Here’s a treat for Jane Austen lovers. Beginning in January, Masterpiece (formerly known as Masterpiece Theatre) will be airing The Complete Jane Austen,  dramatizations of all six Austen novels. Two of the adaptations we’ve seen before (one is the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice with a smoldering Colin Firth; the other is the version of Emma starring Kate Beckinsale). But the other four–Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Sense and Sensibility–are new.

The Masterpiece Book and Film Club will have “everything you need to organize an Austen book club or session,” including discussion guides, Q&A with screenwriter Andrew Davies, recipes, and more. 

These days most publishers include discussion questions for a lot of their books.  You can find them either on their web sites or printed at the back of books.  But what do you do when your web searching has come up with nothing and you have no time to make up questions of your own?  Don’t panic—help is out there. 

I know it was mentioned in a previous post, but I just have to tell you that ReadingGroupGuides.com is an awesome site.  They offer discussion guides for a variety of books and are a great place to go if you come up empty elsewhere.  And they’ve thought of everything—even for those times when you’ve got nothing.  Check out their “What to Do When There’s No Guide Available” page for good general conversation starters for a variety of genres (fiction and non-fiction).

My book group relies on the Washington Center for the Book’s Book Group Collection for our books each month.  This way group members don’t have to buy the book or get on a hold queue.  It’s a great list and a great service, no doubt about it.  But hundreds of other Seattle-area book groups are vying for the same titles, and the new and popular titles are booked a year out.   

So my group was very excited to be reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love.  The day that we discussed it, the author was on Oprah again no less. How on top of it were we! 

As thrilled as I was to be discussing such a popular book, I wasn’t sure how discussable it would be.  But it turned out to be one of our best discussions in some time.  There was a lot to talk about and everyone’s contributions were thoughtful and considerate.  (There is nothing worse than having the smooth out an ego-contest of the “I can’t believe that you liked this book” variety, or any other such personal attack.) 

The author’s potentially controversial views about God were not of issue in my group. Many readers appreciated how up front the author was about her views.  Of course, some of the conversation came around to whether a reader liked or disliked the author (this always happens with memoirs—well, and for characters in fiction, too), but from there a number of other topics grew.   

One reader said that when she read about the author’s spiritual retreat in
India, it calmed her down.  She found herself walking slower, breathing differently; she found peace in the author’s search for peace.  Other readers expressed that some of their troubles with the book and the author might be generational which provoked some discussion about women today as well as the memoir form (was the author self-indulgent, etc., etc.).  

A topic I would have liked to delve into more deeply was why this particular book is so popular right now.  The Oprah program that aired later that day was one in which readers whose lives had been positively effected by the book shared their stories.  It would have been interesting to discuss the book in that context.  Why does a certain book capture the popular imagination?  No doubt Oprah holds a huge sway.  But what else?  Why this book and not another?  Discuss!

Monthly attendance at my book group had dropped to two or three members. I was bussing back to the bookstore on book group night hoping someone would show up. I was ready to throw in the towel and consider that a five-year group had run its cycle and reached a dead end. Yesterday, however, when I sent out an email announcing our final meeting of the year, I received ten reservations. What changed?

At the University Book Store in Seattle, our monthly book group meets in what’s called the conference room. It’s a long, narrow room with most of the space taken up by a boardroom table. With blackboards and easels for product demonstrations, the meeting room is lined with black chairs where managers sit to agonize over budgets. It’s removed from the rest of the bookstore, around a balcony hallway and down beyond the managerial offices where no customer would dare to tread. Though originally it seemed delightful to have our own place for monthly meetings, I’m seeing it now as a liability.

When I’m through with work, I want to go home and relax. I want to read. I want to enjoy my cat’s company. If I’m going to ask people to leave their comfortable homes and give up a chunk of their evening to talk about books, the locale needs to be a spot where people are happy to be. I get so caught up in nudging along the conversation with questions and thinking about all the various aspects of the book under discussion that I forget the effect of the location.

I cancelled the November meeting. I was ready to cancel the December one, too. Fortunately I was persuaded by a couple stalwart members to have a holiday get-together somewhere else. So this is what I tried: I announced that our final meeting of the year would be in Casa d’Italia, a delightful little neighborhood restaurant that’s right across the street from my home. Inside it’s like a crowded little Italian market. Out back is a sheltered patio in a grape arbor with big heaters. The food is to die for. Every night your waiter rattles off a blackboard full of mouthwatering specials. But there’s also soup of the day. And their awesome hero sandwiches.

 And so Thursday evening, December 27, I will be ordering myself a hot meatball parmigiana “hero” sandwich and a glass of wine and enjoying the discussion of my favorite book of the year, Mario Vargas Llosa’s THE BAD GIRL, with ten book-loving friends. I can hardly wait. There’s something to be learned from this…

In a previous life, I taught the Great Literatures to ungrateful, deadline-ignoring, homesick freshmen and sophomores. I loved encouraging them wrap their brains around the many meanings of the rose in “A Rose for Emily.” All that short story/play/poetry explication and analysis in my academic past paid off big time in my librarian future.

Until I learned otherwise, I ran my reading groups the way I ran my Lit 101 classes, constantly asking the readers what they thought objects, places, or names meant. Most readers liked the thoughtful examination of a story’s elements, still others told me to “lighten up.”

What I did instead was look for less scholarly ways to discuss the more meaningful parts of a selection. Which leads me to my absolute favorite reading group reference, How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster.

Foster employs an ebullient and educated tone to his literary criticism and will actually bring forth laughter in the chapter on vampires.

Readers who groan whenever a facilitator wants to discuss the hidden meanings in a literary work, whether it’s Plath, Morrison, Hemingway or Picoult, will find looking for the “clues” to the story much more enjoyable with a little guidance from Foster and improve their own powers of reading observation as well.

New York Times:

Publisher Seek to Mine Circles

Book clubs? Reading groups? Whatever you call them, they’re becoming an important part of the publishing world. Book groups can turn a book into a bestseller, and publishers are  turning to these groups to help create buzz.   

Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster is a book that’s spread like wildfire among my work group. Most everyone I know has also been reading Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs which depicts down-at-heel, small-town life. But Russo’s book is more like a doorstop, whereas this one, at 146 pages, is more like a love letter—I’m just talking size, here. And while it’s slim in size, it is anything but slight.

Last Night at the Lobster takes place in one day at a Red Lobster in New Britain, Connecticut in its last day of operation; it will be closing its doors due to mediocre sales. The manager, Manny DeLeon, takes great pride in his restaurant and his team, and is taking his better workers with him to the Olive Garden. But since so many of his co-workers are losing their jobs, and because there’s a winter storm brewing, Manny’s got a skeleton crew to make it through an unpredictable day.

There is a quiet dignity to Manny, to the reverence and nostalgia that he brings to his every action and decision. For Manny this ordinary day is momentous. So much of his life has played out here among this ragtag bunch who have become like an extended family to him. And then there’s Jacquie, the waitress with whom he had an affair, the one who still haunts his thoughts, even though his girlfriend, Deena, is pregnant with his child.

Reading this book is like looking into a snow globe. The snow swirls, revealing brief glimpses of the lives within, only to be engulfed by the snow once again.

If your group is looking for a slim, thought-provoking book—a little palate cleanser—than I would definitely recommend trying O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster. And to drag out the metaphor—you can make quite a memorable meal by pairing O’Nan’s book with Russo’s Bridge of Sighs. Call it the blue-collar special.

There are two things Librarians don’t do on the job. The first is read. Sorry. Gotta dispel that myth right now. And if you still believe that one, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn tucked in the side pocket of my overcoat to sell you.

The second thing Librarians don’t do is take a lunch. Unless we are forced to leave the building in search of the fabled two-martini repast because there are only so many ways we can fix the printers, Internet and fines.

All this is a ’round about way of saying how I spent my “eating work time” in front of the computer sussing out a new website devoted to book groups and the readers who love them.

LitLovers is a one-woman bandwidth of all sorts of great book group related stuff in one place. To be honest, there’s not much on the site that the experienced web trawler hasn’t seen before on reading groups. There’s the usual material: book reviews cobbled from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, yours truly, and other sources; reading guides with discussion topics that have been lightly reworked from other sites; some book group basics such as how to facilitate wisely and well, how to select books and how to get the conversational ball rolling.

The section of the site I valued most was LitCourse. Ten easy lessons on literature and how to read it for maximum value with an eye towards discussing. Each lesson takes about ten minutes to read completely and a “student” needn’t read the recommended novel or short story to understand the point of each mini-course. There is also information on starting and maintaining children’s and teens’ book clubs.

LitLovers has been up and running since October of 2007. It’s easy to navigate and the text style is chatty and welcoming and substantive. And if you don’t want to talk about it, then shop about it at LitShop.

I’ve had a rollicking good time with Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel, The Bad Girl. There’s something about this spirited, beautiful life-wrecker (whatever her real name is) with her spellbinding sexiness and heart of ice and the poor doomed narrator who’s so hopelessly in love with her that strikes a chord of recognition in me. I know the attraction here. This sexy, literate novel frequently causes me to erupt into laughter remembering my own follies.

But how will women take to the bad girl?

A book club could have a really good time with this one. First of all, it’s an opportunity to encounter one of the major living writers of our time in a new novel that’s just plain fun to read. Vargas Llosa’s most famous novels can be politically dense and intimidating, except for maybe Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter or Who Killed Palomino Molero? His new book is so darn entertaining it’s going to make him many new fans. He’s been called the poor man’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and that’s unfair. He has his own strengths, and readers will certainly care a lot more about the bad girl and the good boy than they have cared about any character in a novel by Garcia Marquez.

Then there’s the plot, which zips along, lunging unexpectedly from country to country – France, Cuba, Japan – and leaping forward in years. The characters are so well drawn they’re easy to remember (the fat cook revolutionary, the adopted Vietnamese boy who won’t speak, the old breakwater-builder who communes with the ocean). And then there are the sex scenes, appropriately hot and refreshingly real.

Those are the side dishes. The main course, the primary discussion topic, is the bad girl. What a topic she is. What a character. She’ll divide the room. Assuming most clubs are comprised of mature women, I suspect the bad girl will meet with a much more critical response than she gets from Ricardo Somocurcio, the hapless “good boy” in love with her, or from her creator Vargas Llosa, or from any male reader, or from me. But then comes the second half of the book, and the reader’s whole sense of her as a human being deepens. As women readers understand more and more of the reasons behind her behavior, I think many will find themselves opening up their hearts to her. And yet some will suspect her of lying and opportunism right up to the end.

Characters like the bad girl are ideal for book club discussion because they’re aggressive, offensive rule-breakers who are still multi-faceted enough to resist easy moral judgments. Book discussions thrive on evaluating a complex character’s behavior. Was a particular action genuine or contrived, charitable or self-serving? The more room there is for alternate viewpoints, the richer the conversation.

Okay, I must have memoirs on the brain. But the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s powerful graphic novel memoir (or “graphic memoir”—a more apt term must exist or be created) is coming out shortly and is already generating critical acclaim.

In 2006, The Seattle Public Library chose Persepolis (1 & 2) as our “Seattle Reads” book. The entire city was invited to meet the author and engage in community discussions about the book and its themes. I facilitated several community discussions and was thrilled to see how readers took to Satrapi’s work. For many, it was their first exposure to the graphic novel format. It is such a dynamic book that I left most discussions buzzing with all of the things we didn’t get a chance to talk about. Sometimes an hour is just not enough!

If your group has never tried a graphic novel, put Persepolis on your list for 2008. Better yet, take your group to see the film afterwards! And check out the fantastic Reading Group Toolbox created by the Washington Center for the Book for discussion questions, author information and more. For extra fun, your group can also check out our Podcast!

It can be hard to find discussion guides for children’s books on the web.  With more and more parents taking on the leading of children’s book groups or parent/child book clubs, there is an increasing desire for discussion guides for kids’ books.  Luckily, librarians, publishers and booklovers are making more guides available online.

Here are some of the resources I’ve encountered or used to help brave parent book leaders find discussion questions for children’s books for their clubs.

Multnomah County Library  - Book discussion guides for books selected by librarians to work as group discussion books.  I see titles that would work with 4^th – 10^th graders. http://www.multcolib.org/talk/guides.htmlAlso, this library created a list of universal questions to ask on any book (in case questions aren’t available for the title you wish to discuss). http://www.multcolib.org/talk/universalquestions.html

Hennepin County Library - Book discussion guides for books selected by librarians to work as group discussion books.  This is a smaller list than Multnomah with titles ranging in appeal from 3^rd to 8^th grade level. http://www.hclib.org/pub/bookspace/BookListAction.cfm?list_num=468KidsReads.com - Part of The Book Report Network, a commercial group of websites that share book reviews, author profiles and interviews, excerpts of new releases, literary games and contests.  Twenty or so discussion guides to children’s books suited for grades 4^th – 8^th.  These guides are longer and include page numbers for sections to discuss. http://www.kidsreads.com/clubs/

Random House - Publisher Guides. Book discussion guides are organized by grade level with many lower grade level titles which can be hard to find.  This resource has more titles covered than the others.  The guides are designed with teachers in mind and so include curriculum connections along with the discussion questions. http://www.randomhouse.com/teachers/guides/grade/

Scholastic - Publisher Guides. Book discussion guides for both popular and award winning titles from this publisher.  The site includes a guide to the Bone graphic novels and the early Harry Potter books. http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/tradebooks/discussionguides.htm

Powell’s Bookstore - Bookmuse Kids’ Corner. You need to create a username and password to use this resource created by a large online bookstore, but it does have guides to picture books and primary grade level books which can be hard to find (kindergarten to 3^rd grade).  You can browse their guides by grade level which is a plus. http://www.bookmuse.com/pages/notes/kidscorner.asp

The Literary Link - Designed as a resource for teachers, this website features longer discussion guides for books ranging from 5^th grade to teen appeal. http://theliterarylink.com/questions_otherbooks.html

On Thursday, I promised the title of the book all the NEFLINers said was a successful book group read.

Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by James Bradley spurred plenty of heated debate for a few of northeast Florida’s library-sponsored reading circles.  Bradley is also the author of another book group favorite, Flags of Our Fathers. This gruesome WWII story of nine Navy and Marine pilots who were captured by the Japanese during the waning days of the war generated plenty of chat about cultural differences; honor during wartime; and class differences among enlisted men for the Florida readers.

Katrina also noted that this book brought in some new readers to a book group, particularly men, and suggested that the next time any of the Library’s book groups chose a book focusing on the United States at war, a publicity blitz be aimed at the VFW halls in town.

Smart thinking, Kat. Thanks for the idea.  

A brilliantly funny new political novel is the Mexican mystery, The Uncomfortable Dead – but I would have misunderstood it, considered it flawed by an odd surrealism, and possibly even accused it of (gulp!) magical realism, without the explanation provided by a book club member.

The novel is written by two authors in alternating chapters. One author is the popular Mexican mystery writer, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, whose cigarette-smoking, Coke-draining detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne appears in several previous novels and operates out of Mexico City.

The hilarious part of The Uncomfortable Dead is the other half of the chapters, told by sixty-year-old country yokel investigator from the mountains of Chiapas, Elias Contreras, who has been assigned to go to that confusing place, Mexico City, where they do things differently. These satirical chapters are the work of the second author, the real-life revolutionary leader of the Zapatistas, Subcomandante Marcos, the intellectual who led the indigenous insurgency movement, whose face has never been seen without a ski mask. And this guy is a brilliant writer, cleverly literate and wildly funny.

My only problem with the novel was the way some of the characters, including Elias, referred to themselves as dead. I didn’t understand why dead characters were walking around acting like living characters. It added a non-realistic flavor to some of the dialogue, and at first it annoyed me, and then I ignored it.

Enter book club member Sheri Lockwood, a University of Washington employee, who suddenly flipped the light switch that explained it all. In real life, when the peasants joined the Zapatista movement, they automatically began referring to themselves as “dead” from that moment on, assuming it was just a matter of time before they were killed. Not a surrealistic touch, at all, but grimly realistic dialogue I hadn’t understood.

We read the same mystery novel in the International Book Club, a campus-based University of Washington group focused on international students. That afternoon a woman attended who’d never been with us before, who had actually experienced the Zapatistas first hand on a recent vacation. She and her family had been driving through Chiapas, Mexico, when they noticed that all the cars up ahead were being flagged over to the side of the road by peasants. They found themselves in the hands of the revolutionaries. Instead of being tortured and shot, they were seated at picnic tables, generously fed and entertained, and then sent on their way.

The same kind of infectious Zapatista good nature infuses the funny Elias chapters, in a book that was made more meaningful with the kind of enrichment provided by two good book clubs.

Finding discussable memoirs and biographies for your book group can be a challenge. They pose all kinds of problems.  The quality of the writing, how a group feels about an individual, and how well a biographer deals with the historical details and source material all come into play.  And again, the aim is to find discussable books—books that have provocative content, subtleties in theme or execution.  Being that my group has focused primarily on fiction over the years, a book group that focuses on memoir and biography might have a different perspective.  But I think that no book quite fails or “klunks,” as I like to say, than a bad biography. 

Let me share some good, bad and middling.  A couple of years ago, before he became a Presidential candidate, my group discussed Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from my Father.  Obama is a remarkably good writer, and he doesn’t over-tell so there was a lot to talk about.  As is often the case, a group member’s personal experiences were enlightening to the discussion.  She had also lived in Hawaii and when she had first heard about the school that Obama had gone to there, she had assumed he was one of the haughty rich types on the island that always lorded it over everyone else.  When she learned that he had grown up poor and what it had taken to get him into that school, her perspective changed.  The mention of that school, which meant nothing to me when I read the book, took on a new dimension.  Some parts of his memoir were more compelling than others, but overall it went over well .   

One biography that I think partially klunked was Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia by Janet Wallach.  Gertrude Bell was a fascinating woman whose work in the Middle East is legendary.  But the book itself was a bit dry.  It didn’t bring the history or the woman to life as fully as it could have.  In turn, the discussion was a bit hampered by the limitations of the book. 

 I facilitated a discussion for a colleague’s book group while she was on vacation for a biography that I really love: The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Sisters by Mary S. Lovell.  I am absolutely enthralled by the stories of the Mitfords; I find them alluring and fascinating, so I thought that this book would be a sure-fire win.  No dice.  Surprisingly, most of the group didn’t understand what the fuss was about them.  Inexplicably, the compelling political and social issues of their time did not make for great discussion.  It was a sore disappointment.  Of course, maybe it could have been my facilitation.  Don’t all group leaders worry about that?

On Tuesday I had the distinct pleasure to spend a day in the company of some of NEFLIN’s (North East Florida Library Information Network) most convivial and dedicated librarians. We had gathered for a workshop called Common Grounds: Book Groups for New and Experienced Readers & Leaders. Whenever I lead a workshop on this topic, I walk away with more good ideas for my own book groups than I think I present. I also get at least five books to use for discussions. I will post more about one of those on Friday.

But for now, I just had to share one of the best ideas to come out of the workshop from one of the attendees, Jackie. She was wondering why more readers weren’t on a first name basis with her favorite author, Joanne Harris. Jackie wanted to do one of Joanne’s books with her book club, but felt that the best choice for the group, Chocolat, wasn’t really the best of the author’s works (Jackie’s favorite is Five Quarters of the Orange).

The workshop participants eagerly tackled this quandary. One person suggested that Jackie assign the author to the entire book group and give all members a handout of Harris’ works with annotations. Readers would select from the list the title they found most appealing and then all would attend the book group meeting to promote their chosen novel. Jackie could concentrate on doing some biographical research on Harris, gathering some photos, possibly emailing the author for some comments for the group and collecting reviews of all the novels for the group to share.

Then another workshop participant jumped in with, “Since most of Harris’ novels take place in France, you should bring in a map and put thumbtacks for each novel’s location!” “And photos of the places!” chimed in another participant, “Especially of post-WWII France.” Linda proposed bringing in a film clip of Chocolat to whet reader appetites for that particular novel and Todd took the idea further by suggesting bringing in some books or articles on the lives of the ’canal gypsies’.

Another participant thought that some French food might make a tasty contribution and it was a gimme that chocolate and oranges would be on the menu as well. Someone mused aloud that chocolate should always be offered at book group. Other contributions to turn this book group meeting into a Book Lovers event included playing French folk music; handouts with all the titles, short descriptions and possible discussion topics for each book and a couple of nonfiction titles on the French countryside, French history and French culture.

The brainstorming session ended with Jackie furiously scribbling every idea into her notes and then grinning when one of the other librarians said, “If you turn that into a program, I want you to come to my library to do it!”

I’m on it, NEFLINers.

Here are a few Web sites that offer support for people interested in starting a book club, or keeping one going. 

Book Clubs Resource.com has information on running a book club, as well as links to reading guides and other resources.

Reading Group Choices recommends discussible books, and also has author interviews and book club tips. Every year it publishes a printed guide called “Reading Group Choices.”

Reading Group Guides bills itself as “the online community for reading groups” and provides guides that include discussion questions, author biographies, excerpts, and more. The guides can be searched by a number of categories, including Most Requested. There are also tips for starting and running a book club. Reading groups can register on the site by creating a profile.

If we were divine beings and knew how to read books perfectly, we wouldn’t need to talk about them. Unfortunately we’re far from divine readers. We have short attention spans. We have limited knowledge. We’re easily distracted. We miss details. And sometimes we miss the whole point. Occasionally half a dozen smart, committed readers banding together into a book group can correct that. Here’s a perfect example:

I loved every story in Vincent Lam’s new Giller Prize-winning collection of stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, but I hated the last one. The book is a well-written collection of linked stories following four idealistic young medical students as they become doctors and cross paths professionally and romantically. Each of the stories is morally complex. There’s a passionate youthful idealism just under the surface.

Then comes the last story: an inexplicably negative chain of vignettes composing the frustrating, rage-filled day of a hair-trigger, whining, overworked doctor on the night shift. The doctor is grumpy, self-pitying and mean-spirited. In my review of the book, I said the last story should not have been included. When I met Vincent Lam at the annual bookseller tradeshow in September, I shook his hand and congratulated him on the brilliance of the collection.

I said nothing about what we both knew was my issue: the last story.

Then came the University Book Store’s monthly book club meeting in Seattle’s University District. One of my favorite members attended, Mary Owen, a doctor of internal medicine at Harborview.  She felt entirely differently.

In a later email, Mary summarized her response by saying: “I actually thought the last story was the best and the most real. It’s the ultimate and very real burnout that almost every doc is feeling these days. Road rage, disinterest in a patient’s concerns (the lady with the rash), willingness to lie or stretch the truth to get a patient to participate in some study or other (the rollerblader with chest pain who finally agrees to take the thrombolytic therapy). Notice, they aren’t even people. The bradycardic is in the AMR, another bradycardic is being brought in on a stretcher. The patients and doctors have become robots in a tedious, exhausting dance. Ouch! That last story should be incorporated into every medical school curriculum!”

And I had considered it the flaw in the collection.