I feel like a lost puppy without a book to read between book clubs, so if it's alright with others, I'm going to post three options and just proceed. My vote is to aim to have a book chosen by the end of this week and to have the next meeting sometime mid-endish May. I'll just throw out May 23rd for now. Respond away!
I am a notorious book crier; I won’t apologize for it, either. I’ve seen people who sob at movies, and no one bats an eye. So, if I seem a little melancholy to you, it’s probably because I just finished a really good book, as was the case with Every Last One. A disclaimer: I think Anna Quindlen can do no wrong. Love her. This book, though, was like a punch in the gut. That’s what I told Jordan after I finished, and months later, I still feel that way. Let’s just say it took me a while to get over. My only regret is that I checked it out from the library instead of buying my own copy. It’s just that good.
From Amazon: An Object of Beauty
Martin compresses the wild and crazy end of the millennium and finds in this piercing novel a sardonic morality tale. Lacey Yeager is an ambitious young art dealer who uses everything at her disposal to advance in the world of the high-end art trade in New York City. After cutting her teeth at Sotheby's, she manipulates her way up through Barton Talley's gallery of "Very Expensive Paintings," sleeping with patrons, and dodging and indulging in questionable deals, possible felonies, and general skeeviness until she opens her own gallery in Chelsea. Narrated by Lacey's journalist friend, Daniel Franks, whose droll voice is a remarkable stand-in for Martin's own, the world is ordered and knowable, blindly barreling onward until 9/11. And while Lacey and the art she peddles survive, the wealth and prestige garnered by greed do not. Martin (an art collector himself) is an astute miniaturist as he exposes the sound and fury of the rarified Manhattan art world. If Shopgirl was about the absence of purpose, this book is about the absence of a moral compass, not just in the life of an adventuress but for an entire era.
Highly recommended by a friend: Her Fearful Cemetery
(publisher's description) Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls' aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie.
The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt.
