MY PICK

Ok all...I have decided to go with one of my top 3 favorite books of all time...THE THORN BIRDS!! Hope you all love it as much as I do. Maybe when everyone is done we can all watch the mini series and discuss that too, I have 2 copies if anyone wants one! :) Rani and I talked, and we decided that we will read Thorn Birds until January. It's a long book, and things start getting crazy over the Holidays. Our book review will be the first or second week of January. Once we start again in January, there will be some new rules and changes to the book club. So far we noticed our members dwindling away, and people not showing up for their reviews! From here on out Rani and I may have to be the book nazis...so I apologize in advance. We are serious about our club, and only want people that are totally committed and will participate each month.

Enjoy The Thorn Birds and see you all again in January!!

BTW, if you read any good books between now and then, please share! Les, I have one for you...The Rembrandt Affair. I read it on the flight home from Paris and it was set mostly in Paris and Amsterdam!! I loved it, soooo good! Made me wish we would have gone through The Rembrandt Museum in Amsterdam though. :(

And one last item on the agenda...Congrats to Andrea on the new baby!!! Can't wait to see pics, you should post some!

XOXO!

Nat

NAT'S PICKS

Ok, my pics are below. Sorry, I am going for LONG novels..maybe we should give ourselves 3 months to read??? I also have to add in my two cents: I have read novels by each of the authors, and actually read The Thorn Birds twice. All are epic sagas, all are long, and all are AMAZING authors and some of my favorite books. Has anyone read Pillars of the Earth or The Poisonwood Bible? Amazing!! And you have all heard my raving about The Thorn Birds (one of my favorite books on earth!) I am so excited about these selections! Please vote on the right!

1) KEN FOLLET: FALL OF GIANTS

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010: Welcome to the 20th century as you've never seen it. At over 1,000 pages, Fall of Giants delivers all the elements that fans of Ken Folletthave come to treasure: historical accuracy, richly developed characters, and a sweeping yet intimate portrait of a past world that you'll fully inhabit before the first chapter is through. The story follows five families across the globe as their fates intertwine with the extraordinary events of World War I, the political struggles within their own countries, and the rise of the feminist movement. Intriguing stories of love and loyalty abound, from a forbidden romance between a German spy and a British aristocrat to a Russian soldier and his scandal-ridden brother in love with the same woman. Action-packed with blood on the battlefield and conspiracies behind closed doors, Fall of Giants brings the nuances of each character to life and shifts easily from dirty coal mines to sparkling palaces. There is so much to love here, and the good news is the end is just the beginning: Fall of Giants is the first in a planned trilogy. --Miriam Landis

Product Description

Ken Follett's World Without End was a global phenomenon, a work of grand historical sweep, beloved by millions of readers and acclaimed by critics. At a towering 1,000 pages,Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic and the first novel in The Century Trilogy.

It follows the fates of five interrelated families-American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh-as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.

Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man's world in the Welsh mining pits...Gus Dewar, an American law student rejected in love, finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson's White House...two orphaned Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, embark on radically different paths half a world apart when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution...Billy's sister, Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London...

These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangled as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St. Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. As always with Ken Follett, the historical background is brilliantly researched and rendered, the action fast-moving, the characters rich in nuance and emotion. It is destined to be a new classic.

In future volumes of The Century Trilogy, subsequent generations of the same families will travel through the great events of the rest of the twentieth century, changing themselves-and the century itself. With passion and the hand of a master, Follett brings us into a world we thought we knew, but now will never seem the same again.

2) COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH: THE THORN BIRDS

Review

"A heart-rending epic...truly marvelous" -- --Chicago Tribune

"A perfect Read...The kind of book the world blockbuster was made" -- --Boston Globe

"Beautiful...compelling entertaiment" -- unknown

Product Description

Now, 25 years after it first took the world by storm, Colleen McCullough's sweeping family saga of dreams, titanic struggles, dark passions, and forbidden love in the Australian Outback returns to enthrall a new generation. As powerful, moving, and unforgettable as when it originally appeared, it remains a monumental literary achievement—a landmark novel to be read . . . and read again!

3) BARBARA KINGSOLVER: PRODIGAL SUMMER

There is no one in contemporary literature quite like Barbara Kingsolver. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy wit and earthy poetry; her descriptions are rooted in daily life but are also on familiar terms with the eternal. With Prodigal Summer, she returns from the Congo to a "wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness." And there, in an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, she recounts not one but three intricate stories.

Exuberant, lush, riotous--the summer of the novel is "the season of extravagant procreation" in which bullfrogs carelessly lay their jellied masses of eggs in the grass, "apparently confident that their tadpoles would be able to swim through the lawn like little sperms," and in which a woman may learn to "tell time with her skin." It is also the summer in which a family of coyotes moves into the mountains above Zebulon Valley:

The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This is what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration.

The "she" is Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, "Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story."

Structurally, that gossamer web is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature. --Kelly Flynn