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<p>Then this should be perfect timing for you – I hope 11/22/63 turns out to be a nice companion piece for your current viewing! </p>
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<p>Promises, promises…:)</p>
<p>I meant Jane Austen in Scarsdale, by Paula M Cohen. Anyone read that? I do like P D James. So many good books, so little time to read…</p>
<p>Bookworm: Look at posts 1385, 1386, and 1401 on <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/403424-one-best-books-ive-read-last-6-months-94.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/403424-one-best-books-ive-read-last-6-months-94.html</a> - and just fyi, Paula M. Cohen also wrote Jane Austen in Boca.</p>
<p>Mary: I gave my word of honor to restrain myself this time, and I don’t have House of Silk here … so all’s good.</p>
<p>I want to read Death Comes to Pemberley. I thought of it first when bookworm mentioned a Jane Austen book. I thought of Jane Austen in Scarsdale second. </p>
<p>Then third I thought of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star. Voted “steamiest” by *The Chicago Tribune<a href=“which%20actually%20concerns%20me%20-%20how%20steamy%20is” title=“steamiest”>/i</a>: [Jane</a> Austen: Modern updates of Jane Austen novels - Chicago Tribune](<a href=“Thoroughly modern Jane”>Thoroughly modern Jane) - and one of five Publisher Weekly’s Best Romances 2011. </p>
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<p>Am I going to be kicked out of the CC Book Club for finding this amusing rather than appalling? I mean, really, Long Bourne Suffering as the name of the Bennett girls band - clever. ;)</p>
<p>I’m in! </p>
<p>wbow - I felt the same way about reading a Stephen King book. I have not read any of his books and assumed they were all horror stories. When I mentioned this to my husband, he reminded me that Stephen King wrote The Shawshank Redemption. I didn’t read the book, but the movie is exceptional. </p>
<p>After reading the Amazon description of 11/22/63, I am intrigued and excited to read the book. I’m going to download it right now!</p>
<p>ignatius - I won’t kick you out. That is amusing!</p>
<p>Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is one of Stephen King’s short stories. (“Red” in the book is a red-haired Irishman; in the movie, it’s Morgan Freeman—perfect casting despite his lack of Irish heritage!) </p>
<p>Although Shawshank is not a horror story per se, King still addresses issues that are “horrifying,” if you know what I mean (prison life, etc.). He also wrote the short story The Body which became the film “Stand by Me” (with River Phoenix), a coming-of-age tale about four boys who go searching for the body of a missing teenager. Even in his non-horror work, he likes to examines the dark side of humanity, and maybe we’ll find that in 11/22/63 as well.</p>
<p>I very much appreciate all the the book suggestions and look forward to joining the discussion in Feb! Thanks, everyone!!</p>
<p>Bookworm, I read Jane Austen in Scarsdale a while back. I thought it was pretty well done with regard to its premise, structure and pace of the storyline. My one complaint is that for a story that’s supposed to take place in present day, the dialogue was stiff and wooden. Otherwise it’s an appropriate topic for this audience! </p>
<p>Coming in late, but I also just finished Before I Go To Sleep for my book club. Loved it! Here’s a question I have that I haven’t seen raised in reviews I’ve read. With the attention given to confabulation and invented memories in amnesiacs is it possible there is more than one interpretation to the ending? Are we so sure of Christine’s reality? Perhaps Ben # 1 never came back to her at all. Perhaps Adam really was killed in the war. I had to wonder!</p>
<p>roshke, you raise an interesting point! What if Christine is as bad as–or worse than–she was right after the accident? What if we really looked at her journal and found it to be a nonsensical scrawl? After all, that’s how her old journal looked:</p>
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<p>It could be that her current journal is just as unintelligible (in fact, maybe she’s actually describing her current journal), and an outsider finding it would be like Wendy discovering Jack’s endless typed pages of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in The Shining. Christine writes:</p>
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<p>We learn that Christine was “occasionally violent” – typical behavior “when the amnesiac’s fantasy is contradicted.” Dr. Wilson tells her:</p>
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<p>Maybe Fake Ben keeping Christine against her will is just another paranoid fantasy, and the violent struggle at the end is merely Christine’s distorted version of a routine struggle against medical personnel trying to keep her under control. Maybe she’s still in the psychiatric ward, a virtually hopeless case, with only glimmers of sanity that do little to pull her out of her confusion. Think of the scene when Christine becomes hysterical with the doctors:</p>
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<p>So who is the “real” Christine? Did any of her story really happen? Are we reading accurate journal entries or just the paranoid fantasies of a disturbed mind? Christine is a classic example of literature’s Unreliable Narrator:</p>
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<p>All I can say to the above is OMG!! Way to really mess with my head! 
I never, ever even considered this as a possibility. Would certainly be an interesting twist on everything … Now I’ll be thinking about it all day.</p>
<p>My head is now spinning! This kind of confabulation reminds me of delusional characters we meet in the movie A Beautiful Mind. Perhaps this is why Dr. Nash was so pessimistic at the end…that might have been the only real glimpse we see of him. The plot makes more sense, in a way, if it is all fabricated within Christine’s mind!</p>
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<p>^ And his name is Dr. NASH! Is that a clue that the entire story is in Christine’s “beautiful mind”?</p>
<p>Mary, those are some great excerpts you pulled. And if you start thinking this way, with all the (alleged)red herrings in the book, the possibilities are endless. Maybe Christine really was hit by a car, and/or her best friend WAS having an affair with her husband. I even spent time worrying about whether or not Christine could have killed little Adam by running him over in the car ( lots of references to images of Adam on his tricycle). And yes, perhaps she never left the psychiatric facility in the first place. </p>
<p>One thing thing that required a true suspension of disbelief for me was the willingness of Dr. Nash to risk going behind Ben’s back to treat Christine. Wouldn’t there be numerous ethical and assuming the level of incapacitation described, legal proscriptions to that? Speaking of Dr. Nash, what about the unexpected visit - the one where she has zero memory of the arrangements for him to drop by within that same day? An understandable lapse or something that suggests not all is what it appears?!</p>
<p>Edited: OMG - Dr. Nash!!!</p>
<p>roshke: I had trouble with Dr. Nash’s actions - mighty suspension of belief required on the part of the reader. </p>
<p>However, I don’t doubt Christine’s narrative: not her journal nor today. </p>
<p>Still, the author introduces two unreliable narrators in Fake Ben and Dr. Nash. </p>
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<p>Fake Ben intentionally - and continually - misleads Christine. I can’t say Dr. Nash acts intentionally, but he bolsters Fake Ben’s unreliable narrative, making Christine doubt herself. Christine worries about her accuracy due to her amnesia, her past as a novelist, and misplaced trust in Dr. Nash at the least … if not Fake Ben. Hello, suspense.</p>
<p>So, I believe in Christine’s veracity, but think the author did a masterful job with unreliable narration.</p>
<p>For SJCM: Since you always like to know what the rest of us plan to read next, I’m starting Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens. I like the idea that I can pick it up and put it down easily over the next busy couple of weeks. No story line to follow …</p>
<p>If people are writing about what they are reading apart from our book club selection…</p>
<p>I’ve started “The Crimson Petal and the White” (couldn’t restrain myself…it had been sidelined for much too long), and I love it. It’s a great plum pudding of a book, studded with delightful treasures.</p>
<p>Only problem is, I’m going to have to put it down when I obtain “11/22/63,” and get back to it later! Or could I possibly read both at once, going back and forth, lol??</p>
<p>I recently finished the short novel “Leaving the Atocha Station” by Ben Lerner. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I bought it as a Christmas gift for a young person who is going to be living abroad for a little while, and I wanted to read it myself. It really opened my eyes to what a certain type of young American’s experience in another country could be like. It’s pretty funny, in a sardonic kind of way, as well.</p>
<p>ignatius, did you see that Christopher Hitchens just died? </p>
<p>[In</a> Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949?2011 | Blogs | Vanity Fair](<a href=“http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/In-Memoriam-Christopher-Hitchens-19492011]In”>http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/In-Memoriam-Christopher-Hitchens-19492011)</p>
<p>NJTheatreMOM, I just figured out how to send library books to my Kindle and The Crimson Petal and the White is available, so thanks for the mini-review! (But I think I’m going to tackle 11/22/63 first.)</p>
<p>ignatius, I probably wouldn’t have considered my Bobby Ewing in the shower (Dallas - he was dead for the entire previous season) meets Inception theory but for the way the author, in a seemingly offhand way, has Dr. Nash show up at the house unannounced, claiming to have made plans with her on the phone earlier that day. Christine remembers nothing about it. Is Nash lying? Perhaps - IMO he’s manipulated her for his own glory all along. Or is there more to it than that? </p>
<p>I thought the timing of this unusual incident, right near the conclusion, might have been meant as an intentional and provoking question mark. Up until that point, Christine had been SO completely reliable, within the parameters defined by her unique illness, that a sudden deviance from that pattern at the end seems notable. </p>
<p>But going back to the straightforward version of events - did anyone catch the discrepancy in the conversations between Fake Ben and Christine vs. Claire and Christine regarding the age of Adam at the time of the accident? Fake Ben told her that Adam was two, while Claire was specific in saying that he was three about to turn four. Another clue that Fake Ben was an imposter!</p>
<p>^^^ Laughed at the Bobby Ewing reference. I’ve never seen either A Beautiful Mind or Inception, so the references pass over me. Does the movie The Sixth Sense count?</p>
<p>Thinking some about narration: Christine narrates from a first person point of view, but she can go no further than that day itself. She relies on Fake Ben to fill in all the missing pieces of her life and for Dr. Nash to confirm that “narrative”. Now comes my English essay type of question: can we even consider Fake Ben and Dr. Nash third-person narrators, with Christine recording their narration; or do we consider FB and Dr. Nash recurring secondary characters in Christine’s first-person narrative, which as roshke points out, may be totally distorted? (Any English majors out there?) Poor Christine, either way presents problems.</p>
<p>I tend to like the straightforward version. </p>
<p>Mary: Thanks for the update on Christopher Hitchens.</p>
<p>The biography “A Beautiful Mind,” by Sylvia Nasar, about the mathematician John Nash, is a stunning book…really something. You didn’t miss much by skipping the film, though, Ignatius.</p>
<p>I favor the straightforward version of Christine’s story too. I think the business of Dr Nash claiming that he made plans with her that she didn’t know about, when she should have, was just another way the author manipulated us into feeling uncertainty and dread as the story approached its climax.</p>
<p>Here’s my new theory: Dr. Nash is working with real Ben, if an effort to re-create Christine’s delusional world, to try to jolt her out of amnesia, in a take-off of Shutter Island.</p>
<p>Currently, I am reading Secret Daughter, suggested in the “Best books I’ve Read In The Last 6 Months” thread. Captivating, thus far.</p>
<p>I did read A Beautiful Mind before I saw the movie and still recommend seeing the film! Hollywood at its best!</p>