May: Other Voices, Other Rooms

Proper discussion questions for May's book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, will begin to appear below this post around May 20th. Feel free to link your reviews via Mr. Linky below or link to any other "Dangerous" titles you review in May.

Have fun!

Feel free to discuss general points of Other Voices, Other Rooms in the comments section of this post, post questions you're interested in getting opinions on, or just talk amongst yourselves.

April: Transformations, by Anne Sexton

Proper discussion questions for April's book, Transformations, will begin to appear below this post soon. Feel free to link your reviews via Mr. Linky below or link to any other "Dangerous" titles you review in April.

Have fun!

Feel free to discuss general points of Tranformations in the comments section of this post, post questions you're interested in getting opinions on, or just talk amongst yourselves.

Discussion 1 - "The Gold Key" and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"

1. Does anyone remember--and this is partially a selfish question--if "The Gold Key" corresponds to a particular Grimm fairy tale or if she's purely using this as a way to set up the speaker, etc? I think I found a story titled "The Gold Key" once, but I don't have my complete Grimm with me in North Carolina.

2. How would you describe the tone Sexton establishes from the beginning of this collection? Is it pretty consistent throughout or do you see subtle changes?

3. Talk about some of the imagery Sexton uses, in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" particularly. What did you think of lines like "cheeks as fragile as cigarette papers" and "rolling her china blue doll eyes open and shut?"

4. Why do you think she chose to retell "Snow White?" What does this poem accomplish as a literary work? Do you find it particularly innovative as far as retellings go?

Anne Sexton Biography

Click HERE to read about Anne Sexton's life.

March Winner!

The winner of a Book Lover's Magnetic Poetry collection, bookplates, and a bookmark:

Cathy from Butterflies Used to Be Caterpillars!

Congratulations, and thank you for discussing Cat's Eye with us!

March: Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood

Proper discussion questions for March's book, Cat's Eye, will begin to appear below this post soon. Feel free to link your reviews via Mr. Linky below or link to any other "Dangerous" titles you review in March.


Have fun!

Feel free to discuss general points of Cat's Eye in the comments section of this post, post questions you're interested in getting opinions on, or just talk amongst yourselves.

Cat's Eye Discussion Questions, Round 2

4. Discuss the impact of the type of parenting received by Elaine, Cordelia, and their third friend, Grace. At one point Elaine's mother tells her that she does not have to be with the girls that are tormenting her. Is her mother in any way responsible for what happened to Elaine?

5. Early in the novel, Elaine is warned by her first new friend, Carol, not to go down into the ravine: "There might be men there." Discuss the significance of this warning, taking into account the later incident between the girls at the ravine. What does this say about our ability to apprehend danger? If you're read other Atwood novels, in what way does she explore the nature of evil and its relationship to gender?

6. Why do you think Elaine became an artist? What is the significance that she did so? Do artists use life experiences in ways nonartists do not?

Cat's Eye, First Round of Questions

1. What does Margaret Atwood's novel Cat's Eye say about the nature of childhood and the development of adolescent friendships? Is there a gender influenced difference in cruelty between boys as opposed to cruelty as expressed by girls?

2. In the opening line of the novel, the narrator, artist Elaine Risley, who returns to the city of her birth for a retrospective of her painting, observes: "Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space . . . if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once." How do you interpret this statement?

3. Elaine is haunted by Cordelia, her "best friend" and the tormentor of her childhood. All predators must have a motive. What benefit did Cordelia receive out of tormenting Elaine? What weakness in Elaine made her particularly vulnerable to Cordelia? Why did she continue to play such importance in Elaine's adult life?

February Prizes!

SO sorry I'm late posting this month's prizes. For those of you who read my blog you know that I'm teaching college, and mid-term was a killer this time around. Without further ado, the prizes for February are:

"Slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women," Harriet Jacobs wrote in 1861. At that time she was an escaped slave living in the north, but the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 meant that she could not longer consider being in the northern states a guarantee of freedom or safety. Her book is an eloquent recital of the suffering that is slavery. Families broken apart; promises of freedom made but never kept; whippings, beatings, and burnings; masters selling their own children - all are recounted with precise detail and a blazing indignation.

A 101-year-old retired laborer who enrolled in a literacy class near his Dallas, Tex., home at the age of 98, George Dawson now reads and writes on a third-grade level. From Dawson's eloquent words, co-writer Glaubman, a Seattle elementary school teacher, has fashioned two engrossing stories. First is the inspiring saga of how someone who was the grandson of a slave managed to navigate the brutally segregated small Texas town of Marshall, where Dawson was born, without losing his integrity or enjoyment of life.

That's right...two great books--one of my favorites and one of Heather's--going out to two lucky Year of Reading Dangerously Participants. And the winners are!

Incidents: Lisa
Life is So Good: Kim L.

Ladies, if you would, please send your contact info to estellabooks(at)gmail(dot)com.

If you've already read the book you were chosen for just let me know and I'd be happy to substitute another book, Blood Done Sign My Name, by Timothy Tyson.

The Bluest Eye - Sticky Post

Proper discussion questions for February's book, The Bluest Eye, will begin to appear below this post soon. Feel free to link your reviews via Mr. Linky below or link to any other "Dangerous" titles you review in February.

Have fun!

Feel free to discuss general points of The Bluest Eye in the comments section of this post, post questions you're interested in getting opinions on, or just talk amongst yourselves.

Bluest Eye Discussion Questions - Volume 2

WARNING: Possible spoilers ahead!

5. At a certain point in the novel, Morrison, through her narrator, states that romantic love and physical beauty are "probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought." How do the lives of individual characters bear out that statement? Where do the characters first encounter ideas of romantic love and beauty—ideas which will eventually torture and exclude them? What positive visions of beauty and love does the novel offer?

6. The novel is set in a Midwestern industrial town, Lorain, Ohio, Morrison's own birthplace. Pauline and Cholly Breedlove are transplanted Southerners and several key scenes in the novel are set in the South. How does Morrison set up comparisons between a Northern black community and the Southern black way of life? What values have been lost in the migration north?

7. Consider Morrison's characterization of Cholly Breedlove. While she clearly condemns his actions, she resists dehumanizing him. If rape of one's daughter is an "unimaginable" crime, can one at least trace the events (and resulting emotions) that made it possible for Cholly to commit this brutal act? Is there a connection between the white hunters' "rape" of Cholly and the sexual aggression he eventually turned on his daughter?

Bluest Eye Questions - First batch!

1. The novel opens with an excerpt from an old-fashioned reading primer. The lines begin to blur and run together—as they do at the beginning of select chapters. What social commentary is implicit in Morrison's superimposing these bland banalities describing a white family and its activities upon the tragic story of the destruction of a young black girl?

2. How does Morrison's powerful language—both highly specific and lyrical—comment on the inadequacy of "correct" English and the way in which it masks entire worlds of beauty and pain?

3. "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow."

With these lines Morrison's child narrator, Claudia MacTeer, invites the reader into a troubling community secret: the incestuous rape of her 11-year-old friend Pecola Breedlove. What are the advantages of telling Pecola's story from a child's point of view?

4. In what ways does Morrison show how Pecola's environment—and American society as a whole—are hostile to her very existence?

Meet Toni Morrison

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, in 1931 in Lorain (Ohio), the second of four children in a black working-class family. Displayed an early interest in literature. Studied humanities at Howard and Cornell Universities, followed by an academic career at Texas Southern University, Howard University, Yale, and since 1989, a chair at Princeton University. She has also worked as an editor for Random House, a critic, and given numerous public lectures, specializing in African-American literature. She made her debut as a novelist in 1970, soon gaining the attention of both critics and a wider audience for her epic power, unerring ear for dialogue, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black America. A member since 1981 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has been awarded a number of literary distinctions, among them the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997

For a more extensive bio, click HERE.

And the Winner Is! (January Prizes)

The winner of the January prize pack...a "Reading Woman" calendar, the "Thai Gems" journal, and a hand-painted bookmark is Alicia from Slightly Lively! Alicia, if you'll send your mailing address to us at the address below, we'll get your prize in the mail.

Thanks so much to everyone who's discussed with us so far. You can certainly continue to discuss Great Expectations at your leisure and post January links if you have them, and if you'd like to see any questions posted that we haven't covered, drop us an e-mail at estellabooks (at) gmail (dot) com.

We'll go ahead and post the sticky post for February later in the weekend.

Great Expectations: Sticky Post

NOTE: Proper discussion questions are now beginning to appear below this post! Questions are spoiler-free, but the comments section is open season!

This brief sticky post will remain at the top of the page until the end of January. Post links to your reviews of our January book or any alternates you may have chosen via Mister Linky down there. In the comments section...

Feel free to discuss general points in the comments section of this post, or just talk amongst yourselves. Feel free to answer the discussion questions, if they strike your fancy, at your leisure.

Note: Please don't feel like you need to rush if you haven't even started the book yet. Jump in when you have a chance and feel like it. We're very free-flowin' around here.