who longs her entire life for her lover, Pedro, but can never have him because of her domineering mother's traditional belief that the youngest daughter must not marry but instead care for her parents.

Tita is only able to express her passions and feelings through her cooking, which causes the people who taste it to experience what she feels.

Host/Discussion Leader: Katie
Discussion Meeting: Sunday June 24th, 6pm

Location: 1307 N. Greenview Ave. Apt. 3F

(Katie's place)

Book Club Picnic

Let's come out and play!

Now that the summer is around the corner we will have our first Book club picnic. This will not be a discussion meeting, but rather a get-together to catch-up and have some fun outdoors. Feel free to bring games, snacks, or anything.


Host: All of us :)
Meeting: Sunday May 20th (4pm).
Location: Humboldt Park
Contact: Fanny (773.606.2684)

March

A Long Way Gone:Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah (240 pages)
A gripping story of a child’s journey through hell and back.
There may be as many as 300,000 child soldiers, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s, in more than fifty conflicts around the world. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. He is one of the first to tell his story in his own words.
In A LONG WAY GONE, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a riveting story. At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. Eventually released by the army and sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, he struggled to regain his humanity and to reenter the world of civilians, who viewed him with fear and suspicion. This is, at last, a story of redemption and hope.

Host/Discussion Leader: Fanny (773.606.2684)

Discussion Meeting: Sunday April 15th (6pm).

Location: Letizia's Natural Bakery - 2144 West Division St.

(If weather allows we'll discuss Al Fresco)

February -

Innocent Erendira / La increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (192 pages)


This is the story of a twelve year old who accidentally sets fire to the house where she lives with her grandmother. The grandmother decides that Erendira must pay her back for the loss, and sells her into prostitution in order to make money. The story takes on the characteristics of a bizarre fairy tale, with the evil grandmother forcing her Cinderella-like granddaughter to sell her body. They travel all over for several years, with men lining up for miles to enjoy her. Meanwhile, Erendira falls in love. Her lover tries to poison the grandmother with arsenic in a birthday cake and to blow her up with a homemade bomb, but she survives all this and continues to dominate, until Erendira's lover finally stabs the grandmother to death. By the time he regains his composure, Erendira has fled alone.

Host/Discussion Leader: Gaby (773.401.4011)
Discussion Meeting: Sunday March 11th (6pm).
Location: Filter
1585 N. Milwaukee Ave.
(Blue Line Damen/North Stop)

January --

Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co.: A Road Novel with Literary License
Maria Amparo Escandon

From the author of Esperanza's Box of Saints (1999) comes this semi-surreal tale of Libertad Gonzalez, imprisoned in the Mexicali Penal Institute for Women. The jail has a decidedly looser environment than its name implies--one of the wealthier inmates has transformed the yard into a beachfront--and model prisoner Libertad decides to start a book club. No matter what book she chooses to read aloud from, though, she always has the same story to tell. In telenovela fashion, complete with cliff-hanging chapter endings, she tells her increasingly large audience a story about a former literature professor and fugitive from the Mexican government who becomes a truck driver in the U.S and his loving but controlling relationship with his daughter. Libertad's audience grows hooked on the story line (much like Escandon's will), chiming in with heated opinions on the twists and turns of the plot. It soon becomes apparent that the story is Libertad's own, and it has become her way of making sense of her life and her crime. This highly readable novel is a paean both to storytelling and to freedom