It is that time again–I have to pick the books my crime and mystery book discussion group is going to read this fall.

This past year was a bit challenging for the group. Here is what we read:

FOX EVIL by Minette Walters.
END OF STORY by Peter Abrahams.
THE MADMAN’S TALE by John Katzenbach.
OPEN SEASON by C. J. Box.
AMAGANSETT by Mark Mills.
THE CLUB DUMAS by Arturo Perez Reverte.
MY NAME IS RED by Orhan Pamuk.
BY A SLOW RIVER by Philippe Claudel.

THE CLUB DUMAS failed miserably, even with me. There was just something about that book that made all of us feel inadequate. OK, stupid. While I loved BY A SLOW RIVER, the majority of the group did not think to highly of that title either. Both of these titles have won awards, and my group is now in open revolt declaring all foreign award winners verboten and they are too happy about American award winners either.

So, how do I go about selecting titles for this group? Here is what I suggested in READ ‘EM THEIR WRITES. I think these elements are not unique to crime and mystery fiction but could also be factors in selecting any book to discuss.

. Author-Is the author well respected in the field? If this is a first novel, did it get a great review? Has the author won awards? Is this author a bestselling author?

. Plot-Is the crime compelling by its nature? Is the plot
believable? Are there enough clues? Does the plot play fair? Does the plot hold your interest? Do you care whodunit? Do you care whydunnit?

. Subplots-Are there threads to the plot that were as compelling to read as the mystery/crime?

. Main Character-Do you care what happened to this character? Do you understand what happened to this character? Do you agree with what happened to this character? Do you identify with this character? Is this character heroic? Are the characters’ decisions and actions believably motivated? Is there something about this character that you cannot understand?

. Secondary Characters– Do you care what happened to these characters? Do you understand what happened to all of the characters? Do you agree with what happened to all of the characters? Do you identify with one of the secondary characters? Are any of the secondary characters heroic? Are the secondary characters decisions and actions believably motivated? Is there something about any of the secondary characters that you cannot understand?

. Subject-Is this book about some life experience outside of the mystery/crime? Does this novel teach you anything new?

. Setting-Is the setting of this novel interesting? Are there elements within the setting that taught you something new?

. Time Period-Does this novel hold a mirror up to a particular time period? Are there elements in the time period that taught you something new?

. Structure-Is there something unique or challenging in the structure of this novel?

. Style-Is there something unique or challenging in the style of this novel?

. Theme-Does this novel make you consider an element of life from a new angle? Does this novel challenge your opinion or perspective on an element of life? Does this novel raise your emotional level?

Perhaps part of the problem is that I am the one who wrote, “Has the author won awards?” It has become evident now to me that I know nothing about selecting books of a group to discuss.

Yes, I now have selection paralysis. Check in with me next week to see how I overcame this affliction and manage to make a decision.

My colleague, Linda, sent around this article about why high schools have not been putting actual teen books on their summer reading lists.  Here is an excerpt:

“But it’s summer! Summer reading is supposed to be fun, right? Shouldn’t that negate the whole “are these books literature?” debate? That depends on whom you ask. Many teachers and librarians have been moving toward the notion that summer reading should, above all else, be designed to keep kids reading (Period.) and that it should therefore be less about educational value than about sheer pleasure. But others believe the intent of summer reading is to keep kids in “learning mode” or keep them “working” throughout the summer, so that the transition back to the work of the school year comes as less of a shock.”

Every summer I see teens and even college students clutching massive lists of the ‘classics’ they must spend their summers reading through.  I admire this undertaking for sure, but I have helped everyone from the eager reader to the disinterested to the incredulous find copies of Animal Farm, Anna Karenina and The Old Man and the Sea.  Many of those readers are going to discover their newfound love for Orwell or Tolstoy or Hemingway, but just as often it will feel like a forced march through dusty tomes.

Why isn’t the enjoyment part more important?  One of the things I love about library summer reading programs is that they celebrate leisure reading.  Read whatever you want and get credit for it–get a prize, a sticker, your name on the wall, your review on the blog.

And what, exactly, do these students do with all of these books they have supposedly read over the summer?  Is there a quiz?  Do they simply fill out a bubble-form (in my mind one of the worst modern inventions in educational history) to indicate which of the 100 books they have finished?  Are they ever asked to articulate which books they actually liked or didn’t like and why?  What, exactly, is the aim or the point of this undertaking?  Again, I speak as a librarian, who bears a huge amount of respect for teachers and the work that they do.

But I wonder how we can enter into a conversation together to inform educational institutions that there are some new ‘classic’ teen/YA books out there that should totally make those lists, too.  I don’t advocate doing away with the lists, necessarily.  But what can we do to shake them up a little, make them fun?  Any teens out there, let us know what you think!

Here’s another tool to add to your reading group and readers’ advisory toolkit. 

Nora Rawlinson’s collection development philosophy for Baltimore County Public Library, known as Give’ em What They Want, radically altered the way librarians approach the selection of materials.

Nora went on the become editor Library Journal and Editor-in-Chief of Publisher’s Weekly. Now she has a Web site, Early Word, with a blog called, appropriately, Give’ em What They Want: News for Collection Development and Readers’ Advisory Librarians. 

The blog is full of book buzz–information about bestsellers,  film adaptations,  one-book programs,  and much more. There are also links to publisher catalogs, reviews, and podcasts of readers’ advisor extraordinaire Nancy Pearl’s reviews for NPR. 

Take a look–this could be a great resource for identifying titles your book group will want to read and talk about.

Does this happen in your book discussion group?

Do group members bring to the meetings items related to the book  — without prompting from you — as a way of enhancing the discussion?

This happens from time to time with my group, and I got to thinking the other day what a pleasure it is.  Every time it occurs, it’s unexpected to me, although by now, after 30 some years of group leading, I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised.

I recall the time we were scheduled to discuss Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, and one of the participants came with her portable CD player and some opera CD’s so that we could appreciate some of the music that was mentioned in the story.  Another time, we were set to talk about Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and a group member brought several of her own books on Vermeer, with illustrations of his work, to share with us.

When we talked about Ivan Turgenev’s Spring Torrents, someone in the group passed around a program from one of his plays that she’d seen on a recent trip to a theater festival in Canada.  Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago brought a visitor to our group, who came with a notebook of correspondence he’d received from Dybek after meeting him at an earlier discussion, as well as photographs of the Chicago locations described in the book.

The Diary of Anne Frank inspired a reader to share with the group her mementos from a trip to Amsterdam when she visited the museum now housed in Anne Frank’s actual hiding place  — photographs, pamphlets, and other souvenirs. 

Often when an author we’ve focused on receives media coverage shortly after our discussion, group members come in with newspaper articles to share.  I remember this happening when the film version of The Kite Runner (which was released months after we’d talked about the book) drew criticism because of the use of child actors in  scenes depicting sexual acts.  We recently discussed Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and the very next month, a new compilation of his essays was published — Armageddon in Retrospect – and a group member brought the review from The New York Times to let everyone know about it.

This “extra participation” by the book group members provides an added dimension to the book discussion experience that I, as the leader, greatly appreciate, and I believe my enthusiasm is shared by the group at large – the members always seem delighted to sample these surprise contributions.  I hope readers of Book Group Buzz will share similar experiences that have occurred at their group meetings.  Perhaps this will give both leaders and participants some new ideas for enriching their groups.

The following 1500-word essay will be read by 22 high school students from Western Washington this Friday as part of the Young Writers Workshop of the Puget Sound Writers Project at the University of Washington, as a springboard for discussion and an essay writing exercise.

My Cancer Summer

I can remember Doctor Lisa firmly closing the door behind her as she stepped back into the small consulting room where I was waiting. She seemed to be looking for a pen somewhere behind me. Then I noticed that her eyes were red and wet.

That was my first clue that my life was about to change.

I couldn’t identify the cause of her emotion, because doctors never show emotion, because her emotion couldn’t possibly be linked to me. After all, I’d come in to check on nothing more serious than a persistent tummy ache. I probably just needed a new digestive aid.

The clinic was right across the street from the bookstore where I worked. Making an appointment was easy. Most of the personnel there were bookstore customers. Dr Lisa was a real book-lover. I’d been patiently waiting for her, sitting on the end of an examining table in a skinny, cramped room somewhere in the maze of Hall Health Center. Now she’d come back from the radiologist downstairs, and appeared to be upset.

 “There’s a dark ring around your intestine and I’m very concerned about it,” she told me with urgent sincerity. I don’t remember much more. I went emotionally numb while her mouth continued to move.

I left the office in a daze. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon. I sat on a stone bench behind the building, trying to believe what I’d just been told. I had cancer of the colon. Our family did not get cancer. We had no history of cancer.

Now we did.

My family immediately stepped up to the plate. My parents drove me to appointment after appointment. My estranged brother came to my rescue and paid my swelling medical bills. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the result of the colonoscopy turned out negative. Whatever the dark ring was, it wasn’t cancerous. Another venture into my colon for more biopsies gave the same result. Apparently it wasn’t cancer, but it didn’t seem to be getting any better.

I became sicker and sicker. When I became so dehydrated and weak that I couldn’t get out of bed, I was admitted to the emergency room at University Hospital for nine hours in hell. That was the beginning a four-day stay in which I slowly came back to life. Antibiotics tortured my bowels into agony. When I was finally able to sit up without pain, I had only one thought in mind: how to get home to my cat.

Finally I convinced the doctors I could be an out-patient. They signed my release. I was free. I’d had the most awful scare of my life, but I had survived. No cancer! No cancer! As my parents drove me home from the hospital that glorious August afternoon, the world seemed good again. I had escaped the most devastating sickness I’d ever experienced. I was getting stronger by the hour.

A week later, I was called back to University Hospital for a follow-up. Again my family gathered around me in the waiting room of the Digestive Disease Center. This time, however, when my name was called and my whole family rose to their feet, a nurse told them they would have to wait outside, that the doctor wanted to speak to me alone.

How unexpected! I’d heard the nurses call me “the one with the family.” This time not even my brother could accompany me to take notes.

Dr Tung set down my file and charts on the table. I was looking at the back of his white lab jacket. I noticed he had a very nice haircut. He’s a handsome man, but his face was turned away. He was avoiding looking me in the eyes. “Your test for HIV has come back positive.”

My reaction was a complete blank.

I was stupefied. It was the last thing I expected. I’d always practiced safe sex – well, I guess I actually hadn’t a couple weeks ago, but that was the only time. It couldn’t have just been that once. I couldn’t get a grip on it. Had the doctor pulled the wrong file? Someone inside me who still spoke logically piped up. “But the hospital tests for HIV were negative.”

“Those tests were for antibodies,” he explained. “The infection was so new your body hadn’t begun to make antibodies yet. This test was to measure your actual viral load. It was off the chart.”

I don’t remember anything after that. I remember nodding and agreeing with everything he said, even though it all seemed impossible.

I thought the drama was supposed to be over! This was supposed to be the hospital follow-up to a done deal. I’d never considered the possibility that this could be the beginning of anything. I mean, I was feeling better by the minute. I wanted my cancer summer to have a happy ending. But in one of life’s great ironies, while I was in the hospital for my non-cancerous gut ailment, what was really happening was that I was seroconverting.

The kingdom of HIV had just gained a surprised new citizen.

Unfortunately, I now had my entire family waiting for me in the lobby. I didn’t have long to digest my new situation. At the end of one very short hallway, my mother and father rose from their armchairs looking toward the opening door, my brother and his wife rose to their feet, my niece beside them, all gathered in the office lobby. I had no idea what I was going to say.

I just opened my mouth. The words came out, and then they knew.

They were almost as supportive as they’d been when my diagnosis was cancer. But something was slightly different. Less eye contact, maybe. Slowly I understood. Cancer has no guilt stigma attached to it. HIV does. HIV is almost always due to a moment’s sexual carelessness. Cancer, except for the chain smoker who won’t stop, is not choice driven. HIV is.

As we walked out across the Digestive Disease Center patio, my mother snapped back at me without looking, “You were careless!”

She was right. I had made an impulsive mistake. I thought it couldn’t happen to me. I was over-confident. I wasn’t afraid enough of HIV.

Soon I was well again. I got my strength back, and was working full days. Everything seemed to go back to the way it was.

HIV is no longer a death sentence. Today we have meds. I didn’t need any yet, but they were there for when I did. Sure, there’s the stigma of being HIV-positive, but that can only affect me if I open my big mouth. It doesn’t show. I look as healthy as ever. I know what’s safe and what isn’t safe. I won’t accidentally infect anyone.

Not until six months later did a friend’s sharp outburst of fear wake me up, and make me realize I had truly stepped across an unforgivable line. My wake-up call came in the produce department of a North Seattle QFC, with potatoes and onions on one side and bags of iceberg lettuce and spinach on the other.

I have no memory of what I could possibly have said. The topic must have involved passion, since I was clearly talking too fast and not taking the time to swallow. Because it wasn’t my words that were at issue. It was my delivery.

Now imagine here the face of a friend of over twenty years, clean-shaven, crewcut, pink-cheeked, pushing his two little blond daughters in a shopping cart, a loving father buying groceries, his lips curled back in irritated repulsion.

“Do you realize that you spray when you talk? You should be more careful, now that you have HIV.”

I went quietly into shock. I watched his two little blond daughters playing in the shopping cart. My friend stopped in front of the meat department, and asked what I’d like for dinner.

“You know it’s not transmitted that way, don’t you?” I offered quietly, not looking directly at him. “It dies in the air.”

“Not quickly enough,” he countered. “How about barbequed ribs?”

That was the beginning of these essays. That was the first time I realized the fear and misunderstanding that now exist between me and even the most educated of my friends. Writing these essays was my attempt to bridge the gap, to help all of you uninfected people understand those of us who have crossed that line. But writing has also been my therapy, a chance to take a good look at my life, putting into words what’s really there, what has really happened to me, what I really want, and what a happy and healthy life really means.

I’m an easy target for any book about books, but I especially enjoyed Hallie Ephron’s new book 1001 Books for Every Mood. Library presses publish many similar books, but unfortunately those books often come with reference book price tags. This one, like Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust volumes, is priced for everyday consumers. It’s the kind of book that I usually browse while I’m watching television, but in this case, the screen didn’t get much of my attention. I kept jumping through one page after another, curious about the topic of the next list or which books Ephron would place in each category.

1001 Books for Every Mood could be an excellent source for your book group. It’s stuffed full with annotated lists of books to satisfy every mood your group might want to indulge: the mood to laugh, to cry, to take a walk on the wild side, to celebrate siblings, to find romance, to take a trip down memory lane, and so on. Her selections are solid throughout, mixing both classics and recent publications, but with a focus on the kind of not-too-heavy literary fiction that book groups thrive on. Symbols that run throughout estimate each book’s literary merit and denote titles that are particularly provocative, influential, inspirational, humorous, easy-to-read, or difficult. Award winners and books that have been made into films are also noted. There’s even a website with reading group guides for many of the books that are featured.

Instead of using Ephron’s book to pick a single selection, you might pick one of her themes and let your readers choose a book from her list or select one of their own. You might have a good time compiling your own lists of books to fit varying moods. Book groups are like individual readers: they often need to select the next book to fill an ongoing need or to counteract the mood created by the last book. Ephron has provided a quick way to find a strong choice no matter what mood you’re in the need to satisfy.

Every summer for the last twelve years, high school students interested in writing from all over Western Washington have attended a two-week program at the University of Washington called the Young Writers Workshop of the Puget Sound Writers Project. For many of those years, I’ve been invited to be a guest writer for a couple hours, using whatever I’m working on at the time as a springboard for a writing exercise.

One year we did a classroom reading of a new play of mine, a four-character werewolf version of the Red Riding Hood story called Red. Another year I demonstrated the step-by-step process of transforming the classic novel of Frankenstein into a theatrical adaptation, a romantic version seen from Elizabeth’s point of view. Another year I worked through the structure of Seattle Ghost Story, my third novel, showing how certain characters were chopped out and why. You get the picture. Whatever I’m working on, I throw something together that I can share with young writers.

This year I’m confronted with a challenge. What I’ve been working on is a very personal sequence of twelve essays, dealing with some new issues in my life after a traumatic last summer. It means opening up in a way I never have before. I’ve selected the second essay of the collection, “My Cancer Summer,” as the piece I’ll share with the students. The topic of the essay for class discussion is how unexpected change can alter the course of your life.

Their instructor, Steve Garmanian, has taught English for the past twenty years at Cascade High in the Everett School District and has been published in a variety of literary magazines. He’s guided the summer youth workshop for twelve years, and will be putting the twenty-two students enrolled this year through an intense two weeks of writing. My date for sharing with the workshop is next Friday.

Steve and I have discussed how we’ll arrange the experience. Steve wants to start with me reading the essay. He wants each student to have the text. I’ll have twenty-two copies, but I’ll hand them out after the essay has been read. You see, I haven’t been completely up front with Steve on this. He thinks he knows what the essay is about, because of the title, but he doesn’t.

Instead of me reading it aloud, I’m going to ask Steve to read the essay. I keep trying to read it myself, but I get so choked up I make these embarrassing noises and can’t talk. I have buried emotions here that I haven’t dealt with. I’m not emotionally detached yet. So I’m going to introduce the series of essays, and explain how I came to write them, and then throw Steve and the students into the experience blind.

Afterward, I’ll pass out copies of the text, we’ll discuss how the essay was constructed, the devices used to create a sense of realism and honesty. I’m sure we’ll also discuss what the essay is about. The students will be given a brief session to write down their own short, spontaneous essay on an unexpected change that altered their own lives. Then we’ll hear some of them read aloud. This could be electrifying.

The text of my 1500-word essay, “My Cancer Summer,” will be my next blog. And then I’ll tell you what kind of experience it triggered in twenty-two high school writers.

I have a new favorite book group tool: How to Read Novels Like a Professor.

I enjoyed Thomas C. Foster’s delightfully informative first “how to,” How to Read Literature Like a Professor, but I think this latest entry tops the first. I actually laughed while reading this book and wished I’d had Dr. Foster in college.  

For any book group member who has despaired that he or she doesn’t “read like the rest of the group” and wonders “where are they finding all that stuff” in the text, this is the literary guide book you’re looking for.

So far my favorite chapter is Chapter 15, “Fiction About Fiction” or, to my mind, “what is this meta-fiction term all the cool kids keep bandying about?” Dr. Foster explains it all for you and he goes back much further than the McSweeney’s crowd. He takes us back to Homer, Virgil, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, pointing out where all the current writer-hipsters have picked up their influences.

Second most useful portion of the book is the list of eighteen things you can learn about a book just by reading the first page. Look for it in Chapter One, “Pick Up Lines and Open(ing) Seductions.”

Lest you think the good literate doctor is getting too literary, I should point out that he states, unequivocally, that Chuck Jones, of Warner Bros., animating fame is the “first postmodern genius.”

See? We needed Dr. Foster in our undergrad days. He references Bugs Bunny and makes it relevant to reading.

For those of us who love books, it’s hard to imagine what we would do without them. It can be difficult to understand why others seem so resistant to their pleasures.

I grew up in a large family of seven. My father instilled the library habit in me early and many of my fondest memories of him involve our monthly trips to the tiny branch library where he would select his Erle Stanley Gardners, his Zane Greys, and his nonfiction adventure stories while I devoured books of all kinds as fast as I could.

My oldest sister Janice was also a reader. She picked up Dad’s taste for fat James Michener historicals, but also had a good selection of literary fiction on hand. My brother John is also a reader, who at times has favored thrillers, has dabbled in science fiction, but most often these days has a book about current events.

Somehow, the reading bug never bit my mother or other four sisters as strongly. Mom had her religious books and Laurie, my nearest sister had short flings with Victoria Holt, but family obligations and craft projects always seemed to fill their time first. When a pulmonary embolism took Dad and breast cancer claimed my sister Janice too young, reading in the family seemed to be dwindling. Among my many nieces and nephews, the habit seemed even more scarce. All the gloomy reports about the death of reading seemed to be sadly demonstrated by my own family.

Don’t underestimate the lure of the book. Reading is making a comeback in my family.

I wish I could take credit. I’ve talked about books with my family over the years, sent a few largely random choices out as gifts, and always spoken highly of my love for library work. But I live on the other side of the country from my Utah home, and my promotion of reading has been far too half-hearted to revive them as readers on its own.

On a recent trip home, I was pleased to hear about new favorites from many of my sisters. Lynette has become a voracious reader of authors like Maeve Binchy, Rosamunde Pilcher, and a slew of suspense and thriller writers. She visits our hometown library a couple of times a month. Shauna and Pat told me about newly discovered favorites like Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle or Jennifer Chiaverini’s Elm Creek Quilter series. Laurie had her nose stuck in Beverly Lewis’s latest Amish romance. Shauna even spoke highly of her first foray into my beloved fantasy genre, a successful encounter with The Goose Girl and The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale. Mom has gotten into the act too: as she turns 80, she seems to be reading more fiction than ever before.

Now my sisters are beginning to pass books around, and curiosity is driving the new family habit to ever higher levels.  The younger generation is noticing: slowly, my nieces and nephews are beginning to pick up more books. I nearly swooned when two of my sisters talked about how they would like to find book groups to join.

I honestly can’t explain why reading has revived in my family. I never thought it would happen, but it has taught me on a very personal level that people can find a love for books at any point in life. 

For those of you in book groups, keep promoting what you are doing. Talk about good books with your friends, even if they don’t read. Invite them to attend a meeting and see what it is like. Children aren’t the only ones who are more likely to read if they are surrounded by a culture of reading. It may take years, but you never know when someone you care about will come around to the joys and comforts of reading.

This week my book group discussed Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.  I was really looking forward to the discussion as it is one of my favorite books. 

As I mentioned in my last post, one of my group members found an excellent interview with Yates that was very informative to the group.  I found a lengthy article by Stewart O’Nan about Yates’ work that also helped me prepare for discussion.

I did not, however, get a chance to comb over the book a second time to prepare notes, examine the full arc of the story chapter by chapter, as I often do.  For one, I have just returned to my work as a Readers’ Advisory Librarian after 6 months as an interim Branch Manager for two library branches.  So while I know I have been distracted, I thought I had prepared enough.  But I left feeling like I had left the group down a bit.

The discussion went really well.  My book group is a funny, smart bunch, and they all brought different insights and questions to our discussion.  But I left somehow feeling disappointed–in myself. 

Usually, I am good at steering the conversation gently, tabling issues and scenes that occur towards the end, guiding us to relive the book through its story arc and themes.  I don’t necessarily go in with a map in mind of how I think a discussion should go.  I believe that book discussion should flow organically, that one comment or question should lead to another.  But I know, and I think the group can feel, when we have gotten off track, or are backtracking or not transitioning smoothly from point to point.  As a book group facilitator, I feel it is my job to help smooth transitions.  It is my job to make the group feel that we have discussed a book fully in our hour allotment. 

We definitely covered a lot of territory in Revolutionary Road in our discussion.  But we ended by talking about the violent tragedy that ends the book in our final minutes without really tying it all together.  And somehow I walked away feeling I had failed.

Maybe I am just being hard on myself here, but I am wondering how other book group facilitators deal with this.  How do you examine your own performance at the end of each discussion?  Does anyone else feel the way I felt this week, and how do you move on?  Is this kind of assessment even constructive?  Maybe I just need some “book group therapy” of a different kind…

Thanks for listening.

Monday night, after our book club’s delightful discussion of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, I announced to the members gathered around the fireside at University Book Store that next month we would be trying something different. At the end of July, when we discuss Sasa Stanisic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, we’ll be using a reading guide – in this case, a guide that I’ve just been hired to design myself. After trying it out on my book group, I’ll make the final adjustments, work out a last few bugs, and then send it to the book’s publisher.

  Today I received three sample reading guides from Grove/Atlantic to give me an idea of what they wanted.   Two of the books – Turpentine and Up High in the Trees – I’m not familiar with. I certainly know the third title, Sherman Alexie’s The Indian Killer, and stock it in our campus bookstore, but I haven’t read it. Let’s see if these samples can give some definition to this nebulous thing called a reading guide. 

To my surprise, all three samples are short and quite simple – a numbered list of a couple dozen “thought questions.” In a real sense, these aren’t study guides or reading guides, either. They’re discussion guides. Their goal is to highlight the ambiguous or debatable elements of the novel, the controversial or provocative moments that might spark an insight or difference of opinion. The questions are designed to elicit the feelings and opinions of the reader.

This is a relief to me, because an actual study guide would have had to include more. There is apparently no historical background section, so I won’t be expected to explain the war in Bosnia, thank goodness, or what happened to the real village on which the novel is based. That spares me a hefty chunk of very depressing research. None of the reading guides had interviews with the author or a biographical sketch. All they really consist of is 21-24 questions about character motivations, reader reactions, and literary techniques.

These are more facilitator aids and conversation-starters. The purpose is not to dispense enriching supplementary information. It’s goal is to trigger discussion, the questions designed to deepen the reader’s appreciation of the novel’s complexities and subtext.

In Nick’s Notes, my own private study guides that I create for University Book Store, I have veered to the opposite extreme – dispensing with topics of discussion altogether, Nick’s Notes are simply a tool to induce memory recall and provide the vocabulary of the book. To do that, I create an outline of chapter-by-chapter plot summaries, followed by the name of each character where they first appear and notable quotations from the text. Just the facts. The characters and places and page numbers you need at your fingertips to be able to talk about the book.

As for the topics to discuss, I generate them through a technique used in recovery support groups – it’s called a check-in. The evening’s conversation begins as each member “checks in” with a short two-minute “stand” on the book, how they feel about their experience with it, what they liked, what they didn’t like. As each member does this, themes of interest quickly become apparent. That’s where I, as facilitator, guide the discussion. In addition, I’ll admit, I usually come loaded with one or two questions of my own, ones often without answers. These aren’t hard to dream up. If you’re a thoughtful reader, questions pop into your head all the time. What made her go there? Why did she believe him? Who’s telling the truth?

But now I need to provide a kind of conversation ladder, a step-by-step stimulation for a book group meeting on this sometimes difficult, always thoughtful, frequently hilarious book. I need to come up with twenty-four challenging questions that will spark a thoughtful evening of conversation. A template of questions to examine how the novel is put together and what’s on the author’s mind. Actually, with a book as rich and delightful as this one, creating a reading guide is going to be fun.