I loved the way pix did this
last time, so I'm going to do it pretty much the same way. I'll be posting six options for all of us to choose from and decide on the next selection for the book club. I'll keep the thread locked till I finish posting all the choices and then open it back up for discussion.
Option 1:The Stories of John CheeverJohn Cheever, 1978
704 pages
Links:
Amazon /
Powell'sw@w: I have some egregious gaps when it comes to American authors and this is one that I really want to fix. I first encountered John Cheever through the PRI: Selected Shorts podcast where someone read out
The Trouble with Marcie Flint. The story was just so impeccably crafted that I found myself comparing him to Chekhov. The fact that it won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award is probably worth mentioning as well.
Finally, it's a big book with a ton of stories. But I like the idea of having a collection of short stories in the mix. It makes discussion a bit more complicated but gives us the chance to pick and choose and only read parts and make it less important to read it in one stretch which I thought would be a good thing.
Excerpt from T.C. Boyle talking about John Cheever on All Things Considered"There is a great, questing soul alive everywhere in these stories, a soul trying to come to grips with the parameters of human experience amid the ravishing beauty of nature. Few prose writers can touch Cheever for the painterly precision of his descriptions, and the reward of them too -- his characters, locked in the struggles of suburban and familial angst, regularly experience moments of transcendence and rebirth in nature.
My recommendation? Read the entire book through, the stories unfolding in chronological order, and you will feel the deep calm of immersion in Cheever's universe, even as you see the world of his society, our society, unfolding in all its fads and obsessions from the end of World War II through the late 1970s."
Opening Lines:"We are a family that has always been very close in spirit. Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young, and our mother has always stressed the fact that our familial relationships have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again."
Semi-Random Excerpt"Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. "
I love the idea of a radio with a malevolent green light
.