Current 2010 Schedule Update!

Thanks for voting everyone! Head over to the  current schedule page to see what we will be reading!

February 2010

Book: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
When: Friday, February 26th @ 7pm
Where: Jill’s Place (see Pingg Invite for address)

Synopsis
Join us as we read one of the most magical concoctions in children’s literature, Lewis Carroll’s tale follows Alice into the upside-down, inside-out world of Wonderland where she attends the tea party of the Mad Hatter and plays croquet in the court of the Queen of Hearts.

Vote on your favorites for Spring/Summer 2010!

It’s time to vote!! We have listed the new book options for the Spring and Summer of 2010 on our website: http://austinbookclubforwomen.wordpress.com/new-book-options/.
There are some really great choices for our next year — hope you will think so too!

Feel free to peruse the links to read the descriptions, then click on the Survey Link which is also provided on the above page to vote on your favorites. For your convenience, we will list it here as well: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GJRPQ8M

Thanks for your help in making the Austin Book Club a success!
Ellie, Beth, & Amanda
www.austinbookclub.com
austinbookclub@gmail.com

January 2010

Book: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
When: Friday, January 29th @ 7pm
Where: Ellie’s Place (see Pingg Invite for address)

Synopsis
Since its first publication in 1890, Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. After having his portrait painted, Dorian Gray is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary friend, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wished to stay young forever and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. As Dorian’s slide into crime and cruelty progresses, he stays magically youthful, while his beautiful portrait changes, revealing the hideous corruption of moral decay. Set in fin-de-siecle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Howard to the opium dens of the East End.

November 2009

Book: Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
When: Friday, November 20th @ 7pm
Where: Jenn’s House

Synopsis
From Publishers Weekly
Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city’s finest moment, the World’s Fair of 1893. Larson’s breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac’s Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes’s relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes’s co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim’s Suicide. However, rather than anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of “articulated” corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed.

Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

October 2009

Book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
When: Friday, October 23rd @ 7pm
Where: Beth’s Place

Synopses
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family’s remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden’s dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption—at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman. Larsson died in 2004, shortly after handing in the manuscripts for what will be his legacy. 100,000 first printing. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

September 2009

Book: The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman
When: Friday, September 25th @ 7pm
Where: Ellie’s Place

Synopses
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses) tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina, who, with courage and coolheaded ingenuity, sheltered 300 Jews as well as Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds. Using Antonina’s diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, Ackerman takes us into the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 Jewish uprising and also describes the Poles’ revolt against the Nazi occupiers in 1944. She introduces us to such varied figures as Lutz Heck, the duplicitous head of the Berlin zoo; Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, spiritual head of the ghetto; and the leaders of Zegota, the Polish organization that rescued Jews. Ackerman reveals other rescuers, like Dr. Mada Walter, who helped many Jews pass, giving lessons on how to appear Aryan and not attract notice. Ackerman’s writing is viscerally evocative, as in her description of the effects of the German bombing of the zoo area: …the sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed as they wrenched apart. This suspenseful beautifully crafted story deserves a wide readership. 8 pages of illus. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Lovely Bones – Trailer

And yet another of our book club books is being turned into a movie! Check it out here! December may require another girls night out to go see this movie.

Book Results!

Again, the survey results were very close but here are the books for the rest of the year:

August	September	October	November	December/ January
The Hour I First Believed	The Zookeeper’s Wife	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	Devil in the White City	Picture of Dorian Gray
Wally Lamb	Diane Ackerman	Stieg Larsson	Eric Larson	Oscar Wilde

The Time Traveler’s Wife — Trailer

Well, we wondered how they were gonna do it…and the trailer actually makes it look pretty good. Maybe we will plan a little outing in August…

Check it out.