March & April

2666
Roberto Bolaño
(Part 1-4)

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.


Leader/Host: Open
Discussion Meeting: Tuesday April 14th - 7pm
Location: Noble Tree Cafe (2444 N. Clark St. - Lincoln Park)
http://www.nobletreecoffee.com/

February '09 -

Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas (200 Pages)

In Memory Mambo, her first novel, Achy describes the life of Juani, a 25-year-old Cuban lesbian who has to deal with family, work, love, sex, and the weirdness of North American culture. Obejas's writing is sharp and mordantly funny. She understands perfectly how the romance of exile--from a homeland as well as from heterosexuality--and the mundane reality of everyday life balance one another. Memory Mambo is ultimately very moving in its depiction of what it means to find a new and finally safe sense of home.

Leader/Host: Diana

Discussion Meeting: Sunday Feb 8th (2pm tentatively)
Location: TBD.

January '09 -

Brunch Time!

Title: Various (from Secret Santa Selection).

Discussion Meeting: Sunday Jan 11th (11am)
Location: Sarah's place @ 5032 N. Kenmore #3N

(2 blocks from the red line Argyle stop).

December -

The Zookeeper's Wife

Diane Ackerman (368 pages)

A true story — as powerful as Schindler's List— in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.

When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw — and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen guests hid inside the Zabinskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. With her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors.

-

Leader/Host: Fanny
Discussion Meeting: Sunday Dec 14th (Time TBD)

Location: Lincoln Park Zoo - tentatively @ the conservatory to enjoy a nice "tropical" weather and maybe see the xmas lights.

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This will be a discussion/xmas celebration, so... bring lots of joy & the wraped book for secret book-worm-santa!!!
As planed on our last meeting each one of us picked a member.
For next meeting please bring a book for that person as a gift. A book (from your personal colection/new/used) that you think that person will enjoy/find iteresting.

Please note,there will be a price for most original wrapping ... so feel free to get creative!!! And Feel free to bring beberages & snacks.
- Bring a back-up book in case your 1st choice has already been read, you don't have to wrap the back-up.
- Our very first dicator-style-book-discussion will take place at our 1st discussion meeting in 2009. Here we will have 10-minute mini discussions in which each one of use will review/talk about the book we received as gift on the xmas meeting: was it a good match? would I recomend it to the rest of the group? etc etc..

November -

Veronika Decide Morir

By Paulo Coelho (240 pages).

Veronika es una joven que tiene los mismos sueños y deseos que cualquier persona de su edad. Es guapa, cuenta con un buen trabajo y no le faltan pretendientes. Su vida transcurre sin mayores sobresaltos, sin grandes alegrías ni grandes tristezas. Pero Veronika no es feliz. Por eso, la mañana del 11 de noviembre de 1997, Veronika decide morir. Sueños y fantasías. Deseo y muerte. Locura y pasión. Veronika, en su camino hacia la muerte, descubre que cada segundo de la existencia es una opción que tomamos entre la alternativa de sequir adelante o de abandonar. Veronika experimenta placeres nuevos y halla un nuevo sentido a la vida, un sentido que le había permanecido oculto hasta ahora, cuando ya es demasiado tarde para echarse atrás.

Discussion Meeting: Sunday November 16th - 1pm

Discussion leader/host: Iris
Location: NoFriction Café (2023-A N. California Ave)

October -

Drown

By Juno Diaz

The 10 tales in this intense debut collection plunge us into the emotional lives of people redefining their American identity. Narrated by adolescent Dominican males living in the struggling communities of the Dominican Republic, New York and New Jersey, these stories chronicle their outwardly cool but inwardly anguished attempts to recreate themselves in the midst of eroding family structures and their own burgeoning sexuality. The best pieces, such as "Aguantando" (to endure), "Negocios," "Edison, NJ" and the title story, portray young people waiting for transformation, waiting to belong. Their worlds generally consist of absent fathers, silent mothers and friends of questionable principles and morals. Diaz's restrained prose reveals their hopes only by implication. It's a style suited to these characters, who long for love but display little affection toward each other. Still, the author's compassion glides just below the surface, occasionally emerging in poetic passages of controlled lyricism, lending these stories a lasting resonance.

Discussion Mee9ting: Wednesday October 15th 6pm.

Discussion leader/host: Amy

Location: Piece Brewery & Pizzeria (1927 W. North Ave)

August -

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
("Tlon and Uqbar" & "Funes el memorioso")

First published in 1945, his Ficciones compressed several centuries' worth of philosophy and poetry into 17 tiny, unclassifiable pieces of prose. He offered up diabolical tigers, imaginary encyclopedias, ontological detective stories, and scholarly commentaries on nonexistent books, and in the process exploded all previous notions of genre.

Discussion Meeting: Saturday August 9th 6pm. Discussion leader/host: Sarah
Location: Sarah's place. 180 N. Jefferson #2302
Clinton green/pink line or 56 Milwaukee bus.

In addition to movies and pizza, we'll have the 2 year-aniversary contest.
Dress-up as a character of any of the readings for a chance to win a special prize.

July -

The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards (401 pages)
This stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. For motives he tells himself are good, he makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted story of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of love.




Water for Elephants: A Novel
by Sara Gruen (332 pages)
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.

Host/Discussion Leader: Open
Discussion Meeting: Sunday July 13th 11am.
Time/Location: Earwax Cafe in wicker park (1561 N Milwaukee Ave).

May -

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz (352 pages)

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuk — the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

Host/Discussion Leader: Amy
Discussion Meeting: Sunday May 18th
Location: El Sitio, 1255 N Pulaski (Humboldt Park)

Time: 2pm

April -

Eat, Pray, Love

by Elizabeth Gilbert

At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for "balancing." These destinations are all on the beaten track, but Gilbert's exuberance and her self-deprecating humor enliven the proceedings: recalling the first time she attempted to speak directly to God, she says, "It was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work.

.

Host/Discussion Leader: Fanny

Discussion Meeting: Sunday April 13th 2.30pm

Time/Location: Santullos Eatery
1943 W North Ave
(North/Milwaukee)

March -

The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger (518 pages)

Audrey Niffenegger's innovative debut is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity in his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.


Host/Discussion Leader: Fanny
Discussion Meeting: Sunday March 16th (tentatively)
Time/Location: To be determined

February -

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

by Marjane Satrapi

Originally published to wide critical acclaim in France, where it elicited comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.

Host/Discussion Leader: Sarah

Discussion Meeting: Sunday Feb 17th

Time/Location: 4.30pm @ Sarah's apt.

Followed by a Roller Derby evening.

http://www.windycityrollers.com/

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

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.