Bay Area Book Club

2006-05-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

Bay Area Book Club's Book for month of June:

Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseini
http://www.khaledhosseini.com/

Avaliable at Barns & Nobels & Borders Bookstores

We will meet on Sunday, June 18, 2006 @ 4:30 pm at
Mission Coffee Roasting Company
151 Washington Blvd. • Fremont, CA 94539 • Phone: 510-623-6920

Email Us at bayareabookclub@gmail.com RSVP for this event!!!

Khaled Hosseini's stunning debut novel The Kite Runner follows a young boy, Amir, as he faces the challenges that confront him on the path to manhood—testing friendships, finding love, cheating death, accepting faults, and gaining understanding. Living in Afghanistan in the 1960s, Amir enjoys a life of privilege that is shaped by his brotherly friendship with Hassan, his servant's son. Amir lives in constant want of his father's attention, feeling that he is a failure in his father's eyes. Hassan, on the other hand, seems to be able to do no wrong. Their friendship is a complex tapestry of love, loss, privilege, and shame.

Striving to be the son his father always wanted, Amir takes on the weight of living up to unrealistic expectations and places the fate of his relationship with his father on the outcome of a kite running tournament, a popular challenge in which participants must cut down the kites of others with their own kite. Amir wins the tournament. Yet just as he begins to feel that all will be right in the world, a tragedy occurs with his friend Hassan in a back alley on the very streets where the boys once played. This moment marks a turning point in Amir's life—one whose memory he seeks to bury by moving to America. There he realizes his dream of becoming a writer and marries for love but the memory of that fateful day will prove too strong to forget. Eventually it draws Amir back to Afghanistan to right the wrongs that began that day in the alley and continued in the days, months, and years that followed.

2006-03-05T22:35:00.000-08:00

Bay Area Book Club's Book for month of March:

Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold

Avaliable at Barns & Nobels & Borders Bookstores

We will meet on Wednesday, March 22, 2006 @ 7:30 pm

Fremont's Border Bookstore: 39210 Fremont Hub, Suite 211Fremont, CA 94536

Phone:510.797.9799

Email Us at bayareabookclub@gmail.com RSVP for this event!!!

Lovely Bones
By: Alice Sebold

When we first meet Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. As she looks down from this strange new place, she tells us, in the fresh and spirited voice of a fourteen-year-old girl, a tale that is both haunting and full of hope.

In the weeks following her death, Susie watches life on Earth continuing without her-her school friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her family holding out hope that she'll be found, her killer trying to cover his tracks. As months pass without leads, Susie sees her parents' marriage being contorted by loss, her sister hardening herself in an effort to stay strong, and her little brother trying to grasp the meaning of the word gone.

And she explores the place called heaven. It looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets. There are counselors to help newcomers adjust and friends to room with. Everything she ever wanted appears as soon as she thinks of it-except the thing she most wants: to be back with the people she loved on Earth.

With compassion, longing, and a growing understanding, Susie sees her loved ones pass through grief and begin to mend. Her father embarks on a risky quest to ensnare her killer. Her sister undertakes a feat of remarkable daring. And the boy Susie cared for moves on, only to find himself at the center of a miraculous event.

2006-01-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

Bay Area Book Club's Book for month of Febuary:

Alchemist By Paulo Coelho

Avaliable at Barns & Nobels & Borders Bookstores

We will meet on Wednesday, Febuary 22, 2006 @ 7:30 pm

Fremont's Border Bookstore: 39210 Fremont Hub, Suite 211Fremont, CA 94536

Phone:510.797.9799

Email Us at bayareabookclub@gmail.com to RSVP for this event!!!

The Alchemist
BY Paulo Coelho

The novel tells the tale of Santiago, a boy who has a dream and the courage to follow it. After listening to "the signs" the boy ventures in his personal, Ulysses-like journey of exploration and self-discovery, symbolically searching for a hidden treasure located near the pyramids in Egypt. When he decides to go, his father's only advice is "Travel the world until you see that our castle is the greatest, and our women the most beautiful". In his journey, Santiago sees the greatness of the world, and meets all kinds of exciting people like kings and alchemists. However, by the end of the novel, he discovers that "treasure lies where your heart belongs", and that the treasure was the journey itself, the discoveries he made, and the wisdom he acquired. "The Alchemist", is an exciting novel that bursts with optimism; it is the kind of novel that tells you that everything is possible as long as you really want it to happen.

2005-12-06T12:44:00.000-08:00

Bay Area Book Club's Book for month of January: One Hundred Years of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Avaliable at Barns & Nobels & Borders Bookstores

Our Monthly discussion will be hold on Sunday, January 22 ,2006 at 4:00pm: Borders BookStore located on 39210 Fremont Hub Fremont, CA 94538. Interested participants please email us at bayareabookclub@gmail.com for RSVP.

About the Book

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that took the world by storm. It's a furious, passionate, seething novel filled with hallucinogenic scenery. With his groundbreaking book, Gabriel García Márquez not only established himself as a writer with singular vision, he also established Latin American literature and "magical realism" as forces to be reckoned with. There are many millions of copies in print worldwide, and the readership is so thrilled, the novel has been translated into more than three-dozen languages. Because of the ground he broke with One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature. The first work in Spanish to become, a U.S. bestseller (it was originally published and widely read in Spanish in 1967) this was, in 1970 the book to read. And read it we did—and more than 30 years later, we still do!

Why You Should Read It

Read One Hundred Years of Solitude because of its passion. It's a wildly passionate book that brings to life mythical and colorful characters. In Macondo, wonderful, magical, fantastical, unreal things happen every day. They swirl on a canvas as unique and foreign as any you have known yet they evoke basic human truths that are as real as every day. And through this fantastic town and its fantastic people, you will come to appreciate the magic of your own life. It's a book where a lot happens, and what happens will move you. You'll find your blood boils and your stomach flips from all the love, compassion, conflict, heartbreak, beauty, stubbornness, despair, humor, simplicity, complexity, intellect and prophecy. One Hundred Years of Solitude will inspire you to connect with your family, love more deeply and dream bigger and find deeper truths within yourself.

About the Author

Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928 to Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran and Gabriel Eligio Garcia in Aracataca, Colombia. Luisa's parents did not approve of her marriage to Gabriel and Marquez, the oldest of twelve children, was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. On December 6, in the Cienaga train station, between 9 and 3,000 striking banana workers were shot and killed by troops from Antioquia. The incident was officially forgotten and omitted from Colombian history textbooks. Although Marquez was still a baby, this event was to have a profound effect on his writing.

When Marquez was eight years old, his grandfather died. At that time it was also clear that his grandmother, who was going blind, was increasingly helpless. He was sent to live with his parents and siblings, who he barely knew, in Sucre. A bright pupil, he won scholarships to complete his secondary education at the Colegio Nacional. There he discovered literature and admired a group of poets called the piedra y cielo ("stone and sky"). This group included Eduardo Carranza, Jorge Rojas, and Aurelio Arturo and their literary grandfathers were Juan Ramon Jimenez and Pablo Neruda. In 1946, Marquez entered law school at the National University of Bogota. There he began reading Kafka and publishing his first short stories in leading Liberal newspapers.

2005-10-25T21:16:00.000-07:00

Bay Area Book Club's Book for month of November:
Memoirs Of a Geisha By Arthur Golden
Avaliable at Barns & Nobels & Borders Bookstores

Our Monthly discussion will be hold on Sunday, November 20,2005 at 4:00pm: University Cafe located on 271 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA (650)322-5301 Interested participants please email us at bayareabookclub@gmail.com for a list of discussion questions.

About the Book

The strikingly pretty child of an impoverished fishing family, Chiyo is taken to faraway Kyoto and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house where she is renamed Sayuri. Initially reluctant, Sayuri must finally invent and cultivate an image of herself as a desirable geisha in order to survive in Gion's cruel hierarchy. Through her eyes, we are given a backstage view of the ancient and secretive geisha district, Gion, and of the lives of the women who learn and practice the rigorous arts of the geisha. Behind its facade of haunting beauty the district turns out to be a viciously competitive place where women vie desperately for men's favor and largess, where a young girl's virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder, where personal trust is almost nonexistent, and where no woman can afford even to dream about love or happiness. A timeless pocket of the world, Gion cannot remain cut off from the bustle of the modern era forever. When Japan enters the Second World War, Gion's isolation is finally breached and Sayuri must once again reinvent herself and her way of existence. Memoirs of a Geisha is a treasure of a book, an unparalleled look at a strange and mysterious world which has now almost vanished. It is also, and unforgettably, a dazzling portrait of a singular and most seductive woman who tells her story in a compelling first person voice.

About the Author

Arthur Golden was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was educated at Harvard College, where he received a degree in art history, specializing in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an M.A. in Japanese history from Columbia University, where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. Following a summer at Beijing University, he worked in Tokyo, and, after returning to the United States, earned an M.A. in English from Boston University. He resides in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

2005-10-25T16:54:00.000-07:00

About US:

Simply put we are group of book lovers. Some of us are Bay Area natives and others come from different parts of the country and world. What makes our group unique is that we look through an author's lenses with different
viewpoints, cultural perspectives and socio-economic backgrounds.

We get together on monthly basis at a local coffee shop and discuss the chosen book for that particular month. Also based on our author's nationality/book's theme, we go to different ethnic restaurants. We also go to movies based on our reading and discussions.

So if you are interested in making new friends, learning about new authors/books, love reading, lectures or just listening to discussion about book than you are a perfect candidate to join our group. Come and join our group and let your friends know about our group