I’m at ALA and we’re talking about memorable book group books. My favorite book group story is an old one, about ten years old now. The first nonfiction book I used in a book group was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

For three weeks I heard from over 15 readers opinions ranging from, “I HATE this book! It’s not going anywhere!” to “I LOVE this book. I don’t want it to end!”

No one was in the middle regarding MITGOG&E. I anticipated a discussion complete with sabres and cannons and readers dressed in either Yankee blue or Rebel grey. I knew the exchanges would be heated that evening. However, no matter what anyone said about the book, I encouraged each reader to attend.

On the night the book group was to meet, I brought the usual accoutrements with me: discussion topics, coffee, banana bread, and masking tape. I took the masking tape and laid down a line that divided the room equally into two parts.  As each participant entered the room I pointed to the two areas and explained. “This is the Mason-Dixon line. If you didn’t like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, go sit on that side. That’s the North. If you liked Midnight in the Garden, then sit on this side, it’s the South.”

This may seem rather silly, but it helped dispel some of the strong feelings running wild in the room that night. Everyone also received a rather comical picture of how disparate their opinions could be, but assurance that it’s perfectly acceptable to love/hate a book and discuss it with someone holding a completely opposite opinion.

Say this is your first reading group. You’ve got five committed friends, but don’t know what to read. The health of a reading group lies in its choices. Not all good books spark a good discussion.

How do you decide what to read together? In many clubs, members take turns choosing the titles. If it’s a gathering of real book lovers, this can be a stimulating exchange, turning each other on to your favorite experiences. But it’s a serious problem if members are unfamiliar with books, if they’re selecting in the dark. Choosing from bestseller lists can be disastrous. Some delightful books have absolutely nothing to discuss. Finding the right book as a conversation piece is different from choosing a book for personal enjoyment. Democratic choosing of titles has killed many a club.

Genre books are frequently not the best choices. That doesn’t mean they don’t provide excellent entertainment. It just means that all-too-often there’s nothing much to talk about except the genre itself. Simply a good story – say, a good mystery, a courtroom drama, a fantasy epic or an edge-of-your-seat thriller – can give you wonderful hours of reading pleasure and about fifteen minutes worth of conversation.

For the best discussions to occur, there needs to be some issue that’s ambiguous, some value that’s debatable, some character whose behavior is controversial. Something on which readers can differ in their opinions. Some issue that causes a revelation of personal values.

Try this: choose one member to be the selector for a couple months. Make it someone who will happily take plenty of time to be familiar with the best titles, someone bold enough to get ideas from booksellers and librarians. In the book club at University Book Store in Seattle, I choose the monthly title. Our club’s angle is the best new title of the month from around the world. I read as many advances as I can. I try to find the best reading experiences that are also discussable. The minute you have at least two sides to an opinion, a spark ignites the group. One smart woman thinks Gilead is boring, religious nonsense. Two sensible readers think the hero of The Bad Girl is a fool. Two readers don’t believe Russell Banks’ narrator in The Darling is a realistic woman. That’s all it takes to trigger a great conversation.

 When a book works, the clash of opposing opinions causes everyone’s concept of the book to deepen and change. That’s why you participate in a good reading group, to share personal responses to a provocative reading experience.

We are in what has been called by some a golden age in the publishing of books for teens.  It turns out many of these books are simply great reads and coming of age stories for adults and teens alike  When a book club has a month when many readers are too busy for a long read, I think turning to teen fiction for shorter, faster reads is a great idea.  For my group, this need for shorter fiction happens in December and in the summer months.

The last post mentioned looking at Booklist Editors’ Choice Awards - why not check out the editor’s choice awards for Youth? Booklist Editors’ Choice for Youth

Under the “Older Readers” section you’ll find a stunning biography wartorn Pakistan, a book about Annie Sullivan’s first experiences with Helen Keller, a book about a teen girl with a terminal disease struggling to cram in a life time of experience into a brief window,  a book about a girl on the homefront during the Civil War, and Nick Hornby’s first book written for teens about a skater whose girlfriend is pregnant.  There’s a broad range of reading appeals and voices to be found in teen fiction.  These books often get groups talking about their own coming of age experiences. 

Booklist’s Editors’ Choice 2007 fiction list offers a bounty of choices for your book group discussions. Several are titles everyone else is buzzing about, and others are less well-known gems.  To help start your discussion of  some of the Editors’ Choice selections, here are links to reading guides,  author interviews, and other resources.

The Big Girls by Susanna Moore. Author interview.

 Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo. Reader’s guide.

 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Author interview.

 Divisadero by Michale Ondaatje. Reader’s guide. 

 A Free Life by Ha Jin.  Audio interview.

 The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander. Reader’s guide. Author interview. You Tube video. Video interview.

 Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones. Reader’s guide

New England White by Stephen L. Carter. Reader’s guide. Author interview. 

 Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital. Reading guide.

 A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Reading guide. Podcast. YouTube video.

 Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. Slate book club discussion.

Recently, I have started to notice and appreciate a new kind of narrator, one I will call “the royal we.” By this I mean novels narrated by a group. Nancy Pearl made note of this in More Book Lust in her section on “Voice.” A couple of notable examples of this are Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End.

The royal we is a narration technique that is particularly hard to pull off. When I read The Virgin Suicides, I remember feeling beguiled by the narrators and by their fervent adoration of the ill-fated Lisbon sisters. I was drawn into the voice, intrigued by its possibilities and its limitations (because perspective is always a limitation—we can only see things the way we see them or as a reader, how they are presented to us). I thought, how did he do that?

I am just finishing up Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End, a book that has turned up on a lot of best of 2007 lists. The narration is so simple, yet provocative, so inspired and winning. It’s a perfect book for discussion.

Now, I want to hear if there are other novels with group narrators or with innovative narration that I need to try!

I wanted to share this article that I read in the Nov/Dec. 2007 Mothering magazine about a mother-daughter book group. What I found fascinating about the article is how long this group was together and the ways in which they kept their discussions exciting and fresh over the years. They made recipes, created scrap books and went on field trips together. What better way is there of enhancing the reading experience and getting children and teens interested in reading than making it multi-dimensional? I was impressed with their creativity and ingenuity. Of course, I was jealous that I never got to participate in something like this!

Here is the title and link to the article:

“The page turners: a long-standing mother-daughter book club nurtures a group of girls to womanhood”

We talk quite a bit on this blog about books and tips for existing book groups. Today I’m going to offer something for the potential book group facilitator.

Take a survey of your potential readership. Fold them up and put them in the books on your holds shelf. Particularly the books that would make good titles for discussion.

Ask potential book group members questions that include suggested titles for discussion groups and topics readers might like to address in group reading. Get a little personal by asking what kinds of books the reader enjoys and what book is currently on the nighttable.

Of course, ask all those pesky scheduling questions which will only give you fits, but need to be asked nonetheless. Days and times that best fit a reader’s schedule.

I like to ask about seating arrangements, too. Left to my own wretched event planning devices, I’d have everyone seated in a circle balancing a cup of coffee, a plate of cookies, the current book under scrutiny and note-taking tools. Once a co-worker, clearly a graduate of the Martha Stewart School of Entertaining Arts, pointed out that participants might like a place to put all their “stuff” during discussions, our room become more cozy and efficient.

No reason why you can’t shake up your current book group by taking their temperature in regards to the above, either.  But for those of you wondering where to begin, here’s a jumping off place.

My next book group will be reading: Anything by Jane Austen.

Book store sites can be good sources for book group ideas. They can point you to discussable titles, and also hook you up with reviews, author biographies, discussion guides, and other material.

Barnes and Noble’s book club is a collection of moderated discussion boards where, in addition to featured titles, you can find book clubs for  mystery, epics, literature by women, and other genres and themes.  One of the big advantages of a site like this is the fact that authors are often brought into the discussions, taking part in Q&A sessions regarding specific books. A new feature, Center Stage, provides the opportunity to chat with different authors every month about all of their works. January’s authors are Luanne Rice, Dennis Lehane, Jim Cramer, and Deanna Raybourn.

Down the street (literally, in my town) from Barnes and Noble, Borders does things a little differently. Instead of boards, their book club consists of video programs  in which authors and groups of readers (mostly women) gather in what appears to be a Borders store and take part in a chapter-by-chapter discussions. In the latest program, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about Eat, Pray, Love. Other recent programs feature Susan Minot talking about Evening, Sara Gruen talking about Water for Elephants, and Khaled Hosseini talking about A Thousand Splendid Suns. Your book group should be so lucky.

Some books demand to be discussed. I’ve just finished one.

Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier has just been translated and published in this country, though it’s been a sensation in Europe for several years. It’s a complex, entertaining novel for thinking adults, written not by a novelist but by a Swiss philosophy professor, Peter Bieri. The story concerns 57-year-old Raimund Gregorius, a set-in-his-ways professor of dead languages who on the very first page encounters a young woman about to jump off a bridge and before the day is over walks out of his classroom, out of the school in Bern where he has taught for thirty years, and gets on a train to Lisbon to find out everything he can about a little book he’s found in a secondhand bookstore.

It’s a novel that’s structured on two big myths.

First, it’s one of those books about finding a life-altering book. We all know it can happen, and we love stories about it. Most recently Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind was that kind of novel, in a tradition that includes that other “book about a book,” Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, where Harry Haller finds a life-altering booklet that changes his life because it’s about him.

The second structure of Night Train to Lisbon is the myth of piecing together another person’s life. It’s the act of biography, which as Mercier shows is essentially impossible because we can never really know another person.

While the present-day narrative in Night Train to Lisbon centers around Gregorius finding out about the Portuguese author of his book, the other story is what he discovers, the assembled storylines of the past about Amadeu de Prado. It’s a novel about putting together the pieces of a story. The characters are first learned about in their tragic, romantic youth, then the reader actually meets them as old people, when the drama is long over. The present-day action of the novel consists of geriatric interviews with the survivors.

This fascinating you-are-there approach to assembling the story reminds me of Laura Restrepo’s journalist narrator in The Dark Bride, interviewing in old age the surviving characters in the story of Sayonara, the beautiful, nameless Indian girl who becomes the legendary goddess of the colored-light district in the little Colombian town of Tora.

This is also very much the same technique of one of Spain’s most exciting contemporary novelists, Javier Cercas. His international success, Soldiers of Salamis, has the author himself assembling the research (with a little help from his girlfriend), writing the “book-within-a-book” which is the reconstructed story of a Spanish Civil War incident, and then searching through the present-day nursing homes of France trying to find the elderly surviving soldier of that incident, the quiet, nameless hero who in the midst of war chose not to pull the trigger.

Night Train to Lisbon combines the timeless story of finding the book that changes your life with an ultra-modern deconstruction of the novel into mock-realistic interviews, and in the process creates the first genuinely philosophical novel I’ve read in years – a meaty book with lots of honest questions and thoughtful rewards for an adventurous reading group.

So I’m a couple days late with the resolution thing. I’m resolving to be more timely in the new year. Do not hold your breath.

But enough about my charming personal failings. How about a little  guideline or two to improve conversation at a discussion group? I’ll only offer four. That’s a number most of us can live with.

1. Point out the positive aspects of a book before getting into the criticism (which is ever so much more fun, I know, but still).  Articulating what an author is doing well in a book will actually give readers pause when they begin to critique those parts of a title where they felt the author was less successful.

2. Make efforts to steer conversation away from recaps, summations and descriptions of plot and character. Everyone who has read the book is already up to speed. Construct one meaty question readers can sink their teeth  into and let them start analyzing, evaluating and contemplating.

3. Got a comment? Share it with the group. No matter how insignificant you think your contribution is, if you only share it with your neighbor, someone across the room will feel left out or wonder if you are making comments about their mismatched socks.

4. This is a tough one. In the midst of a spirited discussion, it’s easy to start interrupting and stepping on the comments of others. (I am guilty of this. I resolve to do better.) Listen to all comments carefully. You never know when someone might be saving you breath.

My next book group will be reading: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

As a Fiction Librarian, I often get a little annoyed when patrons distinguish the difference between fiction and non-fiction as “fake” versus “real.”  It’s moments like those when I want to correct such glosses in judgment.  But that’s too big a debate to get into and I probably wouldn’t do it any justice.  Besides, I’d probably come off as a silly little know-it-all (one of the dangers of the profession which I think best to be avoided). 

Fiction, though, can be every bit as “real” as a lot of the non-fiction out there.  Histories, for instance, are assembled and interpreted based on the author’s view and the time in which they are written.  But the relativity question aside, sometimes fictional works really do capture the real world better than their non-fiction counterparts or can accompany them very nicely. 

Case in point: Recently my book group discussed Allegra Goodman’s Intuition.  It’s a novel about a group of scientific researchers, one of whom thinks he’s discovered a virus that may cure cancer.  But when a colleague questions the results as too good to be true, the doors are thrown wide on the pressure-cooker environment that scientists work in where grants and publishing rule.  Many scientists are aghast that one of their own could deign question the results of another’s scientific research—a scientist would never lie!  Or would they?  Goodman’s novel explores the intricacies of motivation, ethics and how personal relationships affect the workplace. 

Shortly after my group discussed the novel, an exposé on a local researcher who falsified findings came out.  Here is the article:

 UW: Researcher faked AIDS data, altered images 

So there you have it, another case of fiction describing reality.  Another feather in our cap! 

Feel free to steal any of our ideas. Over at Kansas City Public Library, we’re starting the New Year by celebrating Jane-uary. Those good folks at PBS, whom MEQ mentions below, provided the germ of an idea and our local JASNA chapter sent me polite notes on monogrammed stationary and paid enough calls until I cried, “Pemberly!” and scheduled plenty of Jane programming, book discussions, films, and author visits to float High Tea. We have suggested related reading and a Jane-iac blog for all the book group attendees as well.

This idea was too good not to pursue and it wasn’t even mine. Kudos to PBS and the Jane Austen Society of North America for always believing in the perennial appeal of Jane Austen for readers and viewers everywhere.

One good idea to swipe regarding a Jane Austen book group is contact your local JASNA chapter and invite a member to either lead discussion on one of the novels or provide a brief program on Jane’s life and works. If there’s no JASNA chapter nearby, persuade your local Jane Austen expert (yes, you have one) to visit the group.

Ahhhh. I am so looking forward to relinquishing book group facilitator duties in Jane-uary….. 

I can’t help but take a page from Nancy Pearl’s fabulous “Book Lust” series and recommend some out of the way authors for book groups to try.

One of my favorite 20th century American authors is William Maxwell (1908-2000). Maxwell was the fiction editor for The New Yorker for 40 years. He won the National Book Award for his novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. But he is most well known for The Folded Leaf and They Came Like Swallows.

My book group discussed They Came Like Swallows a couple of years ago. It’s about the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918 and how it changes the lives of one family. Told through multiple character’s perspectives, it’s a slim book that packs quite a punch. The themes of the mother/son relationship, childhood, and loss are explored with Maxwell’s deft, precise use of language. There are sentences that sing. His writing has the kind of depth and resonance perfect for discussion.

If you are looking for a classic American writer, you can do no better than William Maxwell.

 Just a month ago a quiet, shy young woman employee I encounter every Thursday morning at the University Book Store in Seattle was suddenly animated and talkative, with a lot to say. In fact, Jodie Vinson had been waiting to ambush me. The reason: she knew I had read Remembrance of Things Past twice, that I was a devout Proust fanatic, and she had just plunged into Swann’s Way and was in a state of ecstasy.

She needed to talk about it.

So do we all, especially when we’re reading Proust. His multi-volume masterpiece is a novel that changes the very way we think about our lives, not to mention the way we think about fiction. You may not recognize it by name anymore because it’s recently undergone a name change. Its new title is In Search of Lost Time. But more often than not, it’s just called “reading Proust.”

This life-changing, mind-expanding roman-fleuve (“river-novel”) by turn-of-the-century French author Marcel Proust is much, much more than plot and characters, though it definitely has those in spades. It’s a whole different way of perceiving life. No one who finishes reading it ever looks the same at time, memory or other people. Is she faithful? Is she cheating? In Proust, as in life, you never know anything for sure.

Proust believes that life is a constant wading through errors of perception, and so is his novel. Again and again in this 3000-page river of a novel the reader sees incorrectly, interprets the action erroneously, comes to the wrong conclusion, because as readers we’re trapped inside just one point of view – Marcel’s. Out of the people in his own time and social circle Proust manufactured a mythology of larger-than-life characters who are endlessly intriguing because they’re unresolved puzzles, never what they seem, and their social interactions are a labyrinth of misunderstandings.

It’s not always easy going.

So it doesn’t hurt to have a Proust-loving pal nearby to encourage you when you hit a long, difficult passage, to tell you about the real pieces of music that inspired Vinteiul’s sonata, to show you photos of the real Duchess of Guermantes, to tell you that the character of Albertine was based on Proust’s male chauffeur, to introduce you to Stephane Heuet’s brilliant comic book adaptations, or encourage you to watch Raoul Ruiz’s masterpiece film, Time Regained.

Jodie is currently in a Ulysses club, reading that other hefty tome and discussing it bi-weekly over ales with eight others under the guidance of fellow University Book Store employee, Jacob Burd. And because of Jodie’s daily epiphanies and enthusiasm, and since Jacob loves Proust as much as Joyce, the staff of University Book Store have decided to take the challenge as a group. Starting with a public kick-off Proust Party on January 25, Jodie and Jacob in General Books will be helming folks from all over the store and city on a literary adventure that will turn out – for the hearty few who actually have the muscle to finish the journey – to be the most mind-bending intellectual reading experience of their lives.

If you live in the Seattle area, you should take the plunge. You only live once. Make a commitment to a masterpiece, with a support group behind you.