In Cold Blood, first chapter

Hello readers! How is Capote going? For those reading about vampires, please note that there was a mixing among titles, but we are reading Truman Capote, maybe vampires for the next one...

So, for all that I know, I'm the one really behind this time, as I'm not reading THE BOOK.

And why is that? I mean, shame on me, but, I have some sort of excuse, I read "In Cold Blood" a few years ago... so I felt that I would read something else in the meanwhile... and I'm reading a bizarre African novel, difficult to read even in my native in Spanish...

So I would ask for your help in leading this conversation, I don't have all the details in my memory, so what should be discussing here? Take the lead!

And the Spring Winner is...

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

And below, the second and third positions:

- Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi
- Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts

Time to get your copy and be ready for some true crime genre, as the book has been regarded by critics. 

Will you be able to pick just one?

One more time, we have a wonderful selection of books from which to pick. We can select just one, but make sure to swell your "to-read" list with all of them!

Send us your pick by Friday, and we will have a winner by next week.

Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi - sent by Jorge

Selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, the book has been sold in 16 countries as of 2014.
 “Ghana Must Go” comes with a bagload of prepublication praise. For once, the brouhaha is well deserved. Ms Selasi has an eye for the perfect detail: a baby’s toenails “like dewdrops”, a woman sleeps “like a cocoyam. A thing without senses…unplugged from the world.” As a writer she has a keen sense of the baggage of childhood and an unforgettable voice on the page. Miss out on “Ghana Must Go” and you will miss one of the best new novels of the season.

Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts - sent by Rika
I'm choosing off my bookcase because I haven't been able to get copies of some of your titles.
Help me finish this book!

Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in Shantaram, a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means "man of God's peace," which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving a 19-year sentence. He served two years and leaped over the wall. He was imprisoned for a string of armed robberies peformed to support his heroin addiction, which started when his marriage fell apart and he lost custody of his daughter. All of that is enough for several lifetimes, but for Greg Roberts, that's only the beginning.

A 4.5 out of 5 stars book - Amazon reviews.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie - sent by Arantxa M.

The tale takes place in China during the harsh days of the Cultural Revolution, when millions of young people were sent to the countryside for "reeducation." The two teenage boys in Sijie's novel fail to escape this fate, but lonely and frightened as they are in the rural mountain village to which they've been exiled, they find themselves transformed when they uncover a forbidden treasure trove: a suitcase filled with Western literary classics. Hugo, Stendhal, Dumas, Flaubert, Dickens, and especially Balzac become the boys' secret companions, firing their imaginations and giving their lives new meaning. The books become the motivation and the sweet reward for everything they do: They lead them into danger but also help them out of scrapes. And the books also become the vehicle by which one of the boys, Luo, woos a beautiful seamstress who lives on the other side of the mountain. Ultimately, the secret books become the catalyst for Sijie's provocative and unexpected ending.

The strange case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson - sent by Rocio H.

I see we don't pay much attention to horror in this club, so maybe, the time has come to read under the blankets!!!!

The young Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from repeated nightmares of living a double life, in which by day he worked as a respectable doctor and by night he roamed the back alleys of old-town Edinburgh. In three days of furious writing, he produced a story about his dream existence. His wife found it too gruesome, so he promptly burned the manuscript. In another three days, he wrote it again. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic. In the first six months, 40,000 copies were sold.

In True Blood, by Truman Capote - sent by Monica De la Paz

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.

The African by Le Clezio

Hi cookiest,

I have enjoyed the book, but in different ways as I was advancing on its pages.

I find the first half of the book as a nostalgic description of the mostly nice memories the author has from his childhood in Nigeria. The manner how he describes that time of his life and the feelings he had to the land and people there made me remember my own chilhood in a place closer to Africa in several senses than many of the people I met as a child would admit now. This part is mostly about the boy and the view, through his candid eyes, of the world (the people, the animals, the landscapes) that was in front of him.

But then, almost suddenly, we start to learn about the African, about war, loneliness, the unfairness and unjustices of the colonialism and how all of them left a deep scar in the personality of the writer's father. That changed the life of the family too, and Le Clezio masterly uses the book to try to learn, to try to justify, to try to forgive his own father while at the same time criticizes the behaviour of the colonial powers and the greed of its people in Africa, the absurdity of the war and the everyday fight against death that we can still find in many developing countries. Instead of the child, we hear now the voice of the adult, the man trying to understand his father in an uncomprehensible world.

I find this book amazing because the author deals with all that social, psicological, antropological and even political complexity easily, in a quite short book, seemingly without any effort, as talking to a good friend while drinking a cup of tea. But the memories, the sentiments and the realities described are far from simple, far from easy to write about.

I think I will read more books that came out from your typewriter, monsieur Le Clezio.

The African, second half

In the second half of the book, we read a more intimate part of the story. Le Clezio talks about his father, his personality, his relationships with his children, with the people he works. He searches for the causes of what made his father an unhappy man, unable to show love for his children, and he blames the war. What else is there? Do you agree with this vision?

An interesting (and funny) article about The African

According to Geoff Wisner, it is worth reading The African "to learn more about the author's childhood, personality, and relationship with his father… for the sometimes elegant beauty of the prose". 

However, "don't read it for its insights into Africa and its people. Why? 

The most efficient way to explain is to say that The African scores high on the criteria set out in Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina's essay How to Write About Africa".

Really worth reading the criteria analysis here:

http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/j.m.g.-le-clezio-shows-us-how-its-done

The African, by J.M.G. Le Clézio - First chapters

We travel into the youth of the author, to meet a French family that lives in the depths of Nigeria, and not far from Cameroon. We meet the characters, our boy, the father, the mother, the brother, basically the family. Le Clézio presents the situation, why they were there, what it was to be there, the change of moving to Africa after the war, meeting his father, meeting severity and having freedom at the same time. Is this family different? Or no matter that they were in the middle of nowhere, a family is a family with the same kind of issues? What strikes you most in the first part of the book?

2014 Starter

After a close vote, our winner is…

The African, by J.M.G. Le Clézio.

Here is a summary of the votes:

The African, by Le Clezio - 4 votes

I am Malala, by Malala Yousafzai - 3 votes

Persuasion, by Jane Austen - 1 vote

Maybe "I am Malala" could be presented again for the next election?

In any case, get your copy of "The African" and be ready for the suggested reading schedule to be posted soon.

Looking forward to sharing some African traveling adventures and reflections with you!

End of the book (with beautiful spoilers)

Dear Cookies,

I did not want to read Steinbeck's book, I did not purposely vote for it. I had read "the pearl" many years ago and is still a book I remember, the kind of story that remains, engraved forever in your mind. In that book, as in this one, you can feel the tragedy coming slowly but irreversibly as you advance on each page. You can deeply feel sorrow, injustice and the unfair situation of the poor and the ignorants. Steinbeck is damn good to masterly describe that kind of situations, the kind of writer that deserves a Nobel prize, but that shocks those that read him and even more those that dare to do it twice.I think this book is more than great. On one hand we have a perfect, sharp description of a part of the american society in the thirties of the 20th century. Clear as a picture. Everything from the clothes or the food to the cars or technologies used to crop (to me, having studied agriculture, is amazing to discover that theree was not machinery available to pick the cotton on that time). The roles of each one in these family groups, the social cliches, the prejudices and hierarchies, everything detailed. That is the history book. But in the other hand it is an actual text, a description of things that are currently happening all around the world, not only in Spain, or in the US, but also, as you have said, in developing countries, all around the world. I guess abuse of power, injustice and hunger is something inherently attached to the human beings that will happen once and once again, wherever, always.The end of the book is as good as the rest of it. Tom goes away, as others before him, he will never be back. The flood, the Nature, spoils the little things the Joads still had. The coming baby, the hope, the  future, is not a baby anymore. We do not know the sins of John, we do not need to know, he will pay for them anyway. We do not know the fate of the remaining members of the family, but we can imagine that they will do the same as the rest of the okies: to suffer, to die sooner than later in misery, it does not matter how. That is irrelevant, the book is elegant enough not to make us read that. We can only hope that they will manage to survive, in order to not to feel too sorry for them, maybe guilty. Then we close the book, and go back to our reality, hard as it can be, but that is not the same as the one of the miserable, of those that have lost everything and are starving.I did not want to read this book. I was sure that it was going to make me thirsty, hungry, cold, tired. Nothing good. But also angry, impotent, desperate. It is so terribly good, actual and real that it will stay carved in my memory, as the one from the same author I mentioned above. I will have to think about ethics, about society and about Justice, while at the same time people around us are desperately looking for a job, searching food in the trash or sleeping in the streets.I will bear the burden of this two books, I only hope we will choose, in our always interesting club, a new one, lighter to read and not to carry on our shoulders.

The grapes of wrath: the rest of the chapters

It seems that we are all late, but as always, it's not a problem! We'll just add up from here all the comments for the rest of the book, so please add whatever remarks, comments, ideas that "The grapes of wrath" are provoking you... By the way, a very good title, if you ask me... what do you think?
We'll give some more weeks to reach the final line before we start thinking about the next book, the first of 2014, sounds good?