July 2011 Selection

Janna has selected Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier as the July selection.

From Google Books:

In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

 The Book Snobs Gathering

The Book Snobs met at Janna's home on Monday, August 1. As always, the Snobs spent the first half hour or so enjoying wine and conversation. The dinner menu included a large salad bar with many, many choices, two soups, and a delicious artichoke dip along with an assortment of crackers and croutons. For dessert we enjoyed a refreshingly light Dreamsicle Cake.

After dinner, we moved to the living room and discussion began. Many (most) of the Snobs did not enjoy Cold Mountain. Some thought the writer was too detailed in his descriptions. Others thought the action was too slow. We talked about the development of each character and how they changed over the course of the novel. We also discussed how both Ada and Ruby were influenced by their fathers and the loss of their mothers in their infancy. It was also fun for each of us to choose two items, one old and one current, that we would want to take with us on a trek like Inman's. We talked about the perceptions of the Civil War and the difference between those perceptions in the North and the South.

June 2011 Selection

Claudia has selected Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier as our June reading selection.

From Strand Magazine:

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." The opening line to Daphne du Maurier’s most famous novel, Rebecca is one of the great opening lines in English fiction. In one stroke, du Maurier establishes the voice, the locale, and the dream-like atmosphere of the story. It’s not surprising that Alfred Hitchcock used the same opening line for his celebrated cinematic adaptation of the novel—one which many critics feel is among his most accomplished. Although Daphne du Maurier was one of the most popular authors of her day and wrote or edited dozens of books—biographies, plays, and collections of letters as well as works of fiction— she is best remembered today for only a handful of novels including, of course, Rebecca.

The novel Rebecca is a curious hybrid—a mixture of romance, murder mystery, and the Gothic. The romance ... is at the core of the novel. A naive young woman—interestingly never named in the novel—is alone in the world (a paid companion to an older, coarser, social-climbing woman) until she meets the handsome, wealthy, and recently widowed Maxim de Winter. He had been married, we are told early on, to the accomplished, beautiful Rebecca who tragically died in a boating accident off the south coast of Cornwall near the de Winter family estate of Manderley. An older, distraught wealthy man meets a younger, callow impoverished woman whom he decides to marry in order to restore his mental health—the plot is common to any number of traditional English romantic novels, most obviously Jane Eyre.

The Book Snobs Gathering

Monday, June 27
Claudia's home
Details will be emailed