September  30th, 2009. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This novel, written by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, tells a story revolving around a murder in a small town, and the many families and individuals involved.

October  28th, 2009. Larry’s Party by Carole Shields

Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator’s perception, irony and tenderness. Carole Shields gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash back and forward seamlessly. As Larry journeys toward the millennium, adopting to society’s changing expectations of men, Shields’ elegant prose makes the trivial into the momentous. Among all the paradoxes and accidents of his existence, Larry moves through the spontaneity of the seventies, the blind enchantment of the eighties and the lean, mean nineties, completing at last his quiet, stubborn search of self. Larry’s odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy and faultless wisdom.

November 25th, 2009. Veronika Decides to Die by Paolo Coelho

This novel centers on Veronika, a woman in her mid twenties who appears to have everything: good looks, good job and a great life ahead of her. Yet, she decides to end her own life. She is unsuccessful, and awakens in a mental hospital where she learns that she has five days to live. it is revealed that the reason she attemped suicide was that she felt so constrained by the rules and expectations of “normal” society, that she had concluded that she had experienced all that life had to offer. With little left to lose, Veronika embarks on a journey where she begins to allow herself to experience relationships, emotions and what it means to live.

December 16th, 2009. The Uncommon Reader : A Novella by Alan Bennett

Briskly original and subversively funny, this novella sends Queen Elizabeth II into a mobile library van in pursuit of her runaway corgis and into the reflective, observant life of an avid reader. Guided by Norman, a former kitchen boy and enthusiast of gay authors, the queen gradually loses interest in her endless succession of official duties and learns the pleasure of such a common activity. Mistaken for the onset of senility, plots are hatched by the prime minister and the queen’s staff to dispatch Norman and discourage the queen’s preoccupation with books. Ultimately, it is her own growing self-awareness taht leads her away from reading and toward writing, with astonishing results.

January 27th, 2010. Tender is the Night by Scott F. Fitzgerald

In 1932, Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was hospitalized for schizophrenia in Baltimore, Maryland. The author rented the “la Paix” estate in the nearby suburb of Towson to work on this book, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wife Nicole, who is also one of his patients. It would be Fitzgerald’s first novel in nine years, and the last that he would complete. 

Regards,

Terri and Sharda