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The Odyssey Bookshop Monday - Friday, 10:00 - 8:00 |
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Order Books Here! |
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The Odyssey Bookshop Monday - Friday, 10:00 - 8:00 |
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Order Books Here! |
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The Odyssey Bookshop is one of five independent
bookstores participating in WAMC's Roundtable on Tuesday mornings,
just after the 10:00 news. People from the Odyssey will be on about once a
month, talking about our favorite books. The Odyssey Bookshop 413-534-7307 email odysseybks@aol.com
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Book Club Home Page | Register | Recommendations | Links Book Group
Recommendations These
paperback books are our recommendations for your
book group reading and discussion pleasure. Enjoy! Elli Meeropol,
book group coordinator THE
GOLDEN AGE by Tahmima Anam. When her college-aged children get
involved in resisting the brutal response to Bangladesh’s efforts at
independence, Rehana Haque gets caught up in the freedom fighting as
well, and her life is changed forever. This is a beautifully written
first novel, an account of political upheaval through the lens of one
ordinary family. THE GIVEN DAY by Dennis Lehane. The grittiness is still there, but in his latest novel Dennis Lehane has widened his vision and dug even more deeply into his characters and their times. He mixes historical persons – J. Edgar Hoover, Calvin Coolide, Babe Ruth – with an imagined cast of white and black characters embroiled in class and race war, union strikes, anarchist terrorists, and baseball politics. Set around the 1919 Boston police strike, THE GIVEN DAY illuminates the very questions about the balance between security and civil liberties that our society struggles to answer today. MUDBOUND by Hillary Jordan. In a Mississippi Delta farming community in 1946, two families—one white, one black—welcome their soldiers home from World War II to a divided Jim Crow world. Set against the rising flood waters of an isolated farming community and told from multiple points of view, this debut novel is a fast-paced story of domestic discord, racial bigotry, and the aftermath of war. Winner of the 2006 Bellwether Prize for literature of social responsibility. THE
FOLDED WORLD by Amity Gaige.
This is a stunning novel, unabashedly romantic and
infused with its own variety of magical realism. Social worker
Charlie is drawn to people in emotional
turmoil. When he brings his clients into the safe world of his wife
Alice and their twin daughters, the boundaries separating work and home,
sanity and illness, begin to waver and dissolve.
Gaige’s prose is graceful and her insights fresh and piercing. OLIVE
KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout. I’ve loved both of Strout’s
previous novels, and this “novel in stories” is the best yet. Olive
is an amazing character who breathes from the first pages. This retired
Maine schoolteacher is both complex and flawed, immensely kind and
sometimes utterly
clueless. These small-town stories are an elegant way to reveal
Strout’s insights into the universality
of human hope, despair, and redemption. PEOPLE
OF THE BOOK by Geraldine Brooks. Tracing the history of the
priceless and exquisitely illustrated Sarjevo Haggadah, rescued during
the Bosnian war, Australian rare manuscripts expert Hanna Heath unearths
the book’s tumultuous history by following small physical clues – an
insect wing, a wine stain, a white hair. Bringing her deep imagination
to historical periods of religious persecution and strife, Pulitzer-Prize winner Brooks gives us
another unforgettable character and nother
wonderful read THE
AIR WE BREATHE by Andrea Barrett. The tubercular patients taking
the fresh air cure in the Adirondacks in the weeks before the U.S.
enters the first World War people this meticulously researched and
evocatively written story, which concludes Barrett’s four book
narrative that began with Ship Fever. Although from widely
different class, national and ethnic backgrounds, the
patients speak with one voice, as anti-immigrant prejudice, fear,
and political repression escalates into violence. The result is an
eerie, disturbing, and exciting exploration of themes that consume our
world today. MARTYRS’
CROSSING by
Amy Wilentz. Marina’s little boy is having an asthma attack. Between
the two of them and the Israeli hospital is a closed checkpoint, and an
Israeli soldier who waits too long to let them through. It doesn’t
help that Marina’s husband is a political prisoner or that her father
is a former Palestinian activist now turned U.S. academic. From this
newspaper headline plot, Wilentz crafts a nuanced story that gives a
human voice to the political and personal complexities of the Middle
East. My book group loved this one! A
LITTLE LOVE STORY by
Roland Merullo. This is a love story but it’s definitely not
little. Merullo writes of the romance between Jake, a carpenter
and artist, and Janet, who works for the Governor. But it is also the
story of courage, of Jake’s mourning and Janet’s cystic fibrosis.
Merullo’s prose is often stunning; this book is powerful and moving
but never sentimental. It contains my all-time favorite description
of love-making. His other novels are also rich and meaty books to read
and to discuss; I especially love IN
REVERE, IN THOSE DAYS . THE
ART OF SEEING by
Cammie McGovern. Rozzie and Jemma are sisters, and their story
illuminates so much about family connections, ambition and envy. Rozzie
is a star, a
celebrity as a teenager. Jemma lives in her sister’s shadow,
slowly developing her own
professional and artistic life. Rozzie’s secret affects them
both deeply. Also check out McGovern’s wonderful second novel, EYE
CONTACT. THE
BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by
Junot Díaz. Oscar is an overweight, Dominican sci-fi nerd with an
enormous yearning for love. He grows up in New Jersey with his
bewitching mother and his rebellious sister, under his family’s fukú,
an ancient curse mixed up with Trujillo and serious bad karma. Written
in a wonderfully edgy prose, this book is captivating, irreverent, and
profound. THE KNITTING CIRCLE by Ann Hood. A beautiful, painful, hopeful novel about love, loss, recovery, and the threads that bind us together as parents, friends, lovers, members of a community, and—of course—knitters. Hood’s story of a woman’s search for meaning after a life-changing loss, and the people she meets along the way, will delight knitters and readers alike. BIRDS
IN FALL by Brad Kessler. I was blown away by this beautifully
written book. Like Ann Patchett does in Bel Canto, Kessler
gathers an unlikely group of people from around the world in a small
inn, brought together by tragedy and by chance (in this case, an
airplane crashing into the ocean off Nova Scotia). Through their
multiple points of view, he crafts a compelling story about grief and
community, about survival and healing. The LA Times called it one of the
best books of 2006, and I absolutely agree. KARMA AND OTHER STORIES by Rishi Reddi. I’m fascinated by stories of immigrant communities – the richness of language and culture; the complicated generational conflicts; the mix of grudging admiration and intense suffocation young people often feel for the “old” ways; and the delicate balance between appreciating traditions and inventing yourself from scratch. All these themes appear in Reddi’s stories, in smooth and unerring prose that reveals character and conflict seamlessly. Reminiscent of Kiran Desai and Jhumpa Lahiri, but different and wonderful. LOST & FOUND by Jacqueline Sheehan. When her young husband dies suddenly, Rocky’s professional knowledge is of no help. She leaves her home, her counseling practice, and moves to a secluded Maine island and reinvents herself. Healing comes in strange ways, and Rocky’s comes via a wounded black Lab she names Lloyd, a mystery, a friend who sees sounds as vivid colors, and an anorexic neighbor. Even as a lukewarm "dog person," I was captivated by Lloyd and by this book LIKE TREES, WALKING by Ravi Howard. In 1981, Roy Deacon is a high school senior in Alabama, working in the family mortuary business, when his older brother discovers his buddy’s body hanging from a tree. People don’t get lynched in 1981. Do they? This is a page-turner of a first novel, with agile prose and a powerful story. THE
LAST TOWN ON EARTH by Thomas Mullen. The small lumbar town of
Commonwealth, Washington, built on utopian socialist philosophy, tries
to isolate itself from the larger community in hopes of avoiding the
devastation of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. But, of course, it
can’t. The response of the frightened townsfolk to a “spy” at
their borders makes for a very compelling story, and a thought-provoking
allegory about our world today. HALF OF A YELLOW SUN by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie successfully balances the political turmoil of 1960’s Nigeria with three compelling point-of-view characters: a middle class Igbo woman, a young village houseboy, and a white British citizen in love with an African woman. After living with these characters through the military coup, the battle for Biafran independence, and the devastating violence and starvation that followed, I didn’t want to let them go at the end of the story. Lushly written and emotionally haunting, this book contributes new faces to our understanding of the human costs of race, class, and ethnic struggles in our world. MONIQUE
AND THE MANGO RAINS by Kris Holloway. When Kris Holloway joined the
Peace Corps and was sent to a small village in Mali, West Africa, to
work with midwife Monique Dembele, she expected poverty and a desperate
public situation, especially for women and children. She found that, of
course, but she also found a life-changing friendship that crossed
cultural barriers in amazing ways. This book is educational, it’s
funny, and it will break your heart SPECIMEN
DAYS, by Michael Cunningham. In THE HOURS, Cunningham paid homage to
Virginia Woolf; in SPECIMEN DAYS, he celebrates Walt Whitman, in three
connected narratives set in New York City during three different
centuries. The stories are linked by the three characters, by the
poet’s work, and by a painted porcelain bowl. In all three narratives
we see Cunningham’s dedication to exploring how people seek to connect
with each other across the barriers of death, race, even their species. THE
WHOLE WORLD OVER by Julia Glass. When Greenie Duquette, Greenwich
Village baker and mom, is introduced to the visiting governor of New
Mexico by her gay restaurateur friend Walter, her life’s path is
seriously derailed. The governor woos her away from New York, her
beloved business, her depressed psychiatrist husband, and for what?
Greenie doesn’t really know. As with Three Junes, her National
Book Award-winning novel, Julia Glass weaves and balances
multiple narrators – each a wonderfully complex and quirky character
– and several story lines, with great skill and subtlety. When 9/11
occurs, each of these characters must face their own deceptions and
choices. I loved this book. LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING,
by Jeannette Winterson. A girl named Silver is orphaned in Scotland;
she is taken in by a blind old man and nurtured on his storytelling
until she learns to tell her own. In her spare but lyrical prose,
Winterson writes a fable about the power of telling stories and of love.
This is a book to read and reread. A great book group discussion – we
disagreed about so many things!
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