"Birdsong" Preview Post

So, I finally decided to get off my sorry lazy butt and post up the preview post for our July book "Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks. Hopefully you guys have started reading it, so this preview post probably won't be any surprise to you but here it is anyways. And just as a warning, this preview will not be anywhere near as intelligent as Laine's.

"Birdsong" was published in 1993 by British author Sebastian Faulks. Faulks has written two other books set in France that are connected by minor characters including "Charlotte Gray" and "The Girl at the Lion D'Or". He has become one of the most popular writers in England and his stories are often about Modern European and American history. Most of his stories feature similar themes, namely contrasting themes of love/war, violence/peace and how they exist in the same reality for people.

Birdsong tells the story of Stephen Wraysford before, during and after World War I. The story covers three different time periods and is split into seven sections. The first is before the war when Stephen is 20-years-old and traveling in France to learn about the manufacturing business where he ends up having a disastrous affair with the business owner's wife. The story then jumps ahead six years later to his life in the war and also about the life of his granddaughter Elizabeth.

While the story jumps in its timeline, it's largely episodic. While Stephen is the main protagonist, it also features a lot of supporting characters that are fleshed out and given backstories as well. It is told as a third person narrative and focuses largely on the lives, details and experiences of the soldiers in World War I, including the psychological implications the war had on the soldiers as they try to return to a normal life after all they have seen and done.

I'm not particularly a fan of war novels but I've heard great things about the book and hope you guys will enjoy it! Since I've started reading it, the detail in it has made me somewhat uneasy but I suppose that's kind of the point. Faulks doesn't glorify war but instead focuses on the reality of it.

Also, Toby Stephens, who is my new obsession, has done a BBC Radio dramatization of it. Therefore, I will now be spending the next little while obsessively looking for it.

Tune in near the end of the month for the discussion post and enjoy!

Murakami Preview Post

Greetings!

For anyone who has stumbled across this site from the wide world of intertubes, this is an online book club of the read-a-book-and-talk-about-it variety (not the columbia-house-buy-ten-for-one-dollar variety). Every month we'll be reading a book and generating online discussion and debate.

Let's get things started in style: post-modern Japanese fiction! Woo. First up, we have Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I'm reading the Vintage copy, translated by Alfred Birnbaum. Written in 1985, this book contains two intertwining narratives: that of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and, of course, that of The End of the World. Although belonging more to magic realism than science fiction, HBW&TEW does employ many elements of "dystopic future" sci-fi and creates for us a new world (or worlds) with which we must familiarize ourselves. In the first chapter we are immediately hit with some of Murakami's most prominent themes: magic realism, the everyman narrator, sexuality, (un)spoken language, and the physicality of communication.

Murakami writes in what the internet calls a "post-war mindset", using narrators that question and subvert established orders, critiquing (seemingly omnipresent) societal norms. In many of his works, the different modes of communication used -- varying through combinations of spoken, heard, written, read, electronic, past or live -- carry different emphases and different nuances that he uses to rework our expectations of human interaction.

What I love about his writing is the honesty of it. His narrators take things as they come; they act, react and respond. They don't spend a lot of time whining about what could be, or wishing "if only x, y, z" hadn't happened. They are curious, and often go to great lengths to observe things, but they are still ultimately realistic.
I also appreciate his rather dry sense of humour as well. "A hallway as long as Marcel Proust?" (10).


All right folks!
Tune in mid-way through June for the my discussion topics, but feel free to leave comments/thoughts/questions before then.

~Laine

Summer Picks

Here is your list of summer readings (which one my roommates picked out of a hat):

JUNE

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

written by Haruki Murakami

picked by Elaine

JULY

Birdsong

written by Sebastian Faulks

picked by Sherry

AUGUST

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

written by David Sedaris

picked by Jax

Meet Your New Library

After some serious brain crunching we have gathered a list of books that we will be reading over the next year and beyond (in no particular order):

1. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
2. The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland
3. At Swim- Two-Birds - Flann o'Brien
4. The Cave - Tim Krabbe
5. When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro
6. When You Are Engulfed in Flames -David Sedaris
7. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
8. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
9. The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton
10. Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder- Evelyn Waugh
11. Black Hole - Charles Burns
12. Travesties - Tom Stoppard
13. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
14. The Kite Runner- Khaled Hosseni
15. Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
16. Still Alice - Lisa Genova

Other suggestions

• The Accidental - Ali Smith
• Love in the Time of Cholera- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch
• Men at Arms (first book of the Sword of Honour trilogy) - Evelyn Waugh
• Cambodian Odyssey - Haing Ngor
• My sister's keeper - Jodi Picoult
• Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature - Jan Lars Jensen

Do Not Disturb: Thinking in Progress

Essentially I feel as if I should start this new journey off with either some wise or some witty words, but I can't force either of those. So, instead I will just keep it to a simple WELCOME!

Now that you are here, it is just a matter of getting this show on the road!