The Adult Reading Round Table (ARRT) is a group of librarians and library workers in the Chicagoland area who meet regularly to develop their readers advisory skills.  One of the group’s ongoing activities is genre study, and for the past two and a half years, members have been focusing on nonfiction leisure reading interests.  Every other month, an ARRT sub-group has been meeting for two-hour discussions centering on such topics as True Crime, Memoirs, and Natural History.

Joyce Saricks and Roberta Johnson are co-leaders of the genre study, and they have designed a format that requires every participant to read a specific book the leaders have selected, which typifies the nonfiction category under examination.  (For instance, for the True Crime discussion, everyone was asked to read Truman Capote’s classic, In Cold Blood.)  Also, each participant is urged to choose another book that fits the category, read it, and share it with the group.

At the meetings, the featured book is discussed first, then participants chime in with their own choices.  The group members are told to be prepared to discuss the appeal of the books, rather than to give plot summaries.  In considering the appeal of the works, participants look at the frame, tone, characterization, storyline, and pacing, as well as responding to such questions as “What does the author do best?” and “What makes the book popular?”  The participants talk about whether they fell into the book immediately or discovered what was going on at a more leisurely pace.  They sum up their sharing of authors and titles by suggesting other books that are brought to mind, as well as what type of reader might especially enjoy reading these books.

In past years, ARRT genre study activities focused squarely on fiction, looking at popular genres such as romance, suspense, and fantasy.  The move to nonfiction was prompted by an interest in drawing reference librarians into the group – staffers who worked regularly with nonfiction, who perhaps didn’t read much fiction, and who weren’t particularly aware of readers advisory principles, but who were in a position to recommend nonfiction titles to library users.  What began as a two-year study is now extending into its third year and probably could keep going for several more.

Saricks and Johnson stress increased knowledge of nonfiction as one of the primary benefits of the study.  Participants also gain a sense of the range of each topic, along with key authors and titles, as well as an understanding of what readers enjoy about these books,  Finally, they are provided with  links to other fiction and nonfiction titles fans may also enjoy.

The meetings are held at two suburban libraries, one northwest of Chicago, the other southwest of the city;  this is done to equalize the commuting distance for members who must travel from the far north or the far south regions.  A secretary takes notes of the discussions and provides copies via e-mail to all members, along with lists of the many books that are discussed.

Perhaps this project — which participants describe as stimulating, fun, and useful –could work as a model for Book Group Buzz readers to try in their own communities!

Our book club has been asked to move.

It isn’t the first time the book club at University Book Store in Seattle has moved. Since the club’s inception in 2003, we’ve gone from a circle of folding chairs to a conference room, and from several different restaurants in the University District to half a year of meetings at a neighborhood restaurant one block from my home. After five years of monthly meetings, I’m getting some concrete evidence that where we talk plays a huge role in how people think and interact.

In a couple weeks we’ll be having our last meeting at the Varsity Restaurant. There, at the end of each month, the book club reserves the circular, padded eight-seater banquette at the back of the restaurant. It’s been the club’s best environment so far. Dining together makes club members feel like old friends. Conversation flows naturally over food. People are willing to give up a pleasant evening at home to go out to a restaurant and treat themselves to dinner while discussing a good book they’ve just read. And when we had to pull up more chairs to the banquette, it only made the conversation warmer. People were relaxed enough to say what they really thought. Not to mention that I got to enjoy chicken-friend steak with lots of country gravy.

This is in sharp contrast to our club’s first home.

For several years the book club met in the bookstore conference room. This was located off the sales area on the second floor, past gift wrap and shipping, past five business offices and through the door at the end of the hall. It was a boardroom where we sat around a long table under fluorescent lights like grad students at a seminar. Speaking out felt like a classroom situation. No refreshments, no windows with a view, made the room claustrophobic. No matter how enjoyable book talk can be, it’s pretty tempting to stay home where it’s comfortable, rather than sit at a long corporate table in a cramped, oppressive room.

The last month only one person came. I sadly decided it was time to drop the book club. Either that, or make a change.

The change was fortuitous. The film of The Painted Veil looked gorgeous in the previews and I’d never read the short novel by W. Somerset Maugham, and both were so excellent, each in its own way, that I organized the book club meeting around a viewing of the film, to be discussed after the show in Mamma Melina’s restaurant under the theater. What resulted was the kind of wonderful conversation that smart, sensitive people can have after a stimulating movie, but in this case, the pleasure was doubled, because we’d all read the book, too. With that, the club’s wanderlust was born.

We’ve had several larger meetings in the Continental, a long-time Greek family restaurant in the heart of the University District. We entertained three of our all-time favorite authors there: Rory Stewart, Marjane Satrapi, and Tony D’Souza. It was perfect for large groups dining together, but not as ideal for intimate, thoughtful conversation.

Which leads me to the club’s approaching move at the end of June.

We’re going to be settling into an area of the University Book Store that has a fireplace, armchairs, and an Oriental rug, within thirty feet of the Bookstore Café. You can smell the coffee. They’ve got salads, sandwiches, and bakery treats. That should work out nicely.

It’s right by the big front picture windows, which means the raunchy and sometimes outrageous life of “the Ave” will be on colorful display, but as long as I sit with my back to the window like a good boy, everyone else should be fine.

We’ll be exposed to anyone shopping nearby – the huge magazine selection is right beside us – but this could be a plus. Potential new members may notice us and think coming next month might be a good idea. We’ll have to make some kind of signage – maybe “All are welcome” in big letters, and then in smaller letters, “Participation limited to those who’ve read the book.” Or maybe just wing it as it comes, without signage. Why not? I can be graceful with anyone inappropriately joining in – you know, gently heading off someone who saw a movie once that was just like this book, but in the movie blah blah blah.

There will also be those lonely old souls who aren’t playing with a full deck, the two or three who spend their evenings haunting the bookstore and join all the bookstore events. We’ll have to welcome them, too, and still preserve our own atmosphere of friendly, reflective thinking and critical conversation.

Ultimately, the whole change of location is bound to be interesting – because, if nothing else, it will be more real-life data on how space effects a conversation about books.

This week I have immersed myself in Seattle Reads The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu.  Incidentally, Mengestu’s book recently won the LA Times First Fiction Award.

My week started with the Book-It Reperatory Theater’s staged reading of excerpts from the book.  The actors brought such life to the characters and to the words on the page.  Not being much of a play-goer, I forget how inspiring such performances can be.  I walked away invigorated for my book group discussion the next day.

When my group discussed Dinaw’s book, we talked about the immigrant experience and about the melanchony and loss that pervades the book.  The book’s main character, Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant, lives in Washington D.C. and owns a corner shop in Logan Circle, a neighborhood that is starting to change.  Sepha lives a quiet life; in fleeing the violence in his home country, he did not move to America with any grand plans or expectations.  But when Judith, a white academic, and her biracial daughter Naomi move into the neighborhood and restore and old mansion, it awakens in Sepha a sense of what has been missing in his life.  He longs for connection, but fears it.

We talked about the positive and negative aspects of gentrification.  Some members questioned the main character, Sepha’s, actions and choices, his inactions.  Why did Sepha decide not to write back to Naomi? Was the ending hopeful or not?

The following day I saw Dinaw speak.  He answered questions from the audience and was so poised, well-spoken and thoughtful, wise beyond his 29 years.  I should have expected this from his book; he is able to write about old age and nostalgia and melancholy with the depth and wisdom of someone much older.  As I listened to the audience’s questions and Dinaw’s thoughtful responses, I wished that my book group could have been there.  So many of the questions that had been asked the day before were illuminated or touched upon in a new way by the author.

At one point in the novel Naomi brings The Brothers Karamazov into Sepha’s store for him to read to her (she chooses it because it is a big book and will keep him reading).  Several readers questioned Dinaw as to why he chose that book, and he explained his love of the book and how the quotation that Sepha memorizes provides a turning point for him:

“People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.  If a man carries such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

These beautiful words from Dostoevsky’s masterpiece resonate in a wholly different way in Mengestu’s book–illuminating the immigrant experience and the disappointment, hardship and loss that every human being experiences in life.

Encouraging your group to expand their experience beyond just the monthly discussion, to see an author read or watch a film or see a dramatic adaptation, can be so valuable.  It needn’t be your city’s One Book program (if you have one).  But in this case, I was so grateful to have so many opportunities to celebrate Mengestu’s book on my own and with others.

The list of Man Booker Prize winners and shortlist titles can be a wonderful source for book group ideas. For its 40th anniversary, the Man Booker Prize had a contest this spring  to determine the best Booker-winning title. The official contest is closed, but the online bookseller ABEBooks is conducting its own customer poll.  

An ABEBooks panel will announce a shortlist this month, and a public vote will decide the winner, to be announced in July.  Here are the results of the poll so far:

1) Life of Pi by Yann Martel (12.4%)

2) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (10.5%)

3) The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (8.8%)

4) The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (8.5%)

5) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (6.9%)

6) The Bone People by Keri Hulme (5.5%)

7) Possession by AS Byatt (5.4%)

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (5.2%)

9) Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (4%)

10) The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (3.3%)

With the help of Book Group Buzz (or possibly, sniff!, some other minor resource) you’ve selected the next choice for your book group. Where can you go to get more information?

Many publishers make it easy these days, with discussion questions and author interviews included in the back of the book. When that fails, we all know about reader reviews and other material on the sites of online booksellers like the BookSense consortium, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. Your library should have access to great book and literature databases that will help with author bios, reviews, literary criticism, and readalikes for the upcoming title. Adding the word “review” or “blog” to the title of the book on Google can also reap a quick and easy bounty.

But if discussion questions aren’t in the back of the book, you aren’t out of luck. Several websites specialize in collecting these reading guides. Let’s take a quick look at five collections and how to search them.

After experimenting with a garage door remote, various intonations of “Open Sesame,” and several varieties of Gregorian chant, I can report that the most useful keywords to help you find questions are “reading guide.” Add them to the title of the book (and if the book title is simple or bland, add the author’s name as well) and Google away. If there’s a guide out there, this search string is likely to find it. Other terms like “discussion questions” or ”book group” were much less likely to bring the guides to the top of the hit list.

The most extensive site is http://www.readinggroupguides.com. I couldn’t find a count of all the books that they have guides for, but there are 135 that begin with just the letter “A”. They cover a diverse set of books, feature original discussion questions, and include plenty of other advice for groups. There’s even a blog you might read (after you’re finished here of course). If they don’t have a guide for you, they have some lists of default questions broken up by the book’s genre or type.

The next best bet is http://www.readinggroupchoices.com, a site connected to annual books that collect the same content in print. Their archive includes original questions for over 500 books. The bad news is that the guides at this site don’t make it into search engine results without extreme contortions in your searching. Instead, visit the site itself and search for the title as a second resort if a broader search comes up empty.

BookBrowse, http://www.bookbrowse.com, is a good all-purpose book site that includes a variety of tools, reviews, lists, and other bookish doodads. They have over 500 discussion guides that turn up high on search engine lists. These are not, however, original questions: they’re reprints of materials from the publisher.

Book Movement, http://www.bookmovement.com, has a large archive of books and comes up in search engine results, but the guides here often lack discussion questions. When they do have them, they are publisher retreads. But this site has a large constituency and bears further watching for improvements.

Finally, BookMuse, http://www.bookmuse.com has good original discussion guides, but you must register (free) to access them and they didn’t come up in my experimental searches. The archive here is not large, with only 71 books on this viewing. The new titles here aren’t very new, and this site may be dying out.

There are two other major sources for discussion questions: publisher web sites and online databases. More about those in next week’s blog. Meanwhile, if you know of other large collections of original discussion guides, don’t hesitate to post a comment below.

Here’s a book that begs to be read in August when minds are melting from the heat and readers want something engaging but not too taxing. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Co-authors Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, aunt and niece respectively, have constructed a charming post-World War II epistolary novel that will please fans of the kind of books “they don’t write anymore.”

A book of essays by Charles Lamb finds its way into the hands of one of the Guernsey Islanders. The original owner’s name and address is inside the front cover. Thus begins a warm and humorous correspondence between a resilient, yet war-torn community, and a London war correspondent facing writer’s block.

Little is known about the German occupation of the Island of Guernsey. The authors easily weave the island’s intriguing and turbulent history into the letters of the islanders and create easily recognizable characters with heart. For use in a book discussion, bring along a map of Guernsey. The isolation the islanders faced during wartime is truly remarkable.

This week, to tie in with the Edgar Awards (and, as it happens, with Booklist’s May 1 Mystery Showcase), Reading Group Guides is blogging about crime fiction. So far,  Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire mystery series; Jacqueline Winspear, creator of Maisie Dobbs; and Nancy Martin, author of The Blackbird series, have made appearances as guest bloggers.

Two books have tumbled into my reading path lately, both of which would make great choices for a book club looking for a fast read. Although completely different in many ways, both books feature very English settings and develop a theme of a love for reading. With busy summer months coming up, these might make fun choices for overtaxed book club readers.

Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, at only 120 pages, is slight in size but not ideas. When the Queen (yes, Elizabeth II) stumbles into a bookmobile on the grounds while walking the dogs, she decides out of politeness that she must check something out and read it. One book leads to another and we (both the royal We and those lucky enough to encounter this book) find ourselves in the midst of a delightful account of how passion for reading can change a life. Norman, a kitchen helper who seems to be the only other patron of the bookmobile, finds himself raised unexpectedly to the position of the Queen’s amanuensis, guiding her from book to book.

Perhaps the funniest part of this wise little book is the distress that Elizabeth’s new habit produces in her advisors, the royal family, and even the public, whom she starts to ask about what they are reading. If their answers aren’t good, the Queen gives them whatever she has just finished. In the end, Bennett reminds us of how the reading habit, even if it isn’t common, adds depth to a life and ripples outward, spreading its effects to the world.

 For a more substantial assignment, add one of Bennett’s equally delightful plays, such as The History Boys or The Madness of King George III to the reading list. Another of his short novels, The Clothes They Stood Up In, about a couple whose lives change when they must replace the items stolen in a burglary, would also make a great companion read.

Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel, Alice in Sunderland, will take readers on an entirely different journey, but is also very English and very bookish. Casting himself as a ham actor, a narrating cartoonist, and even as his own boorish audience, Talbot guides us on a tour-de-force trip to Sunderland an its environs in northeast England. The tale uses Lewis Carroll, his Alice books, and their influence on many important readers as its base, but meanders through dozens of fascinating tangents from English history.

Sunderland’s art is a collage of eye-popping styles that fits perfectly with the collage of his writing. He blends book covers, photographs, newspaper recreations, and Alice artwork from William Hogarth and John Tenniel with his own drawings to create a mix that fascinates on every page. By the time you’re finished, you’ll be planning a long trip to England and a quick trip to the local library to pick up copies of the dozens of titles that Talbot touches upon. Longer than the average graphic novel at 319 pages, you’ll still follow the author quickly through the rabbit hole of his tale. If your group would like to dig deeper, pair this with a re-reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a treat for adults who haven’t enjoyed it since childhood.

I just finished a book that would be perfect for any group looking for a short, substantive read.  It’s Dorothy Baker’s lost classic, Cassandra at the Wedding.

Cassandra and Judith Edwards are twins.  They grew up in an eccentric California home where their father, a retired philosophy professor who spends his days filling his glass with Hennessy, and writer mother taught them to be individuals, to think for themselves.  Inseparable for most of their lives, Judith decides to move away for a year to New York and returns with a beau.  Cassandra returns to the family ranch to try and stop her dear sister from breaking up their sisterly union.

Cassandra’s voice is beguiling, sly, and sharp, mirroring her wit and aplomb.  She is so alive, so real.  Her complexity jumps off the page.  And again, that voice–she is so fetching you want her to narrate everything she does, you want her in your head in the morning narrating breakfast.

What this book does is draw you into a family whose dynamics are as fascinating as they are familiar.  It draws you into the minds and the lives of two young women on the cusp of figuring out who they are, who they can be, apart.  It is about identity, heartbreak, acceptance and love.  It is also about a wedding.

This book made me again so happy that New York Review Books is reviving and revisiting books that should never have gone out of print.  They should win awards for this! 

So do your book group a favor, and put Dorothy’s Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding on your summer list.

  This autumn all five thousand members of Seattle’s largest reading group will be tucking into a hair-raising true account of illegal Mexican immigration, Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. If this compelling book doesn’t engage the minds of the University of Washington’s 2008 Freshman Class with its harrowing, heartbreaking picture of our immigration laws, nothing will.

It’s the story of the Yuma 14, the worst loss of life in border crossing history. Seven years ago, twenty-six walkers set out on the Devil’s Highway, became lost in the brutal terrain under conditions of extreme heat, and were abandoned by their guide. Only twelve survived.

Unexpectedly, the book doesn’t begin with the victims – it begins with forty pages about the men who guard the Devil’s Highway, the Border Patrol. It’s a respectful account of the guys everyone hates, men who love their country but sometimes do some pretty repugnant stuff. An illegal is called a “tonk,” the sound of a flashlight cracking over a human skull. A popular Border Patrol joke is to throw a dead rattlesnake into a truck full of captured immigrants and watch them piss themselves with fear. But Urrea shows both sides of everything, including the Border Patrol, who will pay out of their own pockets for a new device to save lives.

Once you know all the mistakes illegals make and all the tricks and technology waiting to catch them, Urrea begins to introduce the reader to the poor trusting wretches who are optimistically undertaking this journey. They come from faraway Veracruz in southern Mexico. They have no idea what lies ahead. They’re coming so they can send money to a mother or a wife back home, or send a child to school, or pay for a new roof. Urrea begins with the bags that hold their remains, what they were wearing when their bodies were found, their belt buckles, their underwear.

This is a very special kind of non-fiction. It’s the facts, all right, but presented with liberties, convincingly brought to life even though the author wasn’t there and never met the survivors. It’s all imaginative re-creation, educated guesswork, exhaustive research and most-likely scenarios, a novelistic bringing-to-life of the taped interviews and records, infusing the men with the feelings and thoughts of characters. At times The Devil’s Highway does a border crossing of its own between non-fiction and historical fiction, incorporating the strengths of both.

The next-to-last chapter includes an exceptionally surreal moment for non-fiction: Urrea takes you into the fourteen body bags being transported to the medical examiner in Tucson, into the minds of the dead men – an artificial technique that might have seemed strained and unnecessary were it not such a heartfelt memorial to each of the men, name by name, what little is known, a profoundly moving elegy to the trusting men who died. Not many writers could have pulled it off. Not many would have dared to try.

Slowly Urrea draws all his threads together, and the hapless band of illegals set out with the young rocker guide called Mendez. In excruciating detail Urrea lets you know what it’s like to die slowly from a merciless sun, and once you know exactly how it will happen, you watch the men start to go through each stage, slowly cooking to death, deceived by their guide, perishing for their dreams, some of them just as the rescuing helicopters finally arrive.

At the center of the spiderweb is the enigmatic Mendez, the nineteen-year-old guide, who is either a criminal cold-bloodedly leaving twenty-six walkers behind to die in the sun, or else a stupid, reckless young lout who won’t admit he doesn’t know where he’s going, whose failed attempt to be a solo guide turns him inadvertently into a mass murderer.

A nineteen-year-old peer for five thousand college freshmen to discuss!

Lest you fail to appreciate the cost of this border drama in tax dollars, Urrea gives you the sobering figures per body, the skyrocketing costs of hospitalization, transport and burial. But he’s got plenty of surprising facts to leave you with as you close the book, not least of which is how much revenue illegal immigrants bring into this country. As one Mexican politician says, “We have inserted twelve million workers into the United States – it is already Mexico! We have won the war!”

The University of Washington’s challenging 2008 Common Book is a thrilling choice, a provocative, humanitarian examination of an ongoing modern tragedy, a perfect tool to engage students with the struggles of the real world and to stir up passionate dialogue about one of the moral crises of our time.

At a recent discussion of Kurt Vonnegut’s acclaimed novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, I learned a useful lesson.  The group was talking about some of the more controversial aspects of the book that led to its being questioned as an appropriate reading choice for students at the local high school, and this prompted a number of teachers and ex-teachers in the circle to begin spinning off into anecdotes of their encounters with would-be censors.  Suddenly, one of the group members raised his hand, and when I nodded in his direction, he quietly asked, “Whatever happened to Kurt?”

That brought me up short.  I realized I’d become so interested in the horror stories the participants were recounting that I’d forgotten my role as the leader and my obligation to keep the group focused on the book we’d gathered to discuss.  Of course, we all laughed and quickly got back to talking about Vonnegut’s work, but what I learned from that slightly embarrassing moment was that I could use that question — appropriately revised — to keep future groups on track. 

And I intend to do just that.  When the need arises to pull the group’s wandering attention back to the book of the evening, I can simply ask, “Whatever happened to Jane?”  or more specifically, “Whatever happened to Ms. Austen?”  They’ll get the idea quickly enough.  It’s a nice little device to have in the discussion leader’s bag of tricks.  Very direct and not at all impolite.  And effective.  I urge you to use it, too.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erda M. Göknar,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001 [original title: Benim Adim Kirmizi].

While we are supposedly reading crime and mystery fiction at my library’s book discussion once a month, I stray a little out of the box when I help the group select our titles for the year.  The book we end up reading often engenders comments like, “I would have never chosen this book to read.”  Yes, even the occasional “who the hell picked this book?”

Last night’s title was My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.  Chances are if a group has selected a title by someone who has been bestowed the Nobel Prize for Literature, the book is not going to be a quick read.  This proved true with this story of 16^th Century Turkish miniaturists who are struggling to maintain the purity of their craft against the influences of the West.  When one of the artisans is murdered, a young diplomat named Black is charged with figuring out which of the three remaining artists committed the murder.   

That outline of the plot is a skeleton frame for a very complex narrative which tells us more about the nature of Islamic thought, the process of making miniatures in Turkey, the nature of art, man’s relationship to God, and man’s relationship to women (and occasionally little boys).   

In case that does not sound daunting enough, each chapter has a distinct narrator who manages to divulge the truths through such dissembling methods as answering questions with a fable or outright lying.  This novel may set some sort of record for unreliable narrators.  And then there are the chapters narrated by a coin, a tree, a dog and the color red.  Oddly, the chapter narrated by Satan may be the funniest part of the book.

Then, what to make of the role of the central female in this book?  One of the most hotly debated questions we answered last night was:  is this book a romance?  Key to the whole story of Black is whether the love of his life is the classic femme fatale so familiar from hard-boiled American crime novels of the 1930s.  

Pamuk may be as interesting as any of his narrators.  Born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1952, he managed to talk his parents into letting him live at home until he was thirty.  This was necessary because he studied journalism and architecture before deciding he would grow up to be a Nobel Prize winning novelist. 

So how did the group like this book?  I was afraid to enter the room last night out of fear that the group would not like this book.  Instead, what I found was that the power of the story held the group’s interest with one understanding:  nobody cared who the murderer was. 

The reason for that is that Pamuk is so adept at showing a society of unfamiliarity to Western readers that shocks, dismays, frustrates and educates us while pulling us through the narrative.  Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from this novel is that no passage of time changes the nature of people.  The same issues that separated East from West in the 1500s is still present in the world today.  Perhaps no one knows this better than Pamuk.  In Turkey, because of his opposition to fundamentalist religion his comments on the Armenian Genocide, and his outspoken criticism of Turkey’s war on the Kurds, he has been criticized by the government and criminal charges were pressed against him.  As is the fate of the storyteller in his novel, Pamuk has learned that satire is still a punishable offense in some places in the world. 

 I love her writing, she’s perfect for book clubs, and no one knows who she really is.

Elena Ferrante is currently a very popular Italian author whose identity remains unknown. Imagine, in this age of celebrity, an author who actually chooses to avoid the celebrity machine, and succeeds! Ferrante lives in Naples, and that’s all anyone knows about her, other than that her swift, elegant novels are intense little bullets of literature, electrifying experiences in which you become trapped in a woman’s mind.

I should know. I’ve just escaped from narrator Leda’s mind in Ferrante’s newest novel, The Lost Daughter. What an experience.

Leda hasn’t been a very good mother, and her two twenty-something daughters have gone to live with their father in Toronto. For the first time in decades Leda is alone again. She rents a summer place and goes to the beach, where she becomes fascinated watching a pretty new mother and her daughter. Their lives converge.

We get a nice jolt of a plot surprise on page 40, and another nice surprise on page 82, and the whole thing wraps on page 125. Which means the neat little novel falls into perfect thirds. Five pages from the end, I had absolutely no idea where the plot was going, only that the two previous shocks appeared to be on a collision course. I’ve just finished the novel. The ending was utterly unexpected and completely satisfying.

It’s Leda’s voice that’s hypnotic, and it’s the writing that makes it that way. Ferrante can do a woman’s interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt. Only a woman could have written this, but don’t expect poetic, sensitive, delicate stuff. This is not that kind of feminine writing. You’re afraid of what she’s going to say next. You’re not sure you want to hear it.

She admits things most people erase from their memories. The many times she loses her patience being a mother. The many times she snaps at her children, or treats someone unfairly. As a man, I can’t imagine how this would read to a mother. Is Leda not cut out to be a mother, or is this what all women go through? She records the numerous miscommunications between mothers and their children with excruciating precision. Maybe it’s her anonymity as a writer that allows Ferrante let go of propriety and admit the dozens of blunders and little unpleasant deeds that litter our lives.

Trapped inside her head, watching how her emotions bump her into making bad decisions and dangerous choices, Ferrante makes you achingly aware of how many illogical, small-minded, counter-productive things you yourself do every day.

It’s like a member of the reading group suddenly taking off all her clothes and telling you candidly what she really did last summer. You feel that someone is trusting you with her inner life, telling you her story because she needs to tell someone, but at the same time you’re not sure if maybe you wouldn’t rather bolt from the room. But now you can discuss her. You’ve all heard her confession. You know everything you need to know.

She has two other slim novels in English translation, The Days of Abandonment and Troubling Love, each of them narrated in first person by a different woman, perhaps all of them simply the voice of Elena Ferrante taking us on a tour of the thrilling, dangerous terrain inside her soul, all three of them in those handsome Europa paperbacks that are such a dang pleasure to read. Next time your reading group is looking for a fresh new voice, I’d take a look at the work of this mysterious, unknown Italian woman who calls herself Elena Ferrante.

I now know the depths of my love for a certain novelist.

This morning on the way to work, NPR did an advance promo for today’s Fresh Air. Special guest Helen Hunt, four-time Emmy winner, Oscar winner and recently turned director, will be discussing her new film. It stars Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick and Colin Firth in addition to Ms. Hunt.

The film? Then She Found Me. I took that moment to harangue Terry Gross via my radio that this movie is based on Elinor Lipman’s first novel and that I wasn’t going to go see it because Ms. Hunt directed it. I’m going to see it because it’s Elinor Lipman!  One of the funniest writers I’ve ever read! I suppose I’ll go for Colin Firth, too.

But, please, Helen, props to Elinor for providing you with such great material! And if you think Then She Found Me is good, you haven’t read The Way Men Act. Favorite scene? The description of the floral delivery. Chapter 29. Do. Not. Miss.

Don’t discuss without me!

Everybody loves Nancy Pearl.  Okay, well, anyone who loves books loves Nancy Pearl.  If I had my way that would be everyone!

Nancy celebrates books in everything that she does.  And she has a masterful way of describing books that makes you want to run right out and buy, borrow or steal anything she just raved about.  From her librarian action figure doll to her books, Book Lust and Book Crush, she is the ultimate cheerleader for the written word.

But I wanted to alert all of the book-lovers out there to Nancy’s weekly book reviews on local NPR.  You can even subscribe to her weekly reviews and get them e-mailed to you, or listen to the podcasts.

Let Nancy choose your group’s next book!

Libraries need to recognize book group readers as one of their core audiences, a population that deserves “extra-mile” service. Here’s my list of 25 ways that a library can support book groups. How many of these are available at your local library?

1. Organize groups, provide staff leaders for those groups, or train community volunteers to lead the groups.
2. Provide book databases and training in how to use these databases to prepare discussion materials.
3. Collect discussion materials for groups on demand–reviews, author biographies, and other related material.
4. Link to web sites that support book groups prominently on the library web site.
5. Offer meeting rooms in the library for book group use. Consider designing at least one meeting space specifically to be inviting to groups (comfortable chairs in a circle, allow refreshments, etc.)
6. Develop a handout with advice for successful book group practice that you can distribute to local groups.
7. Build a directory of local book groups with contact information, subject specialties, meeting dates and frequency, membership limitations, past reading lists, and an indication of whether the group is willing to consider new members.
8. Promote new groups in a centralized location. Provide a matchmaking service to help new readers find appropriate groups and groups find new readers.
9. Circulate book group bags or kits: collections of 10 to 15 copies of a title with discussion materials that can be checked out for two months for use by book groups.
10. Offer staff members as guest leaders for various reading specialties.
11. Design plenty of book lists and bookmarks on different reading themes and encourage book groups to take copies and distribute them to their members.
12. Compile and distribute  list of books in the collection that contain discussion questions; Make this notation part of the online catalog.
13. Become aware of book group picks from Oprah, Book Sense, and other major media outlets. Make sure that enough copies of these books are available to support groups.
14. Conduct a training day with advice on how to lead a discussion, how to select titles, how to add a touch of fun or creativity, and how to advertise your group.
15. Build “reading maps” or readalike lists for popular book group titles.
16. Devote a display space to books about book groups and good books for discussion at least one month every year.
17. Organize a day of book talks about good book group selections. Invite book group members to participate, not just listen.
18. Take special notice of subject or reading interests that are popular in your community. Design book groups to fit these interests or create book lists in these subjects and distribute them to existing groups.
19. Collect lists of links to websites that would enhance the discussion of various popular book group titles.
20. Provide readers’ advisory for groups: Given a list of what the group has discussed and enjoyed (or not enjoyed) in the past, a librarian would provide a list of other suggested titles.
21. Ask book groups to notify the library of upcoming titles. The library can then buy new or extra copies of these titles as appropriate.
22. Compile a list of local establishments and locations that are “book group friendly”: good places for groups to meet.
23. Invite a successful local book group to design and select titles for a library display.
24. Schedule one-on-one or small group consultations with local group leaders to discuss methods, provide advice, or just exchange information about the library and the group.
25. Encourage librarians and book group leaders to read Book Group Buzz!

Libraries can potentially do much more to support groups. If you’re a librarian, considering adding one or two of the practices from this list to your repertoire. If you are in a book group, talk to your local library about which of these services they can support.

Please add your own comments about any service methods for book groups that I might have missed!

They are a boisterous and creative lot at the joint Oregon/Washington Library Association conference. Last Thursday I presented a sesssion called “Book Group CPR: Breathe New Life into Your Discussion Group.” I thought I wouldn’t have enough material to give the audience and it turns out, they had plenty of material to share with me! Handouts for the progam will be uploaded here.

After a discussion on the pros and cons of themed book groups (a topic I willl address in greater depth in a later post unless someone’s beaten me to it), we brainstormed ways to dress up an existing book group’s meeting and chat about Luncheon of the Boating Party.

I have mentioned Susan Vreeland’s latest novel before in this blog. I think it will become a book group staple. A member of the audience asked about this particular book and wanted it to be the focus of the exercise, “because my group is doing it next week and I don’t have anything planned.”

I tossed the title and query out to the audience and they did not disappoint. They started right in on the food.  Suggested servings included wine (!), grapes, bread, cheese, French pastries and “a spread that looks like the one in the painting.”

Then the audience started to have fun with the concept. Some of the ideas bandied about were: Everyone wear a hat. Bring in a costume historian to discuss the dress of all the models in the painting. Have the book group attendees reenact the various models’ poses and hold it for five minutes. Play music of the time. Bring in all those over-size Impressionist painting books and check them out to attendees. Ask someone to pronounce all the French phrases and words in the novel and provide definitions or American slang equivalents for some of the expletives. Someone shouted for a can-can demonstration.

Sorry, folks. I left my ruffled bloomers in Kansas City.

Arlington Heights, Illinois, the community where I live and lead book discussions, has never conducted a “One Book, One City” reading program.  However, the public library does participate in a regional program organized by The Daily Herald, the newspaper that serves Arlington Heights and the surrounding towns.  It’s called “Suburban Mosaic,” and focuses on books that promote diversity.  Every year a new book is selected for adults to read and talk about, and there are also titles chosen for young adults and children.  Library staff members have provided input into the selection process, along with teachers, clergy, and representatives from the newspaper.  The books are widely promoted, and discussions are held in libraries, schools, churches and coffeeshops — so it’s the same idea as the “One Book, One City” model, except for the use of a continuing theme and wider coverage than just one town.  In past years, the adult readers have read and discussed The Kite Runner, The House on Mango Street, Dreams from My Father, and Enrique’s Journey.  

I’ve just learned that next year’s choice for the adult discussion groups is Digging to America, by Anne Tyler, and I’m very excited by this news.  To me, Anne Tyler is the ideal author for a satisfying book discussion.  Over the years, I’ve used many of her books with my groups, both at the library and in workshops illustrating how to lead effective discussions. So I’m definitely looking forward to talking about Digging to America.  In describing this book, Tara Gallagher of The Wall Street Journal states that Tyler has “a reputation as a master of the fine threads of human relationships,” which I think is the perfect way of summarizing the qualities that make her books so fascinating to read and talk about.

Digging to America centers on two families who become intertwined when they meet at the Baltimore airport on the evening both have come to pick up the Korean girls they are adopting.  One family has deep American roots, while the other has an Iranian background, although the adopting couple is fully assimilated to America.  Over the subsequent years, Tyler explores the closeness — and the tension — that develops between the two couples, their children, and their relatives.   This is her 17th novel, and it’s subtle and assured, as her fans would expect, but new readers can’t help but be drawn to this absorbing story of what it means to be an American, worked out on several different levels.  If you’re interested in looking at complex characters caught in a clash of cultures, please consider adding Digging to America to your list of titles for future discussions.

I have failed to get my whole community behind a book.  Our efforts are definitely more one library, one read than the alternative.  However, knowing that we are too small to pull this off does not keep us from doing one spring and one fall session called Greendale Reads.

Well, this time around we were able to renew our partnership with the City of Milwaukee Public Library, a great partner for a community wide effort.  It works even better when the City employees do all the work for me.

Dawn Lauber and her cohorts applied for a National Endowment for the Arts grant called The Big Read.  A committee selected the title Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.  I will admit that I was unfamiliar with Hurston other than the fact that we own the Library of America collection of her works. 

The Big Read makes it very easy to feel good about a title.  They provide massive amounts of publicity including posters, reader’s guides and informational CDs.  The graphics are eye popping and make reading look like it is fun.

So, with anticipation, I picked up the book to dive right in.

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”

Why has no one ever told me that Zora Neale Hurston has written one of the greatest opening lines in literary history?

I was hooked from the first words.  Now I will grant that any reader may be challenged by the use of dialect in the novel.  However, if you are swept up in the novel like I was, it becomes like a dance.  There is a rhythm to the dialogue that pulls the reader along, pacing the reader’s heart to the intent of the passages.  

The journey of Janie, both physically and spiritually, is one fine read.  Due to the timing of The Big Read, Greendale’s book discussion was the caboose of the grant, coming home a distant two to three weeks after the end of Milwaukee’s portion.

Although I did none of the work, I would encourage you to apply for a Big Read grant.  It works.  Last night, we had 25 people join Dr. Edwin Block from Marquette University in a discussion of this fine work.  Even more exciting for us was that six of the people who attended were from the City of Milwaukee Riverside High School, studying the book as a part of their coursework.

That is one city, one book enough for me.  

A couple of lists of top books for book discussions have popped up recently.

This list of the top ten book group choices in 2007 was posted on Reading Group Choices. It was selected with the help of book group leaders representing more than 50,000 book group members.

1. Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen

2. The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

3. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

4. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

5. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards

6. TIE: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert; and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

7. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

8. Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

9. The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

10. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

All of the books on the Reading Group Choices list are familiar and you may have already discussed them in your group. If you’re looking for something different, Kristen at Book Club Classics posted this list of the books that readers of Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust thought created the best discussions.

The Boy on the Bus by Deborah Schupack

Heart, You Bully, You Punk by Leah Hager Cohen

The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy

Spilling Clarence and The Disapparation of James by Anne Ursu

The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer