The A.V. Club - Wrapped Up In Books

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Carter Beats The Devil live chat today at 3:30 PM CST

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:00:00 -0600

We hope you've been following along and participating in our week of conversations about Glen David Gold's Carter Beats The Devil. And we hope you'll join us via the interface below at 4:30 EST / 3:30 CST to chat live with several of our writers about the book's style, ideas, and themes. Bring questions as well as answers. We'll see you then! Wrapped Up In Books: Carter Beats The Devil

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Carter Beats The Devil: More rehearsal needed

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. This concludes our discussion of this month’s selection, Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats The Devil. Watch this space for an invitation to a livechat with staff members this afternoon at 3:30 p.m. CST. Donna Bowman: I'm happy to report that I enjoyed Carter Beats The Devil as much as I had hoped. It's been sitting at my bedside for years, ever since I picked it up off a remainder table somewhere, and one of the reasons I proposed it to you ...

Features: Wrapped Up In Books: Carter Beats The Devil: The backdrop of American history

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 10:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats The Devil, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Donna Bowman: Rowan made a comparison to The Prestige in his response to Monday's post on magic, and it strikes me that there's another irresistible connection between these two books: Both feature actual historical figures and technology as key elements in their narratives. Carter himself is based loosely on ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Carter Beats The Devil: Unpacking Carter the Great

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats The Devil, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Donna Bowman: Carter the Great was a real person, like so many of the characters Gold fancifully appropriates and extends in this book. We’re going to talk about the historical and technological setting of the book tomorrow, but let’s get into Charles Carter as the book’s protagonist now ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Carter Beats The Devil: On writing magic

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 10:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats The Devil, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Donna Bowman: Almost all live performance frightens me. But magic frightens me the most. The combination of unpredictability and danger creates suspense that I find almost unbearable. Of course everything is supposed to be tightly controlled, but that just makes it worse; if something truly does go wrong, the shock is ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: The Blind Assassin live chat today at 3:30 PM CST

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:56:00 -0600

We hope you've been following along and participating in our week of conversations about Margaret Atwood's novel The Blind Assassin. And we hope you'll join us via the interface below at 4:30 EST / 3:30 CST to chat live with several of our writers about the book's style, ideas, and themes. Bring questions as well as answers. We'll see you then! Wrapped Up In Books: The Blind Assassin

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: The Blind Assassin: the story unfolds

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. This concludes our discussion of this month’s selection, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. A live online chat will follow today at 3:30 p.m. CST—watch this space for a link. And don't forget that voting for next month's selection ends today at midnight CST. Tasha Robinson: The Blind Assassin unfolds in a variety of ways: In the present, in the past, through a novel, through a metaphorical story being told by characters within the novel, through news clippings which serve as ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: The Blind Assassin: Blunt style, artful image

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 09:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Tasha Robinson: Margaret Atwood's writing style has never been my favorite thing about her work, but I'm often caught by how blunt it is—how given she is to short, sharp sentences and simple vocabulary. It makes for an odd contrast with her twisting, multilayered plots, her complicated chronologies (Blind Assassin ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: The Blind Assassin: Bringing the characters into focus

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 09:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Tasha Robinson: Toward the end of The Blind Assassin, narrator Iris Chase apologizes because, over the course of the story, she's failed to portray her husband Richard Griffen "in any rounded sense. He remains a cardboard cutout. I know that. I can't describe him. I can't get a precise focus ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: The Blind Assassin: these are a few of Margaret Atwood's favorite themes

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 09:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Tasha Robinson: Margaret Atwood is one of the few writers who’s never let me down. In part, I think that’s because I share two of the main interests that run throughout her books and short stories: a certain dubiousness about gender relations, and a fascination with the unreliability of memory, particularly ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Wrapped Up In Books relaunches January 24 with The Blind Assassin; vote for February’s book now

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:30:00 -0600

Hello, participants in and newcomers to The A.V. Club’s monthly book-club discussion, Wrapped Up In Books. This is a reminder that we’ll launch the year with a group discussion of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin starting January 24; look for the daily posts in the right-hand column of the front page the week of the 24th. We hope you’ll join us for those conversations and for the monthly live-chat with staffers about the book. It’s a whole new year, and we have a few changes to the format in store. First off, we now ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Watson's Apology: On history

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Beryl Bainbridge’s Watson’s Apology, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat today at 3:30 p.m. CST. Join us here this afternoon. Zack Handlen: And here is where I expose more of my ignorance than usual. I don't really know anything about the court case which inspired this book, apart from what the book itself tells us. Bainbridge wrote several novels of historical fiction, and generally, she focused on ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Watson’s Apology: On murder

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 09:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Beryl Bainbridge’s based-on-real-life novel Watson’s Apology, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Zack Handlen: "My mother made my father happy," Anne said. "I remember a particular smile." "You won't remember mine," he replied, "particular or otherwise. You've not caused me to smile in twenty years." There is, so far as we can tell, no history of violence between them. At least ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Watson's Apology: On marriage

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:05:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Beryl Bainbridge’s based-on-real-life novel Watson’s Apology, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Zack Handlen: There are meet-cutes, and then there's whatever the hell this is: Years after they last met, John Watson writes to a woman who doesn't remember him, with the intention of ultimately proposing marriage. Nearly broke, and trapped living with a sister she can't stand, Anne jumps ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Watson's Apology: thoughts on style

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:00:00 -0600

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Beryl Bainbridge’s based-on-real-life novel Watson’s Apology, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Zack Handlen: Beryl Bainbridge died this summer at the age of 77, but when I first started reading her work in the middle of 2002, her oeuvre was essentially complete. Bainbridge wrote 18 novels, plus two collections of short fiction and four non-fiction books; her final novel, According To Queeney, was ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: Reminder: Watson’s Apology discussion starts a week from today

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:42:00 -0600

Just a quick reminder, since we’re all caught up in pre-Thanksgiving deadlines and don’t want to interrupt your holiday planning for long: The latest chapter in Wrapped Up In Books begins on Monday, November 29, a week from today, when we’ll launch into discussing Beryl Bainbridge’s 1984 novel Watson's Apology, a historical novel based on a real-life murder case. It’s a fairly short book; if you haven’t picked it up yet, it isn’t too late to immerse yourselves in the long, unhappy relationship between J.S. Watson and his doomed wife Anne ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: November/December reminder, and our January pick

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 11:29:00 -0500

With the latest book-club discussion over and done, it’s once again time to look to the future… in this case, all the way to next year. Our next Wrapped Up In Books discussion will be over Zack Handlen's pick, Beryl Bainbridge’s 1984 novel Watson's Apology. Again, here’s why he chose it: Beryl Bainbridge is a British writer who passed away recently; she's probably best known for An Awfully Big Adventure, which was made into a movie starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. In the later part of her career, Bainbridge turned to historical fiction ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: The Intuitionist live chat today at 4:30/3:30 PM CT

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:30:00 -0500

Wrapped Up In Books: The Intuitionist

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: The Intuitionist: Who do we believe?

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:00:00 -0500

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat today at 3:30 p.m. CST. Join us here this afternoon. Ellen Wernecke: It was the ending more than any other aspect of The Intuitionist that prompted me to think of the book when choosing a selection for this round of the book club. I remembered feeling devastated, almost robbed the first time I read about Lila Mae’s second ...

Books: Wrapped Up In Books: The Intuitionist: Corruption and the city

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:00:00 -0500

Wrapped Up In Books is The A.V. Club’s monthly book club. We’re currently discussing this month’s selection, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, in a series of posts to be followed by a live online chat Thursday at 3:30 p.m. CST. Ellen Wernecke: I hadn’t read Martin Dressler when I chose The Intuitionist as my pick for Wrapped Up In Books, but I think in a way, they complement each other in their visions of the same, or at least very similar, cities. (Whitehead’s chosen city is never named in the book, true ...