Category Archives: Great Reads

Gone Girl, Orphan, All the Light You Cannot See, and Hope Against Hope.  These were suggested during the Conway 2014 Mini-Reunion.  Marion’s book group is reading the latter, written by Sara Carr (note last name) and describing success stories of new Orleans schools.  Students at Tulane will have this book as a campus wide read. 

From Rocki Hill Hughes:  Looking for something to divert and captivate your imagination?  If you have not discovered Jasper Fforde, do so!  I’ve been recommending The Eyre Affair for some years now.  A romp that digs at English Lit, futurist books, libraries, the Goliath Corporation, and a whole lot more.  Check it out!

FROM JUDY:  I am all but finished listening to the audio version of Maggie Shipstead’s new novel, Astonish Me!!, and just loving it.  If you’re into ballet like me, don’t miss this one; and if you’re not, you may want to give it a look anyway as it’s a good yarn, light enough to qualify for a entertaining vacation read but substantial enough to get you thinking hard about achievement and commitment in a tough and competitive world, and no one is immune from that these days.

As a novel, it’s fiction of course, but it’s also a very thinly veiled glimpse of the NYC ballet world of the 1960s — 1990s.  Even if you don’t know ballet, you can easily match up people like Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine, Suzanne Farrell, and many other well known forces that are fleshed out fully in Shipstead’s vast array of colorful characters, real and imagined.  Reviewers indicated that the book was filled with totally credible stories of dancers and those involved in making dance — how they work and think and feel — and it certainly is all of that — a really easy spoonfeed of what it takes to achieve or try to achieve perfection, but, it’s also a good story told well with real insight not only into ballet but also into the cause and effect of whatever one chooses to do with life.  …

From BETSY:  I have read Magggie’s Seating Arrangements, and will look forward to this one!   She  does paint very colorful characters!  I  just finished another great new book .     It is All the Light We Cannot See  by Anthony Doerr.    It is a novel about WWII, and centers on two young people, a blind French girl whose father carefully measures her paths, first in Paris and then in Saint Malo, and constructs models for her to follow, and a German youth who is an orphan and a brilliant radio engineer, and thus one of Hitler’s Youth Corps at a very young age.    Doerr’s writing is fabulous, his descriptions unbelievably beautiful…even and especially about war…his similes are magical.   I never cease to be amazed at how so many writers that are new to me can come up with such descriptive language.   I want to read it again, but …

And from SUE WHEATLEY CARR:  Thank you so much for the recommendation of  All the Light We Cannot See.  Was that a story! I hated to give it up. The characters are still with me and it’s been several days. From some of the grimmest people to the noblest, Doerr paints an incredible picture of life during the war. And makes you wonder…”Where would I have fit in?”

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (an incredible concept handled by a master writer)

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes (one of my all-time favorites — a big surprise as I thought I wouldn’t take to it)

The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bojahlian  (one of his best — about Italy during WW2, which most of us know nothing about)

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Dickensian in scope and length and brilliance — may need extra time for a club to read)

and I’m in the middle of Frog Music by Emma Donaghue, who wrote Room.  She’s a fabulous storyteller, as those of you who read Room know, and this new one is every bit as good a story.  At first, I didn’t think it would make a very good book club discussion, but it’s getting a lot more involved and I’m beginning to think it would.  Stay tuned…

submitted by Bonnie Stretch

Ann Karus Meeropol – A Male President for Mount Holyoke College: The Failed Fight to Maintain Female Leadership, 1934-1937

A struggle arose over who would succeed Mary Emma Woolley as president of Mount Holyoke College in 1937. Over her 36-year tenure, Woolley had transformed Mount Holyoke into an elite women’s college in which leadership in the administration and faculty was almost exclusively female. Beginning in 1933, a group of male trustees determined to change the college. This book tells the story of how this group dominated the search process and ultimately convinced the majority of the trustees to offer the presidency to Roswell Gray Ham, an associate professor of English at Yale University.

Ann Karus Meeropol has a doctorate in the history of higher education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A former Mount Holyoke College LITS Scholar-in-Residence, she lives in Putnam County, New York.

3/12/2014  About this book comes an interesting note from Ruth Vars Barnes:

I was very interested to read about this book, as just very recently at my Elk Springs Book Group here in Glenwood Springs, CO, I met a woman whose mother had gone to MHC. She was thrilled to have someone to share some MHC memorabilia of her mother’s. She brought a folder for me last week to read. Her mother, Barbara Louise Waugh, class of ’45, coordinated an Aspen Conference entitled, “Western Horizons – Global Futures” ‘Rigor and Wisdom in Environmental Decision Making’ –  Aspen, CO July 23-26, 1987. It was celebrating the Sesquicentennial Anniversary. It had a stellar roster of speakers. One of those included was John Gille, husband of Ellen Fetter Gille ‘61! He spoke on ‘The Global Ozone Layer’.

Also included in this MHC folder that she loaned to me was a brochure from the Sesquicentennial entitled, “An Historical Map of Mount Holyoke College 1837 – 1987”. It is fascinating to see the maps and description of buildings throughout those years on one side, and then on the other side the Growth of the Campus with separate sections entitled, “Mary Lyon, founder. Principal 1837-1849”; Years of Transition. 1849-1889; Elizabeth Storrs Mead, President, 1890-1900; Mary Emma Woolley, President, 1901-1937; The Modern Period. 1937-1987. I knew some of this history, but a lot was new to me. My older daughter graduated in ’88 – but I’d not seem this brochure.

When we arrived at MHC, I knew of Roswell G. Ham, because he had a summer home in RI, near where I had grown up. And then, I got to know Richard Glenn Gettell fairly well, when I invited him to be my ‘father’ for Father-Daughter weekends our junior and senior years. I’m really interested in what you learn about the ‘politics’ of appointing a male president.

I’m also getting to know my fellow book group member, and am wondering about all the memorabilia she has. She did not go to a woman’s college – she’s younger than we are. I know that MHC might like to have some of these materials. Originally, she was excited to share some of it with me – also because both my daughters have gone to MHC. She and her husband will be building a home in this area where we live. Any suggestions you might have– as time passes – for encouraging her to give some materials for the archives at MHC??? What is MHC looking for? Who is in charge of that now?

Many thanks. Ruth    (Ruth Vars Barnes)

The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers.  Review from Jane Shaw Dietrich:

Richard Powers is one of my favorite authors, and I think I’ve read almost all of his often-very-long novels.  That was one of my favorites.  Some of them are a bit too intellectually dense and go off the deep end into true weirdness.  But I’m currently reading his latest book, Orfeo, which just came out and is also about music; I like it immensely.  The protagonist is an elderly composer (well, about our age) who wants to encode a piece of music into the DNA of a bacterium and is fleeing from an accusation of bioterrorism.  Powers seems to like codes, but he doesn’t go into too much detail about it here, as he did in an earlier book, The Gold Bug Variations, which I must have read about 20 years ago.  It’s also about music, and codes, as you might guess from the title.

from Susan Rhodes Brown:  Regarding A Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers, I am enthralled. This is a book in which every word counts – a real pleasure after flipping pages in The Goldfinch. Susan sends her wonder and thanks to Jane for the suggestion.

submitted by Mary Lynn McCaffrey:  The heroine of  Anna Quindlen’s new best-seller, Still Life With Bread Crumbs (#5 on last week’s NYT list), is a Mount Holyoke graduate, a fact mentioned several times in the novel.  Still Life With Bread Crumbs is a reference to our MHC heroine’s early success with her photographs of domestic scenes.  NPR called the book “the literary equivalent of comfort food” but it’s charming and easily digested, if a touch unrealistic – ( how is it so many middle-aged women move to  remote villages populated primarily with hunky carpenters?)  All-in-all, a good book to get us through winter doldrums which we’ve had too much of in North Jersey!  My Irish father always claimed St. Patrick’s Day as the first day of Spring – may it be so for all of us.