Booooo(ze) Book for October

To all you brilliant lovers of fine booze and finer books!

Thank you so much for your participation in our book selection poll. Fantastic!

We will meet on October 25 to discuss author Margaret Atwood’s all-too-pertinent dystopian vision in her award-winning novel-- The Handmaids Tale.

Maple Street Bookstore will have the book as of Friday, Oct 7. Mention the book club and you get a 10% discount. It's also available online for as little as $4, and is also an ebook. You can find both the book and audiobook in the Orleans and Jefferson Parish libraries.

I hope you can join us. (Feel free to give your Halloween attire an early outing.)

Lorraine

“In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies? Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now.... Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force. “ (Indiebound.org)

Fiercely political and bleak, yet witty and wise, the novel won the inaugural Arthur C “Clarke award in 1987, but Atwood has always maintained that the novel is not classifiable science fiction. Nothing practised in the Republic of Gilead is genuinely futuristic. She is right, and this novel seems ever more vital in the present day, where women in many parts of the world live similar lives, dictated by biological determinism and misogyny.” (guardian.co.uk)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale