Category: ENG4U Reading List

Half Blood Blues

Published on by wmelnickLeave a comment

Winner of the 2011 Giller Prize, Esi Edugyan talks about her novel HERE with CNN.

Excerpt:

Opening chapter: Paris 1940

Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you, all of us still reeling from the rot – rot was cheap, see, the drink of French peasants, but it stayed like nails in you gut. Didn’t even look right, all mossy and black in the bottle. Like drinking swamp water.

See, we lay exhausted in the flat, sheets nailed over the windows. The sunrise so fierce it seeped through the gaps, dropped like cloth on our skin. Couple hours before, we was playing in some back-alley studio, trying to cut a record. A grim little room, more like a closet of ghosts than any joint for music, the cracked hearts lisping steam, empty bottles rolling all over the warped floor. Our cigarettes glowed like small holes in the dark, and that’s how I known we wasn’t buzzing, Hiero’s smoke not moving or nothing. The cig just sitting there in his mouth like he couldn’t hear his way clear. Everyone pacing about, listening between takes to the scrabble of rats in the wall. Restless as hell. Could be we wasn’t so rotten, but I at least felt off. Too nervous, too crazed, too busy watching the door. Forget the rot. Forget the studio’s seclusion. Nothing tore me out of myself. Take after take, I’d play sweating to the end of it only to have Hiero scratch the damn disc, tossing it in the trash.

“Just a damn braid of mistakes,” Hiero kept muttering. “A damn braid of mistakes.”

So begins the tale of a brilliant jazz musician, a talent lost to the brutality of the Nazis, his tale retold by his old band mate Sid. What really happened to Hiero? The story relives those smoky, passionate times full of resistance and music. An excellent story.

Amercian Dervish

Published on by wmelnickLeave a comment

Ayad Akhtar brings us the story of a Muslim boy growing up in Milwaukee, a perspective that is innocent, yet full of clarity and understanding. It all begins as a college student looking back at his childhood, a well to do family where home life is stormy at best but interrupted by the arrival of Mina, a childhood friend of his mother. This is where his spiritual journey begins as he navigates his way through both Muslim and Jewish cultures. An intimate look at his coming of age story.

Read the New York Times Review HERE

The Paris Wife

Published on by wmelnickLeave a comment


paris-wifeThe Paris Wife by Paula McLain

A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time—Paris in the twenties—and an extraordinary love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.

In Chicago in 1920, Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and finds herself captivated by his good looks, intensity, and passionate desire to write. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group of expatriates that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

But the hard-drinking and fast-living café life does not celebrate traditional notions of family and monogamy. As Hadley struggles with jealousy and self-doubt and Ernest wrestles with his burgeoning writing career, they must confront a deception that could prove the undoing of one of the great romances in literary history. (URL)

11/22/63

Published on by wmelnickLeave a comment

Stephen King’s new novel is full of intrigue, suspense, humour and of course, the signature terrifying aspects. On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, president Kennedy died, and the world changed. What is you could change it back?

Jake Epping’s friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession-to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying. (Publisher blurb)

 

The Sisters Brothers

Published on by wmelnickLeave a comment

A novel in the tradition of a true Western – saloons, gun-slingers, beautiful damsels, gold – it has it all!

This is the story of two brothers, the Sisters brothers, who are trying to make a living as hired guns for the Comodore. Each brother has his own demons, but they are an inseparable team. But, life has thrown them into a job where one brother starts to question the rationale for murder and he begins to imagine settling down to a normal life.  It almost looks like he may be close to his goal, when disaster strikes!

Patrick de Witt web site

Short listed for the Man Booker Prize