Yale Book Club
Hello Everyone! The Triangle Yale Book Club's next meeting is on Sunday, June 13, at 7 p.m. at the home of Martha Scotford at 2705 Augusta Drive, in Durham. We'll be discussing Ghost Train To the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux, published in 2008. New members are always welcome to attend; please RSVP directly to Martha at 490-5321, and please bring along drinks or light finger food for snacking.
Here's a description provided by The Regulator Bookstore in Durham:
"Half a lifetime ago, Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his grand tour by train through Asia. In the three decades since, the world he recorded in that book has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed and China has risen; India booms while Burma smothers under dictatorship; Vietnam flourishes in the aftermath of the havoc America was unleashing on it the last time he passed through.
"In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux re-creates that earlier journey. His odyssey takes him from eastern Europe, still hung-over from communism, through tense but thriving Turkey into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism.
"Theroux is firsthand witness to it all, encountering adventures only he could have: from the literary (sparring with the incisive Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk) to the dissolute (surviving a week-long bender on the Trans-Siberian Railroad). Wherever he goes, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain."
Cal and Faith
Faith's e-mail: fherndon1@nc.rr.com
Cal's e-mail: calnordt@aol.com
Announcing the 2009-2010 schedule for the Yale Book Club
We have a diverse selection that includes science fiction, new fiction, a classic American novel, non-fiction, and fabulous travel writing. Please notice that we've scheduled six meetings through November 2010. (All meetings are at 7 p.m.; locations will be updated as they are determined.) Sunday, January 31, 2010 - Arvind Adiga, White Tiger (2008). Winner of the Man Booker Prize. Location to be announced.
White Tiger is Adiga's first novel, but don't let that put you off. "Darkly comic ... Balram's appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling."
- The New Yorker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/14/booker-prize-adiga-white-tiger Sunday, April 11, 2010 - W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941). Location to be announced.
Oxford American Magazine lists Mind of the South as one of best five southern non-fiction books of all time. This slim volume has been recognized as a path-breaking work of scholarship and a literary achievement. Cash's book has shaped how millions of readers saw the South for decades. Sunday, June 13, 2010 - Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar (2008). Location to be announced.
In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux's odyssey takes him from eastern Europe, still hung-over from communism, through tense but thriving Turkey into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism. Wherever he goes, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain. Sunday, September 19, 2010 - William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930). Location to be announced.
As I Lay Dying recounts a family's trip by a mule-pulled wagon to bury their mother, Addie. No one can do existential angst like Faulkner, and this alternately tragic and comic journey is one of Faulkner's and American literature's greatest novels. Sunday, November 14, 2010 - Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (2008). Location to be announced.
Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. "Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory. Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way."
- Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated "Here's what Netherland surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell."
- NY Times Book Review
