Central Market Book Club
Affiliated with
a Non-Profit Educational Organization
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Contact info for the Houston Central Market Book Club
Location: HEB Central Market
3815 Westheimer(at Weslayan) [map here]
2nd Floor Community Room
Schedule: Every month on the second Monday from 7:00pm to 9:00 pm (sometimes we finish sooner)
Contact: Alice Aman
Email: amanhaus@gmail.com
Ph:713-523-3652
Check out our new Blog Current plans are to share the blog between Montrose Great Books and Central Market Book Club with possible occasional "guests" sharing descriptions of other book discussions around the city. You need to register to add comments. I'm not limiting registrations to book club members only. Anyone as long as they aren't spammers or obnoxious may contribute.
Note from Alice:
Our group is free and open to the public. The group
doesn't provide the text so attendees must find a source
for obtaining a copy of the readings on their own.
(Library, web, used book store, retail book store, friend, etc.)
We are associated with the Houston Great Books Council and
always appreciate if someone wants to submit membership dues
to the council but this is not a requirement for the group.
We welcome everyone who might be interested.
We do ask if someone wants to actually participate in
the discussion (and not just listen), that they read the
book and hopefully bring any questions they might have.
The questions from attendees are what really form the basis
for our discussions.
You are invited to join our google group and to review prior google group activity for our group by going to: http://groups.google.com/group/CentralMarketBookClub?lnk=li
We select our readings by voting though getting suggestions on the ballot requires that the title is either a classic, or written by an author noted for writing classics or winner or runner up for a major literary award (Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker, National Book Award). For more info [click here]
Reading Selections for the Central Market Book Club
Readings for 2008
- Jan 14, 2008 LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding (200 pages) publ 1959
Author is 1983 Nobel Prize winner
Story about a group of young boys stranded on a desert island who must negotiate cooperation and self-government without adult supervision…An investigation of what happens to civilized people when the structures of civilization disappear.
Connie leading discussion.
- Feb 11, 2008 NATIVE SON by Richard Wright (432 pages) publ 1940
Named as #20 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century. Bestseller and one of the earliest successful attempts to explain the racial divide in America. Tells the story of 22-year old Bigger Thomas, an African-American of the poorest class, struggling to live in Chicago's South Side ghetto in the 1930s. While not apologizing for Bigger's crimes, author is sympathetic to the systemic inevitability behind them.
Alice leading discussion
- Mar 10, 2008 UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch. ( 256 pages) publ 1984
Included in Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century
Story of a struggling young Oxford educated male British writer (Donaghue) living in London who goes on a madcap adventure of a little more than a week According to some reviewers, there is much clever wit and humor causing some to laugh out loud thru many of the scenes.
Allan leading discussion.
- Apr 14, 2008 MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert (400 pages) published in 1857 (publ in English in 1886)
Depictions of sex and adultery in the book considered to be vivid in 1857 incited a backlash of immorality charges. Considered to be one of the first modern realistic novels and is included on many lists of greatest novels ever written. It is a story of a doctor's wife who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was notoriously perfectionistic about his writing.
Full text of Madame Bovary available for download from Project Gutenberg or Bibliomania
Jackie leading discussion
Note: Election of new selections to be held at end of April meeting. Ballot is HERE
- May 12, 2008 DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather ( 297 pages) publ 1927
Author won Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for another work titled ONE OF OURS
Included in Time Magazine list of 100 best novels
Notable for its portrayal of two well-meaning and devout French priests who encounter a well-entrenched Spanish-Mexican clergy they are sent to supplant when the United States acquired New Mexico and the Vatican, in turn, remapped its dioceses. Several of these entrenched priests are depicted in classic manner as examples of greed, avarice and gluttony, while others live simple, abstemious lives among the Indians
Connie leading discussion.
- Jun 9, 2008 THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS by Kiran Desai (324 pages) publ 2006
2006 Man Booker Prize winner as well as 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
Main themes include migration and living in between two worlds and in between past and present. Setting is the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency
challenges the old way of life. Characters include a Cambridge educated retired judge, his granddaughter, their cook, the cook's son who is an illegal immigrant working in grimy Manhattan restaurants and the granddaughter's boyfriend who is involved in an insurgency.
Jackie leading discussion.
- July 14, 2008 SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser (Dover Thrift edition - 368 pages) publ 1900
According to H.L. Mencken, "American writing, before and after Dreiser's time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin." About a young country girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream by first becoming a mistress to powerful men and later as a famous actress. Author had difficulty finding publisher "due to the blurred division line between good and bad in the plot."
Connie will lead discussion
- August 11, 2008 MRS DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf (192 pages) publ 1925
Story of Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. Story is preoccupied with a number of issues including madness and feminism. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time, and in and out of the characters' minds, to construct a complete image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.
Alice will lead discussion
- September 8, 2008 THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neal Hurston (194 pages) publ 1937
From the 1930s through the 1950s, Zora Neale Hurston was the most prolific and accomplished black woman writer in America. The book was not universally praised by Hurston's peers, with particular criticism leveled at her use of black southern dialect to show that complex relationships and metaphoric language are possible in something considered "substandard" to English. Setting of novel is central and southern Florida in the early 20th century.
The main character, an African American woman in her early forties, tells via an extended flashback, the story of her life which has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three very different men.
Ellie will lead discussion
- October 13, 2008 DELTA WEDDING by Eudora Welty (326 pages) publ 1946
Welty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER.
DELTA WEDDING is a portrait of a large Southern family living on their plantation in the Mississippi delta land in 1923. "A perfect ear for dialect is matched by deep spiritual concerns, and the limits of family and sexuality are explored." says one reviewer.
Mary will lead discussion
Note: Election of new books for our reading list to be held at end of October meeting.
- November 10, 2008 NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoevsky (136 pages) publ 1864
Considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel.
It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. Considered to be possible inspiration for Wright's THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND.
Alice wil lead discussion
- December 8, 2008 THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND by Richard Wright (65 pages) publ 1945
Written seven years before Ellison's novel INVISIBLE MAN , Wright's story is considered by many to be an unacknowledged source of Ellison's work; however, both writers rely heavily on Dostoevsky. Wright's story is also thought to present a better portrayal of the black man's plight in American society during that time period.
An African American falsely accused of killing a white woman, attempts to make a new life in the sewers.. he examines his assumptions about guilt and innocence and comes to believe that people are inherently guilty and isolated from one another.
Before anyone gives up trying to find a copy, we will discuss what options are available in making sure everyone has a copy of the text. One source for text is a collection by Wright titled EIGHT MEN: SHORT STORIES but supply seems limited at this point.
Esther will lead discussion
Reading selections for our earlier years are available here
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