Cornell Campus Club Reading List

I have definitely riffed on Cornell Campus Club for women before. The club is mostly a social organization, offering affinity groups and educational lectures, set up to help women who have been Shanghaied to this town meet friends with similar interests. I joined the book club, which meets regularly and every year they choose the reading list in advance. Since I am moving and busier than a politician’s PR agent, I cannot attend the potluck next week where all the book suggestions are discussed and selected, but I thought my blog followers, being of impeccable literary taste, would want to know what’s on the table for the upcoming year. I am v. excited to have my summer reading list penciled out for me! Please note, my writing mentor’s book, Cleaning Nabakov’s House is on the list. An excellent read! I can also vouch for The Help and The Glass Castle, and will tell you I was given Cutting for Stone from my mother-in-law who says it's a must read. I am starting it tonight. Enjoy!

Cornell Campus Book Club Book List Suggestions:

Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson
For those who enjoyed When Will There Be Good News or have read other of Atkinson's terrific novels, Started Early, Took My Dog is the latest. It again features Jackson Brodie, this time in a story that collides with the stories of a security chief called Tilly, and an aging actress on the brink of disaster. Atkinson's writing blends of humor, wit and insight while facing the hardships and horrors of a violent and sometimes unexplainable world. Her gift for characterization, careful plotting, and well toned sentences make her novels mysteries that are rightly reviewed as good literature and are a pleasure to read. (384 pp.)

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
This is a classic, and for some of our group it may be a long-overdue revisit either as a reread or if you've seen Hitchcock's film version. I read it for the first time in high school but just re-read it and absolutely could NOT put it down. It's the story of a young girl who finds herself becoming the second wife of a wealthy man with a mysterious past and who must in a sense grow into a woman and learn to manage the house, the people and the secrets that she unknowingly takes on in marriage. The novel is taut, seamlessly smooth to read, and jam packed with beautiful descriptions, clever characterization, and page-turning revelations. (416 pp.)

The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life - Jasmin Darznik
Adult daughter Jasmin Darznik discovers by chance that her mother, Lili, lived a completely different life in Iran before marriage to her father, forced into an arranged marriage at 14 years old. The first marriage was abusive and Lili's father helped her divorce, but she had to leave her first daughter in his custody in Iran. Reviews say: "fulfills the highest ambition of the memoir as a genre: to tell a personal story that, by virtue of its honesty, sheds light on an all too universal truth," "beautifully recounted,"and "illuminates the complexity of Iranian women's lives as few books have ever done." (330 pp.)

Cleaning Nabokov's House - Leslie Daniels
"A comic woman-in-distress novel involving the literary master Nabokov and a country cathouse ... her out-of-the-box narrator is hilarious, chaotic, and surprisingly resourceful. Wardrobe-challenged Barb, who is inordinately fond of toast, loses custody of her kids in a vicious divorce... [Barb] discovers a hidden manuscript. Is it Nabokov's?... Daniels is warmly funny and audacious in this shrewd and saucy mix of family drama, gender discord, sexual healing, and high literature; a raucous yet sensitive tale of one quirky woman's struggle to overcome the lowest of low self-esteem to get motherhood and love right." (330 pp.)

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Many of us have read it before so we could concentrate on the themes it discusses. Was it the basis of the romantic literature that we now find sells most widely of any type of fiction? Also, we could tie it in with the latest movie version which has gotten good reviews. (352 pp.)

A City of Djinns - William Dalrymple
This book is classified as a travel literature. William Dalrymple is regarded to be a master at this genre. He won a prize for his Last Mughal. City of Djinns is an account of the author's year in Delhi, with his new wife who provides illustrations. It is part personal and part a history of the city. For those of us who will never visit Delhi and even for those who will, it should expand our experiences. I suggest that we could put this in the January slot and make Indian food. (350 pp.)

Fields of Glory - Jean Rouaud
This book represents a dialog between two generations seemingly far apart. The memories of World War I era veterans from the French lower Loire Valley are narrated from the perspectives of the grandchildren, whose initial boredom with the nostalgic stories from another era progressively become affection and understanding for the psychological urge to remember and be remembered. Prix Goncourt 1990. (168 pp.)

Dreams of My Russian Summers - Andrei Makine
Andrei Makine, born in Siberia in 1957, has written an ode to his French grandmother, a memorable account of life in Communist Russia as lived by the woman who gave him joy, comfort, and permission to dream of other worlds. Slowly, over the years, Charlotte reveals harsh truths to young Andrei - but always with a lyrical and dreamlike quality that makes reading this book feel as though you're inhaling pure, gauzy poetry. Prix Goncourt 1995. (256 pp.)

The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls
(250 weeks on NYT bestseller list) Memoir: Life of a family with idealistic nonconforming parents. Both the good and bad aspects related with thoughtfulness, understanding and grace: Hard to put down. (288 pp.)

Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese
Anglo-Indian twins grow up at a charity hospital in Ethopia mid 20th C. Story of their family, lost parents, guardians, medical training and Ethiopian politics and war in rich, tapestry woven language. (Possible Ethopian meal connected with this). (688 pp.)

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in a small Far West town of Fingerbone,which is set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. The author also wrote Gilead. (219 pp.)

American Lion - Jon Meacham
This is a biography of Andrew Jackson in the White House. (316 pp.)

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination - Elizabeth McCracken
In Elizabeth McCracken's memoir—a love letter to the child she lost and the devoted husband who suffered alongside her—McCracken displays her many talents. Her warmth, candor, crystalline prose, lovely imagery, and attention to detail bring her story to life. (208 pp.)

Finding George Orwell in Burma - Emma Larkin
In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Finding George Orwell in Burma is a lively combination of biography and armchair travel, as Larkin travels to all the places where Orwell lived and worked. (304 pp.)

Behind a Mask - Louisa May Alcott
For those who wanted to read a 19th-century American woman writer, but a far cry from her well-known domestic fiction. She made her living and supported her family by this sort of writing. It is a dark and ingenious study of deception and betrayal. My edition has an introduction by Doris Lessing. (108 pp.)

Private Life - Jane Smiley
Her latest work, it got a rave short review from the New Yorker, which called it masterly. A precise compelling depiction of a singular woman living near San Francisco with her astronomer husband about the turn of the 20th century. (416 pp.)

The Cookbook Collector - Allegra Goodman
Her latest novel, teaming with new life: a dozen characters on both American coasts, whose lives intersect in ways that she lovingly traces. We liked the book by her that we read a few years back. (394 pp.)

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family - Annette Gordon-Reed
An excellent non-fiction work that would help us know a lot more about a period of American history and a prominent American president, Thomas Jefferson. For this writer, the scandal was not what Jefferson did, but what historians did in scanting the evidence for it. (800 pp.)

The Island - Victoria Hislop
The Petrakis family lives in the small Greek seaside village of Plaka. Just off the coast is the tiny island of Spinalonga, where the nation's leper colony once was located—a place that has haunted four generations of Petrakis women. There's Eleni, ripped from her husband and two young daughters and sent to Spinalonga in 1939, and her daughters Maria, finding joy in the everyday as she dutifully cares for her father, and Anna, a wild child hungry for passion and a life anywhere but Plaka. And finally there's Alexis, Eleni's great-granddaughter, visiting modern-day Greece to unlock her family's past. (480 pp.)

Every Man Dies Alone- Hans Fallada
Fallada wrote this novel in twenty-four days in 1947, the last year of his life; he was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and had just been released from a Nazi insane asylum. The story is based on that of an actual working-class Berlin couple who conducted a three-year resistance campaign against the Nazis, by leaving anonymous postcards at random locations around the city. The book offers a visceral, chilling portrait of the distrust that permeated everyday German life during the war. Especially interesting are the details that show how Nazi-run charities and labor organizations monitored and made public the degree to which individuals supported or eschewed their cause. Ranked #2 bestselling in German literature in Amazon.com. (544 pp.)

The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
Harrison Shepard, the product of a divorced American father and Mexican mother, spends his formative years in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of artists Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo, and their houseguest, exiled Leon Trotsky. After Trotsky is assassinated, Harrison returns to the US settling down in Asheville, NC where he become an author of historical potboilers and is later investigated as a possible subversive by the McCarthy Committee. Fascinating, educational read. Good candidate for our January dinner because Harrison is the cook for the Riveras. Frida loves to entertain and eat. (507 pp.)

The Help - Kathryn Stockett
Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s is a city of tradition. Silver is used at bridge-club luncheons, pieces polished to perfection by black maids who “yes, ma'am,” and “no, ma'am,” to the young white ladies who order the days. This is the world Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan enters when she graduates from Ole Miss and returns to the family plantation, but it is a world that, to her, seems ripe for change. As she observes her friend Elizabeth rudely interact with Aibileen, the gentle black woman who is practically raising Elizabeth's two-year-old daughter, Mae Mobley, Skeeter latches onto the idea of writing the story of such fraught domestic relations from the help's point of view. With the reluctant assistance of Aibileen's feisty friend, Minny, Skeeter manages to interview a dozen of the city's maids, and the book, when it is finally published, rocks Jackson's world in unimaginable ways. With pitch-perfect tone and an unerring facility for character and setting, Stockett's richly accomplished debut novel inventively explores the unspoken ways in which the nascent civil rights and feminist movements threatened the southern status quo. Look for the forthcoming movie to generate keen interest in Stockett's luminous portrait of friendship, loyalty, courage, and redemption. (464 pp.)

Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial – Janet Malcolm
"She couldn't have done it and she must have done it." This is the enigma at the heart of Janet Malcolm's riveting new book about a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention. The defendant, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a beautiful young physician, is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her estranged husband, Daniel Malakov, a respected orthodontist, in the presence of their four-year old child. The prosecutor calls it an act of vengeance: just weeks before Malakov was killed in cold blood, he was given custody of Michelle for inexplicable reasons. It is the "Dickensian ordeal" of Borukhova's innocent child that drives Malcolm's inquiry. With the intellectual and emotional precision for which she is known, Malcolm looks at the trial—"a contest between competing narratives"—from every conceivable angle. It is the chasm between our ideals of justice and the human factors that influence every trial—from divergent lawyering abilities to the nature of jury selection, the malleability of evidence, and the disposition of the judge—that is perhaps most striking. A longer version of a fascinating article in the New Yorker earlier this year. (168 pp.)