October Meeting

Here are the details for our October Meeting:

Date: October 25, 2008

Time: 9:00am

Loction: Mimi's Cafe (615 S Hurstbourne PkwyLouisville, KY 40222 (502) 426-6588)

Book: Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell

October 2008 Book Selection List

Here are the list of books for our October selection!

Case Histories by Atkinson, Kate
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by by Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows

The Wednesday Sisters by Clayton, Meg Waite

The Bondswoman Narrative by Crafts, Hanna
Good Harbor by Diamant, Anita
Outlander by Gabaldon, Diana
The Water Dancers by Gamble, Terry
Hidden by Gray, Shelley Shepard
Marley & Me: Love and Life with the World's Worst Dog by Grogan, John
Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together by Hall, Ron

The Painted Kiss by Hickey, Elizabeth

Welcome to the Great Mysterious by Landvik, Lorna
Family Baggage by McInerney, Monica
Blessings by Quindlen, Anna
The Last Oracle by Rollins, James
The Pilot's Wife by Shreve, Anita
The Rescue by Sparks, Nicholas
The Matchmaker of Perigord: A Novel (P.S.) by Stuart, Julia
The Shadow of the Wind by Zafon, Carlos Ruiz

The Shadow of the Wind - Zafon, Carlos Ruiz

Barcelona, 1945-A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and a boy mourning the loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax's other books, it begins to dawn on him, to his horror, that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book the man has ever written. Soon the boy realizes that The Shadow of the Wind is as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget, for the mystery of its author's identity holds the key to an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love that someone will go to any lengths to keep secret.

The Matchmaker of Perigord: A Novel (P.S.) - Stuart, Julia

Guillaume Ladoucette wiped his delicate fingers on his trouser leg before squeezing them into the glass jar. As he wiggled them around the cold, slippery fat he recognized what he felt was an ankle and his tongue moistened. He tugged it out and dropped the preserved duck leg into the cassoulet made by his mother thirty-one years ago and which had been on the go ever since. The ghostly white limb lay for several seconds suspended on haricot bean and sausage flotsam before disappearing from sight following a swift prod with a wooden spoon.

Custodian of the cassoulet now that his mother had gone cuckoo, the barber gave the dish a respectfully slow stir and watched as a goose bone appeared through the oregano and thyme vapours. The flesh had long since dropped off, his mother having first added it to the pot nineteen years ago in celebration of his opening a barber shop in the village. Initially, Madame Ladoucette had strictly forbidden the bone's removal out of maternal pride. Years later, her mind warped by grief following the death of her husband, she convinced herself that her son's good fortune at starting his own business the only happy memory to surface during that difficult time was proof of the Almighty's existence. It was a conviction that led to her irritating habit of suddenly standing up at the table and dashing over to whichever unsuspecting dinner guest had mistakenly been served the grey bone. With a pincer-like motion, she would swiftly remove it from their plate with the words ‘not so fast', in the fear that they would make off with what she had come to consider a holy relic.

From amongst the beans emerged an onion dating from March 1999, several carrots added only the previous week, a new thumb of garlic which Guillaume Ladoucette failed to recognize and a small green button still waiting to be reclaimed by its owner. With the care of an archaeologist, he drew the spoon around the bottom and sides of the iron pot to loosen some of the blackened crust, which, along with an original piece of now calcified Toulouse sausage, were, the barber insisted, the secret of the dish's unsurpassable taste. There were those, however, who blamed the antique sausage for turning the pharmacist Patrice Baudin, who had never previously shown any sign of lunacy, into a vegetarian, a scandal from which the village had never recovered.
Keeping the cassoulet going was more than just the duty of an only son, but something upon which the family's name rested. For the cassoulet war had been long and ugly and there was still no sign of a truce. All those fortunate enough to have witnessed the historic spectacle agreed that the first cannon was launched by Madame Ladoucette when she spotted Madame Moreau buying some tomatoes in the place du Marché and casually asked what she was making. When the woman replied, Madame Ladoucette recoiled two paces in horror, a move not appreciated by the stallholder on whose foot she landed.

‘But tomatoes have no place in a cassoulet!' Madame Ladoucette cried. ‘Yes, they do. I've always used tomatoes,' Madame Moreau replied. ‘The next thing you'll be telling me is that you put lamb in it as well.' ‘Don't be so ridiculous, I would never commit such a perversion!' Madame Moreau retorted.

‘Ridiculous? Madame, it is not I who puts tomatoes in a cassoulet, it is you. What does your husband have to say about this?' ‘He wouldn't want it any other way,' came the terse reply.
Moments later, several onlookers witnessed Madame Ladoucette striding up to Madame Moreau's husband, who was sitting on the bench by the fountain said to cure gout watching an ant struggling with a leaf five times its size. Monsieur Moreau looked up to see a pair of crane's legs, whose owner was carrying a straw basket which his nose immediately told him was full of fresh fish.

‘Monsieur Moreau,' she began. ‘Forgive me, but it is a matter of utmost importance and a true Frenchman such as yourself will know the definitive answer. Should a cassoulet have tomatoes in it or not?'

Monsieur Moreau was so startled by her sudden appearance and line of questioning that he could think of nothing but the truth: ‘The correct method of making a cassoulet is always a source of contention. Personally, I prefer it without tomatoes, as my mother made it, but for God's sake don't tell the wife.'

According to Henri Rousseau, who happened to be standing next to Madame Moreau as she was paying for her tomatoes, Madame Ladoucette walked straight back up to her and repeated the entire conversation, adding that it was her civic duty to cook a cassoulet correctly. Precisely what Madame Moreau called her in return Henri Rousseau failed to catch, a crime his wife never forgave and which led to her insisting that he wear a hearing aid despite the fact that he was not in the least bit deaf. There was no doubt, however, about what happened next. Madame Ladoucette reached into her basket, pulled out what was unmistakably an eel and slapped Madame Moreau across the nose with it, before leaving its head wedged firmly down her cleavage and stalking off. She had made it halfway down the rue du Château, when, much to the delight of the villagers who couldn't have wished for better entertainment on a Tuesday morning, Madame Moreau put her hand into the brown paper bag she was holding and hurled a tomato at Madame Ladoucette. It landed with such force her victim momentarily staggered.
While the pair never spoke again, the salvoes continued. From that day, Madame Moreau insisted on keeping a large bowl of over-ripe tomatoes near her kitchen window, which she used as ammunition from behind her white lace panels whenever her enemy passed. Madame Ladoucette retaliated by always doing her eel impression whenever she caught her adversary's eye in the street. And while Madame Moreau's throwing arm was not what it used to be, and Madame Ladoucette's eel impression, which was never that good to begin with, had for several years been hampered by a pair of ill-fitting dentures, the two kept up their insults well into their senility, when they became almost a form of greeting.

Leaving the duck leg to heat up, the barber decided to fetch a lettuce from his potager. By the time he reached the back door the soles of his bare feet had collected a small sharp black stone, a ginger-coloured feather, two dried lentils and a little sticky label from an apple bearing the words ‘Pomme du Limousin.' Resting his right foot on his left knee, he first removed the stone, lentils and label. Then, with a muttered blasphemy, he picked off the feather which he immediately carried to the bin.

The Rescue - Sparks, Nicholas

Secret traumas again haunt Sparks's characters, in the author's fourth novel (after The Notebook; Message in a Bottle; A Walk to Remember). Denise Holden, the 29-year-old heroine, is destitute and forced to live in her mother's old house in Edenton, N.C. She's also the single mother of a handicapped child, Kyle, a four-year-old with "auditory processing problems" that render him unable to express himself or to fully understand others. Though she doesn't suspect it, Denise is on a literal collision course with true love. After she smashes her car into a tree and wakes up to discover Kyle missing, she finds deliverance in the form of Taylor McAden, dashing firefighter and compulsive risk taker, who rescues Kyle, too. Since Taylor enjoys an instant, unprecedented rapport with Kyle, there is little standing in the way of burgeoning romance. Trouble comes, however, when Denise learns of Taylor's checkered romantic past. Taylor's inability to commit, it seems, is somehow tied to his compulsive heroism, of which numerous histrionic examples are described. Denise's quest to find the source of Taylor's emotional distance takes up the final third of the book. The story here is mostly a pretext for the emotional assault that Sparks delivers, but when he manages to link affect to action, the result is cunningly crafted melodrama. These occasions are rare, though; more often Sparks gets bogged down in interminable interior monologue. Because these characters are preordained lovers, their feelings prescribed by fiction conventions, their psychology amounts to little more than a profusion of banality. Yet Sparks's narrative acquires immediacy when his characters' exaggerated emotions compel immoderate actions, and his readers will surely delight at these moments of heightened expressiveness. 1 million first printing; 24-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

The Pilot's Wife -Shreve, Anita

Oprah's latest Book Club pick is The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve—an engrossing thriller woven between the pages of a stirring meditation on love and betrayal. With one late-night knock on her door, Kathryn Lyons's worst fears as a pilot's wife come true: Her husband, Jack, has died in a mid-air explosion off the coast of Ireland. Later, a phone number found among Jack's papers leads Kathryn to London and the unfathomable truth about her husband's secret other life. A second wife and two young children are just the beginning of what Jack was hiding in England. With each staggering revelation, Kathryn must reconcile her memories of the man she loved with the disturbing portrait unfolding before her.

The Last Oracle - Rollins, James

What if you could bioengineer the next great world prophet: scientifically produce the next Buddha, the next Muhammad, or the next Jesus? Would it mark the Second Coming or initiate a chain reaction with disastrous consequences?

A master at combining historical and religious intrigue with edge-of-your-seat adventure, New York Times bestselling author James Rollins brings back SIGMA Force to battle a group of rogue scientists who've unleashed a bioengineering project that could bring about the extinction of humankind.
In Washington, D.C., a homeless man dies in Commander Gray Pierce's arms, shot by an assassin's bullet. But the death leaves behind a greater mystery: a bloody coin found clutched in the dead man's hand, an ancient relic that can be traced back to the Greek Oracle of Delphi. As ruthless hunters search for the stolen artifact, Gray Pierce discovers that the coin is the key to unlocking a plot that dates back to the Cold War and threatens the very foundation of humanity.

An international think tank of scientists known as the Jasons has discovered a way to bioengineer autistic children who show savant talents—mathematical geniuses, statistical masterminds, brilliant conceptual artists—into something far greater and far more frightening, in hopes of creating a world prophet for the new millennium, one to be manipulated to create a new era of global peace . . . a peace on their own terms.

Halfway around the world, a man wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory of who he is, knowing only that he's a prisoner in a subterranean research facility. With the help of three unusual children, he makes his escape across a mountainous and radioactive countryside, pursued by savage hunters bred in the same laboratory. But his goal is not escape, nor even survival. In order to thwart a plot to wipe out a quarter of the world's population, he must sacrifice all, even the children who rescued him.

From ancient Greek temples to glittering mausoleums, from the slums of India to the toxic ruins of Russia, two men must race against time to solve a mystery that dates back to the first famous oracle of history—the Greek Oracle of Delphi.

But one question remains: Will the past be enough to save the future?