Classics I Forgot to Read Book Club

November 2011 Pick: With the publication of this book, Capote permanently ripped through the barrier separating crime reportage from serious literature. As he reconstructs the 1959 murder of a Kansas farm family and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, Capote generates suspense and empathy.

September 2011 Selection: Sixty years after REBECCA was first published, Daphne du Maurier's unsurpassed masterpiece continues to enthrall readers with romance and suspense, as the second Mrs. de Winter narrates the haunting events surrounding her marriage to Maxim de Winter and her growing obsession with his first wife, the beautiful, now dead Rebecca. Includes excerpts from the author's personal notes and essays, exclusive to this edition. Show Less

July 2011 Selection: Adventures of cannery workers living in the run-down waterfront section of Monterey, California.

May 2011 Selection: Direct and vivid in its telling of the details of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel manages ultimately to deliver much more. It is the feelings that loom behind those daily events--the social alliances, the shopkeeper's exchange, the fact of death--that give Mrs. Dalloway texture and richness.

March 2011 SelectionThe passionate love story of stubborn Cathy and wild-as-the-wind Heathcliff has been a favorite since its original publication in 1848.

January 2011 Selection: The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, "The Sun Also Rises" is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, "The Sun Also Rises" helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century

August 2010 Selection: With sure and subtle touch, Eliot paints a luminous and spacious landscape of life in a provincial town, interweaving her themes with a proliferation of characters, including an innocent idealist, a self-defeated young doctor, a naive young woman, and a cold man, who "lives too much with the dead."

March 2010 Selection: A unique and powerful tale of a Holocaust survivor seen through the art and words of his son - America's leading avant-garde cartoonist.

July 2009 Selection: Written during the darkest, most repressive period of Stalin's reign, this novel gives substance to the notion of artistic and religious freedom. Although Bulgakov completed his masterpiece in 1940, it was not published until 1966, twenty-six years after his death, when the first section appeared in the magazine Moskva, which sold out within hours. Despite its devastating satire of Soviet life and its audacious portrayals of Christ and Satan, the manuscript had somehow eluded Russian censors, and the enthusiasm of its readers assured the novel immediate and enduring success. A brilliant blend of magical and realistic elements, grotesque situations, and major ethical issues, The Master and Margarita combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem. Brimming with historical references, religious imagery, storms, witchcraft, and romance, Bulgakov's novel is impossible to categorize: Its story lies between parable and reality; its tone varies from satire to unguarded vulnerability. Its publication represents the triumph of imagination over politics. This new translation has been made from the complete and unabridged Russian text.

January 2009 Selection: Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of his spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters - his fiance e Isabel whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliott Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. Maugham himself wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.

October 2008 Selection: "Catch-22" is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary. At the heart of "Catch-22" resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. "Catch-22" is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane -- a masterpiece of our time.