December 03, 2014

~ The Book of the Month for December! ~

Votes are in.....................

Hello fellow Bookenders! Votes are in and the book of the month has been decided.


Welcome to Derry, Maine…
"It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real….

They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name."
 
 
Thank you to all of those who got a chance to vote. For the month of December we'll be reading IT by Stephan King! Definitely different for the holiday spirit but hope this break you get a chance to read a lot and everything you've been wanting to; as for now good luck on upcoming exams. Hope everyone has an amazing restful break which includes tons of reading! See you all early January and look out for information regarding our next meeting when schools commencing again. 


Happy Holidays and Happy Reading!

- Thurga

 

November 19, 2014

~ November - December Nominations! ~

Thank you to those of you who sent in nominations for the month of November. The Book chosen will be the book of this month, in conjunction with December. The nominations are listed below and don't forget to vote!

And the nominations are.................

1.) Sunset Park by Paul Auster

 
"A New York Times Bestseller
From the bestselling author of Invisible and The New York Trilogy comes a new novel set during the 2008 economic collapse. Sunset Park opens with twenty-eight-year-old Miles Heller trashing out foreclosed houses in Florida, the latest stop in his flight across the country. When Miles falls in love with Pilar Sanchez, he finds himself fleeing once again, going back to New York, where his family still lives, and into an abandoned house of young squatters in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Woven together from various points of view—that of Miles’s father, an independent book publisher trying to stay afloat, Miles’s mother, a celebrated actress preparing her return to the New York stage, and the various men and women who live in the house."


2.) White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

 
"The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture, the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. On the occasion of the president of China’s impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his transformation and his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society."
 
 
3.) Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
 
 

"Sterling is an ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens--until the day its complacency is shattered by an act of violence. Josie Cormier, the daughter of the judge sitting on the case, should be the state''s best witness, but she can''t remember what happened before her very own eyes--or can she? As the trial progresses, fault lines between the high school and the adult community begin to show--destroying the closest of friendships and families. Nineteen Minutes asks what it means to be different in our society, who has the right to judge someone else, and whether anyone is ever really who they seem to be."


4.) We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver


"That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child''s character is self-evident. But such generalizations provide cold comfort when it''s your own son who''s just opened fire on his fellow students and whose class photograph--with its unseemly grin--is blown up on the national news. The question of who''s to blame for teenage atrocity tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years ago, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York. Telling the story of Kevin''s upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault? We Need to Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents--whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton--have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in suburban comfort. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story while framing these horrifying tableaux of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy--the tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose."


5.) IT by Stephen King



"Welcome to Derry, Maine…It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real….
They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name. "


6.) A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray


 
"A thousand lives.
A thousand possibilities.
One fate.
Marguerite Caine grew up surrounded by cutting-edge scientific theories, thanks to her brilliant physicist parents. Yet nothing is more astounding than her mother''s latest invention-a device called the Firebird, which allows people to leap into alternate dimensions. When Marguerite''s father is murdered, all the evidence points to one person-Paul, her parents'' enigmatic star student. Before the law can touch him, Paul escapes into another dimension, having committed what seems like the perfect crime. But he didn''t count on Marguerite. She doesn''t know if she can kill a man, but she''s going to find out. With the help of another physics student, Theo, Marguerite chases Paul through various dimensions. In each new world Marguerite leaps to, she meets another version of Paul that has her doubting his guilt and questioning her heart. Is she doomed to repeat the same betrayal? As Marguerite races through these wildly different lives-a grand duchess in a Tsarist Russia, a club-hopping orphan in a futuristic London, a refugee from worldwide flooding on a station in the heart of the ocean-she is swept into an epic love affair as dangerous as it is irresistible"

** All descriptions taken from Chapters/Indigo and book covers are from Google.



- Thurga

October 24, 2014

~ October Meeting ~

The end of the month is soon approaching and Halloween is just around the corner, I hope everyone has picked out their costumes!

In the spirit of Halloween our theme for the month was Horror/Mystery and "Bluebeard" By Kurt Vonnegut was chosen. And now that the end of the month is almost here we will be gathering together for our first meeting to chat about the book, school and life!!!!!

We will be meeting ~~~~~

When : Wednesday October 29th, 2014
At : 
5pm - 6pm
Where : Hart House Committees Room

Can't wait to see all of you then! As for now Happy Reading!

 - Thurga Ganeshamoorthy

October 03, 2014

~ Book Of October! ~

Votes are in and the book of October is...........


1.) Bluebeard By Kurt Vonnegut

 
" Broad humor and bitter irony collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at age seventy-one, wants to be left alone on his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn. But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story—and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man’s careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves."
 
Click the link below to send in your availability for our October Meeting.
 
 
Can't wait hear all of your thoughts at our October Meeting! Happy Reading and See you all soon! 

September 28, 2014

~ October Nominations! ~

Thank you to everyone that sent in nominations here they are..........

1.) Bluebeard By Kurt Vonnegut

 
" Broad humor and bitter irony collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at age seventy-one, wants to be left alone on his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn. But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story—and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man’s careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves."
 
 
2.) American Psycho By Bret Easton Ellis 
 

 


" In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. "
 
3.) It By Stephan King
  
 

 
 
" Welcome to Derry, Maine…It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real….

They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name. " 
 
4.) The New York Trilogy By Paul Auster  
 
 
 
" The New York Trilogy is the series that made New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster a renowned writer of metafiction and genre-rebelling detective fiction. The New York Review of Books has called his work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature."
 
"Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, these uniquely stylized detective novels include City of Glass in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He's drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that's more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems. " 
 
 
5.) Dracula By Bram Stoker
 
 
 
" Since its publication in 1897 Dracula has enthralled generations of readers with the alluring malevolence of its undead Count, the most famous vampire in literature. Though Bram Stoker did not invent vampires, his novel helped catapult them to iconic stature, spawning a genre of stories and movies that flourishes to this day. A century of imitations has done nothing to diminish the fascination of Stoker's tale of a suave and chilling monster as he stalks his prey from a crumbling castle in Transylvania's Carpathian mountains to an insane asylum in England to the bedrooms of his swooning female victims. A classic of Gothic horror, Dracula remains an irresistible entertainment of undying appeal. "
 
' "Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain." '
 
 
 
 
* all descriptions and pictures taken from Chapters, Amazon and Goodreads.

September 21, 2014

~ October Nominations! ~

It's finally time for the reading to begin! First and foremost, Thank You to all of those who where able to make it out to the general meeting. If anyone does have questions please don't hesitate to send them in my direction.

Now to get the year started; October is just around the corner and the theme for the month is Horror/ Mystery. Nominations for book suggestions are now open. Feel free to send in any book titles you're interested in reading during the month of October, or you think will best fit the theme. Deadline to send in nominations is: Thursday, September 25th, 2014.

Can't wait to see what we will be starting our year with! Hope to hear from all of you and look out for future posts soon!

Thurga Ganeshamoorthy
Director of Bookends
University of Toronto St. George

 

September 15, 2014

~ First Meeting of The Year!~

Welcome Bookenders, both new and old members!

Get ready for another year of great reads and new adventures!

We'll be starting the year off with a general meeting. Where questions will be answered, fellow Bookenders will be met and great conversations are bound to happen! Can't wait to meet all of you. Below is more information on where and when the meeting will take place. See you all there!

First meeting:  

Date: Thursday, September 18th, 2014 (this Thursday)

Time: 5-7 pm

Location: Hart House (7 Hart House Circle Toronto, ON M5S 3H3 Canada)
              in the Board Room (on the second floor to the left)
 
Hope To See You There!
 
- Thurga

Director of Bookend
University of Toronto St. George

September 12, 2014

Welcome to 2014!

Hi Bookenders!

Welcome to a new year! Now that first week of classes are almost done and the homework has started piling up, take some time to think about the fun extra-curriculars you'll be doing this year!

Bookends is back for another year, though with new management.

For the last four years, it has been my pleasure to run this club and meet with all of you book-lovers every month to discuss books, movies, and life. However, all good things come to an end. I am graduating and handing over the reigns to Thurga, a Bookends regular whom many of you might have met through our meetings. Thurga is a third year life science student and I have no doubt she will be a very capable Bookends Director.

She is currently busy organizing our first meeting of the year. Look for an email from her in the upcoming week and mark your calendars for meeting. It'll be a fun way to meet more people who enjoy reading and talk about the books you'd like to read in the upcoming year.

I look forward to attending as many meetings as I can this year and meeting more awesome Bookenders!

Best wishes and have a great year!
- Aditi.

February 11, 2014

Book of February

It's that time of the year! Pink and red dominate all shops and little hearts are everywhere...
...so we thought we'd deviate from stereotypes a little bit, and read something different this February.

Here is your book of Feb 2014!

January 14, 2014

January movie + meeting details

The votes are out!

Thanks to everyone who voted. The rooms are all booked, so here are the details for our first meeting this semester:

Movie: Up


We're starting off the semester by screening Up, a heartwarming tale of 78-year-old Carl who ties thousands of balloons to his home, and sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America. Russell, a wilderness explorer 70 years younger, inadvertently becomes a stowaway.

When: 4:00 PM on Friday, Jan 17
Where: Room 1, Media Commons at Robarts Library, 3rd floor

Meeting

When: 6:00 PM on Friday, Jan 17
Where: Sammy's Student Exchange, Hart House

We will hold our meeting after the movie screening, so if you can't make it to the movie, but would like to join us for the meeting, you're more than welcome! We will be walking over from Robarts to Sammy's around 5:45 so if you are around Robarts and would like to join us, meet us in Media Commons.

I look forward to seeing old and new members this Friday!

- Aditi

January 10, 2014

Welcome back! Book of January + meeting

Book of January

January is upon us , so that means time for a new book! For this month, we wanted to go with theme of "new years resolutions" or "to-do list". I know all of us have books that we have always wanted to read but never quite gotten to it, or have resolutions which can be helped by reading certain books. Anything you think will help you improve yourself, that's the book we want you to read for January. And since everyone is different, we've decided to let you guys choose your own book and read it this month.

Not sure where to start? Here are some suggestions (courtesy of Goodreads)!
These are just some suggestions. I know these are all non-fiction books, but you are free to read whatever you want (including fiction). If there's a book you think everyone should read at some point, email us and we'll pass it along!

This month's meeting

Our next meeting will be two-folded. At our actual meeting, we will be getting together to meet new members and discuss the books we read in January. Additionally, we will also be hosting a movie night this month!

Click here to vote for a day / time: http://www.doodle.com/4rch5u4s57bc7h94To suggest a movie, comment below or email us at bookendsuoft@yahoo.com

Happy reading!

- Aditi.