March 2014 Theme

March is a theme month. There are so many possibilities. I just a a look at the list of suggestions on the wiki and have a couple to put forward.

Maybe we could focus on an EDUCATION theme. Books focused on education or set in educational institutions, or the main character is an educator or a student. A book that comes to mind is Caleb's Crossing.

Another option could be ENTERTAINMENT. This one could include many area of entertainment, vaudeville, circus, radio, rodeo etc. I recently read The Little Shadows about vaudeville entertainers which was pretty good. Then there is the Rosie Winter mystery series, Rosie is an actress who finds herself solving mysteries. I'm sure there are heaps more.

There are many more options on the wiki list if anybody wants to put one forward, or maybe you have thought of something else?

We could also do something that's Irish-themed. Or if "Irish-themed" is too broad, it could be something like the Irish diaspora – which in literature, for example, would include Joyce and Beckett and the Brontes (Patrick was from County Down) and in biography would include (maternally) DeGaulle. Oh, yeah, and the Kennedys too of course.

Personally, I've been meaning for ages now to get around to a reread of Ulysses combining the book with the 40-CD audiobook. And if I have time, I could always throw in some Beckett too.

Interesting possibilities for education: Rousseau's Émile, The Education of Henry Adams, Colette's Claudine à l'école. I've also been meaning to get around to Mary Ellen Chase's memoir A Goodly Fellowship (a longtime English professor at Smith College, and as a novelist the successor of Sarah Orne Jewett in Maine regionalism).

ETA: Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island. Little Men and perhaps Jo's Boys.

And as to entertainment, for just one literary thought there's Gore Vidal's Hollywood.

ETA: The Day of the Locust. The Last Tycoon. The Song of the Lark.

All interesting options. I can think of books for everything mentioned.

I was thinking about the phrases "March madness" and "mad as a March hare." What about a theme of insanity and mental illness?

6> That's a clever one! (ETA: And I've been planning go reread Wide Sargasso Sea, using the Norton Critical and reading all the supplemental material.)

Another good one

I read a really good book called Blue Asylum set post American civil war which would fit the mental illness theme if anybody was interested. I remember being really impressed by the writing style.

I like all these topics. My order of choice would be: Education, Ireland, Entertainment, Insanity/Mental Illness.

I'm in favor of Education, also in favor of Ireland if we keep it broad - any historical fiction set in Ireland should count, I think. Not in favor of madness/mental illness nor entertainment, although I could potentially find something to read for the latter.

It is very close between Education and Ireland. Let's give it one more day befor we call it.

The voting has now been open for over a week so I guess we are all happy with our vote. The theme for March will be Education. This could include books where the main character is a student, teacher, professor, head-master, anybody involved in education. The book could be set in an educational institution, e.g. school, university, teaching laboratory etc.

Last year I read Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks which would be perfect for this theme. I am off now to scour my bookshelves and do some tag mash searches to see what I come up with. I am also going to pop over the the historical novel society webpage to check out some reviews for books to fit this theme.

My daughter just brought home a copy of To Sir, With Love so I will be rereading that and most likely watching the movie again as well. Very fond memories of both.

I think I'll probably read The Technologists by Matthew Pearl, which portrays MIT in its earliest years.

I have a number of choices for the Education theme, I might go with Agatha Christie's Cat Among the Pigeons as it is set at a girl's school, I believe. I also have a book called Miss Appleby's Academy on my Kindle, or there is Teacher, Teacher by Jack Sheffield which is set in a Yorkshire village school in the 1970's.

Miss Pym Disposes is also set at a girl's school. I've already read it so I probably won't re-read it, but I thought I'd mention it for anyone who might still be looking for a book for this theme.

If I can squeeze it in, I might read Miss Dimple Disappears from my TBR stash. Miss Dimple is a teacher and the story is set in 1942.

I'm thinking of reading The Complaint of the Dove by Hannah March. It's a historical mystery set in 1760s England, and the sleuth is a private tutor.

Hi. I'm new to this group and hope to use it to visit or revisit books outside my usual crime fiction reading. I have a copy of Borderliners by Peter Hoeg which I haven't read for... more years then I care to remember. Set in a Danish boarding school in the 1970s in which some pupils with difficult backgrounds are subjected to an experimental regime. I know I thought it was very good when I first read it.

Welcome to the group Greydoll.

Simply because it fits in with my Category Challenge, I have decided to go with Cat Among the Pigeons for the March theme of Education.

I scanned my shelves and found a couple of possibilities. City of Light set at Niagra Falls 1901, main character a headmistress. Lake in the Clouds main character a woman wanting to set up a school in frontier America. Also I have a sample nonfiction downloaded Other People's Daughters about life as a governess in the Victorian era.

I have completed Cat Among The Pigeons by Agatha Christie, originally published in 1959, dealing with missing jewels and murder at a posh British girl's boarding school.

Just picked that one up to read.

I've just finished Peter Hoeg's Borderliners. It is still an intense and moving reading experience.
Set in Denmark in the early 1970s and narrated from the viewpoint of one of the "borderliners" of the title. It is the story of three damaged children placed in an elite school as part of a secret experiment in integration by the Danish Education department. By then the institutional damage has gone so deep for the children that they observe their teachers and those in authority with feral detail, trying to interpret a pattern regarding themselves and their survival. Their paranoia (if you like) drives them deeper into esoteric theories concerning time. The denouement is moving. On a lighter note.. if you have enjoyed Stieg Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo... you may understand how his "heroine" Lisbeth Salander got to be the way she was.

Now I am sampling the educational "elite" from a completely different view, in the England of the 1920s & 30s with A Question of Upbringing.. the first in Anthony Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time" sequence.

I finished The Technologists by Matthew Pearl, a historical mystery set in 1868 Boston. A series of disasters using new technologies is terrorizing Boston. The fear of new technology generated by the events threatens the existence of the fledgling MIT. Several students from MIT's first senior class work together to find out how the incidents were staged and who is behind them.

I read Frost in May by Antonia White and really enjoyed it.

Perhaps enjoyed is not quite the right word since at times the book was horrifying in terms of the emotional abuse that the young protagonist suffered at the hands of the nuns at her convent school. But so well written! And I really felt for Nanda and the trials through which her faith never wavered.

I did find the story a little slow to latch on to and until about half way through I was wondering why I was bothering because so little seemed to be happening and I tend to prefer more action in my novels. However, the tide turned and I could hardly put the book down, wanting to find out what happened next and what the fate of our little girl was. A sad commentary on what we put young girls through at that time.

Overall I give this 3.5 stars

I read The Complaint of the Dove by Hannah March, a mystery set in London in 1760. The protagonist, Robert Fairfax, is a private tutor whose pupil is accused of murder; to clear his name, Fairfax must find the real killer. I haven't had a chance to write a full review yet, but I really enjoyed the book! If you like historical mysteries and are interested in the period, I'd definitely recommend it.

Yesterday I finished my book for this month's theme. It was a book that has been on my shelf for a couple of years now. City Of Light by Lauren Belfer. The main character of the novel is Louisa Barrett, head-mistress of the Macauley Girl's School in Buffalo. Set in 1901, during the founding years of hydroelectricy at Niagara Falls. A very interesting read in terms of the electrify side of things and politics in a city being changed greatly by industrial advances. The story itself was ok.

I just finished a reread of Little Women in the Belknap-Harvard annotated edition and posted a 3½*** review. It's got some relationship to education (including "moral education" as a girl's 19th-century "conduct book") and concludes with Jo's founding of her boys' school. I'm going to try to get on to Little Men, which is much more specifically set in a school, before month's end and in any event carry over the Alcott reading (my Library of American edition) into the second-quarter RTT "19th-C America excluding the Old West." I'm also currently reading the supplementary materials in the Little Women (Norton Critical Editions).

>30 ccookie: Frost in May is one of my all-time favorite books. It might help, though, if you've got some personal familiarity with pre-Vatican2 Catholicism or you might not catch some of the humor.

That scene where the half-blind elderly nun accidentally pierces the girl's earlobe during the First Communion (Confirmation?) preparations is positively hilarious! The way the girl thinks it's part of her preparations, imitation-of-Christ suffering, so she doesn't say anything about it. And then the mother superior is so impressed with the girl's sanctity (this is one of the poor girls who are only joining the students for the First Communion service) that she gives a speech to the students about how much they can learn from the girl's faithfulness.

There's also an hilarious story in White's anthology Strangers, "The Exile" I think its title is, a first-person monologue by a nut case who wants to be a nun but the bishop won't have anything to do with her so she plans to cross the Channel to go on pilgrimage by foot to Rome and lay her case before the pope.

Anyway, you may need knowledge of pre-Vatican2 Catholicism to grasp White's sometimes peculiar humor.

I've just finished an Education reread of Goodby, Mr. Chips, a charming little book about a Latin teacher through the years at an English Public School.

>33 CurrerBell: Yep! Didn't get the humour at all. Just found it horrifying, although I understand that White wrote it as a satire!

This month I also listened to Carter Finally Gets It by Brent Crawford which I got as a free download last summer. Carter is experiencing his first year of high school and is not quite prepared for it. It was very cute, humorous, had me laughing right out loud and has a nice message about being true to yourself. I enjoyed it.

I finished one more book for this month's theme. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has been on my Overdrive wishlist for a while and I was glad for this opportunity to listen to it. Nadia May does a fine job with the narration, but even so I think I'd have been better off reading it the first time through and listening to it as a re-read.

It just hit me that the memoir I just finished also fits this month's theme. As a newlywed, Joan Fry accompanied her anthropology student husband to British Honduras (now Belize) for a year of field work. She got a job teaching the children in their Kekchi Maya village while her husband pursued his studies. How to Cook a Tapir tells the story of that year, with an emphasis on food.

To finish off the Education theme for me, I've read To Sir with Love by E. R. Braithwaite. Wonderful, true story of a new teacher in a poor Secondary School in the East End of London. Also important to the story, whether it should be or not, is that the teacher is of a different race than most of his students. Very interesting to read this right after Goodby, Mr. Chips. Both books were great reads and I would recommend them both. I also will put in a plug for the Sidney Poitier movie based on To Sir with Love, which was pretty faithful to the book.

Just finishing Anthony Powell's "A Question of Upbringing". A re-read for me and glad to still enjoy Powell's writing. The first of his Dance to the Music of Time sequence of novels, it sets out some of the characters that appear and re-appear throughout the cycle ... not least that object of fascination for Powell's narrator Jenkins, - Kenneth Widmerpool.
This all takes place at public school (Powell himself went to Eton. Is this Eton?), during Jenkins' French "summer school" vacation and at college up at Oxford. It is an overture for the "music" to come, a introduction of characters.
20th century interwar"Education" for the English upper classes and the establishing of a "circle" of connections.

>33 CurrerBell: ....and following up on the Harvard-Belknap annotated edition of Little Women, I just finished the supplementary materials in Little Women (Norton Critical Editions) and posted a 4**** review. I'll be moving on to Little Men and Jo's Boys in my Library of America edition of Alcott, for the second-quarter 19th Century Northern America (excluding the Old West).

My read for the March theme of Education:

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
A professor with Aspergers at a university in Australia goes about finding a companion very methodically in 'the wife project'. In the course of time, 'the father project' comes about. It is largely a story of friendship and some romantic comedy. But I thought it fit the theme this month, for there is a lot of university 'stuff', dealing with other professors, the hierarchy of academicians, and the difficulty of fitting in to those surroundings for one on the autism spectrum. Humorous, touching, well-written dialogue. I 'read' the audio version which was extremely well done. (5 stars)

>42 countrylife: The Rosie Project is on my TBR list -- glad to see you enjoyed it!