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

December

Love in the Time of Cholera
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez (368 pages)

While delivering a message to her father, Florentino Ariza spots the barely pubescent Fermina Daza and immediately falls in love. What follows is the story of a passion that extends over 50 years, as Fermina is courted solely by letter, decisively rejects her suitor when he first speaks, and then joins the urbane Dr. Juvenal Urbino, much above her station, in a marriage initially loveless but ultimately remarkable in its strength. Florentino remains faithful in his fashion; paralleling the tale of the marriage is that of his numerous liaisons, all ultimately without the depth of love he again declares at Urbino's death. In substance and style not as fantastical, as mythologizing, as the previous works, this is a compelling exploration of the myths we make of love.

Host/Discussion Leader: Fanny
Discussion Meeting: Sunday January 7th (6pm).
Location: My Pi Pizzeria (2417 N Clark - Clark &Fullerton).

November

En el tiempo de las Mariposas.
Julia Alvarez (320 pages)

On a deserted mountain road in the Dominican Republic in 1960, three young women from a pious Catholic family were assassinated after visiting their husbands who had been jailed as suspected rebel leaders. The Mirabal sisters, thus martyred, became mythical figures in their country, where they are known as Las Mariposas (the butterflies). Three decades later, Julia Alvarez, daughter of the Dominican Republic and author of the acclaimed How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, brings the Mirabal sisters back to life in this extraordinary novel. Each of the sisters speaks in her own voice, beginning as young girls in the 1940s, their stories vary from hair ribbons to gun-running to prison torture. Their story is framed by their surviving sister who tells her own tale of suffering and dedication to the memory of Las Mariposas. This inspired portrait of four women is a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression.

Host/Discussion Leader: Katie
Film /Discussion Meeting: Sunday November 5th (Time & Place TBA).

October -

Sister Chicas
Lisa Alvarado, Ann Hagman Cardinal, Jane Alberdeston Coralin.
Sister Chicas tells the story of three young Latina friends in Chicago. They meet while working on the school paper, but during their weekly coffee dates they form a friendship that gives them the sisters they never had, and together they struggle with the normal stresses of growing up: parents, careers, boys, fashion, all while figuring out their identities and learning how to fit their rich cultural heritage into their lives as modern Norteamericanas.

Host/Discussion Leader: Amy
Discussion Meeting: Sunday October 8th (6:30pm).
Amy's apt. - 3019 W Belden in Logan Square
(three blocks from the blue line California stop)

Our 1st Discussion Title:

The House on Mango Street / La Casa en Mango Street
By Sandra Cisneros (128 pages)

A linked collection of forty-four short tales that evoke the circumstances and conditions of a Hispanic American ghetto in Chicago. The narrative is seen through the eyes of Esperanza Cordero, an adolescent girl coming of age. These concise and poetic tales also offer snapshots of the roles of women in this society. They uncover the dual forces that pull Esperanza to stay rooted in her cultural traditions on the one hand, and those that compel her to pursue a better way of life outside the barrio on the other.

Host/Discussion Leader: Patty
Discussion Meeting: September 10th (6:30pm).
Cafe Ambrosia
1620 Orrington Ave (3 blocks from the Davis stop going east)
Evanston, IL 60201

Grand Opening Call-out Meeting

Our very first meeting is coming soon!
Mark your calendars. We are having our first meeting on Sunday August 13th (5:00pm).
Location: The Bourgeois Pig Café
738 W. Fullerton Pkwy
Chicago, IL 60614

In the meantime take a look at the reading suggestions.
After introducing ourselves, we'll go through the ground rules and vote to select the current title.