2/08 Eat Pray Love

Live Lecture from Julia Flynn Siler

Julia gives a live lecture at this site. It is 46 minutes long and is fascinating. Put a real personal touch on what you've read (or fills you in on what the book is about if you haven't read it) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--46ZmSk9no Also you can take a "walking tour" of Napa Valley with Julia by clicking the link below! 9It is similar to the above link, only without the Q&A session http://www.juliaflynnsiler.com/siler-tour.htm And I'll let you read her Bio if you're interested!! http://www.juliaflynnsiler.com/siler-bio.htm

Good Reads

This month I read and loved Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, found it in Bookmarks Magazine, requested from WCL and finished it quickly........have recommended to a few male readers and last week it was #1 in the Twin Cities.
If I could figure out how to post the photo I'd try to......need a blog lesson.....love the idea and Thanks to Lisa for getting this going......Deb H.



This fine novel, translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born, was the surprise winner of the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and it really is a book to cherish and remember.
Out Stealing Horses eschews the knowing realism of much contemporary fiction in favour of the episodic ebb and flow of the "unending conversation" in the mind of the narrator, as he looks back upon a series of traumatic war-time incidents in the past, and in the face of approaching old age. The narrator, Trond, has returned, following the death of his second wife, to a remote settlement in Norway where he and his family spent their childhood holidays under German occupation. Not only do old faces re-appear, but he has to try to finally understand the familial and political betrayals of that bitter period of resistance and collaboration, and the breaking of families.
The detail of the daily round of wood-chopping, shopping, cooking, dog-walking and immersion in the life of the forest of an ageing widower is beautifully achieved. There is also the occasional drink with a neighbour, and a nightly reading of Dickens, the novelist whose work shaped the imagination of the young Norwegian who, like David Copperfield, desperately hoped to become the hero of his own life. That question overshadows the whole novel: did he achieve this heroic role?
Tragedy and epiphany recur in equal parts, though the deep forest interiors seem to absorb all of human hope and suffering. In his childhood Trond remembers the milkmaids singing the cows home every evening just as vividly as the presence of the Germans and the secretive night-time manoeuvres of local partisans. However, there was one terrible incident involving the accidental shooting of a child by its twin brother, that provides the fulcrum of the novel, and seems to instigate a pattern of family ruptures that marks the lives of nearly all of the male characters we meet. The narrator, like his father before him, and his best friend, at some point in his life walks out on his family, never to return or even maintain contact. Going missing seems to be the price men under stress have to pay in these taciturn, unforgiving times and places.
There is salvation in this world through physical labour. The scenes of harvesting and tree-felling (and the subsequent rolling of the trees into the river to be manoeuvred downstream to the sawmills) are imbued with a Tolstoyan love and deep nostalgia. If these days are happily foreshortened by the blue hour of dusk "when everything draws closer", so too are the final days and months of the narrator as he slowly untangles the mysteries of childhood; the threads of fragmented family and village relationships are gathered in again, and finally understood.
Don't be put off by the title and its unfortunate echoes of Cormac McCarthy's overly poeticised All the Pretty Horses, nor the jacket photograph of the author in full horse-whispering mode. Inside is the real thing, a novel artfully conveying a profound sense of time passing, the consolations of landscape, and a prose style and folded-in geology that makes every sentence do the work of ten.

Books on my"to read" list

What are you reading besides Chapter Chat picks?

Ok, as usual, I can't decide between my love of all things "Pirate" or all things "Time Travel"So here are the next two I want to read in my spare time...

1.

From Publishers WeeklyIn this light, engaging time-travel yarn, Levinson (The Silk Code) ponders the problem of saving someone who refuses to be saved, in this case Socrates, the Athenian philosopher condemned to death in a shameful moment for democracy. Inspired by a newly discovered dialogue of Socrates in which he's offered escape by time travel, Sierra Waters, classics grad student in 2042, joins her professor, Thomas O'Leary, in a quest to return to the past. Along the way, Sierra gains a lover, the charismatic Athenian leader, Alcibiades, as well as an enigmatic ally, the fabled inventor Heron of Alexandria. Plans are made, betrayed and relaid, all aiming to bring Socrates away before his execution. But the wily thinker, out to embarrass Athens, will have none of it. The plot threatens to fracture as the characters constantly move backward and forward in time, but by the surprise end,

Levinson (http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/2007/06/my-books-novels-and-nonfiction-and.html )succeeds in tying the main narrative together in a way that neatly satisfies the circularity inherent in time travel, whose paradoxes he links to Greek philosophy. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

2.
I think it is a biography!

The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson “Back in America, little was known of my life in Jamaica,” wrote Errol Flynn. In 1946, a storm-wrecked boat carrying Hollywood’s most famous swashbuckler shored up on the coast of Jamaica, and the glamorous world of 1940’s Hollywood converged with that of a small West Indian society. After a long and storied career on the silver screen, Errol Flynn spent much of the last years of his life on a small island off of Jamaica, throwing parties and sleeping with increasingly younger teenaged girls. Based on those years, The Pirate’s Daughter is the story of Ida, a local girl who has an affair with Flynn that produces a daughter, May, who meets her father but once. Spanning two generations of women whose destinies become inextricably linked with the matinee idol’s, this lively novel tells the provocative history of a vanished era, of uncommon kinships, compelling attachments, betrayal and atonement in a paradisal, tropical setting. As adept with Jamaican vernacular as she is at revealing the internal machinations of a fading and bloated matinee idol, Margaret Cezair-Thompson weaves a saga of a mother and daughter finding their way in a nation struggling to rise to the challenge of independence.

The House of Mondavi; the rise and fall of an American wine dynasty

So are you all loving this book? I will be done by Monday I think, if anyone wants it. Don't loose my Post-its! That's what my Chapter Chat name should be....Post-it Girl!!!

Review nickel and Dimed

January 3, 2008 Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich Picked by Nancy Mock Host: Deb HenryFacilitator: Deb's house was beatiful as usual, and the treats were wonderful. I think we all agreed that Barbara saw only one side of the Twin Cities. While affordable housing is hard to find, she wasn't here long enough to see many of the other 'programs' that are available to help. We all decided, living by yourself is a luxury and she should have found a roommate! Am I missng anything?

Chapter Chat Blog is Born!

Trust me gals, you will love this. We can post our reading lists, ideas, pictures. One stop for all things Chapter Chat. You will soon be addicted.