I just created a poll on the website to decide which book we will be reading for September and October for the Classic Book Club. If you are interested in having your vote count for choosing the September Classic Book Club book, please visit http://www.socwbc.org/polls/ and vote for your two favorites right away. You have until next Thursday, when I will send out the final choice that we have decided upon. Thanks!

The Classic Book Club is an offshoot of the regular book club. It meets every second Wednesday at Coco's Restaurant in Mission Viejo at 7 pm. We read only classics.

CHOOSE TWO:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: The 1920s novel of a passion threatened by convention and played outagainst a backdrop of New York City-s upper class, unimaginable wealth,and unavoidable tragedy. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton's most famous novel, is a love story, written immediately after the end of the First World War. Its brilliant anatomization of the snobbery and hypocrisy of the wealthy elite of New York society in the 1870s made it an instant classic, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

Persusasion by Jane Austen: Anne Elliot, heroine of Austen's last novel, did something we can all relate to: Long ago, she let the love of her life get away. In this case, she had allowed herself to be persuaded by a trusted family friend that the young man she loved wasn't an adequate match, social stationwise, and that Anne could do better. The novel opens some seven years after Anne sent her beau packing, and she's still alone. But then the guy she never stopped loving comes back from the sea.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life.

1984 by George Orwell: Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell.

To vote, go to http://www.socwbc.org/polls/
and check two choices.