Classics I Forgot to Read Book Club

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.

November 2009 Selection: Based on Flaubert's own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as the moral history of the men of our generation. It follows the amorous adventures of Frederic Moreau, a law student who, returning home to Normandy from Paris, notices Mme Arnoux, a slender, dark woman several years older than himself. It is the beginning of an infatuation that will last a lifetime.

August 2009 Selection: The text of this Norton Critical Edition is that of the first edition (dated 1818 but probably issued in late 1817), which was published posthumously. The editor has spelled out ampersands and made superscript letters lowercase. The novel, which is fully annotated, is followed by the two canceled chapters that comprise Persuasion's original ending. "Backgrounds and Contexts" collects contemporary assessments of Jane Austen as well as materials relating to social issues of the period. Included are an excerpt from William Hayley's 1785 "Essay on Old Maids"; Austen's letters to Fanny Knight, which reveal her skepticism about marriage as the key to happiness; Henry Austen's memorial tribute to his famous sister; assessments by nineteenth-century critics Julia Kavanagh and Goldwin Smith, who saw Austen as an unassuming, sheltered, "feminine," rural writer; and the perspective of Austen's biographer Geraldine Edith Mitten. "Modern Critical Views" reflects a dramatic shift in the way that twentieth-century scholars view both Austen and Persuasion. Increasingly, the focus is on Austen's moral purposefulness and political acumen and on Persuasion's historical, social, and political implications. A variety of perspectives are provided by A. Walton Litz, Marilyn Butler, Tony Tanner, Robert Hopkins, Ann W. Astell, Claudia L. Johnson, and Cheryl Ann Weissman. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

April 2009 Selection: "The Bell Jar" chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made "The Bell Jar" a haunting American classic.

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.