Looking for a challenging book for your next discussion?  Try Alice McDermott’s Child of My Heart.  It’s not a new book (published in 2002) nor is it a long one (242 pages), but its themes of childhood and death are timeless, and there’s something to talk about on almost every page, when you consider the exquisite quality of the author’s language and her ability to create characters and situations that are extremely perplexing.  McDermott’s story is set on Long Island in what seems to be the Fifties (she never explicitly tells us), and it concerns a fifteen-year-old girl named Theresa, the only child of older parents, who are away from home much of the time.  Left on her own, Theresa spends the summer entertaining her younger cousin, Daisy, while also caring for other people’s children and pets.   She is intelligent and beautiful, seemingly very interested in the welfare of her charges, but she can also be calculating and manipulative, and as the tale progresses, she lies, steals, even becomes sexually involved with a seventy-year-old man (a famous artist who is one of her employers).  What is going on here?  Because Theresa narrates the novel, we know only what she tells us, and there is much about her behavior and her experiences that is unexplained.  We have to try to understand why she makes such disturbing choices, and what the author is really saying about this character and her troubled life.  Initially it may seem as if McDermott has written just another take on coming of age, but the numerous portraits of neglected and suffering children and animals that she presents suggests to me that this is a work of far greater depth and complexity.  There’s even a possible religious subtext to the story, given the name Theresa’s prevalence in the history of the Catholic faith and certain similarities  shown between the heroine and saints bearing the same name.   This probably isn’t a book for every discussion group — some might find its subject matter too risky and the ambiguity of the rendering somewhat unsatisfying.  But few will quarrel with the breathtaking way McDermott puts her words together (she is also the prizewinning author of the bestseller, Charming Billy).  My own book group found the story unsettling and at times inexplicable — “Would any teenager really do that?” they demanded — but it surely provided the basis for a stimulating discussion.

So, I just got back from a rather whirlwind tour through London.  With an infant in tow, no less.  Well, I meant to take notes on what people were reading in the Tube (one of my favorite things to do while on vacation), but I had another brilliant idea.

I had noticed these stickers on books last time I was in London–stickers proclaiming “Richard and Judy’s Book Club.”  These stickers are everywhere and the books are pretty much always on the bestsellers lists.

Richard and Judy  (pictured above with J.K. Rowling) are two British TV personalities who have parlayed their popular talk show into an opportunity to borrow from Oprah–to talk about and sell books.  Like Oprah (but on a smaller scale, mind you), they have become the taste-makers of a nation.

For quite a few years now, Richard and Judy have been sending books up the bestsellers lists and even host a Book of the Year Award program.

While some book groups avoid bestsellers like the plague, I find that such lists can offer some interesting titles in the mix and represent the pulse of the time.  But even for groups that like to avoid bestsellers or even Oprah picks, why not try some bestsellers from abroad?  While you’ll see many of the same titles in our lists, you’ll also find some books and authors off the beaten path in America.

Here is the list of Richard and Judy picks since they started their popular book club in 2004:

• Monica Ali - Brick Lane
• Martina Cole - The Know
• William Dalrymple - White Mughals
• Zoe Heller - Notes on a Scandal
• David Nicholls - Starter for Ten
• Joseph O’Connor - The Star of the Sea
• Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones (winner)
• Asne Seierstad - The Bookseller of Kabul
• Nigel Slater - Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger
• Adriana Trigiani - Lucia, Lucia

2005

• William Brodrick - The Sixth Lamentation
• Paula Byrne - Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson
• Justin Cartwright - The Promise of Happiness
• Karen Joy Fowler - The Jane Austen Book Club
• Chris Heath - Feel: Robbie Williams
• David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas (winner)
• Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler’s Wife
• Jodi Picoult - My Sister’s Keeper
• Andrew Taylor - The American Boy
• Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind
• Harry Hindley- goes back in time

2006

• Julian Barnes - Arthur & George
• Richard Benson - The Farm
• Geraldine Brooks - March
• Michael Connelly - The Lincoln Lawyer
• Martin Davies - The Conjurer’s Bird
• Nicole Krauss - The History of Love
• Anchee Min - Empress Orchid
• Kate Mosse - Labyrinth (winner)
• Eva Rice - The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
• Andrew Smith - Moondust

2007

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
• William Boyd - Restless
• A.M. Homes - This Book Will Save Your Life
• Lori Lansens - The Girls
• James Robertson - The Testament of Gideon Mack
• Griff Rhys Jones - Semi-detached
• Jed Rubenfeld - The Interpretation of Murder (winner)
• Catherine Ryan Hyde - Love in the Present Tense

2008

• Danny Scheinmann - Random Acts of Heroic Love
• Katharine McMahon - Rose of Sebastopol
• Roger Jon Ellory - A Quiet Belief in Angels
• Patrick Gale - Notes from an Exhibition
• Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End
• Mark Slouka - Visible World
• Lloyd Jones - Mister Pip
• Tim Butcher - Blood River
• Peter Ho Davies - The Welsh Girl
• Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns

Additionally, Richard and Judy have hosted a Summer Book Club, and you can find those titles as well listed on the Wikipedia page.

Cheers!

How do you choose a book if your group has 5000 members?

Some brainy folks are attempting to answer this question for the third time on the University of Washington campus, as the little team of faculty members and librarians on the committee to choose the incoming freshman class’s Common Book for 2008 begin searching for the next campus-wide read. Besides the freshmen, who will have discussion groups and planned activities around the book all year long, the rest of campus reads the book, too, so that the impact of the book is potentially huge.

This will be the third Common Book. The unofficial score on the Common Book selection so far: one win, one loss.

The first book chosen was Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, and a finer book could not have been chosen. Dr Paul Farmer’s attempt to bring medicine to the rest of the world is exhilarating, inspirational stuff, and Kidder is such a warm, fine human being that his appearance on campus, and his slide show of the changes Dr Farmer has been able to make, were enough to make us all want to volunteer on the spot.

The second choice was a mistake. Field Notes for a Catastrophe has an important subject in global warming, but it’s flat, impersonal non-fiction. It’s disturbing information, but not inspirational. It did not bring the thrill of reading pleasure. No one ever said, “Wow, I loved it!” There are still piles of it in the bookstore. Just imagine if the committee had chosen Al Gore’s much more personal and gripping An Inconvenient Truth. We would have had a Nobel Prize-winner speaking on campus!

Ah, well. Here we are on the brink of another choice. The campus bookstore doesn’t get to vote, but the truth is, a number of  professors and librarians on the committee stop in the little branch bookstore where I work and ask for my ideas. So I participate on the sidelines in my behind-the-scenes way, whispering and suggesting, nudging and hoping for the best.

Let’s hope none of them minds if I give away a few of their secrets.

For a while the front runner sounded like it was Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, the moving account of an injured mountaineer who vows to bring a school to the village that nurses him back to health and goes on to build fifty schools throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not brilliant writing, maybe, but extremely touching and motivational in the extreme, with a powerhouse speaker of an author, it was, however, dealt the card of death. It was another book about a white man out to save the world.

Which is probably the card that kills my top choice.

Every year I urge anyone who will listen to choose Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, the personal account of a brave, super-smart 30-year-old Scots historian walking unarmed across Afghanistan in winter, trusting in the Muslim tradition of hospitality. Rory is a top-notch writer, an electrifying speaker, and he lives his truth: he has moved to Kabul and begun the Turquoise Mountain Foundation to restore classic buildings and clear rubble from the streets. My kind of hero, a man who gave up academia to work in a Third World country.

Apparently not a committee favorite.

I’ve also repeatedly urged the selection of Dave Eggers’ What Is the What, the fictionalized autobiography of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. A harrowing glimpse into the realities of genocide, a brilliant job of adopting a persona utterly unlike the author’s, and the profits from the book go to help build a community center in the village destroyed in the story. The University could actually be hands-on participating in Africa. Too long, says the committee.

Okay, then, how about Mohsin Hamid’s SHORT, utterly engaging dazzler, The Reluctant Fundamentalist? It’s about a student from Pakistan becoming extremely successful in the United States until September 11 re-arranges his world. Would it be too controversial to show a student who turns his back on American values when he begins to see exactly what they cost?

Of all the books I’ve quietly nudged the committee toward, one of them has managed to stay afloat as a candidate. Now I’m just keeping my mouth shut and my fingers crossed. It’s Sonia Nazario’s eye-opening Enrique’s Journey, the story of how children in Mexico risk their lives trying to find their working mothers in the United States. The book has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for her superb journalism and one for the heartbreaking photo section. With a brave, compassionate female journalist hero daring to make the trip across Mexico and the border herself, the book opens up the nightmares of immigration, where one country provides the cheap labor force for another.

What a superb goal: to motivate 5000 bright kids to think about solving the injustices of our immigration laws!

In my last post, I wrote about why you should consider book group formats that go beyond the tradition of discussing a single book. In this post, I want to address how you can discuss multiple books. There are many different ways to do it. Consider trying these approaches as an experiment in one of your book groups:

1) Your group may already use the easiest method of bringing more books to the conversation: Simply go around the circle and have everyone briefly share what else they’re reading. This is a way for group members to quickly introduce each other to great reads and become familiar with each other’s reading interests. Books brought up in this kind of discussion often become the selections for later meetings.

2) Taking that idea a step further, one of my book groups divides the evening into two halves. We begin by discussing a shared book, then after a break for refreshments, we come back and share the rest of our month’s reading in more depth. If you try this or any of the upcoming options, it’s recommended that you bring copies to pass around the table. The only downside of this option is that it does take a little more time. It works best in smaller groups.

3) Pick an author instead of a single book. If you like the depth of one-book discussion, it can be just as rewarding to discuss a single author. This is particularly useful when you are taking on an author with a large or varied output and no single book as an obvious entry point. Many readers avoid prolific authors because they don’t know where to start, and hearing about a range of their work may provide a personalized solution for each reader in the group. It will also give you a sense of the author’s themes and let you know if work you have read in the past is typical.

4) Discuss a theme. This is particularly rewarding for nonfiction groups or groups that read genre fiction. The speculative fiction group at my library would not survive if we required everyone to read the same book: our interests are just too diverse. By using themes, we can all pick books that fit our own styles and we get along swimmingly. Themes can be plot elements, settings, character types, award winners, formats, subgenres, historical periods, time of publication, or anything else you can think up.

5) Sam posted an interesting comment on my last entry. At his library, he is working up a program where people will be allowed one minute each to talk about a book they’ve read. He’s mixing it with video clips of library staff talking for a minute about some of they’re favorites. It’s the book group equivalent of speed dating. I’m sure everyone will go home with a list of ideas about what to try next (and perhaps what to avoid).

As you can see there is a range of ways to implement multi-book discussion. For some groups, these methods work well as a permanent modus operandi; for others it will be a nice variation from the usual. Give one of them a try and see if it livens up the discussion at one of your group meetings or helps to balance the participation of your members.

I’ll post once more on this topic next week, with hints on a few of the mechanics you should keep in mind if you try a multiple book discussion.

The Long Embrace:  Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman (Pantheon, 978-0-375-42351-2)

For book groups looking to discuss a work of non-fiction, this title might work.  The reason why I say might is that I am not sure what weight Raymond Chandler carries in the world anymore.

When I was a young man attending college, I was primarily a science fiction reader.  I spent most of my undergraduate years taking political science courses and relaxing with survey courses in science fiction, fantasy and utopian fiction.  To be honest, I saw them as fun blow-off courses while the English majors were grieving over each word in each book. 

When I ran out of the fun stuff, I took a survey course with some generic name like Mystery and Detective Fiction.  The first book we read was The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.  That novel still resonates with me today and I have re-read it many times including leading a book discussion or two.  I tell anyone who will listen that Raymond Chandler is my favorite dead author. 

My favorite living crime writer is Michael Connelly.  Oddly, Connelly is not shy about mentioning his love of Chandler and acknowledging the debt of gratitude he owes to Chandler for his interest in crime fiction and the use of the Los Angeles area as a base for his writing.

Now that I have spent the last thirty plus years obsessed by crime and mystery fiction, it seems logical to me that there would be an interest in a master craftsman like Raymond Chandler.  Obviously, so did Judith Freeman.  Freeman has written four novels prior to taking on Raymond Chandler.  Her interest in this writer was piqued when she began to read his letters, having polished off his novels in short order.  But what really grabbed her interest was the intriguing relationship that Raymond Chandler had with “Cissy.” 

Pearl Eugenia Hurlburt was born in Perry, Ohio, in 1870.  When she moved to New York City as a young woman, she altered her name to Cecilia, which was shortened to Cissy.  After a brief marriage to a salesman named Leon Brown Porcher, she married a classical pianist named Julian Pascal (alias:  Goodridge Bowen). 

Throughout his entire life, Chandler would claim he saved Cissy from an unhappy marriage.  While some biographers including Freeman cast doubt on that statement, no one has yet proven that Chandler, at the time he married Cissy, had absolutely any idea his wife was eighteen years older than he was.  Even at her passing, Chandler fills out her death certificate with the age of sixty-eight, when Cissy was really eighty-four.

Freeman works with that intriguing nugget and expands it into an analysis of their relationship.  There were a number of things that challenged what most observers said was a happy relationship.  They moved every six months and only bought there first permanent home late in their marriage.  Raymond Chandler was an alcoholic who needed a buzz in order to feel special.  Alcohol also made him randy and he turned occasionally in his life to other women to fulfill his self-image as a gentleman, yet ladies’ man. 

Of course, while this rather prim accountant like person with his older wife was living a nomadic and friendless life, he was writing some of the best hard-boiled fiction ever.  However, his success in America did not bring him the attention he wanted while he could not connect to the European audience who adored him.

Freeman also injects herself into the narrative.  Her attempt to view every home that Chandler shares with Cissy takes her on a crisscross journey across greater Los Angeles, into neighborhoods that resonate for her on a personal level, not just because of Chandler.  But the sense of excitement the reader shares with her when Freeman gains entrance into some of the homes is easily understood to any fan.  

If that does not intrigue a book discussion group, or the group is still dealing with Raymond Chandler as an unknown quantity, perhaps this book could be combined with a discussion of The Big Sleep and/or a viewing of the great Howard Hawks film of the same name.

Here are some suggested questions for a discussion of The Long Embrace:

How would you describe the relationship between Cissy and Chandler?

Did, or did not, Raymond Chandler understand the age difference between Cissy and himself?  Why does he put a false date on her death certificate?

Chandler needed alcohol to be created at periods of his life (The Blue Dahlia / Playback), yet he wrote one of his best novels (The Long Goodbye) sober, while Cissy was dying.  What defined his need for alcohol?

Why would Chandler burn all of Cissy’s letters after her death?

Chandler tried to commit suicide twice in his life?  What do these attempts tell you about the man?

Now that you know about the man, what does it explain about the literature?  How could this man have created Philip Marlowe?  What characteristics of Marlowe does Chandler share, and which does he not?

The last three novels I’ve read weren’t novels.

Let me re-phrase that. The last three books I read were not novels, but I read them as though they were novels, and with good reason. They look like novels, they unfold in chapters, they have a narrator, characters, plots, surprises, dramatic trajectory, good writing, insights. I read them like ultra-realistic novels with exotic locales. They were escape fiction without being fiction. Three utterly different books, not novels, giving me everything a realistic novel could give me.

The memoir is an underestimated art form. Sure, it’s a halfbreed, the illegitimate offspring of Biography and Fiction, but the artistic possibilities of a memoir in the right hands are unlimited. It’s a chunk of non-fiction that’s gone through a personal selection process and become humanized, so that instead of just recounting the data of what happened, it’s a portrait of reality from a limited perspective, from the point of view of the narrator telling the story.

Whether that story be real or just realistic.

Biography is altogether different. Biography is a life-assessment, and means including everything. Sheer gatherings of facts lack the refinement of the selection process that goes into the narrower, tighter form of the memoir: only those facts that help to tell the story. Exactly the same criterion as a novel has. A biography honors a life. A memoir tells a specific story.

I was on a bender of bad European novels, one disappointment after another, when I was slammed by the power and delight of Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh. It could have been a novel. It was instantly gripping. The narrator is an idealistic young vegetarian Southern California boy with a ponytail. He cares profoundly about urban poverty, and he’s come to the dangerous high-rise housing projects of Chicago. He’s in way over his head. He asks a gang of crack dealers how it feels to be poor and black in America. It’s funny and eye-opening and eye-popping, as good as any novel about the growth of a sincere young grad student making plenty of mistakes as he dares to risk his neck to discover the truth.

Next I read Daoud Hari’s harrowing The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur. I really didn’t want to read this one, and picked it up hoping it would be poorly written so I’d have an excuse. I was sunk. The style is graceful, honest, spare and restrained, with an occasional flashes of helpless rage. The narrator’s irrepressible sense of humor and bottomless compassion for all make what could have been a gallery of horrors into a vibrant crucible for the human spirit. Daoud is a wonderful narrator, with his love of camels (he thinks they’re beautiful) and his fear of crossing over water. The two men who accompany Daoud on the final third of the memoir are as sharply defined as any novel’s characters, and their battering odyssey cancelled all my plans, since I was unable to leave my armchair during the final seventy pages.

And now I’m reading Richard Grant’s rough-and-funny Mexican adventure, God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre. Once again I have a delightful, personable narrator with a weakness for spicing up his life with the uneasiness of danger, a guy who also can write like an angel as he takes a little jaunt through drug-trafficking country where the leading cause of death for adult males is homicide.

Faced with a growing pile of novels waiting to be read, why am I reading memoirs? Can you seriously ask? I’m in reading heaven. Who cares if they’re not called novels? If the only distinction between a brilliant memoir and a brilliant first-person novel is that one says it’s true and one says it’s not, what we really have is one genre that spans both fiction and non-fiction, equally discussable, equally entertaining, and at the moment there are some true memoir gems hitting bookstores.

Novel-lovers, what’s important: what a book is called on the cover or if you get your fix?

I am a member of the Art Institute of Chicago.  This week I received the latest issue of the member magazine, and I was intrigued to learn that the Art Institute is establishing its own book club, Reading Between the Lions.  (For those of you who haven’t visited this wonderful museum, you should know that the entrance is flanked by two magnificent stone lions.)  The book club’s selections parallel the current exhibitions, Edward Hopper and Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light.  Both books are available for purchase in the Museum Shop.  The Homer-related book is The Country of the Painted Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett, a novel about life in rural Maine.  Written during Homer’s lifetime, this book is considered to be Jewett’s masterpiece, and as the Art Institute points out, “the themes of hardship and isolation in Jewett’s fishing villages echo the tone found in many of Homer’s watercolors.”  The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, is the accompaniment for the Hopper exhibit.  The Art Institute chose this hardboiled piece of noir fiction, which was written just three years before Hopper painted his iconic work, Nighthawks, because “the laconic and stoic protagonist is perfectly suited to the life Hopper portrayed in his art.”  

Even if you don’t live close enough to Chicago to visit the Art Institute and see these exhibitions, you could adapt this idea of blending art into a book discussion.  Perhaps you’ve tried this before, bringing art books to the discussion meeting to enhance novels that are specifically related to art, such as The Girl With a Pearl Earring and Lust for Life,  but you could take a similar approach with stories that are not about art or artists (as the Art Institute suggests) to provide a deeper sense of the setting or the mood of your discussion choice.  Coincidentally, I am going to be leading a discussion of Stuart Dybek’s terrific collection of short stories, The Coast of Chicago, next month, and in reviewing the book yesterday as part of my preparation, I suddenly realized that one of the stories, Nighthawks, specifically references Hopper’s great painting.  You can be sure I will be bringing a print of the painting to the discussion!