Novel Ideas Book Club

January 22, 2008
Reading Lolita in Tehran (WPL Catalog) Azar Nafisi
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Reading Lolita in Tehran - An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people’s lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels…Amazon.com

February 19, 2008
The Da Vinci Code (WPL Catalog) by Dan Brown
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The Da Vinci Code - A murder in the silent after-hour halls of the Louvre museum reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. The victim is a high-ranking agent of this ancient society who, in the moments before his death, manages to leave gruesome clues at the scene that only his granddaughter, noted cryptographer Sophie Neveu, and Robert Langdon, a famed symbologist, can untangle…Amazon.com

March 25, 2008
The Pilot’s Wife (WPL Catalog) by Anita Shreve
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The Pilot’s Wife - With five novels to her credit, including the acclaimed The Weight of Water, Anita Shreve now offers a skillfully crafted exploration of the long reach of tragedy in The Pilot’s Wife. News of Jack Lyons’s fatal crash sends his wife into shock and emotional numbness: Kathryn wished she could manage a coma. Instead, it seemed that quite the opposite had happened…Amazon.com

April 15, 2008
The Blind Assassin (WPL Catalog) by Margaret Atwood
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The Blind Assassin is a tale of two sisters, one of whom dies under ambiguous circumstances in the opening pages. The survivor, Iris Chase Griffen, initially seems a little cold-blooded about this death in the family. But as Margaret Atwood’s most ambitious work unfolds—a tricky process, in fact, with several nested narratives and even an entire novel-within-a-novel—we’re reminded of just how complicated the familial game of hide-and-seek can be…Amazon.com

May 20, 2008
The Road (WPL Catalog) by Cormac McCarthy
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The Road - Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses) here offers a prescient account of a man and his son trying to survive in a devastated country where food is scarce and everyone has become a scavenger. The term survival of the fittest rings true here—very few people remain, and friends are extinct … Library Journal