July Selection

Marta has selected Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill for our July discussion. The genre is fantasy/fable/fairy tale.

From the publisher's web site:

The publication of Joe Hill’s beautifully textured, deliciously scary debut novel Heart-Shaped Box was greeted with the sort of overwhelming critical acclaim that is rare for a work of skin-crawling supernatural terror. It was cited as a Best Book of the Year by Atlanta magazine, the Tampa Tribune, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and the Village Voice, to name but a few. Award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling Neil Gaiman of The Sandman, The Graveyard Book, and Anansi Boys fame calls Joe Hill’s story of a jaded rock star haunted by a ghost he purchased on the internet, “relentless, gripping, powerful.” Open this Heart-Shaped Box from two-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Hill if you dare and see what all the well-deserved hoopla is about. 

Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre: a cookbook for cannibals . . . a used hangman's noose . . . a snuff film. An aging death-metal rock god, his taste for the unnatural is as widely known to his legions of fans as the notorious excesses of his youth. But nothing he possesses is as unlikely or as dreadful as his latest purchase, an item he discovered on the Internet: I will sell my stepfather's ghost to the highest bidder . . . For a thousand dollars, Jude has become the owner of a dead man's suit, said to be haunted by a restless spirit. But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no metaphorical ghost, no benign conversation piece. Suddenly the suit's previous owner is everywhere: behind the bedroom door . . . seated in Jude's restored Mustang . . . staring out from his widescreen TV. Waiting—with a gleaming razor blade on a chain dangling from one hand . . .

The Book Snobs gathered at Marta's house on Monday, July 29. Marta served home made Mexican food that was outstanding.

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.