The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

For March, we are reading The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes. I've collected a few links related to this book. I have no doubt there are many many more sites and links regarding this book. If you'd like, please send the links to me or write a comment.

What wikipedia has on the book
Bookrags has a study guide for this book
A page on Fuentes with links
Amazon on the Death of Artemio Cruz
A summary and study guide on enotes
There's even a facebook site for this book
A salon piece
Something at the booker tea reading group
psri's book blog has a book review

New section: Visit our sites

To make it easy to access our members' sites, we've got a brand new section, now placed in the upper left corner of our blog.


First up: Shelley Adler's website. She specializes in the genre of California realistic painting but brings to it her unique perspective. In her words:

My intention is to recreate within the small framework, the specific moment caught by the camera. I attempt to express the personality of the person(s) through their body language and the way they are positioned in relationship to each other and to express the feeling of the time or era in which they exist with atmosphere and color. Some of these elements may be present in the black and white snapshot, but they are not always obvious. I enhance the image by using my intuitive sense of the scene to imagine the colors that were there as the photo was snapped, and to bring to life the black and white image.

I feel that I am having a conversation with the images of the people as I paint them. They open up to me as I study the photograph and see the subtleties of their expressions and bearing. I then try to make that revelation part of the painting.

Currently, she's showing her work in several galleries in the area. Please visit her site for more information.
Shelley's link on ArtSlant
Tag Gallery interviews Shelley

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

We will be reading J. M. Coetzee's book, Disgrace, winner of the Booker and Commonwealth Prizes. I've gathered some links about the book and the novelist, posted below. Please feel free to send along any other items of interest.

Salon review in 1999
What wikipedia says about Disgrace
The Guardian review of Disgrace
The Amazon page on Disgrace
Book review on Hackwriters.com
Tony D'Souza writes an essay about Disgrace
Complete Reviews page


As you probably all know, Coetzee won the Nobel prize in 2003. Here's his biography on the Nobel web site.
What wiki says about Coetzee

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!