Monkey Gym Book Club

Hey Monkey Mommies,
Here are the voting results from the past few weeks:

Jan. - Any Bitter Thing
Colleen- discussion, Sandy- snacks

Feb.- The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Jenny- discussion, Kendra- snacks

Mar.- What the Body Remembers
Jennifer- discussion, Dawn- snacks

April- Capone Movie Night- Kristi

As you can see, we're going back to sharing hosting/discussion responsibilities.

Friday was great! We all enjoyed discussing The Tender Bar. Don't forget to vote on where we will be meeting in December...Monkey Gym (Thu, Dec 8 @ 4:00-5:30) or Ciao (Tues, Dec 5 @ 7:00 OR Thu, Dec 7 @7:00). Atonement is the book for December.

Happy reading!

Posted by Stacy at 5:47 AM | Permalink | Comments

We have decided not to do a list for the entire year at this time. Here are some titles that were discussed for possible future readings. If you have a chance, Google some of them and leave a comment with your opinions.

The Thirteenth Tale
Any Bitter Thing
Memory Keeper's Daughter
Water for Elephants
Angel's Rest by Charles Davis
What the Body Remembers
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks

Thanks!
Stacy

Posted by Stacy at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

Here is our book list for 2006:


Feb-- The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth
Mar-- The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
Apr-- Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchet
May-- Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
Jun-- Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landviks
Jul-- Shutterbabe by Deborah Copaken
Aug-- Lucia, Lucia by Adriana Trigiani
Sept-- The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
Oct-- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Nov-- The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer
Dec-- Atonement by Ian McEwan

Thank you all for your input, suggestions and votes.
Let's read!

Posted by Stacy at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments

Dear Mommy Readers,

Welcome to our blog!

Below is a collection of all the books submitted to next year's book club list. Please read through the reviews and choose 3 that you would like to see make the list. Email those three choices to me at stacydarwin@bellsouth.net . Hopefully, we can have the list together by December so Santa can bring us some books!

Thanks in advance,
Stacy

Posted by Stacy at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments

It begins with the sudden revelation of astonishing secrets - secrets that have shaped the personalities and fates of three siblings, and now threaten to tear them apart. In author Elizabeth Berg's new novel, unearthed truths force one seemingly ordinary family to reexamine their disparate lives and to ask themselves: Is it too late to mend the hurts of the past?" Laura Bartone anticipates her annual family reunion in Minnesota with a mixture of excitement and wariness. Yet this year's gathering will prove to be much more trying than either she or her siblings imagined. As soon as she arrives, Laura realizes that something is not right with her sister. Forever wrapped up in events of long ago, Caroline is the family's restless black sheep. When Caroline confronts Laura and their brother, Steve, with devastating allegations about their mother, the three have a difficult time reconciling their varying experiences in the same house. But a sudden misfortune will lead them all to face the past, their own culpability, and their common need for love and forgiveness. (fiction, 230 pgs)

Posted by Stacy at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments

Click here to see the books being considered!

Posted by Stacy at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments

In 1987, as a young lawyer, Colby took as his first case what appeared to be a simple probate issue--guardianship rights of the parents of a young woman who was in a persistent vegetative state after being severely injured in a car accident. Because the Cruzans wanted to remove their daughter's feeding tube, the case generated a firestorm of publicity and protests from right-to-lifers. Drawing on the taped recollections of Cruzan's father and his own records, Colby chronicles the stark human drama of a family forced to live its most intimate moments in the courts and the media. He tracks the case from its beginning in probate court in a small town in Missouri to the U.S. Supreme Court. After three years of litigation and seven years spent in a vegetative state, Cruzan was finally permitted to die. This is a truly riveting look at the case that sharpened public debate about the medical and legal issues surrounding brain death and the right to die with dignity.

Posted by Stacy at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots.
Without the demands of the world to shape their days, life on the inside becomes more beautiful than anything they had ever known before. At once riveting and impassioned, the narrative becomes a moving exploration of how people communicate when music is the only common language. Friendship, compassion, and the chance for great love lead the characters to forget the real danger that has been set in motion and cannot be stopped.

Posted by Stacy at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments

"What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when the person you promise to love and to honor for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In Truth & Beauty, her first work of nonfiction, Ann Patchett shines a light on the world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together." "Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work was. In her memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, the years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then the endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long, cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this book shows us what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined." This is a book about loving a person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and about being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.

Posted by Stacy at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors the book received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

Posted by Stacy at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments

Ursula Hegi draws parallels between groups of outsiders in this dramatic audiobook set in Germany. Trudi Montag, the town librarian, feels dissociated from society because she is a dwarf. In her role as librarian, Trudi meticulously archives secrets, stories, and history, all of which become her source of power when the townspeople allow Jews to be mistreated during World War II.

Posted by Stacy at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments

The Vision of Emma Blau is the luminous epic of a bicultural family filled with passion and aspirations, tragedy and redemption. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Stefan Blau, whom readers will remember from Stones from the River, flees Burgdorf, a small town in Germany, and comes to America in search of the vision he has dreamed of every night. The novel closes nearly a century later with Stefan's granddaughter, Emma, and the legacy of his dream: the Wasserburg, a once-grand apartment house filled with the hidden truths of its inhabitants both past and present. Ursula Hegi creates a fascinating picture of immigrants in America: their dreams and disappointments, the challenges of assimilation, the frailty of language and its transcendence, the love that bonds generations and the cultural wedges that drive them apart.

Posted by Stacy at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

Set in the glittering, vibrant New York City of 1950, Lucia, Lucia is the enthralling story of a passionate, determined young woman whose decision to follow her heart changes her life forever.Lucia Sartori is the beautiful twenty-five-year-old daughter of a prosperous Italian grocer in Greenwich Village. The postwar boom is ripe with opportunities for talented girls with ambition, and Lucia becomes an apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at chic B. Altman’s department store on Fifth Avenue. Engaged to her childhood sweetheart, the steadfast Dante DeMartino, Lucia is torn when she meets a handsome stranger who promises a life of uptown luxury that career girls like her only read about in the society pages. Forced to choose between duty to her family and her own dreams, Lucia finds herself in the midst of a sizzling scandal in which secrets are revealed, her beloved career is jeopardized, and the Sartoris’ honor is tested.Lucia is surrounded by richly drawn New York characters, including her best friend, the quick-witted fashion protégé Ruth Kaspian; their boss, Delmarr, B. Altman’s head designer and glamorous man-about-town; her devoted brothers, Roberto, Orlando, Angelo, and Exodus, self-appointed protectors of the jewel of the family; and her doting father, Antonio. Filled with the warmth and humor that have earned Adriana Trigiani hundreds of thousands of devoted readers with her Big Stone Gap trilogy, Lucia, Lucia also bursts with a New York sensibility that shows the depth and range of this beloved author. As richly detailed as the couture garments Lucia sews, as emotional as the bonds in her big Italian family, it is the story of one womanwho believes that in a world brimming with so much promise, she can—and should be able to—have it all.

Posted by Stacy at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. Cops and poets, bookies and soldiers, movie stars and stumblebums, all sorts of men gathered in the bar to tell their stories and forget their cares. The alphas along the bar—including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler—took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys—from his grandfather's tumbledown house to the hallowed towers and spires of Yale; from his absurd stint selling housewares at Lord & Taylor to his dream job at the New York Times, which became a nightmare when he found himself a faulty cog in a vast machine. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak--and eventually from reality. In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys.

Posted by Stacy at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments

In The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger tells a touching love story with a new twist. Henry DeTamble is a librarian who suffers from a genetic disorder that causes him to shift backward and forward through time. Without a moment's notice, he disappears, leaving behind his clothes and everything else, and arrives naked at another time in his life. Sometimes he even meets a different version of himself. He discovers that he has met Clare Abshire since she was a young girl, making several visits with her throughout her life. Clare falls in love with a man who can't control when he comes and goes. Far from being a science fiction novel, Audrey Niffenegger uses the time travel device as a way of drawing out her characters who want to overcome all obstacles in their love. Receiving glowing reviews, the Denver Post says, "Niffenegger's beautiful prose and sure-handed way with character development lifts The Time Traveler's Wife beyond the realm of romance potboilers and into the mainstream of literature that will last." This is one of our favorite books, a highly recommended read.

Posted by Stacy at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments

Atonement is set in 1935, when 13-year-old Briony Tallis is a girl on the cusp of womanhood. Based on events she sees but doesn't quite understand, she becomes the reason an innocent man, (Robbie, her older sister's beau) is convicted of a crime that occurred on her family's estate. Years later during World War II, Briony is trying to atone for her guilt by working as a nurse tending to the mountainous piles of wounded that are arriving from Dunkirk, where Robbie himself is fighting. This is the faint outline of a novel about childhood, love, and war by acclaimed British novelist Ian McEwan that has garnered high praise from all quarters. The New York Times calls Atonement "his most complete and compassionate work to date."

Posted by Stacy at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments

When Mary Boleyn comes to court as an innocent girl of fourteen, she catches the eye of Henry VIII. Dazzled by the king, Mary falls in love with both her golden prince and her growing role as unofficial queen. However, she soon realizes just how much she is a pawn in her family’s ambitious plots as the king’s interest begins to wane and she is forced to step aside for her best friend and rival: her sister, Anne. Then Mary knows that she must defy her family and her king, and take her fate into her own hands.
A rich and compelling tale of love, sex, ambition, and intrigue, The Other Boleyn Girl introduces a woman of extraordinary determination and desire who lived at the heart of the most exciting and glamorous court in Europe and survived by following her own heart.

Posted by Stacy at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments

The culmination of lessons learned in the past three decades -- the "me" years, the therapy years, and the "express yourself" years -- The Bitch in the House welcomes readers into the lives, minds, and bedrooms of its contributors to talk about the choices they've made, what's working, and what's not. Ranging in age from twenty-four to sixty-five, single and childless or married with children or four times divorced, this is the sound of the collective voice of successful women today -- in all their anger, grace, and glory.

Posted by Stacy at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments

Sometimes life is like a bad waiter—it serves you exactly what you don’t want. The women of Freesia Court have come together at life’s table, fully convinced that there is nothing good coffee, delectable desserts, and a strong shoulder can’t fix. Laughter is the glue that holds them together—the foundation of a book group they call AWEB—Angry Wives Eating Bon Bons—an unofficial “club” that becomes much more. It becomes a lifeline.

Posted by Stacy at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal." So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Posted by Stacy at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments

Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day.

Posted by Stacy at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments

"A Chinese peasant survives periods of hardship and becomes a wealthy and powerful landowner." ?... novel tells a simple and moving story that has great emotional impact on readers, through language that is clear, elegant, and beautiful. Wang Lung's efforts to achieve security and happiness for his family become an overwhelming concern with wealth and power... ultimately leads to that family's decadence and unhappiness....." If we end up reading "The Good Earth" I have a guide for it which lists out the characters, plot summary etc.

Posted by Stacy at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments

"Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses, and of Moses' adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the tradition of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James."--BOOK JACKET.

Posted by Stacy at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments

Shutterbabe, Adventures in Love and War is a memoir of a woman whose restless intelligence is powered into a post-collegiate defiance of any parent's assumption that moving out to the suburbs to give your kids green grass and sweet air is a gift to them and a sacrifice toward the American Dream. It ain't necessarily so.

Posted by Stacy at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments

Lily is haunted by memories–of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.
In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s writing”). Some girls were paired with laotongs, “old sames,” in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become “old sames” at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.

Posted by Stacy at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments

I'm in the process of organizing all of our book picks. I'll put them on here and a short description of each, then I'll email a request for your top 3 picks. We'll get a list together from there!

Take care,
Stacy

Posted by Stacy at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments