The Book Club

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451

gd101 — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:32:49 -0700

Okay so for my English Class I have to read "Fahrenheit 451" by: Ray Bradbury. I heard that it's about a place where books are banned!!! I honestly cannot imagine a world like that. I really hope I enjoy this book. Either way, it seems really interesting. More information: http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345342966

Move Over Twilight, The Brotherhood is Better!!!

Whitfield517 — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:55:37 -0700

So after reading all the Twilight books several times and still feeling I wanted something more I found the Black Dagger Brotherhood!!! WOW, is all I can say about the books. They are the perfect mix of the vampire action I love the steamy love scenes that Twilight had to leave out. I am at work right now after only sleeping for two hours last night because I could not put the second book down. I love each character and their strengths and weaknesses are so real and wonderful. The books has made me laugh out loud (always good) and pant with excitement as the romance turned into hot, passionate......... I think that any adult woman that enjoyed the Twilight books but yearned for something more should take the time to pick one of these books.

Fall Reading Lists

Akasha — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:49:58 -0700

Fall for me is a great time to curl up with a good book and drink lots of tea. Generally I try to read at lest one of the classics per month, and the rest are for guilty pleasures and whatever series I'm working on (everyone releases something near Christmas time).
Strangely though this fall the only thing I have on my list is the newest Sookie Stackhouse novel Touch of Dead, and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. I have just recently finished Pride and Prejudice and Zombies so I thought I would continue on with the trend
So, I was wondering what everyone is either reading or looking forward to reading this fall.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Akasha — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:45:14 -0700

I discovered my enjoyment with Dan Brown books in 2000 when while preparing for a trip to Rome I came across Angels & Demons (I was looking for location based fiction). I very much enjoyed the book the subsequent DaVinci Code and Deception Point and his previous novel Digital Fortress. So, I was excited for the release of The Lost Symbol.
I've only managed to get through about 50 pages of it, so I can't really give an effective honest review, but something is missing. I tore through the rest of his books finishing most in a day or two, but I've now had The Lost Symbol for a few days and it still sits unfinished. Maybe it's me.
Has anyone read it yet? What are your thoughts?

New Book!!!!!!

Princess Alexis — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:46:59 -0700

Hey members I'm starting a conversation on To be a slave the book:

Dear John by Nicholas Sparks

fashionista0914 — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:02:59 -0700

It seems like every book I read has a movie coming out, take for example my last post, Time Traveler's Wife - which I'm excited to see!

Moving on.

At first, I found this book extremely monotonous. The introduction and first 10 pages were dull to be honest. Thus leaving the novel untouched for quite a long period of time. Although I had a persistent friend who kept telling me how amazing it was, so I tried to read it again. Let me tell you, I'm glad that I did because when you get past that first few pages, you suddenly can't put the book down! It's quite addicting, and like any other Nicholas Sparks' books, it made me tear up.

This story is about a soldier who met the girl of his dreams when he was on leave. I don't know if I can tell you more without spoiling it, haha! I suggest you just pick this book up because they're already starting to film the movie. With Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried and George Jenkins playing the lead roles, I bet they'll give justice to such a romantic novel.

Let me know if you enjoyed the book.

The Five People We Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom

crazywitch — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:45:10 -0700

"Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

"It is no coincidence that the words 'trying' and 'dying' are only a few letters apart."

"People often belittle the place where they were born."

"Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners."

"This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for."

"...the human spirit knows, deep down that all lives intersect."

"The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

"Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to."

"Fairness, does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young." - The blue man

"Holding anger is a poison...It eats you from inside...We think that by hating someone we hurt them...But hatred is a curved blade...and the harm we do to others...we also do to ourselves."

Love The One You're With By Emily Giffin

crazywitch — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:22:10 -0700

"Love is the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together."

"How different this moment feels, for so many reasons. I tell myself that no two loves are identical - but that I don't have to compare anymore."

"Love as a verb. Love as a commitment."

"Maybe that's what it all comes down to. love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all."

"What every girl dreams of when she's dumped is - that the guy will someday feel regrest and come back and tell her all about it. And the beauty of it is you have no regrets whatsoever."

11 Minutes

crazywitch — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 01:50:00 -0700

Although my aim is to understand love and although I suffer to think of the people to whom I gave my heart...

I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body...

And those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart...

Paulo Coelho

Famed Author Frank McCourt Dies at 78

RubyDreams — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 05:23:41 -0700

FrankTeacherNEW YORK (July 20) – Frank McCourt, the beloved raconteur and former public school teacher who enjoyed post-retirement fame as the author of "Angela's Ashes," the Pulitzer Prize-winning "epic of woe" about his impoverished Irish childhood, died Sunday of cancer.
McCourt, who was 78, had been gravely ill with meningitis and recently was treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. He died at a Manhattan hospice, his brother Malachy McCourt said.Until his mid-60s, Frank McCourt was known primarily around New York as a creative writing teacher and as a local character - the kind who might turn up in a New York novel - singing songs and telling stories with his younger brother Malachy and otherwise joining the crowds at the White Horse Tavern and other literary hangouts.
But there was always a book or two being formed in his mind, and the world would learn his name, and story, in 1996, after a friend helped him get an agent and his then-unfinished manuscript was quickly signed by Scribner. With a first printing of just 25,000, "Angela's Ashes" was an instant favorite with critics and readers and perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proven him wrong," McCourt later explained. "And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools."
The book has been published in 25 languages and 30 countries.
McCourt, a native of New York, was good company in the classroom and at the bar, but few had such a burden to unload. His parents were so poor that they returned to their native Ireland when he was little and settled in the slums of Limerick. Simply surviving his childhood was a tale; McCourt's father was an alcoholic who drank up the little money his family had. Three of McCourt's seven siblings died, and he nearly perished from typhoid fever.
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood," was McCourt's unforgettable opening. "People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty, the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."
The book was a long Irish wake, "an epic of woe," McCourt called it, finding laughter and lyricism in life's very worst. Although some in Ireland complained that McCourt had revealed too much (and revealed a little too well), "Angela's Ashes" became a million seller, won the Pulitzer and was made into a movie of the same name, starring Emily Watson as the title character, McCourt's mother.
The white-haired, sad-eyed, always quotable McCourt, his Irish accent still thick despite decades in the U.S., became a regular at parties, readings, conferences and other gatherings, so much the eager late-life celebrity that he later compared himself to a "dancing clown, available to everybody."
"I wasn't prepared for it," McCourt told The Associated Press in 2005. "After teaching, I was getting all this attention. They actually looked at me - people I had known for years - and they were friendly and they looked me in a different way. And I was thinking, `All those years I was a teacher, why didn't you look at me like that then?'"
But the part of it he liked best, he said, was hearing "from all those kids who were in my classes."
"At least they knew that when I talked about writing I wasn't just talking through my hat," he said.
Much of his teaching was spent in the English department at the elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where he defied the advice of his colleagues and shared his personal stories with the class; he slapped a student with a magazine and took on another known to have a black belt in karate.
After "Angela's Ashes," McCourt continued his story, to strong but diminished sales and reviews, in "'Tis," which told of his return to New York in the 1940s, and in "Teacher Man." McCourt also wrote a children's story, "Angela and the Baby Jesus," released in 2007.
More than 10 million copies of his books have been sold in North America alone, said Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.
"We have been privileged to publish his books, which have touched, and will continue to touch, millions of readers in myriad positive and meaningful ways," Simon & Schuster president Carolyn Reidy said in a statement.
McCourt was married twice and had a daughter, Maggie McCourt, from his first marriage.
His brother Malachy McCourt is an actor, commentator and singer who wrote two memoirs and, in 2006, ran for New York governor as the Green Party candidate. At least one of his former students, Susan Gilman, became a writer.