Discussion Question 2: Escape!

Okay! Pretend your Ma (without Jack) - plan your escape!

ROOM: Discussion Question 1: Perspective

What do you think about Emily only using Jack's point of view? Do you wish we knew more about what Ma was thinking - her perspective other than what Jack overheard? What about even knowing her name? Do you wish you knew more about Old Nick's perspective or even what ended up happening to him??

CHANGE OF PLANS - We're reading ROOM

Persuasion will be next - unalterable! We'll be reading Room by Emma Donoghue.

The website is amazing: http://www.roomthebook.com/inside/

This book has a darker subject - here is the synopsis:

The first half takes place entirely within the 12-foot-square room in which a young woman has spent her last seven years since being abducted aged 19. Raped repeatedly, she now has a five-year-old boy, Jack, and it is with his voice that Donoghue tells their story.

And what a voice it is. "Ma" has clearly spent his five years devoting every scrap of mental energy to teaching, nurturing and entertaining her boy, preserving her own sanity in the process. To read this book is to stumble on a completely private world. Every family unit has its own language of codes and in-jokes, and Donoghue captures this exquisitely. Ma has created characters out of all aspects of their room – Wardrobe, Rug, Plant, Meltedy Spoon. They have a TV and Jack loves Dora the Explorer, but Ma limits the time they are allowed to watch it for fear of turning their brains to mush. They do "phys ed" every morning, keep to strict mealtimes, make up poems, sing Lady Gaga and Kylie, and most importantly, Ma has a seemingly endless supply of stories – from the Berlin Wall and Princess Di ("Should have worn her seatbelt," says Jack) to fairytales like Hansel and Gretel to hybrids in which Jack becomes Prince Jackerjack, Gullijack in Lilliput: his mother's own fairytale hero. And really, what is a story of a kidnapped girl locked in a shed with her long-haired innocently precocious boy if not the realisation of the most macabre fairytale?

Donoghue has not been so crass as to make light of their plight: at times it's almost impossible not to turn away in horror. When Ma's kidnapper comes to the room in the evening, she makes Jack hide in the wardrobe, where he listens as they get into bed: "I always have to count till he makes that gaspy sound and stops." Ma has days where she is "gone" to blank-eyed depression and Jack, left to his own devices, reveals: "Mostly I just sit." But the grotesque is consistently balanced with the uplifting and there is a moment, halfway through the novel, where you feel you would fight anyone who tried to wrestle it from your grasp with the same ferocity that Ma fights for Jack, such is the author's power to make out of the most vile circumstances something absorbing, truthful and beautiful.

Thereafter, the setting moved to "Outside", the relationship diluted by alternative voices, by the number of new things with which Jack has to deal, the novel loses some of its intensity and has the more familiar feel of the naive child narratives of Roddy Doyle and Mark Haddon. Jack's introduction to the confusing world of freedom is handled with incredible skill and delicacy – as is his first separation from Ma. But the novel, like Jack, now has to follow a more logical and straightforward path.

For me, the rhythm of Ma and Jack's speech bears traces of the author's native Irish brogue, though the second half reveals the setting to be America (Donoghue now lives in Canada). But this only adds to the strange, dislocating appeal of Room. In the hands of this audacious novelist, Jack's tale is more than a victim-and-survivor story: it works as a study of child development, shows the power of language and storytelling, and is a kind of sustained poem in praise of motherhood and parental love.

We'll begin discussions on 7/20!

Now starting ...Persuasion!

Persuasion by Jane Austen!

Most people have read Austen's Pride and Prejudice and/or Sense and Sensibility, but many have not had the pleasue if reading some of her less-hollywoodized books such as Persuasion (though it has been made into a movie). Those who have read it won't mind reading it again - if you haven't read it and you love Austen at all, you'll not regret adding this to your library.

Here's a synopsis....
Persuasion begins seven years after the heroine, Anne Elliot, has jilted her lover, Fredrick Wentworth, upon the request of a most beloved mother figure. Although at the time of the refusal the man seems an inadequate match, the tables are now turned: as in most Austen novels--the girl is poor, the boy is rich. To add insult to injury, Anne’s father is going bankrupt and must rent his house to none other than Fredrick’s sister and brother-in-law, bringing Anne and Fredrick in contact again. Through twists and turns of jealousy, romance, poetry, rumors and a serious head injury, Anne and Fredrick always find themselves in uncomfortable situations that brew up old feelings (that were probably never lost). As Jane Austen’s last completed novel, some critics dismiss it as her darkest; however, others see it as her most honest and universal. Whatever your opinion, the whole novel is worth reading just for the letter (correspondence) in chapter twenty-three: it will make you melt.

Need to Come Up With Some Discussion Guidelines...

So I was thinking that it's kind of hard to really discuss the book until everyone (who wants to) has read the book...it was suggested that we come up with a "deadline" for reading the book before we begin discussing it...what do you think???? 

So as we look forward to reading Jane Austen's "Persuasion" should we come up with a date to have finished reading the book and begin the discussion?  Would July 20th work?

Let me know your thoughts and ideas, so we can work out "The Virtual Literary Society" to be a wonderful society! :)

End of the Novel Question!

At the end of the novel, Jacob exclaims:  "So what if I'm ninety-three?...why the heck shouldn't I run away with the circus?"  (page 331).  What would you project the elderly Jacobs experiences after he runs away with the circus the second time How does his decision reflect what we have learned about his early years?