2012 Book Selections

January 9, 2012
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
By Leo Tolstoy
Facilitator: Bob Mahoney

Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins shortly after Ivan Ilyich’s death. A small group of legal professionals, court members, and a private prosecutor have gathered in a private room within the Law Courts, and while looking through a newspaper one of them reads the following; “Praskovya Fedorovna Golovina, with profound sorrow, informs relatives and friends of the demise of her beloved husband Ivan Ilyich Golovin, Member of the Court of Justice, which occurred on February the 4th of this year 1882. The funeral will take place on Friday at one o’clock in the afternoon.” Immediately members of the group begin to think how Ilyich’s passing will affect their positions and status; They thank God it didn’t happen to them and ponder on the implications of how they might benefit from their colleagues demise, each one of them oblivious of the fact that death will come to them all. The story takes us back and we see Ivan Ilyich in the prime of his life. He has studied law and is now a judge. He performs his work with a cold discipline and he is a social climber who has become devoid of emotion. He lacks empathy and any concern for his fellow man, seeking only to reach the top where he can look down upon his peers. One day Ivan has a fall whilst decorating his new house. He sustains an injury and although he doesn’t know it, the injury will cause him to become ill and he will die as a result. During his illness he becomes bad tempered and bitter and refuses to believe he is coming to the end of his life. He gets little sympathy from his family and his only solace is his conversations with Gerasim, a peasant who stays by his bed and gives him honesty and kindness. Reflecting on his current situation and his past life Ivan’s worldview begins to change. He realizes the higher he climbed in his noble profession the more unhappy he became, and looking back he realizes how meaningless his life had been. Slowly Ivan comes to term with his imminent death and finally he sees the light. He begins to feel sorry for those about him busying themselves living a life of habit unable to see how artificial their existence is and that they are not living a good life at all. Finally after his illumination he dies in a moment of exquisite happiness. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is Tolstoy’s attack on the smug satisfaction of a middle and upper class population, who in his mind live artificial meaningless lives, lives of separateness unaware of their creator and what lies before them after death. Tolstoy’s critic Vladimir Nabokov summed it up when he wrote; “The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God’s living light, then Ivan died into a new life – Life with a capital L.”

February 6, 2012
The Tiger’s Wife
By Tea Obreht
Facilitator: Anne Pahl

The Orange Prize winning debut from a truly extraordinary talent. ‘Having sifted through everything I have heard about the tiger and his wife, I can tell you that this much is fact: in April of 1941, without declaration or warning, the German bombs started falling over the city and did not stop for three days. The tiger did not know that they were bombs…’ A tiger escapes from the local zoo, padding through the ruined streets and onwards, to a ridge above the Balkan village of Galina. His nocturnal visits hold the villagers in a terrified thrall. But for one boy, the tiger is a thing of magic – Shere Khan awoken from the pages of The Jungle Book. Natalia is the granddaughter of that boy. Now a doctor, she is visiting orphanages after another war has devastated the Balkans. On this journey, she receives word of her beloved grandfather’s death, far from their home, in circumstances shrouded in mystery. From fragments of stories her grandfather told her as a child, Natalia realizes he may have died searching for ‘the deathless man,’ a vagabond who was said to be immortal. Struggling to understand why a man of science would undertake such a quest, she stumbles upon a clue that will lead her to a tattered copy of The Jungle Book, and then to the extraordinary story of the tiger’s wife.

March 5, 2012
Confessions of An Ugly Stepsister
By Gregory Maguire
Facilitator: Jane Bottlinger

We have all heard the story of Cinderella, the beautiful child cast out to slave amongst the ashes. But what of her stepsisters, the homely pair exiled into ignominy by the fame of their lovely sibling? What fate befell those untouched by beauty …and what curses accompanied Cinderella’s looks? Set against the backdrop of seventeenth-century Holland, CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER tells the story of Iris, an unlikely heroine who is swept from the lowly streets of Harlem to a strange world of wealth, artifice, and ambition. Iris’s path becomes intertwined with that of Clara, the mysterious and unnaturally beautiful girl destined to become her sister. While Clara retreats to the cinders of the family hearth, Iris seeks out the shadowy secrets of her new household – and the treacherous truth of her former life. Far more than a mere fairy tale, this is a novel of beauty and betrayal, reminding us that deception can be unearthed – and love unveiled – in the most unexpected of places.

April 2, 2012
The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
By Linda Gorton
Facilitator: Sandy Woods

A disturbing real-life account of racism at the turn of the century follows 40 Irish orphans brought to Arizona by Catholic nuns to be adopted by local Mexican-American families. The children were kidnapped by outraged Anglo vigilantes and the subsequent Supreme Court case found in favor of the abductors.

May 7, 2012
The Shadow of the Wind
By Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Facilitator: Edy Alderson

Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the ‘cemetery of lost books,’ a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man brings his 10-year-old son Daniel one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book from the shelves and pulls out ‘La Sombra Del Viento’ by Julian Carax. But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. Then, one night, as he is wandering the old streets once more, Daniel is approached by a figure who reminds him of a character from La Sombra del Viento, a character who turns out to be the devil. This man is tracking down every last copy of Carax’s works in order to burn them. What begins as a case of literary curiosity turns into a race to find out the truth behind the life and death of Julian Carax and to save those he left behind. A page-turning exploration of obsession in literature and love, and the places that obsession can lead.

June 4, 2012
Unbroken
By Laura Hillenbrand
Facilitator: Kathie Berry

The new book from the author of the bestselling and much-loved Seabiscuit. On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will. In her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit. Telling an unforgettable story of a man’s journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.

July 9, 2012
Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
Facilitator: Nancy Krumel

In this provocative and inspiring book, Malcolm Gladwell examines everyone from business giants to scientific geniuses, sports stars to musicians, and reveals what they have in common. He looks behind the spectacular results, the myths and the legends to show what really explains exceptionally successful people. Gladwell argues that, when we try to understand success, we normally start with the wrong question. We ask “what is this person like?” when we should really be asking “where are they from?” The real secret of success turns out to be surprisingly simple, and it hinges on a few crucial twists in people’s life stories – on the culture they grow up in and the way they spend their time. What does Bill Gates have in common with the Beatles? How does your IQ relate to your salary? What can a linguist tell us about airline safety? How does the way your child speaks to an adult affect their success in life? What do rice paddies have to do with maths results? And how can you predict a maths star without even making them take a test? Malcolm Gladwell has the answers. This book really will change the way you think about your life. And it will challenge you to make the most of your own potential.

August 6, 2012
City of Veils
By Zoe Ferraris
Facilitator: Judy Thut

The crime: one scalding afternoon, the mutilated body of a young woman, half naked beneath her burqa, is discovered on a Saudi beach; soon afterwards a Western woman’s husband vanishes without trace. The place: Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the City of Veils. A city of narrow streets and closed shutters, where nothing is what it seems; and the Empty Quarter – one of the most beautiful, yet unforgiving deserts on earth. The people: Miriam Walker, alone in an alien culture, desperate to find her missing husband. Katya, a forensic scientist battling the prejudices of a society full of sexual, religious and moral contradictions, and Nayir, devout Muslim, desert guide, amateur sleuth – the man she loves.

September 10, 2012
In the Heart of the Sea
By Nathaniel Philbric
Facilitator:

Best of the Best. The true story behind Melville’s masterpiece–a riveting tale of history and true-life adventure with new insights from a long-eyewitness account of the tragedy of the whaleship “Essex.”

October 1, 2012
Mudbound
By Hillary Jordan
Facilitator: Gail Garrison

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry’s love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud. As the Second World War shudders to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not and is sensitive to Laura’s plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the farm, comes home from war with the shine of a hero, only to face far more dangerous battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. These two unlikely friends become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.

November 5, 2012
A Quiet Flame
By Phillip Kerr
Facilitator: Nancy Larsen

Bernie Gunther, Berlin’s hardest-boiled private eye, returns in this his latest outing. Moving the plot from Pre-War Germany to the dangers of Argentina in 1950 and the post-war world of Hitler’s most notorious war-criminals, Kerr yet again delivers a powerful, compelling thriller. Posing as an escaping Nazi war-criminal Bernie Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires and, having revealed his real identity to the local chief of police, discovers that his reputation as a detective goes before him. A young girl has been murdered in peculiarly gruesome circumstances that strongly resemble Bernie’s final case as a homicide detective with the Berlin police during the dog days of the Weimar Republic. A case he had failed to solve. Circumstances lead the chief of police in Buenos Aires to suppose that the murderer may be one of several thousand ex Nazis who have fetched up in Argentina since 1945. And, therefore, who better than Bernie Gunther to help him track that murderer down? Reluctantly Bernie agrees to help the police and discovers much more than he, or even they bargained for. Redolent with atmosphere and featuring compelling portraits of real characters such as Eva and Juan Peron, Adolf Eichmann, and Otto Skorzeny this novel ends up asking some highly provocative questions about the true extent of Argentina’s Nazi collaboration and anti-Semitism under the Perons.