Hello Bookenders,
As per last week's poll, our meeting to discuss
The Girl on the Train will
be Friday, October 19th at 3pm in SS 2120. Afterwards, we will be
heading over to Robarts' Media Commons Theatre to screen the movie
adaption.
We will also be voting on our November sci-fi/fantasy pick at the
meeting (thank you to all who sent awesome suggestions in!). If you
aren't able to come and would still like to vote, we are including the
nominations below. Feel free to email us your vote to be counted by
Friday.
Hope to see you a lot of you then!
Cheers,
Mia and Connie
The Snow Child
by Eowyn Ivey, 2012, 404 pages
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to
homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel.
Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the
work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment
of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of
snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a
young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl,
who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts
with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow
survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to
understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy
tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this
beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they
eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley, 1818, 288 pages
At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein
tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein.
Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing
animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being
from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in
horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and
loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a
campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.
The Buried Giant
by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2015, 345 pages
The Romans have long since
departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But at least the
wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. The Buried Giant
begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of
mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for
years. They expect to face many hazards — some strange and other-worldly
— but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them
dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another. Sometimes
savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade
is about lost memories, love, revenge and war.
The Golem and the Jinni
by Helene Wecker, 2013, 486 pages
Chava is a golem, a creature
made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark
Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is
unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.
Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert,
trapped in an old copper flask, and released in New York City, though
still not entirely free. Ahmad and Chava become unlikely friends and
soul mates with a mystical connection. Marvelous and compulsively
readable, Helene Wecker's debut novel The Golem and the Jinni weaves
strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and
magical fable, into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale.
