The Adult Reading Round Table (ARRT), the Chicago-area readers advisory continuing education group I’ve mentioned before on this blog, has for a number of years periodically hosted a special event called “The Book Discussion Round-up.”  This program is divided into two parts, the first being a book discussion that lasts for about an hour, the second a review of the attendees’ recent experiences with leading their own book discussions.

The book discussion focuses on a title that the ARRT Steering Committee has selected and publicized when the program is first announced.  Participants are expected to locate their own copy and read it in advance.  When they come to the program, they will have an opportunity to participate in a discussion without having the responsibility to prepare for it as the leader.  Members of the Steering Committee take on the leadership role and bring a packet of discussion materials to the session to share with the participants.  Each participant leaves with this packet, which they can use in conducting one of their own future discussions.  Another big benefit of the activity is that attendees experience the discussions as participants rather than in their usual role as leaders:  they can enjoy the discussion from a different perspective, and often this switch gives them valuable new insights into ways of working with their own groups.

The “round-up” of ideas that takes place during the second segment of the program (often lasting around two hours) offers attendees a chance to compile a list of titles that have worked well for other leaders, as well as some that have bombed (interestingly enough, sometimes the same title shows up on both lists!).  During this “give-and-take” period, everyone shares problems they’ve had with their groups as well as success stories, and the participants come away with plenty of books they want to explore, as well as tips on how to provide more effective discussions.

 Among the books used in past “Round-up” discussions: The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx; Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson; Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt; Rocket Boys, by Homer Hickam; House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III; Plainsong, by Kent Haruf; and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See.

This is a successful continuing education activity that would be easy enough to replicate with book discussion leaders from several nearby libraries or with staff members who lead book discussions in a larger library with branch facilities.  It has also been used as a model for a series of book discussion leadership training workshops coordinated by ARRT members at annual conferences of the Illinois Library Association.

In honor of my recent visit to Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, a veritable mecca for booklovers, I thought I would share some of their unique resources for book groups.

Powell’s has staked its reputation over the years as a robust independent bookseller with knowledgeable staff and one of the biggest general collections of new and used books in the world.  They have been boosting their online presense over the years, and have begun a series of author interviews from their extensive reading series.  I often send their interviews along to my group members before our discussion to give them additional insight into an author or title.  And with interviews with the likes of Sherman Alexie, Jodi Picoult, Ian McEwan, and Aimee Bender, there is something for every group out there.

Another section in Powell’s Author section that may be useful are the INK Q & A columns.  Powell’s also features some Original Essays from authors that can also round out your reading experience.

Powell’s also has a blog and we love those, don’t we?  But one of my favorite Powell’s perks is their “Review-a-Day” e-mail service where you receive a book review in your e-mail inbox each and every day.

So there you have it, my homage to one of the best book stores out there, bar none!

PHILIPPE CLAUDEL

BY A SLOW RIVER

The first question I asked my book group was:  which has a greater affect on the characters in this book:  murder or war?

Considering it is December, 1917, and the rumblings of war can be heard everyday in the small unnamed French village that is the setting for this novel, the answer would seem obvious.  This town has suffered through a unique conundrum.  While their men were spared the horrors of the trenches because of their value in the factories that are producing the machinery of war, the town itself is overrun on a daily basis with wounded soldiers.  Now, not unlike the two armed camps that face each other across the barbed wire, the wounded heckle the healthy and the healthy abhor the wounded. 

What has developed is a dichotomy of interests.  This is shown in no greater fashion than in the nature of the local prosecutor, Pierre-Ange Destinat, who argues for the death of criminals in the courtroom and goes home each night to mourn the wife he has lost to illness.  

So when the body of a 10-year-old girl is found strangled on along the river that dissects the town, how should the local constabulary react when a slightly unreliable witness points her finger at the esteemed prosecutor?  If it were up to the unnamed narrator of this novel, the sad policeman who tries valiantly to pursue justice a few miles from the worst injustice of all, he would enter the manor house of the prosecutor and question the man.  For him, it becomes The Case.

But these are strange times.  The local judge, who rules the village like a fiefdom, in allegiance with a military presence, decides to do nothing with this evidence.  Instead, with hawk-like precision, the judge and colonel descend on the least likely suspect with a torturer’s glee.  

Not to be overlooked in the morass of damaged morality is the jump back in time the narrator takes to tell us of the fate of the local school mistress who teach during the war.  But of even great significance is the narrator’s own personal history that he teases us with throughout the book and then delivers like the last shell to land on Armistice Day at the end of this tale. 

In France this novel was published as Les Âmes Grises.  When published in England, it was re-titled The Grey Souls while Americans got By a Slow River.  I have no idea how much this book owes to its English translator, Hoyt Rogers, but as it stand here it is beautifully written.  Claudell introduces multiple characters, major and minor, each with a dense history display for the reader to the point where it feels like you have lived in this village for years.  So, for language, plot, characters, and sense of place this novel is a rich read that should appeal to all book discussion groups.

In 2005 Claudell won the Prix Renaudot award and Sweden’s Martin Beck Award for Les Âmes Grises.  The novel was adapted for film by Epithete Films in 2005 but there does not appear to be an American release available for viewing.  The author’s website is available in French at http://www.philippeclaudel.com. 

This weekend the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art hosted its second book group for members. I mentioned this project a couple of months ago and wanted to let everyone know how it turned out.

On Friday night, registered readers gathered at the Visitor’s desk and were brought to one of the museum’s special events rooms. Guests mingled and chatted while nibbling on the platter of international cheeses (mostly French) and drinking wine. Museum staff had thoughtfully piped in French music of the late 19th century to add ambiance.

After a quick greeting from the project leaders, the guests were taken on a brief tour of the Museum’s Impressionist Galleries. The docent discussed the rise of the Impressionist movement and had the participants carefully examine certain paintings for differences in the work of the artists and examples of Impressionist brush strokes. She also pointed out why this movement caused such a stir among the French art community.

The tour concluded, guests were led back to the main room and a lively discussion of Luncheon of the Boating Party ensued. Participants were very eager to discuss the roles of women, in both the painting, the novel, and French society, the meaning of la vie moderne and what it meant to the models and Renoir, and how the author also “captured a moment” by only writing about an eight week period in Renoir’s life and the brief, intense relationships formed between his models.

The tour and presentation about the place held by Impressionism in art history lent an added depth to the discussion of Susan Vreeland’s well received historical novel. Our musuem’s gift shop purchased trade paperback copies and sold them with a discount to Museum members. I created a powerpoint presentation with other Renoir paintings featuring model/characters from the book and also put the discussion questions on the slides for all the attendees to read, thus cutting down on the amount of paperwork I felt I had to bring along.

Consider moving the book group out of the library or coffee shop and taking it to a related location that may stimulate more discussion. It’s a partnership worth pursuing at any size library. Cost is minimal and entertainment value is high.

Who was Britain wild about before Harry came along? You might be surprised to find that before J.K. Rowling took over as that country’s best-selling author, the title was held for most of the 1990s by another fantasy writer: Terry Pratchett.

My science fiction and fantasy group enjoyed a delightful meeting this month after reading any title by Pratchett. With over 30 Discworld books and around a dozen other titles available, there were plenty of books to discuss. Although they are set in a fantasy world, Pratchett satirizes and spoofs everything: religion, philosophy, race, gender, music, Shakespeare, fables, psychology, city life, movies, cultures from around the world, schools, and perhaps most important, every aspect of human behavior. He may very well be the best humorist working. This writer is not just for speculative fiction fans.

Pratchett is layered. Upon first acquaintance, one is likely to be knocked silly by a few of the jokes. Then, as one consumes his books like potato chips, the wonderful recurring characters, themes, and locations will start to take a starring role. In recent years, his plotting skills have also improved. His veteran readers begin to appreciate his artistry as a storyteller, bringing big multi-faceted tales to a satisfying conclusion.

We had a good time advocating the best book to start one’s tour in the delightful Discworld. (There were many candidates, but we were unanimous in suggesting that the first two books, in which Pratchett’s humor is in place but not his plotting skills, be saved for later reading). We discussed the merits of the various subseries. We took turns reading favorite passages aloud. We identified our favorite recurring characters. We discussed the merits of his various audiobook readers.

The author’s personal life is also of interest. One of his early jobs was as press officer for the British nuclear power authority, a job that must have honed his skill for subtle satire. He’s worked hard for the Orang-Utan foundation (his Unseen University Librarian, who gets remarkable range from his one-word vocabulary OOK!, would surely approve). We discussed the tragedy of Pratchett’s early-onset Alzheimer’s and passed along the URL of Match It for Pratchett (http://www.matchitforpratchett.org), the website dedicated to matching Pratchett’s million dollar donation to Alzheimer’s research.

Share Wee Free Men with a child or grandchild. Try one of Pratchett’s books about The Watch with a mystery reading group. Laugh through Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman. Pass Small Gods to a friend who enjoys debating religion, philosophy, or science. Hunt for Shakespeare references in Lords and Ladies. Revisit the early days of rock and roll with Soul Music. Laugh at bureaucracy with Going Postal. There are many ways to enjoy this deeply funny, deeply insightful writer. He’s a treasure that every book group should open.

Fifty pages from the end, and he’s still got me guessing. The narrator is up to something, but I don’t know what. What I do know is that this is my favorite new kind of novel – a rascal narrator playing with my mind as he tells me his story. They’re perfect for book groups. Everyone loves picking apart a schemer. Everyone loves sharing dirt on someone who’s told you a lie. I just don’t know what to call novels like this. The genre doesn’t have a name.

  Junior Officer Ali Shigri, imprisoned, degraded, tortured, yet somehow resilient, is the untrustworthy narrator of Mohammed Hanif’s dry new military black comedy, A Case of Exploding Mangoes. He’s telling you the true account of the death in 1988 of General Zia, sixty-three-year-old dictator of Pakistan, along with eight of his top generals in a freak aeroplane accident four miles from take-off. Shigri should know all about it. He’s the only man who stepped aboard that plane who is now alive.

Just how that can possibly be true we don’t know yet. It’s not that Shigri lies. He just leaves things out. He’s got a secret agenda, and every once in a while we get a startling glimpse of another reality operating under the surface – as when Shigri and his roommate are suddenly accused of having sex together.

There’s a lot the reader doesn’t know, a lot that Shigri isn’t telling.

Why was the narrator’s father, Colonel Shigri, found hanging from the ceiling fan by his own bedsheet? What exactly is going on between Shigri and his roommate, Obaid, who mysteriously vanishes and then incriminates his best friend? Does Shigri know why a plane is missing from the base? What role does the unjustly imprisoned woman named Blind Zainab play in all this political scheming, and in particular, why oh why do we care about a crow who overhears her curse and has just been blown back into the story? The character narrating these events knows the answer to all these questions. Shigri is just not ready to tell me yet.

The novel alternates chapters between Shigri’s limited first person account of the two months and seventeen days leading up to the death of General Zia, and a third person recreation of General Zia’s last days, his wife’s abandoning him, the death of his security officer, and yes, the fateful peregrinations of a certain crow.

Now, I don’t know how all this is going to end yet, but I can’t help noticing a similarity between Shigri and the hero/narrators of several other recent favorite novels. Shigri feels like the most recent incarnation of the trickster archetype, currently undergoing some serious popular revival in the role of narrator.

  Take unreliable young Changez who’s telling the story in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Although exactly what happens in this novel is up for grabs, in my interpretation it’s about a disillusioned international student who’s returned to his homeland of Pakistan after 9/11 where he now teaches, and whose students have been inciting trouble on campus. He’s being followed by a covert agent, and is currently weaving a narrative spell of death, telling his own story of disillusionment as he lures the spellbound agent into fatally waiting too long in the marketplace of Lahore.

  If Changez is hard to interpret, Balram is equally so. The narrator of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is a poor country bumpkin from North India trying to survive as a chauffeur in the cutthroat big city of New Delhi. He needs to survive by his wits – but wits he has, in spades. As soon as he confides in the reader that he’s murdered his boss, I was ready to dislike him. As far as I was concerned, Balram had just stepped out of my moral universe. Something kept me reading, partly the contagious humor of Balram’s cagey candor and maybe also sheer bafflement because Balram’s doomed boss is the only one who is kind to him. Well, there are laughs a plenty, but in a novel of inspired comedy the actual murder is anything but. And once your moral values have been thoroughly scrambled, Adiga ends the story with a final sequence that will leave you touched and filled with wonder at the baffling human race.

Changez, Balram and Shigri all share the same impulse to court the reader’s good opinion, even if it means holding back certain pertinent bits of exposition, leaving the reader with little blind spots, planting assumptions that aren’t quite correct. They’re all charmers hiding something behind their backs. As I sit here reading the last fifty pages of A Case of Exploding Mangoes, I’m braced for having that rug yanked out from under me, for the shock from whatever Junior Officer Shigri is still waiting to reveal.

It’s a rich literary vein to mine in these ironic times where governments lie and media collaborate and wars refuse to stop. The trickster is our modern hero, the witty, imperfect cynical narrator surviving in the world today.

While I don’t get the opportunity often, every once in a while I get to be a book group sub.  This week I got to discuss Lisa See’s Peony in Love with the Nikkei Book Group.  This group of Japanese American ladies has been meeting for years now, focusing on Asian-themed literature.

While I did write my thesis years ago on Asian American literature, I am still out at sea when it comes to Asian history and culture.  Luckily, these ladies were just as at sea with this book as I was.  Peony in Love is the story of a young girl, Peony, growing up in 17th century China and the famous play “The Peony Pavilion” which inspired her and many other young girls to starve themselves so as to die a lovesick maiden.  The play introduced a love story between a ghost girl and human man whose love makes the girl come back to life.  Peony narrates most of the novel as a ghost, detailing the intricate Chinese beliefs about ancestor worship and the afterlife.

Much of our discussion revolved around the group questioning some of these beliefs, and the women trying to recall what the Japanese believe about the afterlife.  We really would have benefited from someone with more background on Chinese history, and perhaps I should have done my homework a bit better!

 Overall it was a good discussion and while the group did not love the book, I encouraged them to try Lisa See’s other novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which I think is an even more successful book for discussion.

What subbing reminds me of, though, is how comfortable I have become with my own group.  It has taken me some years to become confident in my skills as a facilitator, and some of this confidence has come from getting to know my group, coming to understand what they expect from me.  Meeting with a new group can challenge you a bit, make you aware of how much you coast sometimes of familiarity or habit.  I enjoy meeting with other groups because it awakes new parts of my brain and makes me work a bit harder.  But what I love most is just seeing a glimpse of another group of readers who take the time to meet and talk about books.  After all, book groups are in and of themselves inspiring.  They are people voluntarily coming together to talk about stories and ideas.   I am humbled and proud to be a part of such a fine tradition.

Book Group Buzz readers, does your discussion group rate the books it talks about?  I bring this up because a fellow discussion leader recently told me about asking her group members to rate Cormac McCarthy’s The Road on a scale of 1-5 before they launched into the discussion, and she was surprised by how many of them gave the book a “1.”  I’ve asked my group to rate titles in the past, but don’t do this as a regular practice.  Since this month’s book to be discussed was the afore-mentioned The Road, I couldn’t resist reviving the rating game to see how my group compared with my friend’s.  To my relief, there were only a few “1″s, but more “4″s and “3″s, and even one “5.” 

The way I use ratings is to get a sense of how the group has generally responded to the book, without asking for any comments or explanations, telling them to just call out the number.  Then I ask someone who has rated the book highly to elaborate on their rating, followed by a response from someone who has rated it very low.  I find it’s a great way to get the discussion started, and one additional benefit is that it immediately involves every member of the group, even if only briefly. 

Sometimes we have taken a moment at the conclusion of the discussion to see if anyone’s rating has changed as a result of our examination of the book.  Usually, there are a couple of switches — and this time was no exception.  We joked that one person who changed her rating was sitting next to the individual who rated the book “5,” and that her proximity to the most positive participant surely must have affected her opinion over the course of the evening!  (She moved from a “3″ to a “4.”)  Oh, yes, and another person who found the book “unbearably depressing” wanted to know if she could rate it lower than a “1″ — say, “.5″?  As you can see, employing the ratings can add a little levity to the proceedings — something we definitely needed with The Road.  For something different, why not consider giving this simple “icebreaker” technique a try?

Simple games are a great way to get your group meeting off to a strong start. They break the ice, get everyone thinking about the book in new ways, and encourage everyone to get involved. If you make them part of your regular practice, they’re also a pleasant way to encourage recalcitrant readers to finish the book. Here are ten fun, easy games to try:

1. TRUTHS AND LIES

Mix five true statements with five false statements and have readers try to sort them out. The statements could be about the book itself, about the author’s life, or could be quotes from reviewers mixed with spurious quotes.

2. MADLIB TRUTHS AND LIES

Take ten quotes from the book, then change one word to something sneaky or silly. Players will try to identify which word has been changed, or in a tougher version, what the original word was. This is especially fun if the author uses a lot of metaphors or descriptive language.

3. POP QUIZ

Write some tough trivia questions based on the content of the book. Trivia themes might include Which Character Said? Which Character Did? Where Were They? or Who Wore the …?

4. SCAVENGER HUNT

Select some quotes, events, place names, or minor character names and have readers or teams race to locate their location in the book.

5. WORD SEARCH

Create a word search where the answers are names, places, or things mentioned in the book. For an extra challenge, don’t give out a word list, just tell your readers how many answers are hidden in the diagram.

6. QUOTE JUMBLE

Take quotes from around the book (you can use your favorite lines or the first lines from various chapters). With books put aside, have players or teams work to put the quotes in the correct reading order. You can also do this with events from the book.

7. CAST THE MOVIE

A good creative game is to select actors to play the roles of different characters in a hypothetical film adaptation. This can lead to more good conversation easily: What would be the hardest scene to film? What would you leave out of the film? Who should direct?

8. IN THE STYLE OF…

Another good creative game is to re-imagine the book, or to think of how the book would change, if written in the style of other famous authors, if re-worked for particular genres, or if made into a film by certain directors. Selecting song titles for a musical version of the book is a hoot.

9. ENTER THE…

What would happen if Scarlett O’Hara suddenly entered the book? Hannibal Lecter? Miss Marple? The cast of Gilligan’s Island? The variations of this simple game are endless.

10. TINY WRITING CONTESTS

If your crew is really creative, try having them compose short haiku, limericks, silly couplets, or acronyms (where the letters of a character name or the book title are used as the first letters of each line). My favorite tiny writing contest is to compose Fracture Fortune Cookies: silly fortunes that you would give to characters at the start of the book.

Use your creativity to come up with other games. Almost any popular party game can be adapted. You can play for honor or give out prizes: a copy of next month’s book, another book by this month’s author, food or drink, first choice of the group’s food or drink leftovers, or the honor of picking a future book or designing next month’s game.

I’d love to hear about other games that you’ve considered or that your group has tried. Any comments?

Just saw a blog post over at Publisher’s Weekly Shelftalker that made me hoot.

Members of a book group read different books and then swap the most promising titles amongst themselves after discussing. Books that fall into the “five-hours-of-my-life-I’ll-never-get-back” catetory are dismissed from the group in a ceremony reminiscent of first grade.

The offending/boring/pedantic tome is marched into a corner, cover first, and left there to think about its crimes against readers, if not literature. Think I’m joking? You need to see this.

Comments on the post were typical. Lots of sighs of relief from readers who sheepishly admitted hating a title that everyone else loved, righteous defense of any words put to paper and slid between covers as “redeemable simply for being printed,” and jokesters who thought up new “punishments” for “bad books.”

One responder recycles books she finds unworthy. Another thinks we need “the literary equivalent of rottentomatoes.com.” And one poorly received title wound up as potting soil filler. Ouch! Talk about getting buried by your critics. Nyuk, nyuk. Lame jokes aside, anyone have any other ways to let a book know it’s been bad, very bad, and it should just wait til Dad gets home?

  Laughter. Reading groups need it. Like in that last novel about Bosnia.

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic is a brand new novel about the young author’s childhood in Bosnia circa 1991, just as life turned into a nightmare and neighbor turned against neighbor. It includes some harrowing stuff. But it’s all seen through the eyes of young Aleksandar, naively optimistic, and every other page is laugh-out-loud funny. With charming characters you genuinely care about, Stanisic lures you into going anywhere and enduring anything.

Yes, the book has teeth. Yes, it leaves its mark on your mind. Especially an unforgettable soccer game near the end of the novel between Bosnian and Serb boys who grew up together, at ceasefire, in between fighting each other on opposite sides of the war. But for every heartbreaking incident there is a compensating comic jewel, the opening scene, for instance, where a little boy at his grandfather’s funeral believes his magic hat will enable him to awaken his grandfather from death, and a hilarious, deeply touching fishing story about two bickering, endearing arch-rivals. The author’s sheer narrative delight and the young hero’s determination to be affirmative triumph over the story’s heartbreaking content.

I tried to follow that book with one I’d been looking forward to for months.

  Written by Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest, Say You’re One of Them is comprised of three short stories and two novellas told in first-person by African children. The gorgeous, heartbreaking cover shows a little girl running away, and combined with the title immediately brings to mind your worst fears of Rwandan-style genocides.

It’s definitely important and sincere. I read the first story.

A mother is helping her baby sniff glue to kill his hunger pains, while waiting for her twelve-year-old daughter to come home from streetwalking, so maybe they’ll have enough money to buy food for Christmas dinner. It was beyond sad, it was quietly appalling. When I turned the page and saw that the following novella was about a man determined to sell his children, I’m embarrassed to say I closed the book.

I urge others to read it. Akpan is a smart, concise stylist. He shoots from the heart. But as a choice for a reading group, I hesitate. Asking a group of readers to take an emotional nose-dive is asking a lot, and sometimes my instinct for emotional self-preservation puts on the brakes.

But for important books you take a chance.

  I’m glad I took the chance of reading Daoud Hari. I would personally urge any reader interested in memoirs or Africa to read his superbly humble The Translator: Memoir of a Tribesman of Darfur. He’s the guy who, after surviving the first wave of massacres, decided to use English as his weapon and guided the major news media into the horrors of Sudan, alerting the world to what was happening. The last eighty pages of the book, as the documentary filmmaker and Hari are caught and imprisoned, beaten and tortured, were so gripping I was sitting straight up in my armchair, a psychological wreck. It’s a short, brave, important book. It took me days to shake it off. If Africa or current events are a group interest, there could be no better introduction to the situation in Darfur. It’s written by a relentlessly upbeat guy, utterly likeable, who plays down the scenes where he’s tortured with a shrug, and has a big-hearted weakness for camels. You endure the horrors because Daoud Hari goes with you.

It’s a trick to see the human comedy when you’re suffering. In the midst of pain and loss, it’s hard to be honest and grapple with multi-sided reality and still include laughter as part of the mix. Which is why of all the novels I’ve read lately, none remains quite as respected and genuinely loved as Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.   It’s quick and tight and wildly funny, dealing with the deadly repression of caste in a realistic, modern day India. Balram Halwai, chauffeur, tells you from the start that he’s taken his employer’s life, but you read relentlessly to find out why, since his boss seems to be the only guy who’s nice to him. Balram is a hustler, determined to make you like him, and he keeps you laughing. You see through him, and you only like him more. I’m still pondering what he does and what happens afterward. The novel is morally brilliant like Vanity Fair is morally brilliant. In fact, I’m eager to re-read it before our group discusses it at the end of June.

Through humor, Adiga relaxes my moral guard and lures me into understanding why Balram acts the way he does. This book will get a different response from every member of our group, because every reader’s reaction to Balram will be so personal. One thing for sure: everyone will finish this one, because yes, it’s a story with sadness, it’s about the unfair darkness of the world, but Adiga’s glimmer of genuine laughter and provocative storytelling keep you helplessly turning the pages right through the utterly satisfying, morally confusing ending.

For the spring conference of the Wisconsin Association of Public Librarians, I led a book discussion on Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.  There is nothing easier than doing a book discussion for librarians who lead book discussions.  When I train, I always talk about the perfect book discussion or what I refer to as the tennis match.  In the perfect discussion, the leader becomes the tennis judge, rotating his or her head back and forth as people discuss the book without much guidance.  This book proved to be one of those titles. 

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965.  His father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and History at a large high school in Kabul.  When the Afghan Foreign Ministry assigned Hosseini’s father to Iran in 1970, the family accompanied him, and they lived in Tehran until 1973.  That year, Afghan king Zahir Shah was overthrown in a bloodless coup, leaving the government unstable and the country vulnerable.  In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris.  They were ready to return to Kabul in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army.  The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States.  In September of 1980, Hosseini’s family moved to San Jose, California.  Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1988.  The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego’s School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993.  He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.  Hosseini was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004.

While in medical practice, Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, in March of 2001.  In 2003, The Kite Runner, was published and has since become an international bestseller, published in 38 countries.  Hosseini’s fiction is inspired by his memories of growing up in pre-Soviet-controlled Afghanistan and Iran, and the people who influenced him as a child.  The Kite Runner introduces readers to life in the pre-Soviet Afghanistan of the author’s childhood and honors his memories of Hazara servant Hossein Khan, who worked in the Hosseini household during their years in Tehran and taught the young Hosseini to read and write.

A trip to Kabul in 2003 provided Hosseini with the inspiration for his second novel. As he explained to in Publishers Weekly, he witnessed Afghan women “‘walking down the street, wearing burqa, with five or six children, begging.’” Talking to these women, Hosseini heard stories that both shocked and saddened him.

From his own memories of Afghanistan and the stories he heard, Hosseini fashioned the character of Mairam.  Mariam is the illegitimate product of a union between a successful theater owner and his servant.  Forced away from the city and his legitimate family, Mariam and her disgruntled mother live in a small impoverished village which receives an occasional visit from the father as a token of his responsibility.  To bury his shame, the father negotiates an arranged marriage for Mariam, at age fifteen, to an older, unattractive shoemaker named Rasheed.  Their relationship is never steady, as Rasheed longs to replace the son he lost and Mariam dreams of a love that is romantic as well as true. 

Because the book covers a number of years, we eventually are allowed to see Rasheed replace Mariam with a fourteen year old wife named Laila by bringing her into their home as a second wife.  Laila’s life, though short, has been filled with Soviet soldiers, a love torn from her side, and a rocket attack that leaves her helpless, thus bringing her to Rasheed.  By now Rasheed is a man to be feared by the women and the actions of their keeper will force each of the women to make a choice that proves to be one of the strong themes of the book. 

These two women characters are keys to understanding and enjoying the book.  There inability to counteract the failure of their country to protect them from harm and their need to deal with an oppressive patriarchal society will provide plenty of opportunities to develop questions for the book discussion. 

All of this is set against a curtain of constant conflict as Afghanistan struggles to find a national identity while dealing with the Taliban, the Soviets and eventually the Americans.  Here are more areas where questions can be found.

This is an unrelentingly tragic story.  It should remind everyone who reads a newspaper or watches the nightly news that behind the shifting maps and the body counts, individuals who love, raise families, go to work, sing and dance—they suffer with each bomb and every bullet. 

It should be easy to develop a discussion, but if help is needed, there are discussion questions to be found at http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/thousand_splendid_suns.html.  You might also like to visit the author’s website at http://www.khaledhosseini.com/index.html.

Last week I highlighted book group support web sites where discussion leaders can find reading guides and discussion questions for their book club selections. Another excellent source for these are the publishers themselves. Most major publishers of literary fiction have figured out that distributing reading guides is a good way for them to increase word-of-mouth and sales for their new titles.

It’s too bad that a wider variety of genre fiction and nonfiction publishers aren’t cluing in to the value of including reading guides as well. Book clubs would love to take on their books in larger numbers with a little encouragement. If a publisher does not have a discussion guide for a book you would like to use, I would suggest that you send them an email request or letter. But I digress…

To locate online discussion questions, either find your book’s publisher and visit their web site or use the magic keywords at Google or your favorite search search engine: Add “reading guide” after the book’s title. I experimented with this method for all of the publishers below, and the discussion guides consistently came up in the top twenty hits.

Because of the consolidation of the publishing industry into huge conglomerates, most of the discussion guides can be found on a few big web sites, but “smaller” publishers like Beacon’s , Hyperion, or Algonquin also have reader guides. I can’t list all of the sites here, but here are some of the larger collections. These sites are also good places to browse when you’re selecting the next book.

HarperCollins has about 800 titles with discussion questions at http://www.harpercollins.com/Readers/readingGroups.aspx. Their imprints include William Morrow, Amistad, Eos, and Avon. The guides can be browsed by interest area. You can also invite their authors to an event, sign up for a monthly newsletter of reading group books, or sign up to get word of author events near you.

Random House, which includes imprints like Bantam, Dell, Knopf, Vintage/Anchor, Crown, and Doubleday, has around 700 guides on their site, http://www.randomhouse.com/rgg. Their list can also be subdivided into particular reading interests.

Penguin, which is also home to Riverhead, Signet, and Daw, has guides for over 600 books collected at http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/readingguides.  Like other sites on this list, they also have newsletters, contests, and advice for starting a group.

Simon & Schuster counts Baen, Atheneum, Downtown, Fireside, Free Press, MTV Books, Scribner, and Atria among their imprints. They have over 500 reading guides and other goodies for book groups at http://www.simonsays.com/content/index.cfm?pid=523081&tab=7.

MacMillan collects nearly 300 reading guides at http://us.macmillan.com/macmillansite/categories/General/Guides/Guides. Their imprints include Picador, St. Martin’s, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Tor/Forge, and Metropolitan Books.

Houghton Mifflin has over 100 reading guides. For fiction, visit http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/fiction.shtml and for nonfiction try http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/nonfiction.shtml.

If none of the publisher sites work, try the NoveList database (assuming your library has access.) Their site includes over 500 discussion guides.

All told, that’s over 3500 reading guides on just a few web sites. Maybe your group will need to meet more often!

There is no doubt that I write a lot about Seattle and The Seattle Public Library, where I work.  Chances are, I will go on writing about both of these topics again and again, so please forgive me.  Today I wanted to draw your attention, dear reader, to a relatively new blog called Shelf Talk.

 Shelf Talk is The Seattle Public Library’s staff blog.  Library staff (meaning not just librarians) have been contributing posts about books, culture, library resources and services and local interests.  The posts are varied, informative and fun.  It’s another great way for us to serve our patrons near and far.

So what’s it to you?  Well, it’s yet another web resource for your book group, another place to look for new and interesting titles to consider.  Take, for instance, Duan’s post on Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, or this post about reading on local buses, or Jen’s article about parallel stories, or Hannah’s post on books for new moms, or even David Wright’s post on “evil scary children” in literature (sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?)!

Library staff at The Seattle Public Library keep coming up with great ideas that could benefit your book group in brainstorming new books to try.  So sign up for an RSS feed, put us in your list of links, and stop by often.  And please share links for the rest of us of some other stellar library blogs!

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.