Longmont Book Club

NOTE UPDATED DATE: This book was originally scheduled for May 7.
.
If you'd like to share an introduction to this book, please let Jennifer L or Gerty know. (You don't have to lead the whole discussion, just share some interesting details about the author or topic at the beginning.)
.
From Wikipedia: A Death in the Family is an autobiographical novel by author James Agee, set in Knoxville, Tennessee. He began writing it in 1948, but it was not quite complete when he died in 1955. It was edited and released posthumously in 1957 by editor David McDowell.
.
The novel is based on the events that occurred to Agee in 1915 when his father went out of town to see his own father, who had suffered a heart attack. During the return trip, Agee's father was killed in a car accident. The novel provides a portrait of life in Knoxville, Tennessee, showing how such a loss affects the young widow, her two children, her atheist father and the dead man's alcoholic brother.
.
Agee won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958 for the novel. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.
.

If you'd like to share an introduction to this book, please let Jennifer L or Gerty know. (You don't have to lead the whole discussion, just share some interesting details about the author or topic at the beginning.)
.
From Wikipedia: Plainsong is a bestselling novel and National Book Award Finalist written by Kent Haruf. Set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, it tells the interlocking stories of some of the inhabitants.
.
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.
.
From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.

If you'd like to share an introduction to this book, please let Jennifer L or Gerty know. (You don't have to lead the whole discussion, just share some interesting details about the author or topic at the beginning.)
.
This will be our second book by Author of the Year Margaret Atwood. We'll discuss this book and see what common themes we find between it and Cat's Eye, our first read by Atwood in March.
.
From amazon: [The Blind Assassin] weaves together strands of gothic suspense, romance, and science fiction into one utterly spellbinding narrative, beginning with the mysterious death of a young woman named Laura Chase in 1945.
.
Decades later, Laura’s sister Iris recounts her memories of their childhood, and of the dramatic deaths that have punctuated their wealthy, eccentric family’s history. Intertwined with Iris’s account are chapters from the scandalous novel that made Laura famous, in which two illicit lovers amuse each other by spinning a tale of a blind killer on a distant planet.
.
These richly layered stories-within-stories gradually illuminate the secrets that have long haunted the Chase family, coming together in a brilliant and astonishing final twist.

If you'd like to share an introduction to this book, please let Jennifer L or Gerty know. (You don't have to lead the whole discussion, just share some interesting details about the author or topic at the beginning.)
.
From Wikipedia: Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticized, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb.
.
Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of the fact that "no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives", and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. The inhabitants of the farm – Aunt Ada Doom, the Starkadders, and their extended family and workers – feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father.
.
As is typical in a certain genre of romantic 19th-century and early 20th-century literature, each of the farm's inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred, or fear, and the farm is badly run. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman in the dandy tradition, determines that she must apply modern common sense to their problems and help them adapt to the 20th century – bringing metropolitan values into the sticks.