EoFF Book Club

[Jinx]

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

WE MUST

READ

[chionos]

PICK SOMETHING.

Any of the books mentioned so far would work for me. I'll read anything. Everything.

[Night Fury]

I would like to recommend The Help by Kathryn Stockett!
(I have a PDF copy of this too, to email to all kindle users if need be!)

The Help, Kathryn Stockett's debut novel, tells the story of black maids working in white Southern homes in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and of Miss Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a 22-year-old graduate from Ole Miss, who returns to her family's cotton plantation, Longleaf, to find that her beloved maid and nanny, Constantine, has left and no one will tell her why. Skeeter tries to behave as a proper Southern lady: She plays bridge with the young married women; edits the newsletter for the Junior League; and endures her mother's constant advice on how to find a man and start a family. However, Skeeter's real dream is to be a writer, but the only job she can find is with the Jackson Journal writing a housekeeping advice column called "Miss Myrna." Skeeter knows little about housekeeping, so she turns to her friend's maid, Aibileen, for answers and finds a lot more.

[chionos]

I would like to recommend The Help by Kathryn Stockett!
(I have a PDF copy of this too, to email to all kindle users if need be!)

The Help, Kathryn Stockett's debut novel, tells the story of black maids working in white Southern homes in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and of Miss Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a 22-year-old graduate from Ole Miss, who returns to her family's cotton plantation, Longleaf, to find that her beloved maid and nanny, Constantine, has left and no one will tell her why. Skeeter tries to behave as a proper Southern lady: She plays bridge with the young married women; edits the newsletter for the Junior League; and endures her mother's constant advice on how to find a man and start a family. However, Skeeter's real dream is to be a writer, but the only job she can find is with the Jackson Journal writing a housekeeping advice column called "Miss Myrna." Skeeter knows little about housekeeping, so she turns to her friend's maid, Aibileen, for answers and finds a lot more.

Not that I wouldn't read it again, but I've read this already, and I'm guessing others here have too. And those that haven't have probably at least seen the movie. It's a good book, though, so I'm not nixing the suggestion. Just something to think about.

[theundeadhero]

The Secret Lives of Lobsters is totally not niche and full of super interesting things about lobsters and their lives. It's non-fiction. Those secretive bastards.

[rarity]

I'd love to join in ! Sounds like a lot of fun x3

I know it's a classic but The Picture of Dorian Gray is a fantastic book, my favourite. Non-classic recommendation would be The Sight by David Clement-Davis.

[Freya]

Everyone is welcome to join! Locky linked her synopsis for the help but I'ma link a picture and it again just so everyone has them all together. I'm taking this info form goodreads.

Here's krissys suggestion:

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

Here's Shions suggestion:

From the day she arrives at quiet Mica High in a burst of color and sound, hallways hum “Stargirl.” She captures Leo Borlock’s heart with one smile. She sparks a school-spirit revolution with one cheer. The students of Mica High are enchanted. Until they are not. Leo urges her to become the very thing that can destroy her - normal.

This is the one Jinx suggested:

This is Ruth Ozeki's third novel, shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2013. In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine.

Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

Here's Locky's suggestion:

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

And here are the two rarity suggested:

Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray’s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”

In the shadow of an abandoned castle, a wolf pack seeks shelter. The she-wolf's pups will not be able to survive the harsh Transylvanian winter. And they are being stalked by a lone wolf, Morgra, possessed of a mysterious and terrifying power known as the Sight. Morgra knows that one of the pups born beneath the castle holds a key to power even stronger than her own power that could give her control of this world and the next. But the pack she hunts will do anything to protect their own, even if it means setting in motion a battle that will involve all of nature, including the creature the wolves fear the most: Man.

[Pumpkin]

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

[Freya]

Thanks! Edited it in!

[Jinx]

Guys, A Tale for the Time Being is SO GOOD. Not just good. It's life-changing. Truly. A year later and thinking about that book still gives me shivers (and I plan on re-reading it again soon regardless!)

I've read The Help, and it's also a really good book. I'm not really raring to re-read it, but if that's what we chose, I'd be happy to.

Stargirl is another excellent choice. One of my favorite books.

[Pumpkin]

So now do we take it to a vote? Except we shouldn't vote for our own because obvious

We should read them all though!

I'm also reading My Sweet Audrina right now but.... its a pretty messed up book so I don't think its for everyone

[Jinx]

Yeah, it might be nice to make a rule that you can't vote for your own.

[Aerith's Knight]

I can suggest Epic Fantasy books if people want. I've read about 120 of them. I'm actually kind of running out of series and am reading them a second or third time.

Free suggestion: Kingkiller Chronicles: starting with "The name of the Wind." Likely one of the best book series I've ever read.

[Fox]

Free suggestion: Kingkiller Chronicles: starting with "The name of the Wind." Likely one of the best book series I've ever read.

Yes, if Pat Rothfuss ever gets around to finishing book 3, that would be great! He and Brandon Sanderson are my favourite fantasy authors at the moment

[Chibi Youkai]

Free suggestion: Kingkiller Chronicles: starting with "The name of the Wind." Likely one of the best book series I've ever read.

Yes, if Pat Rothfuss ever gets around to finishing book 3, that would be great! He and Brandon Sanderson are my favourite fantasy authors at the moment

I know. He put books one and two out super fast, and then book three is just taking it's time. He recently put out a short story in the same universe though. Supposedly it's pretty good.