One of my favorite books to give to readers looking for “something good” or book group members looking for “something everyone hasn’t read” has been Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Company by Maria Amparo Escandon.

First published in 2005, this is Escandon’s second novel after her critically acclaimed debut, Esperanza’s Box of Saints (also a good book group choice).

In the Mexicali Women’s prison, the coin of the realm is story–your life story and/or the story of the crime that put you in prison. Libertad refuses to share either story and is pestered relentlessly by her cellmate, Maciza. Unable to tolerate the curious, sometimes threatening, demands of her fellow inmaes, Libertad starts Library Club. Every Wednesday, Libertad will read a story to anyone who shows up to listen. She starts with The Three Musketeers but she cannot bring herself to read the famous words of Alexandre Dumas. Instead, Libertad begins telling the story of a spirited girl, her father, a Mexican academic turned political fugitive, and her mother, a tough and beautiful trucker. Warning all her listeners that this is merely a story, full of lies and exaggeration, the inmates soon suspect that Libertad is telling them her own lifestory, but which parts are truth and which are fiction? And as the inmates speculate on Libertad’s life before and outside prison while waiting for the next weekly Library Club meetings, they begin to share their own life and crime stories.

Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Company comes with a reading guide in the back of the trade paperback, however, facilitators won’t have to go much further after asking interested readers to speculate on which parts of Libertad’s story are true, which are fabricated, how and why Libertad chooses truth and fiction.

Parenting an infant requires a lot of time and attention and in that first year you don’t necessarily get a lot of time with your spouse or partner. The time you do have (when the baby is sleeping or otherwise occupied) is spent “downloading”–sharing your respective days or what your child has been up to.

And in that first year there is so much to learn and discuss. There are so many approaches and philosophies about raising children and precious little time to discuss them. So what my husband and I have found ourselves doing is parenting through book discussion.

We have our own mini book club where we read and then touch base about what we have read. It makes our “download” time much more substantive.

Some of our reading has been in the realm of memoir. Because if there is anything that parents need it’s a good laugh. Two recent favorites of ours have been Elisha Cooper’s daddy-memoir Crawling and Catherine Newman’s hilarious and tender Waiting for Birdy.

In the ‘parenting manual’ department, we have gone through Dr. Sears’ The Baby Book and The No-Cry Sleep Solution. Currently we are working our way through Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Laura Davis and Janis Keyser and Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting. We also found the DVD for Alfie Kohn’s book helpful–don’t all book group members occasionally cheat or supplement with the film version?

So far the book group approach to parenting has been working pretty well.  For one, it helps us focus.  I have also come to realize that I am not good enough at summarizing to read alone.  Besides, discussing what you have read provides both perspective on and reinforcement of ideas.

This kind of feels like a weird thing to post on this blog, but I am personally very curious if other parents have done the same.   And if anyone has any parenting books to share, please let me know!

Modern masterpieces are what I’m looking for.

Out of the dozens of advance copies piled on my Must Read table, I try each month to ferret out the most powerful, rewarding new literary experiences. The best ones I review for Shelf Awareness and NovelWorld. The very best one I discount and promote at University Book Store. These books are the best of the best. I don’t put energy into a book I’m not behind one hundred percent. I want to spend my time reading, reviewing and promoting the finest literature being published today. I want to look at my twelve monthly promotions when the year ends and think, “Yes, those were the best books of the year.”

Those are the books we discuss in our book group, and rightly so. But there is something to be said for lesser books.

Many times flawed-and-stumbling near-misses make just as good conversation pieces, and sometimes better. Great art can be intimidating. Rather than question an unusual choice in a masterpiece, I’ll first blame myself and assume I don’t understand it. I’m more willing to assess the pluses and minuses of lesser art. I can often learn more about plotting and craft from a story that goes wrong than from a masterpiece award-winner. And discussing where a book goes wrong adds another dimension to the conversation.

Take Perez-Reverte’s new novel, The Painter of Battles. It’s got an intriguing premise, far more ambitious than his intellectual thrillers. A Croatian soldier made famous by a war photograph has subsequently had his wife and son murdered because of it, and has come to kill the photographer. It’s got some brilliant writing, some dramatic setups, and a realistic worldview. It’s all authentic. Perez-Reverte was a war correspondent for twenty years, and his central character is a war photographer whose behavior feels utterly real.

But in spite of the thrilling authenticity of the locales and situations, the intellectual conversations that begin to dominate the book become increasingly annoying, artificial and pretentious, coffeehouse philosophy between the killer and his would-be victim. It’s embarrassing watching these two world-weary studs, rather than fight, settle down to have precious conversations like “How much do you think light weighs?” You’re waiting to see who’s going to kill who. And hoping the female lead won’t open her mouth, since she speaks in vacuous poetics twice as annoying as anything ever uttered by Yoko Ono.

I quit without bothering to see how it ended. But would it make a good book club discussion? Absolutely. I wouldn’t miss it. I’d love to hear how others responded to Perez-Reverte’s odd combination of realism and artificiality.

Same with Katharina Hacker’s German Book Prize-winner, The Have-Nots. It certainly is elegantly written, with three plots converging from three different cities. Nevertheless after fighting my way through half the book, and figuring out who was who at last, none of the characters had become likeable in the least. The central characters are the slightly dense, oblivious young German couple briefly entrenched in a dangerous part of London, Jakob and Isabelle, with a hiding criminal as a neighbor on one side and an abused child on the other. Enough combustible elements, you would think, but out of the blue, halfway through the book, Jakob and Alistair, a fellow employee, come home together, get drunk with Isabelle, remove her clothes and grope her right up to the edge of a three-way – without anyone batting an eye, saying a word, or showing the least surprise for behavior utterly unlike them. I put the book down in sheer disbelief.

Doesn’t mean The Have-Nots wouldn’t make a jim-dandy discussion piece. But who enjoys spending that much time with mean people? As one of the characters observes, even the abused little girl is mean. She hurts the cat. Which reminds me of another flaw in the book. Isabelle picks up the bleeding injured cat. It doesn’t yelp, hiss, screech, or claw her. It purrs in the arms of a stranger. Pure fantasy.

But would I come to a reading group discussing The Have-Nots? You bet. Hearing how other poor souls responded to this odd, twisted book would be irresistible.

Russell Banks’ new novel, The Reserve, is a classic example of this “flawed but fascinating” school. It’s an occasionally brilliant novel with some knockout sequences, mostly in the first half, like the opening chapter’s romantic flying lesson in a little private plane through Fourth of July fireworks. It’s got some gasper surprises, like the bedroom door swinging open to reveal a character bound and gagged inside. But Banks seems to write himself into a hole. He ends up with an unsolvable situation, and when a shotgun is knocked into the air and comes down firing, believability is blown out of the plot like the hole in the character’s chest.

What goes wrong here? I’d eagerly attend a reading group that tackled that problem. Banks is a great stylist. He’s a pleasure to savor as you read. He’s thoughtful and bright and generous. But here he seems to be inventing as he goes. The story has a lot of style and period flavor, but Banks seems to be hoping to stumble on a reason to tell this story, and never finding one.

Vanessa, his leading lady, begins acting like she genuinely belongs in the mental institution she’s fighting so hard to escape. Jordan, the larger-than-life artist hero, so memorable in his two-fisted determination to not be thrown off the posh club grounds by the fussy manager, fades away in the latter portions of the book into a rather unlikable absent husband. The minor characters become more interesting, and then behave inexplicably, reporting on themselves, destroying their own happiness. The plot roars right up to an absent ending, the characters self-destruct, and then Banks sets it all on fire.

I don’t know what Russell Banks was trying to share with me. What literary experience did I just have? I’m dissatisfied and irritated as a reader.

But figuring out where Banks took the wrong turn as the author of The Reserve might trigger a dynamite conversation in a reading group.