WOSAC Book Group
Fall 2009 and Spring 2010
Join Book Group facilitator and Gender and Women’s Studies professor, Dr. Nicole Guidotti Hernandez, on a journey through lush and diverse works of literature. These novels were selected by a majority vote from members of the last book group session. You will not want to miss the camaraderie and enthusiastic discussion that this unique book group provides!
Book Group meets from 5:00pm – 6:30pm in the Gender and Women’s Studies Conference Room at 925 North Tyndall. Metered parking is available at the front of the building. Paid parking is also available in the Main Gate Garage. Meters and the lot behind the building are free after 5:00pm. The series fee is $50 per season. Fall and Spring sessions may be reserved together for $100. Book Group fees are not tax deductible but donations made in addition are 100% tax deductible and deeply appreciated. No discounts or refunds are available for missed meetings. Participants must be current WOSAC members.
WOSAC members receive a 10% discount on Book Group selections purchased at Antigone Books, 411 North 4 th Avenue, 792-3715. See the schedule below for session dates and novel descriptions.
Contact Leigh Spencer at spencerl@email.arizona.edu or 621-5656 with questions or to make your reservation today!
FALL 2009
Tuesday, September 8th – THE BINGO PALACE by Louise Erdrich
Immediately upon returning to his North Dakota Chippewa reservation, Lipsha Morrissey--having failed in the outside world--falls head over heels in love with the beautiful Shawnee Ray. She is the fierce and ambitious mother of the illegitimate son of Lyman Lamartine, owner of the Bingo Palace and a powerful force on the reservation. Lyman is determined to marry Shawnee Ray, who is just as determined to elude him and go to college. When Lipsha goes to work for Lyman, he also enters into a battle for Shawnee Ray's affections, calling first on the magic of tribal elder Fleur Pillager, then on luck, and finally on traditional tribal religion. Erdrich's fourth novel is at once comic and moving, magical and realistic, and filled with evidence of her awesome descriptive powers.
Tuesday, October 13th -A MERCY by Toni Morrison
Nobel laureate Morrison returns more explicitly to the net of pain cast by slavery, a theme she detailed so memorably in Beloved. Set at the close of the 17th century, the book details America's untoward foundation: dominion over Native Americans, indentured workers, women and slaves. A slave at a plantation in Maryland offers up her daughter, Florens, to a relatively humane Northern farmer, Jacob, as debt payment from their owner. The ripples of this choice spread to the inhabitants of Jacob's farm, populated by women with intersecting and conflicting desires. Jacob's wife, Rebekka, struggles with her faith as she loses one child after another to the harsh New World. A Native servant, Lina, survivor of a smallpox outbreak, craves Florens's love to replace the family taken from her, and distrusts the other servant, a peculiar girl named Sorrow. When Jacob falls ill, all these women are threatened. Morrison's lyricism infuses the shifting voices of her characters as they describe a brutal society being forged in the wilderness. Morrison's unflinching narrative is all the more powerful for its relative brevity; it takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go until the wrenching final-page crescendo.
Tuesday, November 3rd -DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE by Isabelle Allende
An orphan raised in Valparaíso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, young, vivacious Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. She enters a rough-and-tumble world whose newly arrived inhabitants are driven mad by gold fever. With the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chi'en, Eliza moves freely in a society of single men and prostitutes, creating an unconventional but independent life for herself. The young Chilean's search for her elusive lover gradually turns into another kind of journey, and by the time she finally hears news of him, Eliza must decide who her true love really is.
Tuesday, December 15th -THE FAITH HEALER OF OLIVE AVENUE by (U of A Author) Manuel Munoz
In a series of ten interconnected stories, Manuel Muñoz illuminates the lives of several Mexican-American families in the same neighborhood in Central California. The title story comes last in the collection, and is perhaps the most poignant. Twenty-one-year-old Emilio works the graveyard shift in a paper mill. One night, after a few shots of whiskey and a few hits of marijuana, he goes back to the forklift to move a pallet of paper, loses control and drops the whole load on himself. He is crippled for life, living at home with his father, who is at the end of his rope with caring for him. He puts Emilio in the car and drives him to a faith healer in Fresno. After giving her his life savings, she gives Emilio a tiny baby food jar of cream and tells him to rub it on his legs. "He watched as his father smoothed the crema onto his thin legs... not being thrifty with it as they had been with everything else in life, rubbing hard with belief..." In these stories, sometimes belief is all there is: belief that a better job will come, that the loved one will return love, that a surly teenager headed for trouble will straighten out, that a gay son will change--faith and hope are staples of these people's lives. For the most part, they are disappointed. Most of the stories are of single mothers or fathers trying to raise families under the shadow of immigration and language problems and too little money. The subtext of many of the stories is homosexuality, not a lifestyle embraced by the Mexican-American community. Muñoz writes with a sure hand of the way these people cross paths in unpredictable ways, in situations where there is never enough love or forgiveness. These are hard stories, sad and beautiful in their truth and clarity.
2666 by Roberto Bolano (in three sessions)
Monday, February 22nd
Monday, March 29th
Monday, April 26th
Last year's The Savage Detectives by the late Chilean-Mexican novelist Bolaño (1953–2003) garnered extraordinary sales and critical plaudits for a complex novel in translation, and quickly became the object of a literary cult. This brilliant behemoth is grander in scope, ambition and sheer page count, and translator Wimmer has again done a masterful job. The novel is divided into five parts (Bolaño originally imagined it being published as five books) and begins with the adventures and love affairs of a small group of scholars dedicated to the work of Benno von Archimboldi, a reclusive German novelist. They trace the writer to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (read: Juarez), but there the trail runs dry, and it isn't until the final section that readers learn about Benno and why he went to Santa Teresa. The heart of the novel comes in the three middle parts: in The Part About Amalfitano, a professor from Spain moves to Santa Teresa with his beautiful daughter, Rosa, and begins to hear voices. The Part About Fate, the novel's weakest section, concerns Quincy Fate Williams, a black American reporter who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a prizefight and ends up rescuing Rosa from her gun-toting ex-boyfriend. The Part About the Crimes, the longest and most haunting section, operates on a number of levels: it is a tormented catalogue of women murdered and raped in Santa Teresa; a panorama of the power system that is either covering up for the real criminals with its implausible story that the crimes were all connected to a German national, or too incompetent to find them (or maybe both); and it is a collection of the stories of journalists, cops, murderers, vengeful husbands, prisoners and tourists, among others, presided over by an old woman seer. It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one.
Monday, May 24th -STEALING BUDDHA'S DINNER by Bich Minh Nguyen
As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic-seeming than her Buddhist grandmother’s traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled “delicacies” of mainstream America capture her imagination. In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen’s struggle to become a “real” American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell-O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.
Book group sessions:
Spring 2009 Book Group
Fall 2008 Book Group
Spring 2008 Book Group
Fall 2007 Book Group
Spring 2007 Book Group
Fall 2006 Book Group
Spring 2006 Book Group
Fall 2005 Book Group
Spring 2005 Book Group
Fall 2004 Book Group