Peachy Reads

This book is part of the Open Letter Initiative from the University of Rochester, an effort to translate world literature into English and expose it to a wider audience and foster a deeper appreciation for international literature. Billie is an eleven-year-old girl living at a country home for children in need. The nation is unnamed, but it seems to resemble Norway a lot.  Anyway, the time is some point in the future and there is some unexplained armed conflict consuming the nation.  Even the isolated country home at Reindeer Woods is not immune from the violence, and Billie’s life is changed forever when soldiers arrive at the home and kill all but her.  It’s not clear why she was spared. Is Billie a bit “retarded” as she herself sometimes wonders, or was her survival a fluke? Billie does seem, somewhat uncharacteristically for a child, to be a bit numb to the violence that she is confronted with when one of the soldiers continues the killing by topping off his comrades and dec

Atlanta-Fulton County Public Libraries picked this title for its one book/one community initiative.  It’s a good choice since A Lesson Before Dying is a novel full of issues and provides many points of departure for discussion.  Set in the Jim Crow South, it deals with the limitations and injustices that African Americans faced before the Civil Rights Movement.  AFPLS will sponsor some community read initiatives on this novel during the month of February.  Check out the events listing on the library homepage for more information. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and a 1997 choice for Oprah’s Book Club

Bordering the access roads that lead to the gleaming new hotels around the modern Mumbai airport, frequently out of sight behind barrier fences plastered with oversized posters advertising a lifestyle unobtainable for most Indians (adverts with the words “Beautiful Forever”), live the underlings of the commercial and entertainment capital of India.   Slumdwellers occupy land that will one day, probably without adequate advanced warning, be reclaimed by the airport authority. Crushing poverty, political corruption, police intimidation, and the challenge of everyday life make suicide by rat poison or self-immolation recurring events in this book. The main storyline centers on the conflict between two families in the slum of Annawadi.   Was the suicide of one motivated by the actions of another?   An entire family is dragged into jail and court, and regardless of their eventual guilt or innocence, their house of cards, their tenuous hold on survival, on life, collapses. Behind the