WOVFAB goes to the movies

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We've talked about it for years, now let's give it a try, WOVFAB at the movies. Let's meet January 14 to watch one of these:

The Closet
Hotel Rwanda
Casablanca
Rebecca

Movie Night
	Closet
	Hotel Rwanda
	Casablanca
	Rebecca
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Polls close Monday at 5

Where Rainbows End aka Rosie Dunne

Chick Lit, pure and simple. The pink cover should be a sign....or a warning.


Alex and Rosie have been best friends, writing and e-mailing since childhood. For 40 years they write and e-mail, through med school, multiple bad marriages, kids, and divorces, always hinting at but never stating one's love of the other. Written in an interesting format, it grows old before the characters do. The plot drags on too long by far. But, all in all, a decent, light, escapist read for the holidays.

Voting for the disenfranchised

Here's an election even us foreigners can vote in! Polls close Monday 5pm. Next meeting Wednesday, December 3.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Where Rainbows End by Cecelia Ahern

Saving Fish from Drowing by Amy Tan

The only poll that matters:
	Kavalier and Clay
	Rainbows End
	Saving Fish
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Under the Banner of Heaven

As we were reading this book, California was struggling with Prop. 8 which would ban same sex marriage. The arguement ran than it would be the death knell for traditional marriage, the union between a man and a woman. One man and one woman.

Meanwhile, the polygamous Mormon fundamentalist compound in Texas had just been raided. Hundreds of children were taken into custody and stories of abuse ran rampant in the media. How can the same book of scripture be used to justify monogamous and polygamous marriage?

Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer tells the history of the Mormon church in America and now rapid world-wide spread. Essentially a get rich quick scheme and companion to the Bible, the Book of Mormon was written by Joseph Smith in the 1830s. Believers quickly came to trust Smith as the One True Prophet, with the power to control their lives down to the smallest detail, including who could marry whom. And how many wives one should have.

The death of Smith brought segmentation to the church. Believers who spoke directly with God felt they were best interpreters of the Lord's will and set up break-away sects. Krakauer tells in detail of their tenets of tax evasion, welfare fraud, plural marriage, incest, and murder.

A thoroughly researched, well-written and horrifying book.

Vote Early

Our selections for the next read are:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

and

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

Holly says polls close at 5 Monday.

Books for October
	Under the Banner of Heaven
	The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Free polls from Pollhost.com

A Walk in the Woods

Yesterday, a friend suggested we hike up into the Oakland hills behind our house. That looks like a challenge, I thought.
Bill Bryson, older and more out of shape than I am, decided to walk the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail which stretches from Georgia to Maine. Taking along his over-weight buddy Stephen Katz, the two struggle with the trail, one another, and the 'local colour'. They endure bad weather, bad sleeping quarters, bad food, and lost trails, always with a sense of humour and a keen eye for detail. Part travelogue, part history lesson, A Walk in the Woods offers a compelling plea for both funding and better management of national parks.

August Book Vote

Vote for the August Book:
	A Walk in the Woods
	The Monkey Wrench Gang
	Under the Banner of Heaven
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Lock your doors...

and check the windows. Then curl up in bed with The Historian.
See you July 16.

Summer Reading

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We've got two nominations for our next book.
The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham
and
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Please vote by Friday at 5pm and remind me when we decided to meet.

June's Choices
	The Painted Veil
	The Historian
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life

What did I learn? Not a lot. This may be a great introductory book for Joe Public but lacks details (and citations) that those in the field might expect. The authors keep the prose light but give poor explanations. Brain structures are mentioned by name, but with no detailed map to locate them. And no, they never tell you why you lose your car keys but never forget how to drive. So what did I learn? Your chances of having a gay son increases with every son you have. And that London taxi drivers have a slight increase in the size of a distinct hippocampal region. That's all.

Anyone out there?

Suggestions for our next books:

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life

and

Tiger in the Smoke

Let's leave the poll open till Monday 5pm.....if Holly's back by then.

Please choose from:
	Welcome to Your Brain
	Tiger in the Smoke
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Winter Break

For those of us who can't get away to some tropical island, let's try escaping with a book. Please choose one of these for our April 9 meeting. Polls close Monday at 5pm.

At the Jim Bridger by Ron Carlson

Momma and the Meaning of Life by Irvin Yalom

Please choose from:
	Jim Bridger
	Momma and Meaning
Free polls from Pollhost.com

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

Jeanette Wells stroll down memory lane includes a few tales some readers may find difficult to believe - 3-year-olds burning themselves while cooking their own dinner; 5-year-olds falling out of a moving vehicle and left for several hours; 7-year-olds precocious enough to talk themselves out of many a sticky situation - and it also consists of stories you would think would land people in jail or at the very least children into a foster home - a father pimping out his daughter; a mother letting her children starve while she hordes chocolate bars - and yet somehow, she manages to tell it (unlike this run-on, clearly grammatically challenged review) in a simple, non-plussed manner, at times humorous, at times heartfelt and gracious. An enjoyable read, if of a not so enjoyable upbringing.

Books for Nice Quiet Winter Evenings by the Fire

We've got 2 suggestions for our next read:

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez



Since I'm late posting, let's leave the polls open till Wednesday, 3pm.

February Read:
	The Glass Castle
	Love in the Time of Cholera
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Everything Is Illuminated

I could write something, but why bother when this review from Salon says it perfectly:

"Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer

By Laura Miller

Apr 26, 2002 | There are two stories wound together in this first novel, and as is often the case, one is more engaging than the other. The first describes a visit to Ukraine by a 20-year-old American named Jonathan Safran Foer. (You just have to ignore the fact that the device of putting a character with the author's name in a novel outlived its freshness before Foer was born, in 1977.) This part of the book is told by Alexander Perchov, a Ukrainian, also 20, who gets shanghaied into acting as Foer's tour guide and semi-competent translator when Foer visits the country. Like many Jews of his generation, Foer wants to touch the pulse of his roots, to see the village of Trachimbrod, where his grandfather was born and raised, and to meet the woman whose family saved him from the Nazis. The two young men are trading manuscripts, and so the narrative alternates excerpts from Alex's account of Foer's visit and his letters to Jonathan with installments of Jonathan's own novel.

At first, Alex's version of English resembles an out-of-control garden hose turned on full-force and allowed to thrash away on a summer lawn. He's got a thesaurus and he'll be damned if he's not going to use it. After bragging about the number of girls who "want to be carnal" with him, and his propensity for "performing so many things that can spleen a mother," he explains his love for American-style culture: "I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa." His youth and his mangled English at first make him seem simply naive, but that hides a native apprehension that, uninhibited by oversophisticated politesse, can be startling. "There were parts of it I did not understand," he writes of Jonathan's novel. "But I conjecture that this is because they were very Jewish, and only a Jewish person could understand something so Jewish. Is that why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself?"

If only the fictional Jonathan's novel were really that esoteric. The manuscript he sends to Alex is a tiresomely familiar thing, a folklorical saga of life in the shtetl of Trachimbrod, full of lusty villagers and their quasi-magical adventures. The Alex sections of the book feel utterly alive and teeter invigoratingly between hilarity and a terrible, creeping dread. By contrast, the Trachimbrod sections only remind the reader of other works -- rehashed Chagall and dime-store Garcia Marquez. There are some pretty passages here, but even these have a framed, almost twee quality. (And, in what seems to be an effort at earthiness, the story also strays into the simply gross, as when a male character with a withered arm uses it as a dildo to console all the widows in town.)

Ordinarily, this caveat would make "Everything is Illuminated" unrecommendable, but the Alex portions of the novel are so good that in the final calculation they far outbalance the book's weaknesses. (Plus you can skim the Trachimbrod sections without missing that much.) With Alex's grandfather (who keeps claiming he's blind and insists on bringing along a "seeing-eye bitch" obtained from "the home for forgetful dogs") as their driver, the two youths head into the Ukrainian countryside and the darkness of the past. Their burgeoning friendship and the way that history and chance keep the balance of power between them -- and their capacity to know each other -- in constant flux, make this feel like a story that, astonishingly enough, has never really been told before.

Foer exquisitely executes the book's best jokes: the way that Jonathan's minor flaws -- his vanity, his American cluelessness, his tendency to patronize -- filter through Alex's admiring portrait of the young man he calls his "most premium friend" and "the hero." As the novel shades inexorably into the tragic mode, and as Alex comes to be a much better writer than Jonathan, with both a finer sense of truth and a more urgent understanding of the need for happy endings, his stumbling English incandesces into eloquence. And that alone is worth the price of admission.