JULY MEETING RECAP!

The Pittsburgh Gay Book Club met on July 21st, 2010 at the Borders Bookstore on McKnight Road at NorthWay Mall (Near Ross Park Mall). We had a great time as we discussed the July Book selection.

Overall, the club really enjoyed reading THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. Most found the intertwined stories of the two men very unique and interesting. Although one member thought it was a little cumbersome at times, and another thought it to be 'claustrophobic', there was agreement that the vast content of interesting facts and incidents made for a very compelling read. A member presented those in attendance with an original souvenir book of the actual World’s Fair featured in the book. The wealth of photographic documentation in it greatly enhanced all of our understanding and appreciation of the Fair and THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. We recommend this read to any website followers of the club!

JULY BOOK SELECTION:

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by ERIK LARSON

Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed.

LINK TO THE BOOK AT BORDERS.COM

http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=0375725601

JUNE MEETING RECAP

The June meeting took place as planned and we discussed The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

The meeting was held on Wednesday June 16th, 2010. We met at the Borders Bookstore in Monroeville, PA.

Watch for an article on the PGBC in Pittsburgh OUT!

MAY BOOK CLUB MEETING RECAP

The May meeting of the Pittsburgh Gay Book Club took place on MAY 19th, 2010. We met at the BORDERS BOOK STORE in Monroeville, PA at 7:00 p.m. and discussed "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

MAP TO THE MONROEVILLE LOCATION http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=13259504532551725754&q=borders&hl=en&cd=1&ei=lom-S86DOpyiM5yYqIMM&sig2=7ki1xhGLx1WU3UiYe_zrTA&sll=40.432265,-79.78941&sspn=0.002091,0.004801&ie=UTF8&ll=40.433752,-79.791813&spn=0,0&z=18&iwloc=A

MAY BOOK CLUB SELECTION

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist has made his living uncovering the corrupt and crooked practices of Stockholm's leading financiers in his magazine, Millennium. But one expose unexpectedly backfires, and Blomkvist's reputation is in tatters. When he is offered an investigative job by powerful businessman Henrik Vanger, he is in no position to refuse. But he is surprised to find it has nothing to do with high finance - this time, it is a case of murder.

Many years ago, Henrik's niece, Harriet, disappeared during a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the Vangers. No-one saw her leave the island, and no body was ever found. Even so, Henrik is convinced that she was murdered by a member of his own family - the tightly knit but dysfunctional Vanger clan.

Blomkvist is soon in over his head. He has linked Harriet's disappearance to a number of gruesome murders from forty years ago, but it has become too dangerous to proceed alone. He needs a competent assistant, and he gets one: the gifted and conscience-free computer specialist, Lisbeth Salander.

This truculent young woman has problems of her own. She in unwilling to take orders, rides a motorbike like a Hell's Angel and handles makeshift weapons with a skill born of rage.
This improbably pair unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.

APPRIL.MEETING RECAP

The April meeting of the Pittsburgh Gay Book Club will take place on APRIL 21, 2010! We will be having a special meeting at the BORDERS BOOK STORE in Monroeville, PA at 7:00 p.m. Join us as we discuss "A Single Man" and plan our May and June Meetings. (A tentative 'meet the author' meeting for May, and possibly having our June meeting at the Warhol Museum is in the works.)

MAP TO THE MONROEVILLE LOCATION
http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=13259504532551725754&q=borders&hl=en&cd=1&ei=lom-S86DOpyiM5yYqIMM&sig2=7ki1xhGLx1WU3UiYe_zrTA&sll=40.432265,-79.78941&sspn=0.002091,0.004801&ie=UTF8&ll=40.433752,-79.791813&spn=0,0&z=18&iwloc=A

APRIL BOOK SELECTION MADE!

OUR APRIL BOOK CLUB SELECTION IS

"A Single Man" by Christopher Isherwood

The author's favorite of his own novels. When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the texture of life itself.

"A testimony to Isherwood's undiminished brilliance as a novelist."
—Anthony Burgess

"An absolutely devastating, unnerving, brilliant book."
—Stephen Spender

"Just as his Prater Violet is the best novel I know about the movies, Isherwood's A Single Man, published in 1964, is one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement."
—Edmund White

MARCH MEETING RECAP

We met on Wednesday, March 17 (Yes, St. Patrick's Day!) and discussed THE BILLIONAIRE'S VINEGAR by BENJAMIN WALLACE. A rousing discussion on the merits of the book took place, and members shared insights on the content and the related it to present day happenings within the wine world. There was agreement that the book is peppered with witty quotations and interesting personalities. Another great read for the Pittsburgh Gay Book Club!

MARCH BOOK SELECTION

THE BILLIONAIRE'S VINEGAR by BENJAMIN WALLACE

REVIEW:
The titular bottle, from a cache of allegedly fine, allegedly French wine, allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s, set a record price when auctioned in 1985. The subsequent brouhaha over the cache's authenticity takes wine journalist Wallace on a piquant journey into the mirage-like world of rare wines. At its center are Hardy Rodenstock, an enigmatic German collector with a suspicious knack for unearthing implausibly old and drinkable wines, and Michael Broadbent, a Christie's wine expert, who auctioned Rodenstock's lucrative finds. The argument over the Jefferson bottles and other rarities aged for decades, flummoxed a wine establishment desperate to keep the cork in a controversy that might deflate the market for antique vintages. (In the author's telling, a 2006 lawsuit almost settles the issue.) Wallace sips the story slowly, taking leisurely digressions into techniques for faking wine and detecting same with everything from Monticello scholarship to nuclear physics. He paints a colorful backdrop of eccentric oenophiles, decadent tastings and overripe flavor rhetoric (Broadbent describes one wine as redolent of chocolate and schoolgirls' uniforms). Investigating wines so old and rare they could taste like anything, he playfully questions the very foundations of connoisseurship.

FEBRUARY MEETING RECAP

On February 17th, we met and discussed A SEPARATE PEACE by JOHN KNOWLES. A rousing discussion ensued as we covered the merits of, and occasional flaws in the story and the author's writing style. The consensus was that it is a worthwhile read that leaves the reader to fill in blanks, perhaps more so than some of us would have liked. Interested online members can share their opinion of the gay innuendo that seemed to be peppered throughout. Was it obvious to you? or, are we just perhaps 'reading' too much into it? Use the comments button below to voice your opinion!

FEBRUARY BOOK SELECTION

A SEPARATE PEACE by JOHN KNOWLES

Knowles' classic story of two friends at boarding school during World War II--one of the most starkly moving parables ever written about the dark forces that brood over the tortured world of adolescence--has been a consistent seller for more than 20 years.

Gene was a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas was a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happened between them at school one summer during the early years of World War II is the subject of A Separate Peace. A great bestseller for over thirty years--one of the most starkly moving parables ever written of the dark forces that brood over the tortured world of adolescence.
"I think it is the best-written, best-designed and most moving novel I have read in many years. Beginning with a tiny incident among ordinary boys, it ends by being as deep and as big as evil itself." -- Aubrey Menen

"A quietly vital and cleanly written novel that moves, page by page, towards a most interesting target." -- Truman Capote

"Is he the successor to Salinger for whom we have been waiting so long? -- Encounter.

"A masterpiece." -- National Review.