Claire's Suggestions for September Book

September Book Club Recommendations.

OUT STEALING HORSES   BY PER PETTERSON

Trond Sander, a sixty seven year old man who has moved from the city to a remote riverside cabin in Norway near the border of Sweden only to have all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him one night while he’s out on a walk. When he sees someone he recognizes coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss. The title serves as both awareness of adolescent prank and password for dangerous activity of the resistance in World War II. Why did his father disappear from his life who he adored, and how did this affect his mother and his relationship with Jon his boyhood companion.

I really loved reading this book and it was a very powerful book with the writing quiet and thoughtful and even a little sly. The writing sneaks up on the reader and captures them without then being aware of it.

TINKERS by Paul Harding (Most of the reviewers I read loved this book, It is the first book that he wrote.)

This book dips in and out of the consciousness of a New England patriarch as he lies dying on a hospital bed in his living room. As time collapses into memory the man travels deep into his past where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth.  At once heartbreaking and life affirming Tinkers is an elegiac medication on love, loss and the fierce beauty of nature. Tinkers is a poignant exploration of where we may journey when the clock has barely a tick or two left  and we really can’t go anywhere at all. Hardy’s prose is lyrical and specific. It is about loneliness, human frailty, fathers and sons, time and eternity. It is told in the voices of three generations.

AFTER DARK by Haruki Murakami

Two sisters, Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion and Mari, young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman.  These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber- mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of this crime, will either restore or annihilate her. After Dark moves form mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency – the interplay between self-expression and empathy, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are her distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.

(Some of you may not like this book but I found it very intriguing. It’s like loving some of Shakespeare plays even thought you cannot understand them but you want to still go and see more of his plays. Something is always drawing you to them. I love Star Trek – the Second Generation the old TV series but cannot always follow what the story or plot is about.)

DANDELION WINE by Ray Bradbury

This was the summer of 1928 about a twelve year old boy. It is a recreation of a boy’s childhood based intertwining of Ray Bradbury own childhood experiences and unique imagination A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns and new sneakers.  Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma’s belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and fold-fuzzed bees.  Dandelion Wine serves as a metaphor for packing all joys of summer into a single bottle. Routines of small town American and simple joys of yesterday.

This was initially short stories.

( I had not read this book at all but have always loved anything that Ray Bradbury wrote and since it is summer now it may be fun to read. Ray Bradbury had just died this past year.)

NOAH’S COMPASS by Ann Tyler

Laim Pennywell 66 years old has just lost job as 5^th grade teacher and is forced to move to a smaller apartment. He has a semi-detached relationship with his three daughters. Life is small and shrunken.  When something unexpected occurs to him he has memory loss and is desperate to recover the past.  He meets Eunice, an unusual 38 women. As their relationship develops he is forced to confront his own isolation. He needs to keep within bounds of his own comfort zones. This is a beautifully subtle book elegant contemplation of what it means to be happy and the consequences of a defensive withdrawal from other people. Life is at its best when we let it be messy and unstructured when like Jonah (his 4 year old grandson) we allow ourselves to color outside the lines. Ann Tyler brilliantly pins down another life on the edge as man confronts memory loss. She has empathy for her characters, she writes about middle-aged characters on the edge of a crisis.