Bookgroup 2003-2006
Explore the Bookgroup 2003-2006 reading list: Discover the curated selection of books discussed and enjoyed during these years. Perfect for finding your next read or revisiting past favorites.
Book
The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ⢠NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER ⢠From one of Americaâs iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriageâand a life, in good times and badâthat will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. One of The New York Timesâs 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days laterâthe night before New Yearâs Eveâthe Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didionâ s attempt to make sense of the âweeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
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Book
A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby
âOne New Yearâs Eve, four people with very different reasons but a common purpose find their way to the top of a fifteen-story building in London. None of them has calculated that, on a date humans favor for acts of significance, in a place known as a local suicide-jumpersâ favorite, they might encounter company. A Long Way Down is the story of what happens next, and of what doesnât.â âThe New York Times Book Review A wise, affecting novel from the beloved, award-winning author of Dickens and Prince, Funny Girl and High Fidelity Nick Hornby mines the hearts and psyches of four lost souls who connect just when theyâve reached the end of the line. In four distinct and riveting first-person voices, Hornby tells a story of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own mortality. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances.
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Book
A Girl Named Zippy
by Haven Kimmel
The New York Times bestselling memoir about growing up in small-town Indiana, from the author of The Solace of Leaving Early. When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar periodâpeople helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards. Laced with fine storytelling, sharp wit, dead-on observations, and moments of sheer joy, Haven Kimmel's straight-shooting portrait of her childhood gives us a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and sly as she navigates the quirky adult world that surrounds Zippy.
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The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sonsâtheir love, their sacrifices, their lies. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner tells a sweeping story of family, love, and friendship against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, bringing to mind the large canvases of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. But just as it is old-fashioned in its narration, it is contemporary in its subject-the devastating history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years. As emotionally gripping as it is tender, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful debut.
Book
You Shall Know Our Velocity
by Dave Eggers
An âentertaining and profoundly originalâ (San Francisco Chronicle) moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the world trying to give away a lot of money and free themselves from a profound loss. ⢠From the bestselling author of The Circle. âNobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere.â âThe New York Times Book Review "You Shall Know Our Velocity! is the work of a wildly talented writer.... Like Kerouac's book, Eggers's could inspire a generation as much as it documents it." âLA Weekly
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
The story of Saleem Sinal, born precisely at midnight, August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Saleem's life parallels the history of his nation.
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My Ăntonia
by Willa Cather
The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation of immigrants.
Book
The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl
Nineteenth-century Boston is plagued by a series of grisly murders inspired by visions of Dante's Inferno. Four renowned scholars join together to stop the killer.
Book
The Twentieth Wife
by Indu Sundaresan
The story of Mehrunnisa, the daughter of servents who became the an empresses of the Mughal empire.
Book
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Three generations of a Greek American family find themselves plagued by a mutant gene which causes bizarre side effects in the family's teenage girls.
Book
Reading Lolita in Tehran
by Azar Nafisi
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ⢠We all have dreamsâthings we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisiâs dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were readingâPride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolitaâtheir Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisiâs account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisiâs class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of âthe Great Satan,â she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense. Azar Nafisiâs luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of womenâs lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran âAnyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. The ayatollahs donâ t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.ââGeraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire
Book
Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
âA book you wonât be able to put down. A Bangladeshi immigrant in London is torn between the kind, tedious older husband with whom she has an arranged marriage (and children) and the fiery political activist she lusts after. A novel thatâs multi-continental, richly detailed and elegantly crafted.â âCurtis Sittenfeld, author of Sisterland After an arranged marriage to Chanu, a man twenty years older, Nazneen is taken to London, leaving her home and heart in the Bangladeshi village where she was born. Her new world is full of mysteries. How can she cross the road without being hit by a car (an operation akin to dodging raindrops in the monsoon)? What is the secret of her bullying neighbor Mrs. Islam? What is a Hell's Angel? And how must she comfort the naĂŻve and disillusioned Chanu? As a good Muslim girl, Nazneen struggles to not question why things happen. She submits, as she must, to Fate and devotes herself to her husband and daughters. Yet to her amazement, she begins an affair with a handsome young radical, and her erotic awakening throws her old certainties into chaos. Monica Aliâs splendid novel is about journeys both external and internal, where the marvelous and the terrifying spiral together.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
This brilliant epic novel set in New York and Prague introduces us to two misfit young men who make it big by creating comic-book superheroes. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America the comic book. Inspired by their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapists, The Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
by Dai Sijie
New York Times Bestseller Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an enchanting tale that captures the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening. An immediate international bestseller, it tells the story of two hapless city boys exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during Chinaâs infamous Cultural Revolution. There the two friends meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, the two friends find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.
Book
Prodigal Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver's fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.
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The Orchid Thief
by Susan Orlean
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ⢠A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orleanâs wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flowerâthe rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindeniiâa deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of Americaâs strange flower-selling subculture, through Floridaâs swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orleanâand the readerâwill have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the âorchid thief,â Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Readerâs Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief âStylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orleanâs] gifts in full bloom.ââThe New York Times Book Review âFascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.ââLos Angeles Times âOrleanâs snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.ââThe Washington Post Book World âOrleanâs gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.ââBoston Sunday Globe âA swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.ââThe Wall Street Journal
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