Our book club's books Part I

Here is the list of our book club's books, from Gillian (posted here in January 2011)

2002/2003

Oct - Sula, Toni Morrison
Nov - Clara Callan, Richard B Wright
Jan - The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
Feb - The Map That Changed The World, Simon Winchester
Mar -The Russlander, Sandra Birdsell
Apr - Any book written by Anita Desai
May - Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks
Jun - Any Known Blood, Lawrence Hill


2003/2004

Oct - Unless, Carol Shields
Nov - Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
Jan - Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Feb - Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
Mar - Stanley Park, Timothy Taylor
Apr - A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
May - Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris
Jun - The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier

2004/2005

Oct - Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
Nov - Crow Lake, Mary Lawson
Jan - East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Feb - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
Mar - Missing Sarah, Maggie de Vries
Apr - Amanda Bright@home, Danielle Crittenden
May - A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews
Jun - The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

2005/2006

Oct- Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Abrom
Nov - The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
Jan - The Rebel Angels (or other book by author) Robertson Davies
Feb - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie
Mar - Atonement, Ian McEwan
Apr - The Last Days of Dogtown, Anita Diamant
May/Jun - One of Malcolm Gladwell's: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,
The Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference, or Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

2006/2007

Oct - Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
Dec - A Star Called Henry, Roddy Doyle
Jan - Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Feb - Sweetness in the Belly, Camilla Gibb
Mar - Cancelled
Apr - (2) The Birthhouse, Ami McKay, and Digging to America, Anne Tyler
May - The Consolations of Philosophy or How Proust can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton
Jun - Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland

2007/2008

Oct - Turn of the Screw, James Henry
Nov - Secret River, Kate Grenville
Jan - Enduring Love, Ian McEwan
Feb - Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Vincent Lam
Mar - Cancelled
Apr - Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See
May - Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Jun - Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards

2008/2009

Oct - My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult
Nov - The Lollipop Shoes, Joanne Harris
Jan - Love in the time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Feb - Cancelled
Mar - Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Apr - Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones
May - Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay
Jun - Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris

2009/2010

Oct - Blindness, Jose Saramago
Nov - The Accidental, Ali Smith
Jan - The Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz
Feb - Cancelled
Mar - Cancelled
Apr - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer
May - The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas
Jun - Exit Lines, Joan Barfoot

2010/2011

Oct - Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
Nov - If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
Jan - Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving
Feb - My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor

Still coming:

Infidel or Nomad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (recommend Infidel)
Lady Chatterly's Lover, DH Lawrence
Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Bishop's Man, Linden MacIntryre

Bear – A Defence of Reading

by Andrew Pyper, February 2013

From the article:

But we should read Bear. Not just the scholars or specialists or historians among us, but all Canadians who might secretly suspect that our literature chooses not to go into certain places. In Bear, it goes there alright.

Read the entire article at the PEN Canada website: Too Much to Bear? Appropriating the Inappropriate

 

There’s More to ‘Bear’ Than Bear Sex

There's More to Bear than Bear-sex, by Sara Bynoe

Excerpt from the article:  

 
The first thing you need to know about Marian Engel’s 1976 novel Bear is that it is about a woman who has sex with a giant bear. Not a metaphorical, figurative, concept-within-a-creature bear: a real, furry, wild brown bear. There’s more to it than that, but why bury the lead?

The second thing you need to know, however, is that this is not some fringe underground chapbook: it won the Governor General’s award—the highest Canadian honour for the literary arts—in a year in which the jury included Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, and Alice Munro.

Bear Re-imagined

From the publisher: http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/hazlitt/feature/bear-re-imagined

“Bear is a strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.” Those were the words of Margaret Atwood, in praise of Marian Engel’s Bear, perhaps the most celebrated work of fiction about, in part, a woman’s unquenchable lust for a bear.

We’re fond of Engel here at Hazlitt; it is the rare author who can turn the erotic coupling between Homo sapien and Ursus arctos into a best-selling winner of the Governor General’s Award for Literary Fiction

.

October Book: Bear, by Marian Engel

Oh, good! There is a lot of stuff about this month's book, Bear, on the internet. Fun times. Let's get started, shall we?

From CBC Q this past August. Click on "listen" to hear the 15 minute discussion: 

Bearotica: Why the 1976 novel 'Bear' is actually a good read

CBC's Canadian 100:  Bear

Here is the post that started all the recent hub-bub:  WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, CANADA?

And here is the cover that inspired the Imgur post: 

Other Books We Considered . . . .

The House Girl, Tara Conklin

The Weight of Blood, Laura McHugh

Brick Lane, Monica Ali

The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd

The Imposter Bride, Nancy Richler

the Town that Drowned, Riel Nason

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell

Adultery, Paulo Coelho

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

NW, Zadie Smith

Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan

The End of Your Life Bookclub, Will Schwalbe

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton

Orange is the New Black, Piper Kerman

The Opposite of Loneliness, Marina Keegan

Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O'Farrell

Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls (if you haven't already read Glass Castle)

Freeman, Leonard Pitts Jr

 

Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

Happy September! Here are this season's books

October 2014 -- Bear, by Marian Engel  

Note: there are several books called "Bear" or "the Bear". The only one we're reading is by Engel.






















November 2014 - either Joseph Boyden of these two Joseph Boyden books: Three Day Road, or The Orenda

January 2015 -- Ripper, Isabel Allende

June 2015 -- The Giver, Lois Lowry

The remaining months, the remaining books:

Three Souls, Jenny Chang 

When we read this depends on when Mary can schedule the author visit

















Fifth Business, Robertson Davies

Prisoner of Heaven, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

Book of Fate, Parinoush Saniee

The Children Act, Ian McEwan