        
Ravenna Third Place Book Club
2003 Book Picks Our December pick was One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty Our November pick was Trail of Feathers: In Search of the Birdmen of Peru by Tahir Shah. Fascinated by the recurring theme of flight in Peruvian folklore, Shah sets out to discover whether the Incas really were able to "fly like birds" over the jungle. The cast of characters includes madmen and dreamers, sorcerers and con men, headhunters and scholars. A wild ride. Our October pick was Educating Waverley by Laura Kalpakian. Sent to a private girl's school on a remote island in Puget Sound, young Waverley Scott encounters a headmistress with a mysterious past and a passion for education. As WWII breaks out across Europe, the girls of Temple School learn hard lessons about love and loss. Our September pick was Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. In this book, the best selling author of Cod and The Basque History of the World turns his attention to salt, a common household item which provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. Our August pick was Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett. A collection of stories from the award-winning author of Voyage of the Narwhal. Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalayas to an Adirondack village, these stories join the world of fiction and science, and travel the territories of loss and unexpected discovery. Our July pick was Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, the hero is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past. Our June pick was Indu Sundaresan's The Twentieth Wife. A fictionalized account of the extra-ordinary 17th-century Empress of India, Mehrunissa, who led a life filled with passion and political intrigue as twentieth wife in the harem of the Emperor Jahagir. This is historical fiction at its best, with impeccable research into the world of Mughal India, breathed into life by Sundaresan. Our May Pick was Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. Readers across the country have been celebrating the reissue of this classic story after many years absence from bookstore shelves - "Uncork the champagne!" said one reviewer for The Los Angeles Times. Praised as a timeless, witty, lyrical account of one seventeen-year-old girl's coming-of-age as a member of an idiosyncratic English family, this book, written as a series of journal entries, has been enchanting readers since its publication in 1948. Our April Pick was Peter Hessler's memoir RIVER TOWN: TWO YEARS ON THE YANGTZE. Chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, this is a wonderful account of one young man's experience as a teacher of English with the Peace Corps in China's Sichuan province. In addition to the portrait Hessler paints of life in post-Cultural Revolution China, he offers an intriguing glimpse of how the American culture is perceived (and misperceived) by the Chinese. A fascinating read. Our March Book Group pick was ATONEMENT by Ian McEwan. Described as "a symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness," this work of fiction was short listed for the Booker Prize and was chosen for numerous "Best Books of the Year" lists from critics around the world. A master storyteller and a writer not afraid to bump the edges of the fiction genre, McEwan gives us a startling story of three interwoven lives and the one lie that echoes through those lives for decades, spanning the years of World War II and ending with the close of the 20th century. Our February 2003 pick was Ludmila Ulitskaya's boisterous and poignant novel, The Funeral Party. This novel won the Russian Booker Prize and its author, celebrated throughout Europe and Russia, is just beginning to be translated into English. The story revolves around a group of Russian immigrants in New York City gathered around the bedside of a dying friend. Our January 2003 Pick was BEL CANTO by Ann Patchett This absorbing novel, based on a real hostage-taking situation at the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, in 1997, has been the #1 best seller at Ravenna Third Place. |
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