Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine

We'll be reading Andrei Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers.
The Amazon link to his book

Interview with Andrei Makine by the Independent, "Through the Iron Curtain to Paris"
The Telegraph interview, "A Writer's Life"
"Torn Between Two Languages": a review in the NY Times
The literary blog, Ordinary World, reviews Dreams of My Russian Summers
wikipedia on Andrei Makine

David Lebovitz' Chocolate Yogurt Cakes

Have been enjoying reading David Lebovitz' book, The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious and Perplexing City.  The recipe for chocolate yogurt cakes came from this book. It's simple and easy. It turns out he has a very nice blog loaded with recipes.

I found the recipe for his chocolate yogurt cakes online in this blogger's post at the Steamy Kitchen.
Podcast below on the Steamy Kitchen.
David Lebovitz Chocolate Yogurt Snack Cake from Jaden Hair on Vimeo.

Makes 12 individual cakes
7 ounces (200g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup (125ml) unflavored vegetable oil, divided
1/2 cup (125ml) plain, whole-milk yogurt
1 cup (200g) sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 1/2 cups (180g) flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
whipped cream (optional – that’s just my little addition to his recipe)
1. Preheat the oven to 350f (180C). Line a muffin tin with 12 indentations with paper cupcake liners, or lightly butter them.
2. In a heatproof bowl set over simmering water, melt the chocolate with 1/4 cup (60ml) of the oil. Once melted and smooth, remove from heat.
3. In another bowl, mix together the remaining 1/4 cup (65ml) of oil with the yogurt, sugar, eggs, and vanilla and almond extracts.
3. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
4. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and add the yogurt mixture. Stir lightly a couple of time, then add the melted chocolate, and stir until just smooth.
5. Divide the batter into the muffin tins and bake for 25 minutes, or until they feel barely set in the middle.
6. Remove from oven and cool before serving. Top with some whipped cream, if desired.

The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious and Perplexing City.
His blog: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/

The Professor and the Madman

Found a few links about our next book, The Professor and the Madman written by Simon Winchester.

A Charles Taylor review at Salon.com

Interview with Simon Winchester at Powells

Wikipedia on Simon Winchester

PBS radio interview by David Gergen with Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester's bio on his website

Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

The top 100 novels of the 20th century at the Oxford Books site

Guardian's 1000 books you must read, the definitive list

For inspiration, we could take a peek at the Guardian compilation of the 1000 books you must read, the definitive list. It's divided into sections so be sure to scroll down to the end.

On the pending booklist, updated

These were the books still left on the pending list from the last meeting

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
Review from Salon.com

In his sober, searing and even cynical little book "Disgrace," J.M. Coetzee tells us something we all suspect and fear -- that political change can do almost nothing to eliminate human misery. What it can do, he suggests, is reorder it a little and half-accidentally introduce a few new varieties. This view should not surprise any of the great South African novelist's readers. In his early-1980s masterpieces "Waiting for the Barbarians" and "Life & Times of Michael K" -- indeed, in all of his work -- political and historical forces blow through the lives of individuals like nasty weather systems, bringing with them a destruction that is all the more cruel for being impersonal. "Disgrace" is Coetzee's first book to deal explicitly with post-apartheid South Africa, and the picture it paints is a cheerless one that will comfort no one, no matter what race, nationality or viewpoint.

Amazon.com link to Disgrace

David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of Disgrace is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University:

Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in Disgrace he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired--a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron's last years. Not empty, unread criticism, "prose measured by the yard," but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter's farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. "Nothing," David thinks, "could be more simple." But nothing, in fact, is more complicated--or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farmworker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David's disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse.

Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine
from Amazon.com

Each summer, Andrei Makine's narrator and his sister leave the Soviet Union for the mythical land of France-Atlantis. That this country is a beautiful confabulation, a consolation existing only in his maternal grandmother's mind, makes it no less real. Though Charlotte Lemonnier lives in a town on the edge of the steppe, each night she journeys to a long-ago Paris, telling tales that the children then translate with their more Russian minds: "The president of the Republic was bound to have something Stalinesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks. And the slow emergence of Paris from the waters evoked a very Russian emotion--that of fleeting relief after one more historic cataclysm ..."
Makine's first novel is a singing tribute to the alchemy of inspiration, but it is no less familiar with the sorrows of reality. And it is only as he gets older that the narrator begins to piece together his grandmother's far more tragic past--her experiences in the Great War, the October Revolution, and after. Dreams of My Russian Summers is a love letter to an extraordinary woman (it's hard not to see the book as autobiographical) as well as to language and literature, which the boy turns to in avoidance of history's manipulations. It has all the marks of an instant classic.

Updated:
Just added Jonathan Franzen's latest, Freedom.
Guardian review
NYTimes review written by Michio Kakutani
Amazon link to Freedom

A new look and changes

I've updated the template and switched the books we read to a separate page.  I still need to update the book list but if you see any errors, please let me know. Thanks!