As you know, my book group only meets during the academic year, and we select all our books at the first meeting in the fall. Here is this year's reading list.

Our Final Selections

• Still Life With Rice by Helie Lee
  Lee traveled from California to Korea to recapture the life of her grandmother. Hongyong Baek (b. 1912) grew up in northern Korea, the daughter of wealthy parents, and at 22 entered into an arranged marriage and began a life of servitude to her husband. Drawing on interviews with her grandmother and writing in her voice, Lee dramatically describes the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Korea, which forced Baek, her husband (with whom she ultimately fell in love) and their children to flee to China in 1939, where they supported themselves by selling opium. After they returned to Korea, the 1950s' civil war caused them extreme hardship. Baek lost her husband to diphtheria and was separated from her son. She supported her other children by practicing the healing art of Chedo. Baek emigrated to the U.S. in 1972. A captivating memoir of a courageous survivor. (from Publishers' Weekly)
• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  Cat's Cradle, one of Vonnegut's most entertaining novels, is filled with scientists and G-men and even ordinary folks caught up in the game. These assorted characters chase each other around in search of the world's most important and dangerous substance, a new form of ice that freezes at room temperature.
  
• History of Love by Nicole Krauss
  "He fell in love. It was his life." This is the unofficial obituary of octogenarian Leo Gursky, a character whose mordant wit, gallows humor and searching heart create an unforgettable portrait. Born in Poland and a WWII refugee in New York, Leo has become invisible to the world. When he leaves his tiny apartment, he deliberately draws attention to himself to be sure he exists. What's really missing in his life is the woman he has always loved, the son who doesn't know that Leo is his father, and his lost novel, called The History of Love, which, unbeknownst to Leo, was published years ago in Chile under a different man's name. Another family in New York has also been truncated by loss. Teenager Alma Singer, who was named after the heroine of The History of Love, is trying to ease the loneliness of her widowed mother, Charlotte. When a stranger asks Charlotte to translate The History of Love from Spanish for an exorbitant sum, the mysteries deepen. (from Publishers' Weekly)
• The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
  “Homer’s Odyssey is not the only version of the story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local -- a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I have drawn on material other than the Odyssey, especially for the details of Penelope’s parentage, her early life and marriage, and the scandalous rumors circulating about her. I’ve chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids. The maids form a chanting and singing Chorus, which focuses on two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of the Odyssey: What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in the Odyssey doesn’t hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself.” -- from Margaret Atwood’s Foreword to The Penelopiad
• Restless: A Novel by William Boyd
  Boyd's ninth novel, an absorbing historical thriller, is loosely based on the history of a covert branch of British intelligence created to coax America into the Second World War. The story unfolds on parallel tracks as Sally Gilmartin, born Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigree recruited into the British Secret Service in 1939, reveals her clandestine past in an autobiography that she gives to her daughter, Ruth, a graduate student and single mother living a dull civilian life in Oxford in 1976. These installments give the narrative momentum (the accounts of Ruth's daily life drag, by contrast) as Eva describes the taciturn spy who recruited and trained her before becoming her lover; her secret propaganda work in New York; and the act of duplicity, almost deadly, that forced her to flee to England and live under an assumed identity. Ruth barely has time to process the shock of her mother's secret before she is swept into a dangerous game: finding her mother's betrayer before it's too late. (from The New Yorker)
• The Book of Flying by Keith Miller
  Pico is the librarian in his city by the sea: a humble, gentle man, a collector of books, a guardian and caretaker of the stories that are his breath and his life. One fateful day, he falls in love with Sisi, a beautiful, winged girl who cannot truly love a wingless creature like him. So Pico sets off to find Morning Town, where legend says he will find the Book of Flying and get his wings. On the way he has fabulous adventures and meets astonishing people, each of whom provides a gateway to learning something important about himself. Perhaps his most important discovery is that he is the hero of his own story. A beautiful and haunting modern fable that reads like exquisite poetry, Miller's first novel is a coming-of-age story cloaked in the language of myth in which Pico, as his humanity matures and expands to encompass those who are like and those who are unlike him, initially represents and eventually becomes the reader. (from Booklist)
• The Cutting Room by Louise Welch
  First-novelist Welsh offers a fresh voice and an arresting plot in this darkly atmospheric portrait of Glasgow's mean streets. Gay auctioneer Rilke agrees to pack up and sell off an enormous quantity of high-quality goods in an inordinately short amount of time, no questions asked. He is a bit blinded by the huge amount of cash and fails to inquire why there's such a rush, an oversight he will soon pay for. While clearing out the attic, he discovers a horrifying packet of snuff pornography. Despite his own proclivities for promiscuous, anonymous sex, he is haunted by the woman portrayed in the photographs and determines to discover whether the events depicted actually happened. His drug-dealing transvestite friend, Les, puts him into contact with an underground pornography ring, and soon Rilke learns more than he wants to about the seamy trade. Welsh offers an immensely appealing cast of characters, from the irreverent yet softhearted Rilke to his business partner, the indefatigable Rose. And Welsh's Glasgow is a desperado's paradise, filled with sodden pubs and seedy sex clubs. (from Booklist)
• The Road to Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
  Conway spent her first 11 years in the windswept grasslands of Australia, where her father owned 30,000 acres of arid land. Though his ability to understand the land was extensive, an eight-year drought finally defeated him, and he comitted suicide. A few years later, Conway's oldest brother died in an automobile accident. The two deaths plunged her mother into depression. Out of this tale of hard work, drought, and sorrow, Conway emerges with character and personal strength. From the University of Sydney, she went on to study history at Harvard and eventually became the first woman president of Smith College. This inspiring book tells in full the details of her life and thoughts up to the time she left for America. (From Library Journal)

Also Considered

• The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
• Border Crossing - Pat Barker
• The Accidental Sleuth - Helen Macie Osterman
• Final Exam - Pauline Chen
• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - Lisa See
• The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls
• Water for Elephants - Sara Green
• My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
• Last Child in the Woods - Richard Louv
• Animal, Vegetable Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver
• The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
• The Photograph - Penelope Lively
• Uncle Tom's Cabin - Jo-Ann Morgan