The View from Here: Lists of Books for 2014-2015

I haven't posted in several days, not because I haven't been reading, but because I've been reading so much.  Not only were the book discussion groups in full swing last week and the week before, I've been preparing the lists of suggested books for the 2014-2015 season of library sessions.  Not sure exactly how the line up will run, but here are the contendors.  The final choice will depend in large part on the number of copies available in area libraries.  

Good reading!

The Return by Dany Leferrière

From the Prix Medicis winner comes a haunting meditation on the nature of identity.

Dany Laferriere's most celebrated book since How to Make Love to a Negro, The Return is a bestseller in France and Quebec and the winner of many awards, including the prestigious Prix Medicis and the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is on the verge of disappearing. Having abandoned her desire to be an artist, she has become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and tidy neighbour always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks a new pupil, Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale...

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle—a string of slaves— Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes.” This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own.

Runaway by Alice Munro

The incomparable Alice Munro's bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises. In Munro's hands, the people she writes about—women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children—become as vivid as our own neighbours. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society.

Room by Emma Donaghue

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world. . . . It’s where he was born. It’s where he and Ma eat and sleep and play andlearn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack’s imagination -- the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells;the imaginary world projected through the TV; the coziness ofWardrobe beneath Ma’s clothes, where she tucks him in safelyat night, in case Old Nick comes.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini's novels have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide. Now, six years after A Thousand Splendid Suns debuted at #1, spending fourteen consecutive weeks at #1 and nearly a full year on the hardcover list, Hosseini returns with a book that is broader in scope and setting than anything he’s ever written before.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace be comes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

The Magic of Saida by M.J. Vassanji

The Magic of Saida tells the haunting story of Kamal, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart, Saida. Kamal's journey is motivated by a combination of guilt, hope, and the desire to unravel the mysteries of his childhood--mysteries compounded by the fact that Kamal is the son of an absent Indian father from a well-to-do family and a Swahili African mother of slave ancestry.

Running the Rift  by Naomi Benaron

Running the Rift follows the progress of Jean Patrick Nkuba from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save his life. A naturally gifted athlete, he sprints over the thousand hills of Rwanda and dreams of becoming his country’s first Olympic medal winner in track. But Jean Patrick is a Tutsi in a world that has become increasingly restrictive and violent for his people. As tensions mount between the Hutu and Tutsi, he holds fast to his dream that running might deliver him, and his people, from the brutality around them.

The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jessi Adler-Oslen

Carl Mørck used to be one of Copenhagen’s best homicide detectives. Then a hail of bullets destroyed the lives of two fellow cops, and Carl—who didn’t draw his weapon—blames himself. So a promotion is the last thing he expects. But Department Q is a department of one, and Carl’s got only a stack of Copenhagen’s coldest cases for company. His colleagues snicker, but Carl may have the last laugh...

Shotgun Lovesongs by Nikolas Butler

When the four men at the core of Shotgun Lovesongs came of age together in Little Wing, Wisconsin, the highest point of the tiny farm town was the abandoned mill. Now in their thirties, Ronny’s trying to start a life after rodeo and booze, Kip has come back to pour stock-market millions into reviving the mill, Hank’s followed his father into farming, and Lee’s indie-rock career--built on his legendary DIY recording in a Little Wing chicken coop--has shot him into another social stratosphere. Nickolas Butler’s debut novel was inspired in part by the life of his high school friend Justin Vernon, who took the 2012 Grammy for Best New Artist as Bon Iver, and despite its occasional flirtation with stereotypes, his characters and their friendships have authentic souls. Through fights, reconciliations, and celebrations, Butler’s polyphonic story swells to a full-throated anthem about the expansive possibility born of belonging to a deep-rooted community, a kind of America we want to believe might welcome us all home. -

Distantly Related to Freud by Ann Charney

It’s Montreal, 1953, and eight-year-old Ellen, an only child prone to daydreaming, and her mother, a woman who believes in the promise of fresh starts, have moved into a large house on the flanks of Mt. Royal. To make ends meet, Ellen’s mother takes in a group of refugees from Central Europe, whose erratic behaviour and dark view of human nature captivate the young girl’s imagination. Ellen sees the refugees as a potential source of valuable information about her own background, of which she has heard little, except for a few stories about a lost golden civilization and the family’s distant connection to Sigmund Freud.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simpson
The feel-good hit of 2013, The Rosie Project is a classic screwball romance about a handsome but awkward genetics professor and the woman who is totally wrong for him
A first-date dud, socially awkward and overly fond of quick-dry clothes, genetics professor Don Tillman has given up on love, until a chance encounter gives him an idea.
He will design a questionnaire—a sixteen-page, scientifically researched questionnaire—to uncover the perfect partner. She will most definitely not be a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker or a late-arriver. Rosie is all these things. She is also fiery and intelligent, strangely beguiling, and looking for her biological father a search that a DNA expert might just be able to help her with.

The Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella
   When her old boyfriend Ben reappears and reminds her of their pact to get married if they were both still single at thirty, Lottie jumps at the chance. But not everyone is thrilled with Lottie and Ben's rushed marriage, and family and friends are determined to intervene. Will Lottie and Ben have a wedding night to remember ... or one to forget?

Canada by Richard Ford
    After his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank, fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is taken in by Arthur Remlinger who, unbeknownst to Dell, is hiding a dark and violent nature

that interfereswith Dell's quest to find grace and peace on the prairie of Saskatchewan.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As she prepares to graduate and tries to understand why her college love life has not lived up to expectations, she finds herself unexpectedly in a love triangle with two very different guys. Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.