January 2017 Book of the Month

Hey Bookenders!

Hope you enjoyed your winter break (and if you didn't get much of one, I hope it happens soon!) Thanks to all of you who voted for the book of the month. Without further ado, it is...

Ghosted, by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall.

Here is the poll for the meeting time/date. I'm hoping the place will be somewhere that's relevant to the book! Let me know if you have any ideas as we go along.

Best,

Taneeta

January 2017 Nominations

*NEW SURVEY (DEC 10). PLEASE VOTE AGAIN.*

January's theme is Canadian fiction. I defined "Canadian fiction" as books taking place in Canada that are by Canadian authors. Many of the noms have author talks coming up in the new year (that we can attend!) or take place in areas around Toronto (so we could have a meeting there!) 

*NOTE: Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson was included on this list, but a helpful Bookends member let me know that it's not being released until February 2017, so it has been removed.*

The January nominations are:

The Night Wanderer | Drew Hayden Taylor

Nothing ever happens on the Otter Lake reservation. But when 16-year-old Tiffany discovers her father is renting out her room, she’s deeply upset. Sure, their guest is polite and keeps to himself, but he’s also a little creepy. 

The mysterious Pierre L’Errant is actually a vampire returning to his tribal home. But Tiffany has other things on her mind: her new boyfriend is acting weird, disputes with her father are escalating, and her estranged mother is starting a new life with somebody else. Tiffany flees into the bush, and has a chilling encounter with L’Errant that changes everything ... for both of them.

[source]

*author talk*

George & Rue | George Elliott Clarke

Brothers George and Rufus Hamilton, in a robbery gone wrong, drunkenly bludgeoned a taxi driver to death. It was 1949, and the two siblings, part Mi'kmaq and part African, were hanged for the killing. 

Both repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins' deeds, which he only learned about from his mother shortly before her death, Clarke set out to discover just what kind of forces would reduce men to crime, violence and, ultimately, murder.

The novel shifts seamlessly back into the killers' pasts, recounting a bleak and sometimes comic tale of victims of violence who became killers, a black community too poor and too shamed to assist its downtrodden members, and a white community bent on condemning all blacks as dangerous outsiders. 

[source]

No New Land | M.G. Vassanji

Nurdin Lalani and his family, Asian immigrants from Africa, have come to the Toronto suburb of Don Mills only to find that the old world and its values pursue them. A genial orderly at a downtown hospital, he has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl. Although he is innocent, traditional propriety prompts him to question the purity of his own thoughts. 

Ultimately, his friendship with the enlightened Sushila offers him an alluring freedom from a past that haunts him, a marriage that has become routine, and from the trials of coping with teenage children. Introducing us to a cast of vividly drawn characters within this immigrant community, Vassanji is a keen observer of lives caught between one world and another. 

[source]

Ghosted | Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

Mason, a struggling writer, comes in from the cold after five years of drifting. His childhood friend Chaz loans him an apartment and finds him a job selling hotdogs. But Mason drinks too much, does too many drugs and loses too much money at poker, digging himself even more deeply in debt to Chaz, who also happens to be his drug dealer. Talk about a vicious circle. 

Then Mason decides he'll become a ghostwriter of suicide notes. What happens when someone already wrestling with his own demons immerses himself in the tragedies of other people's lives? In this case, a lot: a hotdog cart is totalled, a convict sprung, a funeral faked, a head scalped, a horse stolen. Then, just when it looks like Mason is finally going down, he faces the biggest test of all. 

[source]

The Featherbed | John Miller

When Anna and Sadie discover the diaries of their mother, Rebecca, in the days following her death, they learn that her life was far more complex than either of them knew: a garment worker in early-1900s New York; the reluctant wife in an arranged marriage to an ailing and abusive husband; the improbable friend of a pregnant prostitute. But the diaries reveal more than just surprising details about Rebecca's life: they also point to a family secret - and questions about Sadie's true parentage.

The Featherbed is a gripping family saga that moves between the tenements of New York's Lower East Side and the stately homes of Toronto's Annex. Strong in plot, character, setting, and style, it is a fully-realised debut from an assured writer.

[source]

Red Rover | Liz Bugg

Thalia Spencer is missing. Is she in trouble or is she simply avoiding her family? When Thalia's conservative tycoon father confesses to private investigator Calli Barnow that he offered his daughter money to give up her girlfriend and start dating men, Calli thinks she knows where to start looking. 

She and her best friend, novice drag queen Dewey, comb the bars and clubs of Toronto's gay village, hoping to find Thalia hiding in plain sight. But then Thalia's lover, Zoe, says the girl is missing from her life too, and Calli realizes the situation is more dangerous than she'd thought.

[source]




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November Meeting Details

Hey Bookenders! 

Ahhh only 2.5 weeks til the end of the semester! I hope you're rising above all the stress :D

Here are the details for our November meeting /
Book: The Book Thief / Marcus Zusak (as you know)
Date: 25 November 2016
Time: 4:00-5:00 pm
Place: Koffler House, 569 Spadina Ave
             Quiet Room (3rd floor) -- we won't need to be quiet, don't worry

Also, a last reminder about our movie night / 
Film: V for Vendetta
Date: 22 November 2016 (this Tuesday)
Time: 6:30-9pm (ish)
Place: Hart House, North Dining Room

Hope you can come!

Best,

Taneeta

November 2016 Book of the Month

Hey Bookenders!

Thanks to everyone who voted for the book of the month. The two top choices were very close (just 1 vote separated them!) but ultimately there was a winner...

The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak.

Click here to vote for the time/date for our November meeting. Hope you enjoy the book!

Best,

Taneeta

Movie Night Details

Hey Bookenders!

Just a quick update on the movie night -- we're still screening V for Vendetta on Tuesday November 22 in Hart House (North Dining Room -- the same place as the October meeting), but the time is now 6:30 pm because they're really busy! I hope people can still come, and of course you can always leave early. The film is 2h12min, so it should be done by 9pm.

If you're not familiar with Hart House, the North Dining Room is on the second floor (turn left when you've climbed the main stairs). If you take the elevator, turn right and go past the library.

As mentioned before, this is a Bookends-only event due to licensing restrictions.

Details:
V for Vendetta
Tue Nov 22, 6:30pm
Hart House - North Dining Room

Hope to see you there!

Best,
Taneeta

November Book Nominations

This month's theme is historical fiction. Historical fiction, for our purposes, is books that take place more than 50 years in the past. I tried to include a diverse set of noms - hopefully you all find something that you like!

Content warnings for racism (specifically anti-Black racism and antisemitism), sexual assault, domestic violence, and war.

The Color Purple

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.


Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the life of women of color in the southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence.
[source]

The Book Thief

It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . . .

Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.
[source]

Memoirs of a Geisha

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel presents with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.

In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction—at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful—and completely unforgettable.
[source]

Timeline

In an Arizona desert, a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates. Halfway around the world, archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. 

Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation that has developed an astounding technology. Now this group is about to get a chance not to study the past but to enter it. And with history opened up to the present, the dead awakened to the living, these men and women will soon find themselves fighting for their very survival -- six hundred years ago.
[source]

One Hundred Years of Solitude

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind.

Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility - the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth - these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Marquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master.
[source]

Death Comes for the Archbishop

There is something epic about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. 

What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, although he must contend with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. One of these events Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.
[source]

Under a Painted Sky

Missouri, 1849: Samantha dreams of moving back to New York to be a musician—not an easy thing if you’re a girl, and harder still if you’re Chinese. But a tragic accident dashes any hopes of fulfilling her dream, and leaves her fearing for her life. She flees town with a runaway slave named Annamae. 

But life on the Oregon Trail is unsafe for two girls, so they disguise themselves as  two boys headed for California. But when they cross paths with a band of cowboys, the light-hearted troupe turn out to be unexpected allies. With the law closing in on them, they quickly learn that there aren't many places to hide on the open trail.
[source]



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Membership Confirmation

Hi everyone,

I am in the process of getting funding for our club! Yay! One of the conditions of the funding is that I provide a membership list of active members. If you consider yourself to be an active member of Bookends (you read the emails, or look at the website, or participate in the polls/come to meetings), then please send me an email with the following:

• your name
• your student number
• your program of study (PoSt)

This information is submitted for the express purpose of making sure you are UofT students. If you're not, don't worry, but you don't need to send that info! 

I will be accepting this info until Saturday, November 5, at 11:59 pm (for time-sensitive reasons). If you don't email me by this time, I'll assume you don't consider yourself an active member of Bookends. Thanks for your cooperation!

I've also attached a poll for our first social event -- Movie Night! You can vote on the movie below, and choose the date/time here. Both will close Saturday, November 5, at 11:59 pm as well (just to keep it simple).

Looking forward to your responses!

Best,

Taneeta

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