Central Market Book Club
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a Non-Profit Educational Organization
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Central Market Book Club candidates - Ballot for October 8 2007
(Anyone attending will each have 6 votes to choose from this list.)
Suggested by Jackie
- 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
- THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS by Kiran Desai (324 pages) publ 2006
2006 Man Booker Prize winnter 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.
Suggested by Alice
- 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.
- WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF by Edward Albee (240 pages) premier 1962
Won both the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1962-63 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. Also selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama but was overruled by Pulitzer committe because of profanity and sexual themes. The play involves two couples playing "games," which are savage verbal attacks against one or two of the others at the party. These games are referred to with sarcastically alliterative names, "Humiliate the Host", "Get the Guests", and so on.
Suggested by Allan
- HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson. (219 pages) publ 1980
author has won Pulitzer Prize for another book. This one was nominated for the Pulitzer in 1980.
Book is described as a "Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women." by the Guardian Unlimited which also included it in its list of 100 greatest novels of all time. The novel treats the subject of housekeeping, not only in the domestic sense of cleaning, but in the larger sense of keeping a spiritual home for one's self and family in the face of loss.
- 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.
Suggested by Connie
- 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.
- 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
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