Books We've Read
with the club's verdicts, one to five coffee cups · back to The Novel Women
I've only typed in the last two seasons so far. The older lists are in a spiral notebook in my desk drawer, and some of the
early years are in Doris's handwriting, which is a project for a long winter. -- L.W.
1998-1999
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden 4 cups
A fisherman's daughter sold as a child grows up to become Sayuri, a celebrated geisha in Kyoto. Gorgeous, and we learned
more about kimonos than we ever expected to. Mae wondered how an American man knew so much about being a girl in
Gion, and that kept us going for an hour.
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Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom 3 cups
A sportswriter visits his old college professor, who is dying of ALS, every Tuesday. Everyone cried. Half of us felt a
little manipulated about crying. Helen bought copies for both her sons.
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The Reader, Bernhard Schlink 4 cups
A German teenager's affair with an older woman, who years later he sees on trial for what she did in the war. Short, and it took
us the longest to talk about. The question of Hanna's secret, and what it does and doesn't excuse, nearly came to blows.
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The Red Tent, Anita Diamant 4 cups
The story of Dinah, Jacob's daughter, who gets only a few lines in Genesis, told from the women's side of the tent. Pat
brought her Bible and read the original chapter aloud, and we all agreed Dinah deserved better.
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Charming Billy, Alice McDermott 2 cups
An Irish-American family gathers after the funeral of Billy Lynch, a lovable man who drank himself to death. Beautifully
written, everyone agreed. Nobody could keep the cousins straight, everyone also agreed.
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Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë 5 cups
Our classic for the year. Some of us hadn't read it since high school and found it much stranger and much better than we
remembered. Sylvia is still angry at Mr. Rochester. Sylvia will be angry at Mr. Rochester until she dies.
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The Pilot's Wife, Anita Shreve 3 cups
A woman in New Hampshire learns that her husband's plane has gone down off Ireland, and then learns he wasn't who she
thought. Read it in one sitting, most of us. Argued about the ending in the driveway.
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Midwives, Chris Bohjalian 4 cups
A Vermont midwife goes on trial after a mother dies during a home birth in an ice storm, told by her daughter years later.
Nancy delivered babies as a nurse for twenty years and had a great deal to say, and we let her.
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White Oleander, Janet Fitch 3 cups
Astrid's mother, a poet, goes to prison, and Astrid goes through one Los Angeles foster home after another. Dark,
beautifully written, and Doris couldn't finish it. We didn't blame her.
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1997-1998
Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt 5 cups
McCourt's memoir of growing up poor in Limerick. How a book about so much misery can be so funny, none of us can explain.
The first book to get five cups after we started rating them. Joan's mother came from County Clare and Joan brought the soda bread.
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Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier 4 cups
A wounded Confederate soldier walks home across North Carolina to the woman he left, while she learns to run her farm with
the help of a tough young woman named Ruby. We all fell in love with Ruby. Some of us skimmed the walking.
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Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells 3 cups
A daughter and her larger-than-life Louisiana mother, and the mother's lifelong girlfriends who set out to patch things up
between them. The most fun we had all year. We have since been calling ourselves the Ya-Yas when the husbands are listening.
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A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley 4 cups
King Lear on an Iowa farm. Bernice grew up on a farm and said the fights about the land were the truest thing she'd ever read.
Heavy going in places, and not for the faint of heart.
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Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier 5 cups
The second Mrs. de Winter, Manderley, and the frightening Mrs. Danvers. Read it on a rainy October with a fire going, the way
it's meant to be. Anita brought scones and we watched the Hitchcock movie afterward.
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The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan 4 cups
Four Chinese mothers in San Francisco and their American daughters. Every one of us saw herself on one side of that
table or the other, and a few of us on both.
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Stones from the River, Ursula Hegi 3 cups
Trudi, a dwarf in a small German town, watches her neighbors before and through the Nazi years and keeps everyone's secrets.
Long, and it asks a lot of you, and it stayed with us. Helen made a German chocolate cake, which she admitted is not German.
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List last updated Friday, September 17, 1999
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