More favorites

From Jean: A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Doriss
From Sara:  Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Good adventure book

If anyone likes true adventures, I just read In the Kingdom of Ice, by Hampton Sides.  It's the story of an Arctic expedition, in the days when they still believed that the Arctic was a warm water sea surrounded by a ring of ice.  It's quite an amazing and difficult story.  Had a hard time putting it down.

Favorite books

Do you have favorites from our 30+ years?  Off the top of my head, I'm picking Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rølvaag.

Icelandic Dessert

Here's the link to the Icelandic dessert that I made for our meeting.  With so many desserts to choose from, I decided on an Icelandic dessert since I was picking an Icelandic book. Mondlukaka

Charlotte Bronte Biography

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about Elizabeth Gaskell who wrote a biography of Charlotte Bronte published in 1857 named "The Life of Charlotte Bronte."

"Elizabeth Gaskell's astonishingly vivid biography of Charlotte Bronte is written with all the sweep, color and fullness of a great Victorian novelist, which is exactly what Gaskell was.  She was also a shrewd journalist.  Based on her own interviews with Charlotte Bronte and a cache of 400 letters from Charlotte's intimate childhood friend Ellen Nussey, the book opens up the strange family life of the (then) obscure Haworth Parsonage. We see the original of Charlotte's Jane Eyre magically emerging but also the haunting, enigmatic figure of Charlotte's sister Emily; the tender Anne Bronte; the opium wrecked brother Branwell; the deeply eccentric father, Rev. Patrick Bronte, who fired guns in his churchyard.  If you wish to get the flavor, just read the chapters that describe Charlotte's fraught relationship  with Emily and Emily's savage handling of her terrifying bull mastiff, Keeper. Charlotte's modern biographer, Claire Harman, says rightly that Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Bronte" first made biography "an imaginative creation," with the force of myth.

A different take on Jane Eyre

Because the Milwaukee Rep is going to be performing Jane Eyre, I thought this might be fun to take a look at a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's book.  It's called Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys.  It was written in 1966.  There was also a 2006 movie.  Here's what a BBC commentator had to say about it in 2016, the 50th anniversary of its publication

"As any English literature student will tell you, Rhys’s iconic prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is rich in motifs and devices both modernist and postmodernist. In giving a voice and an identity to Mr Rochester’s first wife, Antoinette – aka Bertha, the madwoman in the attic – the novel has become a gateway text to post-colonial and feminist theory."

For the entire article go to http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20161019-the-book-that-changed-jane-eyre-forever

Author of Medicine Walk dies

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/books/richard-wagamese-dead-native-canadian-writer.html