The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Kathryn Stockett’s phenomenal debut novel The Help, set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, is told from the perspectives of three very different women. Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is fresh out of college and back at her parents’ home in Jackson, Mississippi. Her dream is to become a writer. Her mother’s dream is for her to find a well-to-do Southern boy from a good family with a healthy trust fund and get married. Bored with her friends and frustrated by the way they talk to and about their maids—the help—Skeeter dreams up an idea that could change life in Jackson for the better, but it is quite a dangerous proposition.

Next book club February 21st....Tricia Smith

Our next bookclub selection is : The Faithful Departed: the Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture by Philip F. Lawler
Our next meeting is.January 21, at 7pm @ Elizabeth Raymond's
Amazon link and view
Product Description - Faithful Departed traces the rise and fall of the Catholic Church in Boston, showing how the Massachusetts experience set a pattern that echoed throughout the United States as religious institutions lost influence in the face of rising secularization. The collapse of Catholicism in Boston became apparent with the explosion of the sex-abuse crisis. Lawler shows that the sex-abuse scandal was neither the cause nor the beginning of Catholicism's decline in Boston.

A tentative line up of hostesses for .... 2010
The dates can be changed by the hostess to fit her schedule.
January 24th .....Elizabeth Raymond ( Author Talk )
February 21st....Tricia Smith
March 21st ........Kelley Dyment
April 25th ..........Laurie Roy
May 23rd ..........Julie Bigelow
June 27th .........Kelly Bell

The Last Song - Nicholas Sparks

Our next bookclub selection is...."The Last Song" by Nicholas Sparks
Link/video

Questions for book club http://www.nicholassparks.com/LearnMore.asp?BookID=15

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell.

Next Book Club - Sunday, October 25, at 7pm, Kathy Leblanc, 68 Kendall Hill Rd.
Blink - It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

You could also say that it's a book about intuition, except that I don't like that word. In fact it never appears in "Blink." Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings--thoughts and impressions that don't seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It's thinking--its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with "thinking." In "Blink" I'm trying to understand those two seconds. What is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better? More ...
Link http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html
His new book Outliers Stories of Success

The Glass Castle - by Jeannette Walls

Our next bookclub selection is...."The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls
Our next meeting is.....September 20, at 7pm.
Our next hostess is.....Fran Cooley

Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis

Firefly Lane - by Kristin Hannah

Firefly Lane - by Kristin Hannah

More on Google Books http://books.google.com/?hl=en
Information from Powells
Publisher Comments: From the New York Times bestselling author of On Mystic Lake comes a powerful novel of love, loss, and the magic of friendship.
In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the "coolest girl in the world" moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all — beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn. Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her. They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer's end they've become TullyandKate. Inseparable. (continued)

Next Book Club @Mary's Sunday August 23rd @7:00 pm

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Synopsis - link
Genova gives us a hauntingly accurate portrayal of a young woman's descent into Alzheimer's Disease from the prime of life and the loftiest of cerebral heights.
Neuroscientist and debut novelist Genova mines years of experience in her field to craft a realistic portrait of early onset Alzheimer's disease. Alice Howland has a career not unlike Genova's-she's an esteemed psychology professor at Harvard, living a comfortable life in Cambridge with her husband, John, arguing about the usual (making quality time together, their daughter's move to L.A.) when the first symptoms of Alzheimer's begin to emerge. First, Alice can't find her Blackberry, then she becomes hopelessly disoriented in her own town. Alice is shocked to be diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's (she had suspected a brain tumor or menopause), after which her life begins steadily to unravel. She loses track of rooms in her home, resigns from Harvard and eventually cannot recognize her own children. The brutal facts of Alzheimer's are heartbreaking, and it's impossible not to feel for Alice and her loved ones, but Genova's prose style is clumsy and her dialogue heavy-handed. This novel will appeal to those dealing with the disease and may prove helpful, but beyond the heartbreaking record of illness there's little here to remember.



Next Book Club - Joyce Charpentier's - June 28th