Book Club
Each month, members of the ForeWord staff choose a book to read and discuss. We encourage you to read the current book or past selections, and post your comments. To add a comment, just click the Comments link below each primary blog entry. The comment link does not appear on the chapter excerpt page, so return to the main book club page to add your comment. Let's talk about books!
 Monday, September 17, 2007
Don't we love to read about love.

ForeWord's Book Club selection for this month is The Book of Happy Endings by Elise Valmorbida. We've all read it here at the office... Join us now with your conversation, comments—even your own stories of life with love.

 
If you haven’t read the book yet, Cyan Books has kindly allowed us to post the Introduction and First Chapter here. Enjoy, and Vive l'amor!

 About the author: Elise Valmorbida grew up Italian in Australia, but fell in love with London. Her first book Matilda Waltzing (Allen & Unwin) was nominated for two national literary awards. Her short stories have appeared in New Writer via the Ian St James Award, Carve Magazine and the Cyan Books anthologies From Here to Here and Common Ground. She currently runs a communications consultancy and teaches creative writing at the University of London. (From the book flap, The Book of Happy Endings)

posted on Monday, September 17, 2007 11:13:28 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    Comments [13]
Monday, September 24, 2007 11:31:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
Hi All! Loved "Happy Endings". My favorite stories were So Dear, New Light, Just Right, the story about Sam and Fergus and of course I couldn't wait for Marcus and Michele to meet again. Their letter writing skills gave me hope that it hasn't become a lost art.

We had a great discussion in the office about the 2 professors...can love really be that explosive?

What were your favorites?
Maryann | maryannAT NOSPAMforewordmagazine dot com
Monday, September 24, 2007 9:37:53 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
Those letters going back and forth from NYC to London seem like the real kind of magic glue that holds relationships together. Not just that they were writing on real paper with real ink, but that there was a chance encounter, a reticence, a compromise, the giving and taking and small steps forward and back that are invisible is the lusty clouds of movies, but are really so much of what makes a relationship breathtaking.
Heather | heatherAT NOSPAMforewordmagazine dot com
Tuesday, September 25, 2007 9:20:41 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
This is a great little book. The stories are a great length--perfect for traveling or when you don't have a lot of time. I also loved the correspondence between Michele and Marcus. What do you think happens to them?

These stories remind me of a woman I met recently who met her husband while she was on vacation in London. She was walking through a door, not paying attention, and they slammed into each other in the doorway! How romantic...
Whitney | whitneyAT NOSPAMforewordmagazine dot com
Tuesday, September 25, 2007 9:25:41 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Love stories without the passion of cliché. I like these tales for their modesty, simplicity. At the end of “Love Libraries,” for example, the Lithuanian librarian Rasa says to Irishman Declan in chipped English, “But we can just go out and not have to talk and we feel comfortable. That’s love.” I read the story thinking of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory -- the comfortableness of no words that he and Tamara felt gazing at a painting in a remote corner of the Hermitage Museum.
Also, I liked Valmorbida’s technique of contrast in the same story. Beginning with the simple description of two people who have eyes for one another and end being happy, the middle is jabbed with the punches of life.
Another story is about a sonneteer, who loved the geometry of the sonnet’s form -- “three stanzas of four lines, alternating rhymes…” He also loved a poet, who had big, bright eyes and startled hair. Her poetry was dramatic, extreme, intense, and “she broke her sentences, snapped them into pieces.” Their story was one of rhythmical metaphor, but with discordance. After she had snapped him for the last time they became harmonious; the title of the piece indicative: “The Closure of a Couplet.”


Alex Moore | alexAT NOSPAMforewordmagazine dot com
Tuesday, September 25, 2007 12:36:48 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
I never thought of if that way..."love stories without the passion of cliche".

But wait...isn't a happy ending the biggest cliche of all?
Maryann | maryannAT NOSPAMforewordmagazine dot com
Wednesday, September 26, 2007 2:11:05 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
“Love stories without the passion of cliché.” Meaning non-trite endings -- the distinctiveness of detail.
Alex Moore | alexAT NOSPAMforewordmagazine dot com
Monday, October 01, 2007 10:42:56 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
Here's a happy postcript to the story Hungarian Kiss. Just yesterday I went to a 'surprise' brunch. Nobody knew what kind of surprise to expect. When all the guests had arrived, Vilmos and Kati announced that they had just married (they've been together for 40+ years) and the catalyst was... The Book of Happy Endings! They were stirred by the interview with me, they loved the published story (and book), and they were inspired to end their unconventional tale with a real-life "they got married and lived happily ever after". Everybody was given The Book of Happy Endings as a wedding souvenir.
elise valmorbida | eliseAT NOSPAMword-design dot co dot uk
Tuesday, October 02, 2007 3:58:23 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
Did you hear that! Vilmos (62) and Kati (82) got married, finally! Puszi, puszi!

There's another thing besides happy endings that I like about this book, and that's its design. It looks like a valentine -- not a store-bought, Hallmark, last-minute-in-the-grocery-store kind of valentine, but a real one, made by someone who loves you. Could be a girl, a boy, even a kid. It's fresh, cheerful, unsentimental. And look at the spine; wonderful. Somewhere between a doodle and an obsession.

But there's more. The book is actually illustrated on the inside too with the b/w photography of Augusto Braidotti, Rob Hann, Steve Mullins, and the author herself. I love the one at the end of "Hungarian kiss" -- a dark room and light both restricted and set free. It's too bad that publishers have let the tradition of illustrating adult books languish. Or did we adults force it over the cliff in our zeal to be serious, grow up, quit messing around.
Heather | heatherAT NOSPAMforewordmagazine dot com
Friday, October 12, 2007 10:25:26 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
Did end up finding a nice continuation to my question about why illustrations disappeared from adult lit. this morning in an article on Slate by Emily Bazelon ("The Tickle Monster Needs To Lie Down").


'In tracing the history of play over the American centuries, Chudacoff [author of Children at Play: An American History, Brown University] makes the mid-17th century sound like our own time, only better. "Adults were much less self-conscious about what types of play were appropriate for different age groups than would be the case by the time of the American Revolution," he writes. Parents and kids played the same games together: blind man's bluff, find-the-bean, cards, puzzles. Or they "whiled away the time in each other's company, talking, singing, reading, and simply being together." Later, the idyll ebbed. Lines were drawn to mark off childhood as a separate domain. The era of sobriety and duty came along, followed by educational, good-for-you play, followed by obsessive attention to safety.'

Who's responsible for all this "sobriety and duty" then?
Heather | heatherAT NOSPAMforewordmagazine dot com
Wednesday, December 05, 2007 4:51:40 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Thank you very much, I managed to let a learning opportunity!
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Saturday, June 14, 2008 6:07:50 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
"Don't we love to read about love" is really very interesting story.Everyone can know from this story what are the different direction of love.

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There are a lot of sites out there showing book video. BookVideoTV, BookTelevision and of course CSPAN, but I like how BN.com and Reader''s Entertainment TV have specific genre channels and original shows. There''s just more to see and I can be specific in what genre I''m interested in.

Reader’s Entertainment

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maggie | maggie dot woods2008AT NOSPAMgmail dot com
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