Tag Archives: Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Madame Doubtfire by Anne Fine

9780140373554

Lydia, Christopher, and Natalie Hilliard hate that their parents are in the midst of a divorce. Because their father Daniel is an all-too-often unemployed actor, their mother Miranda gets temporary custody of them.

Desperate to spend more time with his family, Daniel cleverly responds to Miranda’s ad for a housekeeper, disguised as the capable yet eccentric Madame Doubtfire. The kids want to keep their dad, but how far should they go to keep his secret?

Miranda’s three children thoroughly enjoy their huge, overdressed baby sitter/cleaning woman who is actually their father in disguise, and they dread the day when their mother discovers Madame Doubtfire is really her ex-husband.

This highly acclaimed book is now a Motion Picture from 20th Century Fox entitled Mrs. Doubtfire.

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Book of the Week: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Mar 18-the-help

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, —mothers, daughters, caregivers, and friends— view one another.

A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’’t.

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Inspirational Quotes


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Book of the Week: A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins

Mar 5 - hutchins

Settled back into the San Francisco singles scene following the implosion of his young marriage just months after the honeymoon, Neill Bassett is going through the motions. His carefully modulated routine, however, is soon disrupted in ways he can’t dismiss with his usual nonchalance.

When Neill’s father committed suicide ten years ago, he left behind thousands of pages of secret journals, journals that are stunning in their detail, and, it must be said, their complete banality. But their spectacularly quotidian details, were exactly what artificial intelligence company Amiante Systems was looking for, and Neill was able to parlay them into a job, despite a useless degree in business marketing and absolutely no experience in computer science. He has spent the last two years inputting the diaries into what everyone hopes will become the world’s first sentient computer. Essentially, he has been giving it language—using his father’s words. Alarming to Neill—if not to the other employees of Amiante—the experiment seems to be working. The computer actually appears to be gaining awareness and, most disconcerting of all, has started asking questions about Neill’s childhood.

Amid this psychological turmoil, Neill meets Rachel. She was meant to be a one-night stand, but Neill is unexpectedly taken with her and the possibilities she holds. At the same time, he remains preoccupied by unresolved feelings for his ex-wife, who has a talent for appearing at the most unlikely and unfortunate times. When Neill discovers a missing year in the diaries—a year that must hold some secret to his parents’ marriage and perhaps even his father’s suicide—everything Neill thought he knew about his past comes into question, and every move forward feels impossible to make.

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Book of the Week: The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

In 1949 four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past-begin meeting in San Francisco to play Mahjong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and “say” stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Nearly forty years later, one of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother’s lifelong wish-and the tragic way in which it has come true. The revelation of this secret unleashes an urgent need among the women to reach back and remember… In this extraordinary first work of fiction, Amy Tan writes about what is lost-over the years, between generations, among friends-and what is saved. Their stories told within this book ultimately display the double happiness that can be found in being both Chinese and American.

Inspirational Quotes


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Book of the Week: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Jonathan Safran Foer confronts the traumas of our recent history. What he discovers is solace in that most human quality, imagination.”

Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, and pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

An inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone’s heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who’ve lost loved ones before.

As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father’s grave. But now he is accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother’s apartment. They are there to dig up his father’s empty coffin.

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Enjoy the movie made in 2011 based on the book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_quK9SEGYE

Book of the Week: Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady by Robert Coover

Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady

The male narrator opens by acknowledging “many stories have been told, songs sung, about the Thin Man and the Fat Lady,” suggesting in addition that they are a metaphor for male and female relations. Despite the conventional nature of the duo, they stand for something larger. “We are all Thin Men. You are all Fat Ladies.”

In this telling, the Thin Man and the Fat Lady are circus freaks, each driven to try to change his or her condition to please the other. The Thin Man wants to put on muscle while the Fat Lady wants to lose weight. Yet their boss, the Ringmaster, demands they maintain their extremes. When the Thin Man starts gaining weight and the Fat Lady starts losing it, the Ringmaster threatens to take action against them.

This book contains some of Coover’s best short stories:

  • Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady
  • The Babysitter
  • A Pedestrian Accident

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Book of the Week: The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Set on the obligatory English moor, on an isolated causeway, the story has as its hero Arthur Kipps, an up-and-coming young solicitor who has come north from London to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The routine formalities he anticipates give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister and terrifying than any nightmare: the rocking chair in the deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child’s scream in the fog, and most dreadfully–and for Kipps most tragically–The Woman In Black.

The Woman In Black is both a brilliant exercise in atmosphere and controlled horror and a delicious spine-tingler–proof positive that this neglected genre, the ghost story, isn’t dead after all.

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The book was adapted into a film starring Daniel Radcliffe. Watch the trailer below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lReemWmO5o

Book of the Week: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

“There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments.”

Thus young Walter Hartright first meets the mysterious woman in white in what soon became one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. Secrets, mistaken identities, surprise revelations, amnesia, locked rooms and locked asylums, and an unorthodox villain made this mystery thriller an instant success when it first appeared in 1860, and it has continued to enthrall readers ever since. From the hero’s foreboding before his arrival at Limmeridge House to the nefarious plot concerning the beautiful Laura, the breathtaking tension of Collins’s narrative created a new literary genre of suspense fiction, which profoundly shaped the course of English popular writing.
Collins’s work with this novel was so gripping in the imagination of the world that he had his own tombstone inscribed: “Author of The Woman in White.”

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