Our book club meets every first Tuesday of the month at 6:30 pm in Starbucks.

September 2008 Selection: Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

In Eva Luna, Allende has written an ambitious work that makes the foreign both familiar and welcoming. “My name is Eva, which means “life,” according to a book of names my mother consulted." As Eva tells her story, Isabel Allende conjures up an unnamed South American nation peopled with the rich, the poor, the simple, and the sophisticated. In a novel replete with character and incident, with drama and comedy and history, anyone who reads it will be drawn into the story as if into another time, or world, and will find it hard to escape.

"I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of these things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory...“ This is the voice that carries us through Eva Luna, the assured voice of a storyteller who relates to us the picaresque tale of her own life and of the people that she meets along the way. They include the rich and eccentric, for whom she works as a servant; the Lebanese emigré who befriends her and takes her in, her godmother, whose brain is addled by rum and who believes in all the Catholic saints; a street urchin who grows into a petty criminal , a leader in the guerrilla struggle, a celebrated transsexual entertainer, and a young refugee whose flight from postwar Europe will prove crucial to Eva's fate.

October 2008 Selection: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Something Wicked This Way Comes is about two thirteen-year-old boys, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, who have a harrowing experience with a nightmarish carnival that comes to their Midwestern town one October. The carnival's leader is the mysterious "Mr. Dark" who bears a tattoo for each person who, lured by the offer to live out their secret fantasies, has become bound in service to the carnival. Mr. Dark's malevolent presence is countered by that of Will's father, Charles Halloway, who harbors his own secret desire to regain his youth. The novel combines elements of fantasy and horror, analyzing the conflicting natures of good and evil, and on how they come into play between the characters and the carnival. This deceptively simple little tale, first published 37 years ago, about the year that Halloween came a week early to a small town has never been forgotten by anyone who has ever read it.

November 2008 Selection: Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Breakfast at Tiffany's tells the story of Holly Golightly as remembered by a never named narrator that once knew Holly when he lived above her in an old brownstone apartment building in New York City. In the time that they knew each other, they went from strangers to the closest of confidants. It has been fifteen years since the last time the narrator has seen Holly. In those fifteen years he says, "It never occurred to me to write about Holly Golightly, and probably it would not now except for a conversation I had with Joe Bell that set the whole memory of her in motion again". Joe Bell is the proprietor of a bar on Lexington Avenue, a bar the narrator and Holly used to visit as often as seven times a day, although not always for a drink. The beginning of the story is really the end. The narrator, now an accomplished writer, returns to Joe Bell's bar and his thoughts are flooded with the bittersweet memories of Holly Golightly. Published in 1958, Breakfast at Tiffany's has since inspired women to pack their bags and seek their fortunes in New York all over the country. Holly Golightly has taken her place as an American fictional icon, and of all his characters, Capote himself said that she was always his favorite.

December 2008 Selection: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:

A Christmas Carol is a Victorian morality tale of the old and bitter miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who undergoes a profound experience of redemption over the course of one night. Mr. Scrooge is a money-changer who has devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth. He holds anything other than money in contempt, including friendship, love and the Christmas season. A Christmas Carol was first published on December 19, 1843. The first of the author's five "Christmas books", the story was an instant success, selling over six thousand copies in one week, and the tale has become one of the most popular and enduring Christmas stories of all time. Contemporaries noted that the story's popularity played a critical role in redefining the importance of Christmas and the major sentiments associated with the holiday because it was written during a time of decline in the old Christmas traditions. "If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease", said English poet Thomas Hood.

Marble Falls Book Club