|
Welcome to the AbeBooks Avid Reader Book Club - a place to celebrate and discuss literature, and interact with hundreds of other book lovers just like you. Our online book club lets you share your thoughts, opinions and questions with readers from around the world!
 | | |
Currently Reading |
|
Two sisters competing for the greatest prize: the love of a king.
When Mary Boleyn comes to court as an innocent girl of fourteen, she catches the eye of Henry VIII. Dazzled by the king, Mary falls in love with both her golden prince and her growing role as unofficial queen. However, she soon realizes just how much she is a pawn in her family's ambitious plots as the king's interest begins to wane and she is forced to step aside for her best friend and rival: her sister, Anne. Then Mary knows that she must defy her family and her king, and take her fate into her own hands.
A rich and compelling tale of love, sex, ambition, and intrigue, The Other Boleyn Girl introduces a woman of extraordinary determination and desire who lived at the heart of the most exciting and glamorous court in Europe and survived by following her own heart.
We will start reading The Other Boleyn Girl in August.
See the reading guide for more details.
|
Next Month |
|
This stunning work, which John Updike calls "a great book, that bespeaks a great, brave, kind human spirit," is often compared to the great Greek tragedies. It concerns itself with the classic struggle between rigid traditionalism and the winds of change. Specifically, it is about the effects of British colonialism on a small Nigerian village at the turn of the century. A simple story of a "strong man" whose life is dominated by fear and anger, it is written with remarkable economy and subtle irony. Uniquely and richly African, at the same time it reveals Achebe's keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.
We will start reading Things Fall Apart in September.
|
|
Vote for the next book
|
A. |  |
Richard Hannay's ennui comes to an abrupt end when a murder is committed in his flat - only a few days before the dead man had revealed to him an assassination plot which would have terrible consequences for international peace.
Fearing the police will see him as the obvious suspect, and desperate to escape the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland. There, among the wild moors, he needs all his courage and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of his pursuers...
Vote for this book.
|
B. |  |
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (abridged)
‘Didn’t I tell you they were only windmills? And only someone with windmills on the brain could have failed to see that!’
Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold adventures, accompanied by his squire, the cunning Sancho Panza. As they roam the world together, the aging Quixote’s fancy leads them wildly astray. At the same time the relationship between the two men grows in fascinating subtlety. Often considered to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote is a wonderful burlesque of the popular literature its disordered protagonist is obsessed with.
John Rutherford’s landmark translation does full justice to the energy and wit of Cervantes’s prose. His introduction discusses the traditional works parodied in Don Quixote, as well as issues surrounding literary translation.
Voted greatest book of all time by the Nobel Institute.
Vote for this book.
|
C. |  |
'Vanity, not love, has been my folly’
When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life./p>
Vote for this book.
|
|
|
