Just to whet your appetite for this book, I’ve put together a small collection of links for Lullabies for Little Criminals and Heather O’Neill.
You can read what some reviewers have said here and here, or learn more about Heather O’Neill here and here.
Happy Reading!
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Below is a link to a podcast from Prosecast (Harper Collins) with host Cathi Bond. Bond provides a brief description of the book Lullabies for Little Criminals and plays the first fifteen minutes from the Lullabies audiobook.
I find that it is always interesting to listen to a book, especially after having already read it. Hearing a book read, if read well, can offer a new understanding of the book as well as a different engagement of the senses. But don’t just take my word for it; have a listen and see what you think!
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Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill!
The voting was close, but this book just inched ahead! The great news is that the St. Albert Public Library owns 8 copies of this as a book club kit, so all of you will be able to loan a copy from the library! In order to get your copy, please come up to the 2nd floor Adult Information Desk and ask to receive a copy of Lullabies for Little Criminals from the Information Desk Staff. Let them know that you are checking it out from the book club kit as a subVERSEive Book Club Member. They will then take your name and phone number, and the book is yours until our next meeting, Wednesday, April 7, 7-8:30 pm.
Those of you who emailed/ posted also seemed to be in favor of a participant led book discussion group. Therefore, I will lead the discussion for this book choice, but at the next meeting, I would like us to choose our next book and facilitator. Please come to the April meeting prepared to suggest a few titles for our next read!
Also, be sure to keep checking the blog as I will be posting tidbits of info on Lullabies for Little Criminals as well as any other information relevant to the book club.
I look forward to our first read and our next meeting!
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Based on the emails and blog votes I’ve received, these are the two books tied for the winning spot: Lullabies for Little Criminals and Eat, Pray, Love.
Please re-vote on these 2 titles by Sunday, March 7 and I will post the winning title (and our first read) on Monday afternoon!
Thanks,
Tabitha
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Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of you at last night’s meeting, but some of you did email with suggested first reads. Therefore, I am posting the discussion topics I wanted to bring up last night. Please have a read and email me or post your responses here. I have also included a list of the titles that some of you suggested as first read interests. In order to get this off the ground, I suggest taking a look at the proposed titles, and voting on the one that interests you most. I will tally up the votes and post the book with the most votes here as our first read to be discussed at the next book club meeting on Wednesday, April 7, 7-8:30 pm.
subVERSEive Discussion Topics-
What do we want to read?
-preferences/ dislikes?
-fiction/non-fiction/Young Adult/Graphic Novels/etc?
How do we want to read?
Thematic- Based on national themes/events/awareness, such as:
March is International Women’s Month- read a biography/autobiography on a woman’s life
April is poetry month- read a verse novel
Genre Based- Read a book from a specific genre each month, such as:
General, Speculative Fiction, Graphic Novels, Non-Fiction, etc…
Participant Led- Each individual is responsible for choosing a book and leading discussion for the next month.
Staff Led- SAPL staff are responsible for choosing books for the next year based on reading types of individuals in the group.
Group Led- The group votes on a book for each upcoming month, but discussion is lead by SAPL.
Please let me know what your preferences are in regards to these matters!
The titles you’ve suggested:
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared off the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family. There was no corpse, no witnesses, no evidence. But her uncle, Henrik, is convinced that she was murdered by someone from her own deeply dysfunctional family. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired to investigate, but he quickly finds himself in over his head. He hires a competent assistant: the gifted and conscience-free computer specialist Lisbeth Salander, and the two unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves. (From the hardcover edition.)
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time. On a burn ward, a man lies between living and dying, so disfigured that no one from his past life would even recognize him. His only comfort comes from imagining various inventive ways to end his misery. Then a woman named Marianne Engel walks into his hospital room, a wild-haired, schizophrenic sculptress on the lam from the psych ward upstairs, who insists that she knows him – that she has known him, in fact, for seven hundred years. She remembers vividly when they met, in another hospital ward at a convent in medieval Germany, when she was a nun and he was a wounded mercenary left to die. If he has forgotten this, he is not to worry: she will prove it to him. And so Marianne Engel begins to tell him their story, carving away his disbelief and slowly drawing him into the orbit and power of a word he’d never uttered: love. (From the Hardcover edition.)
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new -partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple-murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades-with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is remotely what it seems. (From the paperback edition.)
Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill
A gritty, heart-wrenching novel about bruised innocence on the city’s feral streets-the remarkable debut of a stunning literary talentHeather O’Neill dazzles with a first novel of extraordinary prescience and power, a subtly understated yet searingly effective story of a young life on the streets-and the strength, wits, and luck necessary for survival.At thirteen, Baby vacillates between childhood comforts and adult temptation: still young enough to drag her dolls around in a vinyl suitcase yet old enough to know more than she should about urban cruelties. Motherless, she lives with her father, Jules, who takes better care of his heroin habit than he does of his daughter. Baby’s gift is a genius for spinning stories and for cherishing the small crumbs of happiness that fall into her lap. But her blossoming beauty has captured the attention of a charismatic and dangerous local pimp who runs an army of sad, slavishly devoted girls-a volatile situation even the normally oblivious Jules cannot ignore. And when an escape disguised as betrayal threatens to crush Baby’s spirit, she will ultimately realize that the power of salvation rests in her hands alone. (From the trade paperback edition.)
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor-a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon’s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity. (From the trade paperback edition.)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. Routine, order and predictability shelter him from the messy, wider world. Then, at fifteen, Christopher’s carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork, and he is initially blamed for the killing. Christopher decides that he will track down the real killer and turns to his favorite fictional character, the impeccably logical Sherlock Holmes, for inspiration. But the investigation leads him down some unexpected paths and ultimately brings him face to face with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. As he tries to deal with the crisis within his own family, we are drawn into the workings of Christopher’s mind. And herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotion. The effect is dazzling, making for a novel that is deeply funny, poignant, and fascinating in its portrayal of a person whose curse and blessing is a mind that perceives the world literally. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is one of the freshest debuts in years: a comedy, a heartbreaker, a mystery story, a novel of exceptional literary merit that is great fun to read. (From the trade paperback edition.)
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklistcalls “Anne Lamott’s hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister”) is poised to garner yet more adoring fans. (From the trade paperback edition.)
Please vote on the title you are most interested in by Friday, March 5 so I can announce the book online on Monday, and we can all get reading!
I look forward to hearing from you soon!
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