August: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

For August we will be reading "The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards.

Excerpt from the author's website: 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 baby as her own. Compusively readable and deeply moving.

March 17: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

From the author:

Eight years ago, an old man told me a story that took my breath away. His name was Louie Zamperini, and from the day I first spoke to him, his almost incomprehensibly dramatic life was my obsession.

It was a horse--the subject of my first book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend--who led me to Louie. As I researched the Depression-era racehorse, I kept coming across stories about Louie, a 1930s track star who endured an amazing odyssey in World War II. I knew only a little about him then, but I couldn’t shake him from my mind. After I finished Seabiscuit, I tracked Louie down, called him and asked about his life. For the next hour, he had me transfixed.

Growing up in California in the 1920s, Louie was a hellraiser, stealing everything edible that he could carry, staging elaborate pranks, getting in fistfights, and bedeviling the local police. But as a teenager, he emerged as one of the greatest runners America had ever seen, competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he put on a sensational performance, crossed paths with Hitler, and stole a German flag right off the Reich Chancellery. He was preparing for the 1940 Olympics, and closing in on the fabled four-minute mile, when World War II began. Louie joined the Army Air Corps, becoming a bombardier. Stationed on Oahu, he survived harrowing combat, including an epic air battle that ended when his plane crash-landed, some six hundred holes in its fuselage and half the crew seriously wounded.

On a May afternoon in 1943, Louie took off on a search mission for a lost plane. Somewhere over the Pacific, the engines on his bomber failed. The plane plummeted into the sea, leaving Louie and two other men stranded on a tiny raft. Drifting for weeks and thousands of miles, they endured starvation and desperate thirst, sharks that leapt aboard the raft, trying to drag them off, a machine-gun attack from a Japanese bomber, and a typhoon with waves some forty feet high. At last, they spotted an island. As they rowed toward it, unbeknownst to them, a Japanese military boat was lurking nearby. Louie’s journey had only just begun.

That first conversation with Louie was a pivot point in my life. Fascinated by his experiences, and the mystery of how a man could overcome so much, I began a seven-year journey through his story. I found it in diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs; in the memories of his family and friends, fellow Olympians, former American airmen and Japanese veterans; in forgotten papers in archives as far-flung as Oslo and Canberra. Along the way, there were staggering surprises, and Louie’s unlikely, inspiring story came alive for me. It is a tale of daring, defiance, persistence, ingenuity, and the ferocious will of a man who refused to be broken.

The culmination of my journey is my new book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. I hope you are as spellbound by Louie’s life as I am.

February: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

For February, we will be reading "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte. I remember the first time I became aware of this book was in ninth grade when my best friend read it for a book report. She was so angry at turn of events that she threw the book across the room! This book is filled with characters that we love to hate.

Wuthering Heights was written by Emily Bronte. If you'd like, you can find an short and interesting biography of her here at The Victorian Web. Although she also published a book of poetry with her sisters, Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's only novel. She died at the age of 30 from tuberculosis. However, some of her letters and papers have been published and if you're interested, you can access them here.

2011 Book Club selections

January - Night by Elie Wiesel (Margie Harton's house 1/20)

February - Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (Shannon Garofalo’s house 2/17)

March - Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (Karen Rich's house 3/17)

April - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (Marisa Garofalo's house 4/21)

May - The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak (5/19)

June - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (6/16)

July - These is My Words by Nancy Turner (7/21)

August - The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (8/18)

September - Love, Lucy by Lucille Ball (9/15)

October - The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (10/20)

November - The Christmas Sweater by Glenn Beck (11/)

December - skip month? book exchange?

January 2011: Night by Elie Wiesel

Book: Night by Elie Wiesel
When: Jan. 20, 2011
Where: Margie H.'s home



"Haunting in its graphic simplicity, Elie Wiesel's Night documents one of the most infamous crimes against humanity in a startlingly personal way. In this autobiographical account, Elie Wiesel tells of his deportation to the concentration camps at the age of 15 and his struggle to survive. In this new translation by his wife and new preface by the author, Wiesel seeks and successfully adds greater poignancy to his already deeply moving piece of history." -about.com

About the author...Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, which is now part of Romania. He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945. Click here for more.