Winner!

So William Faulkner made it to the top! Not only in the No Cookies Bookclub... we will be reading "The sound and the fury". Please check our book schedule page for more details to follow the discussion. Go get your copy fast!

Your suggestions

One more time, great suggestions for our great reading-together!

Make your pick and email us by Sunday (March 17th) what do you feel like reading.  Thanks!

The White Masai, by Corinne Hofmann – sent by Arantxa M.

I have neither seen the book nor watched the movie. I learnt about this book reading a travel review on Kenya, where apparently many single women go on vacation looking for their Masai (can you believe that?). It may be a girlish book, not even sure it is a good one (too cheesy?), but I am curious about it. Knowing it is a true story makes it more interesting to me.

Corinne, a European entrepreneur, meets Lketinga, a Samburu warrior, while on vacation in Mombasa on Kenya's glamorous coast.Despite language and cultural barriers, they embark on an impossible love affair. Corinne uproots her life to move to Africa--not the romantic Africa of popular culture, but the Africa of the Masai, in the middle of the isolated bush, where five-foot-tall huts made from cow dung serve as homes. Undaunted by wild animals, hunger, and bouts with tropical diseases, she tries to forge a life with Lketinga. But slowly the dream starts to crumble when she can no longer ignore the chasm between their two vastly different cultures.

The sound and the fury, by William Faulkner – sent by Jorge

The Sound and the Fury is the story of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and  one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace – sent by Rocio H.

David Foster Wallace is a name that I have heard again and again, so it might be because he died young, or it might be because he was actually a very good writer. I would like to check it myself... 

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.

Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith – sent by Macarena

This is Highsmith's first novel and the source for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1953 film. The world of Patricia Highsmith has always been filled with ordinary people, all of whom are capable of very ordinary crimes. In her  debut novel we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. "Some people are better off dead," Bruno remarks, "like your wife and my father, for instance." As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith's perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.

The Stranger: Part 2

How did you like the book? Was the second part as you expected? 

It seems that the absurd honesty of our protagonist, the anti-hero Mersault, reaches its highest in this second part. For instance, when after being asked if he regrets the criminal act, he says that, after reflecting on it, it is rather boredom than regret what he feels. Also,when he talks about the conveniences of the legal system, or on how nice the policeman was that he felt like shaking hands…

What is the point of such long trial trial when there is no doubt, denial, remorse or regret for the crime? And what is really the focus of the trial? The protagonist's murder of a person, or his attitude at his mother's funeral? Society's seek of a "rational" explanation of the crime leads to a process that makes no sense, for is hopeless and irrational.

How do you feel about our protagonist in this second part where he seems to start feeling something and gaining consciousness? What is he really feeling? 

This has been a reading full of opportunities to reflect on our very own existence, along or in opposition to the protagonist's process.  

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life".  Albert Camus