October - The Shack

October - Patrick

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?"

September - The Shadow of the Wind

September - Lisa

Ruiz Zafón's novel, a bestseller in his native Spain, takes the satanic touches from Angel Heart and stirs them into a bookish intrigue à la Foucault's Pendulum. The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a "porcelain gaze," Clara Barceló; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best friend's sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. Officially, Carax's dead body was dumped in an alley in 1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and Fermín are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax's childhood friend. As Daniel's quest continues, frightening parallels between his own life and Carax's begin to emerge.

May - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

May - Cameron

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Can she vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read.

April - The Mayor of Castro Street: the life and times of Harvey Milk

April - Jim

Known as “The Mayor of Castro Street” even before he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk’s personal life, public career, and final assassination reflect the dramatic emergence of the gay community as a political power in America. It is a story full of personal tragedies and political intrigues, assassinations at City Hall, massive riots in the streets, the miscarriage of justice, and the consolidation of gay power and gay hope.

March - The Painted Bird

March - Alisa

Semiautobiographical novel by Jerzy Kosinski, published in 1965 and revised in 1976. The ordeals of the central character parallel Kosinski's own experiences during World War II. A dark-haired Polish child who is taken for either a Gypsy or a Jew loses his parents in the mayhem of war and wanders through the countryside at the mercy of the brutal, thickheaded peasants he meets in the villages. He learns how to stay alive at any cost, turning survival into a moral imperative. Full of graphic scenes depicting rape, torture, and bestiality, the novel portrays evil in all its manifestations and speaks of human isolation as inevitable.

Ashley A. - 5/10 - I’m completely torn because although I was extremely disturbed and had trouble believing all of the experiences, I really liked the point that Amy H made about the author desensitizing us to show how desensitized we all have become to the horrors of the world. This is the only reason I can see in why the author chose to write the book the way that he did.

Camille - 5/10 - I actually dreaded reading the book every day, but now that it’s over, I can see that it had some value, and it was definitely engaging and thought provoking (along with gag-reflex provoking).

Cameron - 5/10 - I feel that the author shows a type of anti-humanism by constantly comparing the horrors that occur in the animal kingdom with those that occur amongst human, rarely showing a preference for one over the other and, quite poignantly and literally, mingling the two. However, the constant atrocities, graphically detailed one after the other, not only made the story less genuine and heartfelt, but made it fit perfectly into the new genre of “torture porn” that exists cinematically today. I mostly feel bad for the fellow diners at the training table who overheard us discussing the book.

Amy H. - 5/10 - I debated with myself about whether Kosinski was writing about grotesque, violent things to make a point about humanity or if he was doing it just to be shocking and controversial. Regardless of the truth, the book did make me think about how awful people can be to each other. But for every one of our "animalistic" instincts, I think people have another uniquely human instinct for kindness and generosity. For whatever reason, Kosinski did not choose to show both sides of humanity in his book, and maybe it's more powerful because of it.

Lisa - 6.5/10 - No comment.

Still to comment: Ashley C., Alisa, Patrick