Winter Reading
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A Night to Remember
She was the world's biggest-ever ship. A luxurious miracle of twentieth-century technology, the Titantic was equipped with the most ingenious safety devices of the time. Yet on a moonlit night in 1912, the "unsinkable" Titantic raced across the glassy Atlantic on her maiden voyage, with only twenty lifeboats for 2,207 passengers. A Night To Remember is the gut-wrenching, minute-by minute account of her fatal collision with an iceberg and how the resulting tragedy brought out the best and worst in human nature. From the first distress flares to the struggles of those left adrift for hours in freezing waters, here is the legendary disaster relived by the few who survived and can never forget the many who did not. RCL staff says: "I don't know why I think of it as winter reading--maybe the thought of icebergs makes me cold!"
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Anna Karenina
Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses to conduct the discreet affair that her cold, ambitious husband--and Russian high society--would condone, she is doomed. Set against the tragic love of Anna and Vronsky, the plight of the melancholy nobleman Konstantine Levin unfolds. In doubt about the meaning of life--a mirror of Tolstoy's own spiritual crisis--Konstantine is haunted by thoughts of suicide. A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution, Anna Karenina tells the story of two characters whose emotional instincts conflict with the dominant social mores of their time. RCL staff recommendation: "Characters in conflict, exotic locales, fantastic heroes/heroines--a great 'long book' read."
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Dark Fire
It is 1540, and Matthew Shardlake, the lawyer renowned as “the sharpest hunchback in the courts of England,” is pressed to help a friend’s young niece who is charged with murder. Despite threats of torture and death by the rack, the girl is inexplicably silent. Shardlake is about to lose her case when he is suddenly granted a reprieve—one that will ensnare him in the dangerous schemes of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s feared vicar-general. In exchange for two more weeks to investigate the murder, Shardlake accepts Cromwell’s dangerous assignment to find a lost cache of “dark fire,” a legendary weapon of mass destruction. RCL staff says: "Substantial enough to while away the long dark hours from after work to bedtime."
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David Copperfield
Dickens’ s favorite of all his novels, "David Copperfield" is the story of a boy who loses both parents at an early age, and who escapes the torture of working for his pitiless stepfather to make something of himself and, with any luck, find true happiness. "David Copperfield" features an unforgettable gallery of characters, including David’ s cruel stepfather Mr. Murdstone, the unctuous Uriah Heep, the amiable Mr. Micawber, whom Dickens based on his father, and Dora Spenglow, whom David marries and calls his “ child-wife.” Written in the first person, "David Copperfield" is perhaps the most autobiographical of Dickens’ s fictions. RCL staff recommendation: "Long and classic novels are great for drowning oneself in during the winter."
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Little, Big
Little, Big tells the epic story of Smoky Barnable -- an anonymous young man who meets and falls in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater, and goes to live with her in Edgewood, a place not found on any map. In an impossible mansion full of her relatives, who all seem to have ties to another world not far away, Smoky fathers a family and tries to learn what tale he has found himself in -- and how it is to end. RCL staff says: "One of my top ten books of all time."
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Lonesome Dove
A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize— winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember. RCL staff says: "Great plot full of intrigue and danger--love the long book that sucks you right in!"
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No Biking in the House without a Helmet
When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, 'among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth-century Russia.' Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. She's been praised for her 'historian's urge for accuracy,' her 'sociologist's sense of social nuance,' and her 'writerly passion for the beauty of language.' RCL staff comment: "Funny, sad and happy."
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Solar
When Nobel prize-winning physicist Michael Beard's personal and professional lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, an opportunity presents itself in the guise of an invitation to travel to New Mexico. Here is a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster. RCL staff recommendation: "It's weirdly, savagely funny and set in large part among the endless snowy tracks of the South Pole."
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The Memory Chalet
"The Memory Chalet" is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation 'was a revolutionary generation, but missed the revolution.' A series of road trips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship. Foods and trains and long-lost smells all compete for Judt's attention; but for us, he has forged his reflections into an elegant arc of analysis. RCL staff recommendation: "Very thoughtful exploration of a life of the mind, Great Britain and Europe, the 60s, and illness."
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The Thirteenth Tale
The reclusive author Vida Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself -- all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter's story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission. As Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling but remains suspicious of the author's sincerity. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves. RCL staff says: "A real booky book--with all those "I love reading" allusions."
