Posted in Book Selections, Parties and Meetings on May 9, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Hey GLSers!
Our next meeting is Sunday May 13, 2012 at 7pm at Zaytinya, 701 9th St NW, Washington, DC 20001.
We’ll be discussing Furious Love by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger and dissect the crazy emotional roller coaster that was the love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (or TayBur as they would be called now!).
Until then – enjoy a couple of you tube clips of some Taylor/Burton movies that are talked about in the book.
See ya Sunday!
Posted in Book Selections on November 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Hello Book Clubbers!
Our next book club selection is Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue. We’re going to try and set a Christmas party meeting this year similar to last year and I’ll post more details as they come.
Hope everyone is having a good holiday season!
Posted in Book Selections on March 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Hey GLSers!
Our next book selection is Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Here’s a review from the Amazon page:
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. For two years they met to talk, share, and “shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color.” Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of “morality guards,” the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became “essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity,” she writes.
Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds. The great works encouraged them to strike out against authoritarianism and repression in their own ways, both large and small: “There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom,” she writes. In short, the art helped them to survive.
It looks like a great book. Melissa Holder has offered to host our next party and the meeting will probably be in late April or May. More info will be on the way soon!
Posted in Book Selections on December 19, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Hey all –
Our next book club selection is “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. We also have tentatively scheduled the meeting for February 5, 2011 and it will be hosted by Denise Ferguson Johnson. More deets to come!
Georgetown Literary Society 