Saturday 31 January 2015

Our January Edition

Brighter beginnings...

Matchbook Book Club presents:


January 2015 Newsletter


"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"- Oscar Wilde
Dear Members,

Apologies for sending this newsletter on the last day of the month, please forgive me: I've been super crazy busy this past month and as a result, time flew by all too fast!!

I hope everyone has been doing well! January certainly carries an air of of renewal, of brightened spirits and new memories.
This year, I will be heading out to several destinations in Europe- I want to make 2015 the year of adventure. What does 2015 mean to you?

A new year also means one thing: new books! There are some fantastic reads I am looking forward to this year- I can't wait to share and discuss with you all!

See you all very soon!

Joanne
Thank you to everyone who attended last month's meeting, where we had Sunday brunch at the beautiful Cluny restaurant at the heart of the Distillery District! It was a hearty catch-up to see how everyone was over the holidays and to discuss our previous book, The Table of Less Valued Knights by Marie Phillips. Overall, the feedback was positive- a great start to the bookish new year!
Not only was it funny, but it was a page-turner and full of good cheer. Everyone enjoyed the ending, and the story was well-written. Highly recommended for all!
Many thanks to those who have submitted their titles for this month's Member's Choice! We placed all the titles into a bag and Shirley had the honours of selecting this month's winner, which was Sonya's choice!

Enjoy! I can't wait to discuss this book next month!
Summary: Despite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak, implicitly. But she’s still uneasy at Khattak’s tight-lipped secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton’s death. Drayton’s apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn’t seem to warrant a police investigation, particularly not from Rachel and Khattak’s team, which handles minority-sensitive cases. But when she learns that Drayton may have been living under an assumed name, Rachel begins to understand why Khattak is tip-toeing around this case. It soon comes to light that Drayton may have been a war criminal with ties to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

If that’s true, any number of people might have had reason to help Drayton to his death, and a murder investigation could have far-reaching ripples throughout the community. But as Rachel and Khattak dig deeper into the life and death of Christopher Drayton, every question seems to lead only to more questions, with no easy answers. Had the specters of Srebrenica returned to haunt Drayton at the end, or had he been keeping secrets of an entirely different nature? Or, after all, did a man just fall to his death from the Bluffs?

In her spellbinding debut, Ausma Zehanat Khan has written a complex and provocative story of loss, redemption, and the cost of justice that will linger with readers long after turning the final page.
 
Reading Bingo Challenge: The Canadian Edition!
This year, I thought it would be super fun to take part in Random House's Bingo Challenge! I have given away copies of this Bingo sheet in the previous meeting, but for those who could not attend, do feel free to print out one for your own here.

One rule we have applied is that no member should cross off two squares at the same time- that way it'll be fair for all!

Feel free to bring your card to the meetings and we can compare! So far with our latest pick, we can cross off "A Mystery or Thriller by a Canadian Author" and "A Book Set in Toronto".

Have fun!
Future Event

Our next meeting will be taking place in the middle of February. ADoodle has been placed so vote for your dates!
Location: a place we haven't gone in awhile, but we have been quite fond of their brunch: Wind Up Bird Cafe. See you there!
Member's Recommendations

Shirley found a very lovely post to share with you all:

15 Ways To Prove You're A Book Addict: here is the link

See how many you've checked off!

I also found this very humorous article: 8 Things Only People In Book Clubs Know: read it here
February Selections

Theme: I Carry It In My Heart

Inspired by the words of E.E. Cummings, this month will showcase titles that will inspire and take us to a poignant moment in our lives where we have felt sentiment at its most radiant, a place in time that we have cherished deeply.

Stay tuned!

Friday 16 January 2015

Our January Selections



Our January Selections

Theme: Member's Choice

Dear Members,

Thank you to everyone who have submitted their titles for this month's Member's Choice theme, where everyone gets to pick any title from the fiction or non-fiction genre. The result is a surprise: we pick these titles out of a hat and off we go!

Without further ado, here are the selections:

My Choice:


 

Summary: After witnessing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, 14-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The events of this fateful summer will affect the entire town of Medgar, Kentucky.

Medgar is beset by a massive Mountaintop Removal operation that is blowing up the hills and back filling the hollows. Kevin's grandfather and others in town attempt to rally the citizens against the 'company' and its powerful owner to stop the plunder of their mountain heritage. When Buzzy witnesses the brutal murder of the opposition leader, a sequence is set in play which tests Buzzy and Kevin to their absolute limits in an epic struggle for survival in the Kentucky mountains.

Redemptive and emotionally resonant, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth is narrated by an adult Kevin looking back on the summer when he sloughed the coverings of a boy and took his first faltering steps as a man among a rich cast of characters and an ambitious effort to reclaim a once great community.


Shirley's Choice:


 

 


Summary: The official book behind the film, The Imitation Game, this is a dramatic portrayal of the life and work of Alan Turing, one of Britain's most extraordinary unsung heroes, and one of the world's greatest innovators.
     This is the official story that has inspired the British film, The Imitation Game, a nail-biting race against time following Alan Turing, the pioneer of modern-day computing and credited with cracking the German Enigma code, and his brilliant team at Britain's top-secret code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II. Turing, whose contributions and genius significantly shortened the war, saving thousands of lives, was the eventual victim of an unenlightened British establishment, but his work and legacy live on.
     Prime Minister Gordon Brown released a statement of apology in 2009 on behalf of the British government for the "appalling" treatment of Turing.

Sonya's Choice:

 
 


Summary: Despite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak, implicitly. But she’s still uneasy at Khattak’s tight-lipped secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton’s death. Drayton’s apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn’t seem to warrant a police investigation, particularly not from Rachel and Khattak’s team, which handles minority-sensitive cases. But when she learns that Drayton may have been living under an assumed name, Rachel begins to understand why Khattak is tip-toeing around this case. It soon comes to light that Drayton may have been a war criminal with ties to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

If that’s true, any number of people might have had reason to help Drayton to his death, and a murder investigation could have far-reaching ripples throughout the community. But as Rachel and Khattak dig deeper into the life and death of Christopher Drayton, every question seems to lead only to more questions, with no easy answers. Had the specters of Srebrenica returned to haunt Drayton at the end, or had he been keeping secrets of an entirely different nature? Or, after all, did a man just fall to his death from the Bluffs?

In her spellbinding debut, Ausma Zehanat Khan has written a complex and provocative story of loss, redemption, and the cost of justice that will linger with readers long after turning the final page.

Lauren's Choice:

 
 


Summary:
The epic, unforgettable story of a man determined to protect the woman he loves from the town desperate to destroy her—this beautiful and devastating debut heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, “the kind of pretty it hurt to look at,” has suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. Ruby quickly winds her way into the ripe center of the city--the darkened piano bars and hidden alleyways of the Village--all the while hoping for a glimpse of the red hair and green eyes of her mother. When a telegram from her cousin forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby Bell finds herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out again, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town’s dark past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy.

Full of life, exquisitely written, and suffused with the pastoral beauty of the rural South, Ruby is a transcendent novel of passion and courage. This wondrous page-turner rushes through the red dust and gossip of Main Street, to the pit fire where men swill bootleg outside Bloom’s Juke, to Celia Jennings’s kitchen where a cake is being made, yolk by yolk, that Ephram will use to try to begin again with Ruby. Utterly transfixing, with unforgettable characters, riveting suspense, and breathtaking, luminous prose, Ruby offers an unflinching portrait of man’s dark acts and the promise of the redemptive power of love.

Barbara's Choice:

 


Summary:

The Handmaid's Tale meets The Hunger Games in this brilliantly imagined debut set in an ancient culture where only the queen may breed and deformity means death.

Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, a member of the lowest caste in her orchard hive where work and sacrifice are the highest virtues and worship of the beloved Queen the only religion. But Flora is not like other bees. With circumstances threatening the hive's survival, her curiosity is regarded as a dangerous flaw but her courage and strength are an asset. She is allowed to feed the newborns in the royal nursery and then to become a forager, flying alone and free to collect pollen. She also finds her way into the Queen's inner sanctum, where she discovers mysteries about the hive that are both profound and ominous.

But when Flora breaks the most sacred law of all—daring to challenge the Queen's fertility—enemies abound, from the fearsome fertility police who enforce the strict social hierarchy to the high priestesses jealously wedded to power. Her deepest instincts to serve and sacrifice are now overshadowed by an even deeper desire, a fierce maternal love that will bring her into conflict with her conscience, her heart, her society—and lead her to unthinkable deeds.

Thrilling, suspenseful and spectacularly imaginative, The Bees gives us a dazzling young heroine and will change forever the way you look at the world outside your window


Kristin's Choice:

 



Summary:
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman.

A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.

Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.



JoAnne's Choice:

 


Summary:
In Punishment, his first novel since completing his Long Stretch trilogy, Scotiabank Giller-winner Linden MacIntyre brings us a powerful exploration of justice and vengeance, and the peril that ensues when passion replaces reason, in a small town shaken by a tragic death.

Forced to retire early from his job as a corrections officer in Kingston Penitentiary, Tony Breau has limped back to the village where he grew up to lick his wounds, only to find that Dwayne Strickland, a young con he’d had dealings with in prison is back there too–and once again in trouble. Strickland has just been arrested following the suspicious death of a teenage girl, the granddaughter of Caddy Stewart, Tony’s first love.
Tony is soon caught in a fierce emotional struggle between the outcast Strickland and the still alluring Caddy. And then another figure from Tony’s past, the forceful Neil Archie MacDonald - just retired in murky circumstances from the Boston police force -stokes the community’s anger and suspicion and an irresistible demand for punishment. As Tony struggles to resist the vortex of vigilante action, Punishment builds into a total page-turner that blindsides you with twists and betrayals.Jennifer's Choice:

18039963

Summary: As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself visiting its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark.
Eric's Choice:

 

Summary: A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives.

Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and Jason,” she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.

And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?
A compulsively readable, emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller that draws comparisons to Gone Girl, The Silent Wife, or Before I Go to Sleep, this is an electrifying debut embraced by readers across markets and categories.


 What will be this month's pick? Tune in and see!

Thursday 1 January 2015

New Year, New Bookish Goals

The Duke of Devonshire Taking a Nap in the Library at Chatsworth
 Shot by Christopher Sykes

Dear Members,

Happy New Year! We welcome 2015 with open arms as we look forward to days ahead.
This is the perfect time to start fresh with bookish goals and challenges, but what to choose? Here are some fun pledges to go along with:

HarperCollins Canada's 50 Book Pledge!

With fun contests, plus individualized shelves for your Read, Currently Reading, and To-Be Read picks, it's a fun way to keep track...and collect interesting badges along the way.


The 2015 Classics Challenge

2015 Classics Challenge / Read One Classic Book Per MonthI am continuing with the Classics Challenge this year, alongside the 50 Book Challenge – and I’d love for you to join me! I’ve really enjoyed reading more classics over the past three years. I tend to stretch the meaning of ‘classic’. I’ve read Roald Dahl and Judy Blume alongside Charlotte BrontĂ« and Frances Hodgson Burnett. I’ve read non-fiction alongside children’s classics.I was inspired by So Obsessed With and Belle of the Literati this year (who host the Re-Read Challenge 2015) to come up with a list of questions for you to answer as you post about each classic. Don’t forget to tag your posts with 2015 Classics Challenge.WHEN I Discovered This Classic WHAT Makes It A Classic WHY I Chose to Read It  WILL It Stay A Classic WHO I’d Recommend It ToClick here to add your name and blog to the 2015 Classics ChallengeGo here to read more about the challenge.

I have stumbled across this lovely user on Tumblr and I thought it was a wonderful idea to conjoin with the 50 Book Pledge. I don't know about you, but I love reading the classics, and so it is suitable enough to aim for one classic book per month. Such fun!


Penguin Book's Penguinspiration!

Set yourself a goal for this year, take their mini quiz and they will send you recommendations right to your inbox! How very cute! #penguinspo


Goodreads 2015 Reading Challenge



If you have an account on Goodreads,you can also track the amount of books you wish to set this year!

Random House of Canada's Reading Bingo Challenge

Reading Bingo Card

While they haven't put up their 2015 Bingo Reading Card yet, this what last year's look like- it's just as exciting to continue, or make one up that's unique you can share among friends!


Which one would you choose?

See you very soon!

Joanne

Our December Edition

"In a world that is always trying to self-improve, remember that you are enough. You are always enough."

Matchbook Book Club presents:

December Newsletter

 

Dear Members,

I hoped that everyone had a very lovely Christmas and/or enjoyed the festive holiday season thus far! This year, I was very touched by the wonderful moments spent with family and friends: it is truly a magical time for all.

Come holiday time means more opportunities to catch up on books we've been keeping on the back burner. I'm sure there are those who received one or two books from loved ones! I love the thrill of getting a new book.

Lastly, I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for another fantastic year. Whether you're following along an ocean away, or attend our meetings each month, you have made this book club oh-so-special. I could not ask for better members that are almost like family. A bookish family!

Wherever you are, be with the ones you love.

See you all in 2015!

Joanne
Festive Cheers!
Laughter and merriment was to be had at our latest book club meeting. Crackers were pulled, gifts were swapped, paper crowns were worn, and there were lovely s'mores treats to try!

We gathered at the Swiss Room at Marche, where we talked about our previous book, Vince Flynn's Kill Shot. While it was a fast and a light read, it was hard to keep tabs on the characters and many found the plot to be hollow in some areas. Members like Shirley and Barbara found our other selections for that month to be much more agreeable, such as Daniel Silva's The English Girl and Nevil Shute's On The Beach.
The votes are in!
Theme:
Extraordinary Ways
Holiday 2014


This month's selection aims to provide a good laugh and melt the heart. They also serve to remind ourselves to look for the extraordinary in ordinary ways.
Happy reading! 
Summary
From Marie Phillips, author of the #1 national and international bestseller Gods Behaving Badly, comes a charming, funny story about a down-on-his-luck knight of Camelot, his eccentric band of misfits and their madcap quest to restore order to their lives, and the realm. 
          Sir Humphrey du Val has had enough. Relegated to the Table of Less Valued Knights--Camelot's least prestigious spot, boringly rectangular in shape and with one leg shorter than the other so that it has to be propped up with a folded napkin to stop it from rocking--he has been banned by King Arthur from going on quests, and hasn't left the castle in 15 years. After a chance meeting with Elaine, a young maiden in search of her kidnapped fiancĂ©, Sir Humphrey, along with his squire Conrad (an undersized giant) and Jemima (Conrad''s elephant), sets off on a journey to find the distressed damsel's betrothed, hoping to restore himself to a place of honour at the Round Table.

          Meanwhile, Martha, an errant queen on the run from her new power-hungry husband, is in disguise and on a quest of her own to find her long-lost brother, the true ruler of her realm. Martha soon runs--literally--into Humphrey's eccentric group, who take the incognito queen captive, believing her to be a boy. As they journey through countryside, castles and villages, they gather unlikely friends and enemies along the way. While each member of the party secretly harbours their own ambitions for the quest, their collective success, and the fate of the realm, rests on their grudging cooperation and unexpectedly interconnected lives. 

          The Princess Bride meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail in this funny, charming, and delightful tale about lesser-known heroes in Arthurian England.
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” 
-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

FUTURE EVENT

Our first gathering of the year will be taking place in the middle of the month! Click on the Doodle here to vote for the dates!
For this occasion, I have picked a very lovely French boulangerie for us to try for lunch in the heart of the Disillery District: Cluny. Take alook!
What are your "bookish" resolutions for 2015?

Come the new year, it's a fresh start to set a goal for yourself!