And the winner is:
Thank you all for your votes.
With the addition of the two offline votes in favor of The Paris Wife, this was the clear favorite for this month.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Fall Adventure 2011
Fall Adventure Choice #1
Pine Mountain Lake
5 bedrooms, sleeps 12, probably around $400/night for 8 of us. The house is still available for the weekend we want.
Google map with Pine Mountain Lake, Palo Alto, and a few Yosemite sites tagged:
It's a 3-hour drive to Pine Mountain Lake from Palo Alto and 1 hour 15 minutes to get from Pine Mountain Lake to Ahwahnee.
Note: Peggers has other Pine Mountain Lake houses she can recommend
***
Fall Adventure Choice #2
VRBO in Yosemite National Park
I don't know the area, so I have no idea of distances to and from the park. Here's one that claims to be in the park:
***
Proposed May 2010 Book Selections
Please vote for one of the three - Poll on the sidebar.
Book Choice #1
Goodreads review here
New York Times Review here.
$14.70 hardcover version on Amazon here.
336 pages
No twentieth-century American writer has captured the popular imagination as much as Ernest Heminway. This novel tells his story from a unique point of view — that of his first wife, Hadley. Through her eyes and voice, we experience Paris of the Lost Generation and meet fascinating characters such as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. The city and its inhabitants provide a vivid backdrop to this engrossing and wrenching story of love and betrayal that is made all the more poignant knowing that, in the end, Hemingway would write of his first wife, "I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her."
Book Choice #2
***
Goodreads reviews here.
$15.29 hardcover version from Amazon here.
432 pages
Against the unforgettable backdrop of New York near the turn of the twentieth century, from the Gilded Age world of formal balls and opera to the immigrant poverty of the Lower East Side, bestselling author Susan Vreeland again breathes life into a work of art in this extraordinary novel, which brings a woman once lost in the shadows into vivid color.
It’s 1893, and at the Chicago World’s Fair, Louis Comfort Tiffany makes his debut with a luminous exhibition of innovative stained-glass windows, which he hopes will honor his family business and earn him a place on the international artistic stage. But behind the scenes in his New York studio is the freethinking Clara Driscoll, head of his women’s division. Publicly unrecognized by Tiffany, Clara conceives of and designs nearly all of the iconic leaded-glass lamps for which he is long remembered.
Clara struggles with her desire for artistic recognition and the seemingly insurmountable challenges that she faces as a professional woman, which ultimately force her to protest against the company she has worked so hard to cultivate. She also yearns for love and companionship, and is devoted in different ways to five men, including Tiffany, who enforces to a strict policy: he does not hire married women, and any who do marry while under his employ must resign immediately. Eventually, like many women, Clara must decide what makes her happiest—the professional world of her hands or the personal world of her heart.
***
Book Choice #3
Read Amazon reviews here.
$8.15 paperback version from Amazon here.
336 pages
From Publishers Weekly
This audio version of the surprise French bestseller hits the mark as both performance and story. The leisurely pace of the novel, which explores the upstairs-downstairs goings-on of a posh Parisian apartment building, lends itself well to audio, and those who might have been tempted to skip through the novel's more laborious philosophical passages (the author is a professor of philosophy) will savor these ruminations when read aloud. Tony Award–winning actress Barbara Rosenblat positively embodies the concierge, Renée Michel, who deliberately hides her radiant intelligence from the upper-crust residents of 7 rue de Grenelle, and the performance of Cassandra Morris as the precocious girl who recognizes Renée as a kindred spirit is nothing short of a revelation. Morris's voice, inflection and timbre all conspire to make the performance entirely believable. A Europa paperback. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
