Monday, December 29, 2008

Payback in Kind

Through the wonders of the internets, this lowly book club blog was found by someone at the publishers of Margaret Atwood's new book - who very kindly has sent us signed copies of the book for our members! Isn't that just the most amazing thing you've ever heard? I can't wait to distribute everyone's books! Thank you, Julie at Anansi Publishers! This is such a nice gift!

Sunday, December 7, 2008

The Wondrous Book Club

Oh, wow - finally 7 books into our club we've hit a book everyone liked! You might call it lazy, but when I'm looking for a solid, I go straight to the Pulitzer Prize winners, baby. This month we read Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. As always, we had a rousing discussion about the book, marvelling about the story-telling, the history, the incredible writing style of Junot Díaz, the parts that, you know, made us laugh and the parts that made us cry.

I wrote a longish review over on Bookish and D writes a brief one on DeBordian Perruque.

The next book we'll read for mid-January is Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. From Publisher's Weekly:
...a weird but wonderful mélange of personal reminiscences, literary walkabout, moral preachment, timely political argument, economic history and theological query, all bound together with wry wit and careful though casual-seeming research. Every debt comes with a date on which payment is due, Atwood observes on this conversational stroll, from the homely and familiar notion of fairness and notion of equivalent values in Kingsley's Water Babies to the thornier connection between debt and sin, memory and redemption in Aeschylus's Eumenides.