Classic Suggestion May 2011

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Summary:  "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing -- though absurdly comic -- meditation on human feelings of inadequecy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the mosst widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man. -from Norton paperback version

Discussion Questions

Author Biography

BETH'S PICKS MAY 2011 MAGIC OF ORDINARY DAYS

MAGIC OF ORDINARY DAYS

BY ANN HOWARD CREEL

SUMMARY:
Set in 1944 Colorado, The Magic of Ordinary Days is the story of a young woman, Olivia Dunne, who became pregnant before marriage. Her father, Rev. Dunne, decided to deal with the situation, by arranging a marriage to a shy farmer through another preacher. The groom, Ray Singleton, lives on a remote farm and is very different than Livy. Ray focuses on what is close to him: his family, his land, today. Livy thinks on a much grander scale: the world, ancient civilizations, faraway places.

Ray's farm uses the help of Japanese Americans from a nearby Japanese American internment camp to help work the farm. Livy befriends two well-educated Japanese American women who were working the farm. She finds comfort and familiarity in their friendship. Livy is polite and civil to her new husband and his sister Martha, but she harbors feelings for the father of the baby, a World War II soldier, and feelings of guilt for the pregnancy. Ray, however, is caring, patient, and supportive of Livy, but the fact that she does not want him hurts him deeply. Slowly over time, the two come to understand and love each other...[Wikipedia]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ann Howard Creel is the author of two award-winning young adult novels, Water at the Blue Earth and A Ceiling of Stars. This is her first adult novel.

REVIEWS:

A YA author’s nicely written adult debut novel blends historical richness and a fine sense of place to tell the story of a woman’s developing love for her husband—and for his Colorado farmland—over the course of six months in 1944….

Creel does a delightful job of evoking first the dreariness of the Singleton farm and Olivia's unnerving loneliness, then the slow ripening of her affection for Ray, a simple but profoundly kind and gentle man….The author gives her heroine a satisfying emotional depth, moving Olivia through phases of affection and disappointment with assured confidence before closing with a tranquil scene after the baby is born.

A light, precisely observed novel. (Kirkus)

AUTHOR’S WEBSITE:

http://annhowardcreel.com/

Best in Books May 2011

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge was the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as receiving the American Library Association's 2009 Notable Book Award and Library Journal's 2008 Best Books Award. The book is a series of 13 short stories that take place in a small coastal Maine town. Olive Kitteridge, an unassuming, but acidic resident, is threaded throughout the stories that chronicle the changes around and to Olive.

Review
*Starred Review* The abrasive, vulnerable title character sometimes stands center state, sometimes plays a supporting role in these 13 sharply observed dramas of small-town live from Strout (Abide with Me, 2006, etc.) Olive Kitteridge certainly makes a formidable contrast with her gentle, quietly cheerful husband Henry from the moment we meet them both in "Pharmacy," which introduces us to several other denizens of Crosby, Maine. Though she was a math teacher before she and Henry retired, she's not exactly patient with shy young people -- or anyone else. Yet she brusquely comforts suicidal Kevin Coulson in "Incoming Tide" with the news that her father, like Kevins's mother, killed himself. And she does her best to help anorexic Nina in "Starving," though Olive knows that the troubled girl is not the only person in Crosby hungry for love. Children disappoint, spouses are unfaithful and almost everyone is lonely at least some of the time in Strout's rueful tales. The Kitteridges' son Christopher marries, moves to California and divorces, but he doesn't come home to the house his parents built for him, causing deep resentments to fester around the borders of Olive's carefully tended garden. Tensions simmer in all the families here; even the genuinely loving couple in "Winter Concert" has a painful betrayal in its past. References to Iraq and 9/11 provide a somber context, but the real dangers here are personal; aging, the loss of love, the imminence of death. Nonetheless, Strout's sensitive insights and luminous prose affirm life's pleasures, as elderly, widowed Olive thinks, "It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet." A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing sight of the equally powerful presences of tenderness, shared pursuits and lifelong loyalty. (Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2008)

Book Discusion Questions

Elizabeth Strout Website