Literature+Circle+Book+Titles

=//The Offical, Incredible and Magical Literature Circles List 2012 //=

These are the books that were chosen for literature circles this year. Your choices are due to me by April 30, 2012. You will need your lit circle books by May 14th. We will have our first lit circle reading day on May 16th, and our first discussion will be on May 17th. Read the descriptions of the books carefully. You will end up signing up for your choices on line. Here are the books, in no particular order:

[|Life of Pi on Amazon.com] Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable //Life of Pi // is a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker ("His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth"). It sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don't burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion."
 * 1. //Life of Pi // by Yann Martel **

An award winner in Canada, //Life of Pi //, Yann Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike //Life of Pi // is such a book.

[|In the Lake of the Woods on Amazon.com] Tim O'Brien has been writing about Vietnam in one way or another ever since he served there as an infantryman in the late 1960s. His earliest work on the subject, //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">If I Die in a Combat Zone // <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal;">, was an intensely personal memoir of his own tour of duty; his books since then have featured many of the same elements of fear, boredom, and moral ambiguity but in a fictional setting. In 1994 O'Brien wrote //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In the Lake of the Woods // <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal;">, a novel that, while imbued with the troubled spirit of Vietnam, takes place entirely after the war and in the United States. The main character, John Wade, is a man in crisis: after spending years building a successful political career, he finds his future derailed during a bid for the U.S. Senate by revelations about his past as a soldier in Vietnam. The election lost by a landslide, John and his wife, Kathy, retreat to a small cabin on the shores of a Minnesota lake--from which Kathy mysteriously disappears.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2. //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In the Lake of the Woods //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> by Tim O'Brien OR //If I Die in a Combat Zone// **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Was she murdered? Did she run away? Instead of answering these questions, O'Brien raises even more as he slowly reveals past lives and long-hidden secrets. Included in this third-person narrative are "interviews" with the couple's friends and family as well as footnoted excerpts from a mix of fictionalized newspaper reports on the case and real reports pertaining to historical events--a mélange that lends the novel an eerie sense of verisimilitude. If Kathy's disappearance is at the heart of this work, then John's involvement in a My Lai-type massacre in Vietnam is its core, and O'Brien uses it to demonstrate how wars don't necessarily end when governments say they do. //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In the Lake of the Woods //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> may not //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">be //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> true, but it //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">feels //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> true--and for Tim O'Brien, that's true enough. //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">--Alix Wilber //

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Oryx and Crake on Amazon.com] <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In her latest novel, Atwood's vision of the future is bleak. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">3. //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Oryx and Crake //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> by Margaret Atwood (by permission only) **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Now that he's gotten us talking about the [|viral life of ideas] and the [|power of gut reactions], Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Outliers //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man," he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">4. ****//<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Outliers //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> by Malcolm Gladwell **
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Outliers on Amazon.com] **

//<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Outliers //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> can be enjoyed for its bits of trivia, like why most pro hockey players were born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendents of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York, how a pilots' culture impacts their crash record, how a centuries-old culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math. But there's more to it than that. Throughout all of these examples--and in more that delve into the social benefits of lighter skin color, and the reasons for school achievement gaps--Gladwell invites conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture. He leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential. -- //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Mari Malcolm //

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**5. Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow** <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**[|Billy Bathgate on Amazon.com]** <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In the Bronx of the 1930s, 15-year-old Billy Bathgate hooks up with a legendary mobster, Dutch Schultz. Schultz becomes an unlikely surrogate parent to the boy, introducing him to the ways of the world and training Billy to follow in his footsteps. After Billy falls for Schulz's latest girlfriend, he begins to question the actions of the mob he was so eager to join. As he seeks to protect the young woman, he gains strength in following his own heart and makes a courageous passage from boyhood to adulthood. E.L Doctorow won the 1990 [|PEN/Faulkner Award] for this novel.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">6. The Road by Cormac McCarthy **
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|The Road on Amazon.com] **

In “The Road” a boy and his father lurch across the cold, wretched, wet, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. The imagery is brutal even by Cormac McCarthy’s high standards for despair. This parable is also trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. //The Road// would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty. This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see. --From //New York Times// Review by Janet Maslin


 * 7. March by Geraldine Brooks**
 * [|March on Amazon.com]**

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Brooks's luminous second novel imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's //Little Women//. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or "contraband." His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations. In between, we learn of March's earlier life: his whirlwind courtship of quick-tempered Marmee, his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau and the surprising cause of his family's genteel poverty. Brooks, who based the character of March on Alcott's transcendentalist father, Bronson, relies heavily on primary sources for both the Concord and wartime scenes; her characters speak with a convincing 19th-century formality, yet the narrative is always accessible. Through the shattered dreamer March, the passion and rage of Marmee and a host of achingly human minor characters, Brooks's affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.