Not everyone cries easily over fiction. I do. All it takes is a little too much caffeine in my system and a sad parting (like the sergeant saying goodbye to his beloved mule at the end of The Mule) or an unexpected moment of coming together (the bus stop blessing at the end of Gilead) and my eyes and cheeks are wet in no time.

  But that hardly describes how I came emotionally unglued at the end of Jean-Claude Izzo’s final novel, A Sun for the Dying. I didn’t have wet eyes. I was sobbing. And since he is often described as the author who can make grown men weep, I can’t help but wonder in retrospect what it is in Izzo that moves me quite so deeply.

I’m talking about a contemporary French author, son of an Italian immigrant, who wrote five novels before passing away in 2000 at the age of fifty-five, all of them taking place in his beloved home city of Marseilles. The first three are referred to as the Marseilles trilogy, are considered mystery novels with moody noir settings rather than actual noirs. When the first volume, Total Chaos, came out in 1995, Izzo became immediately famous throughout Europe.

  The last two novels are out-and-out noirs, or tragic crime novels. The Lost Sailors, published two years ago, was my introduction to Izzo. I was blown away. It was like Albert Camus and Joseph Conrad had collaborated on a tale of an ill-fated friendship on a grounded ship in Marseilles harbor. All five novels are defining volumes in a modern genre evolving in Europe called Mediterranean noir – the values and structure of the classic crime novel but with an added dimension of social corruption as well, the crime of economic injustice as a backdrop for the individual crime drama, with all of it sun-cooked in Mediterranean sensuality.

This morning I finished reading A Sun for the Dying. I wept all through the final chapter. I had to keep wiping my eyes to read the pages. One thing this book made clear. I go through many books, and many of them are good novels. This one is a notch above that. This is literature. This has real depth of vision and one masterly touch after another. Brilliant scene after brilliant scene.

  The novel is written in third person, but on page 35 the reader is startled by the sentence, “That’s where I met Rico.” From then on, a first person narrator surfaces periodically, a brief flicker and gone, with no explanation. Then two thirds of the way through the story, the book breaks into Part Two, which takes place a year later and is told by Abdou, a thirteen-year-old Arab boy, the novel’s most delightful and touching character. The sheer genius of emotionally topping his story by intertwining it with this boy mourning his lost father and his lost country of Algiers, holding the introduction of the boy back until the last third of the book – I never would have dared to try it. But it works. It ups all the stakes of the story and pushes the emotional content of the action right through the ceiling.

So why am I crying as I close the book? Because his vision of life, though unspeakably sad, rings true. Izzo tells his melancholy tale of a fallen man’s last days so that it looks and feels like existentialism but without the Sartrean nausea and despair, with more of a Byronic heroic stance right out of classic Romanticism – his Mediterranean vision is a candid, unflinching look at the unfairness of modern life, but done with grand, larger-than-life characters who stand up to their operatic fates with noble, near-suicidal defiance.

  What a writer! I’ve now read both of Izzo’s two stand-alone novels. What’s left? The Marseilles trilogy. Today I brought home from the bookstore the first volume, Total Chaos. And so here I am, with the three-day weekend just beginning, holding in my hands this extraordinary author’s masterpiece…

For those of you familiar with Stephenie Meyer’s popular teen vampire series that starts with Twilight, you know they are not high-brow literature.  And that’s exactly why teens and adults love them.

Set in Forks, Washington, the series centers around high school girl Bella Swan and the vampire of her eye, the dashing and chivalrous Edward Cullen, and her best friend and werewolf, Jacob Black, who is is love with Bella and a sworn enemy of Edward and vampires in general.  Pretty nifty love triangle, for sure. Well, even fans have complained about what a weak character Meyer has created in Bella.  A colleague of mine even wrote a brilliant blog post about how to get over your annoyance with Bella by finding some truly kick-ass female characters.

Meyer’s fourth and final book in the Twilight series was much hyped and anticipated, with midnight parties in bookstores and libraries across the country.  And after fans got a chance to dive into the 700+ page book, it became clear that readers either loved or hated it.  The haters were pretty vocal. Now, let me say, I really enjoyed this book. It was a guilty pleasure to begin with, so I didn’t expect much more than that.

What was England like during and after World War II for children?  What must it have been like to come-of-age during a time of rationing and bombing?  Anyone who has seen John Boorman’s film “Hope and Glory” realizes the power a child’s-eye view can provide in our understanding of a particular place and time.

I happen to love coming-of-age stories, and while there are a multitude of adult fiction depictions of this, there are also countless books written for children that do this just as well or better that, may I add, are worthy of consideration and discussion for book groups for adults.

Two such books are Rumer Godden’s An Epidsode of Sparrows and Jane Gardam’s A Long Way From Verona.

The New York Review of Book reprinted Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows (the world reprint is like an aphrodisiac for a librarian!).  Set in post-war London, where children’s playgrounds were the husks of bombed buildings, it tells the story of Lovejoy Mason, a girl who befriends a tough neighborhood boy, Tip.  They plant a garden together and it brings some light to their grey world.

Jane Gardam’s A Long Way From Verona follows Jessica Vye who at 13 discovers she is detined to become a writer.  Set during the war in rural England, when bombing and rationing were the norm, Jessica sets out to tell us about the year that changed everything for her.

Both of these books features winning protagonists, and their stories are told with a charming lack of sentimentality.  They would be a good paired read, as well.  Perhaps throw in J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun for another WWII coming-of-age from a boy’s perspective of the war in China.

Here’s my last post in a series of useful questions to improve the quality of your group’s discussion of any book.

Question 1: How did the setting of the book contribute to its impact?

When to use it: When the conversation needs more depth; when this aspect of the book is not getting enough attention

Settings are important to any book and critical appeal factors for some readers. Bringing them into the discussion opens the door to comparisons to other books set in similar places or times and invites interesting personal stories from your participants. A related question that also works is to ask if the same story would have worked if it had been set in a different time or place. Don’t forget settings beyond the geographical and the historical: books set within a certain social group, in a particular occupational group, or emphasizing a particular hobby or other activity.

Question 2: Did reading this book change you in any way?

When to use it: When the impact of the book on readers needs to be clarified; when a few readers need a chance to explain why they loved a book in the face of mediocre reception by others

There are so many ways a book can impact us: creating resolve for change; bringing an unnoticed aspect of our lives to our attention; giving us empathy for others; or making us aware of new places, events, or people to name just a few. Weighing these impacts can be a fertile area of discussion and a nice way to summarize what we’re taking away from the book. This question is an excellent way to help those who felt passionately about the book explain that impact to others.

Question 3: I was interested in your comment about… Could you explain a little more?

When to use it: When someone is interrupted or when an interesting lane of discussion is glossed over

This is a procedural question, a graceful way to steer discussion back to an interrupted speaker or a missed conversational opportunity. It’s also a mild, artful way to chastise the interrupter.

Question 4: What is most likely to happen to the characters next?

When to use it: When the book has an unresolved ending or generates different interpretations among the readers

The game of “What if?” is both fun and productive for discussion. It’s a great question if the author leaves plenty of open doors at the end of the novel. A related question, good when the book doesn’t quite click with your readers, is “What should have happened instead?”

Try implementing some of these questions the next time your group is struggling with a book. If any of you have other questions to suggest, particularly questions that can help solve a common problem that occurs in book discussion or group dynamics, I hope you’ll add it as a comment.

Recently I was pleased to learn that the Villa Park (IL) Public Library, where I served as the administrator for over 20 years before retiring in 1999, held a Staff Development Day that featured book discussions.  The library has been offering book discussions for the public for many years and currently has three groups meeting every month — one of which focuses on mysteries.  The Staff Development Day program was, however, the first time staff members were involved as discussion participants.

The Head of the Readers Advisory Department, Candy Smith, came up with the idea and organized the event, which was only one part of the all-day development experience. (There were also segments on community recycling, water conservation, and chair yoga.)  Candy decided there were enough staff members to form four different groups.  She then encouraged the staff to help select the books to be used in the discussions by posting information about possible titles online and asking everyone to vote for their four favorites.  The books that were chosen were The Time Traveler’s Wife (Fiction) by Audrey Niffenegger; Nickel and Dimed (Nonfiction) by Barbara Ehrenreich; Greywalker (Young Adult) by Kat Richardson; and Things Not Seen (Science Fiction/Fantasy) by Andrew Clements.

The discussions were led by three members of the Readers’ Advisory Department (Candy, Jean Cooper and Marna Rundgren) and a Young Adult Librarian (Lee Rabi).  Each session ran for one hour, and the groups met simultaneously in various areas of the library.  This was possible because the library was closed for Staff Development Day.  Multiple copies of the books were obtained for the program utilizing interlibrary loan.

One of the main objectives of the program was to mix the library departments.  Thus, in the sign-up process, each group had a designated number of slots for each department (e.g., three slots for Circulation Department members, two for Adult Services members).  Surprisingly, since it was “first come, first served,” everyone got either their first or second choice of groups.

The staff seemed to enjoy the experience, Candy reports, and the discussions continued, even after the sessions were over.  Organizing the event was somewhat time consuming, according to Candy, but worth the effort because it was a great way for staff to mingle and learn more about book discussions, one of the library’s most prominently featured activities.

Looking for a new way to enliven and enrich your staff development event?  Why not try a book discussion (or several)?

“I don’t like short stories.” How often have I heard that in our book club and in the bookstore? Reading addicts often want to be entrenched in a long narrative, caught up in the rushing current of a strong plot, immersed in the heady waters of suspense and surprise, returning again and again to the new predicaments of favorite characters. And on to the sequels. Longer is better.

None of those are operating values in short stories.

The pleasures offered by stories are significantly different. A short story is like a crossword puzzle or an equation in algebra, a condensed and concise experience boiled down to its essence and fitted tightly together, a turning-point moment in a life, the essence of a character in a single incident or choice. A story is best read at a sitting, a concentrated experience, not in random chunks on the bus and in line at the supermarket.

  If the story collections that I revere were gathered separately, they’d make a very short shelf. In my domain, the queen of all short story writers is Flannery O’Connor, and there’s no collection of stories that more bears re-reading than her Complete Stories. I’ve read it twice, and the second time I felt like I’d never read the stories before, they’re so rich. Who would I dare to place next to her? Well, everyone has their favorites, and I hear cries for Ernest Hemingway and Guy de Maupassant, for Grace Paley and Alice Munro, but none of them has had much impact on me.

  The first contemporary collection that broke through my short story barrier was Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, those awesome tales of Vietnam.   More recently, Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s thrilling collection of Thai stories, Sightseeing, in which every single story is a gem and ending with that superb novella. If the teller of the tales is a bright enough intelligence, that alone can be the unifying factor for my personal reading experience. If the stories have a theme, or all take place in the same location, or all deal with the same industry or nationality, so much the better.

Well, now I’m going to add one more collection to my very short list. Last night I finished reading the final tale in Sana Krasikov’s collection of Russian immigrant stories, One More Year.    I’ll say this for starters: there’s not a single dull page in that book. Not only do all the stories have their major turning points and surprises, but there are dozens of fascinating women characters, hundreds of little delights sprinkled throughout, unforgettable lines like, “He was black and, like all cats, a little obnoxious.” Even a cat lover like me had to laugh at her wisdom. Or how about this: “She could not be bothered with small talk. To her, friendship still meant coming face-to-face with another’s unmediated existence. It was exhilarating, Lera thought, but also exhausting.”

Sana Krasikov doesn’t hesitate to call it the way she sees it. She’s a native of the Ukraine and grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. She writes in English, with a Joseph Conrad-like precision but instead of ships and sailors she’s describing the interactions between husbands and wives, children and their parents.

I can’t remember the last time I encountered so many fascinating women characters in one book. I think that will be my next blog: all the multi-dimensional, unpredictable, unsentimentalized females that come to life in One More Year!

One of my favorite subgenres in narrative nonfiction is occupational memoirs. I’ve read some good ones in the past couple of years and I’m trying to figure out how to work them into a series for my book group. I want to provide my group with a list of books and a list of topics to think about while they read.

I want discussion to focus on the books, the authors, and their subjects. I’d like to keep conversation away from “My first job/my worst job/why I hate my current job.” Instead, I’d like to hone in on why some jobs lend themselves well to memoirs. What is it about this particular job that captures the best or worst of human nature? What are the preconceived notions of a particular occupation and how does the author dispel or confirm those notions? If a reader has never held a job in this particular profession, how is the author getting the reader to identify with his/her job experiences? What aspects of this particular occupation can readers relate to? In the case of books that have been turned into movies, what did the film version exaggerate? Which myths did the film debunk or reinforce?

Those are just a few of the topics I think I want to address in a book group series on Americans at Work. These are the titles I am considering. Weigh in with your thoughts on occupations or memoirs I may have missed.

Free for All  by Don Borchert

Waiter Rant  by Steve Dublanica

My Posse Don’t Do Homework by LouAnne Johnson

Fighting Fire by Caroline Paul

Blown Sideways Through Life by Claudia Shear

Tell Me Where it Hurts by Nick Trout

I’m late again. How is that possible? My promotion materials were due in the marketing department on Monday. I always used to be on time. I should have announced the September book of the month three days ago, and I still don’t even know which book it will be.

  Xiaolu Guo’s Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth has dropped to third place. It’s the prettiest package, I admit, the best cover, with the best sales potential for the bookstore. My bookseller’s lust to have good sales figures wants me to choose this book. It’s light and airy, maybe sometimes too light, a young person’s novel skimming over the surfaces of life with grace.

I’ve been sitting on my front porch this afternoon reading the book in second place, which is really the book that should be in first place, Jean-Claude Izzo’s masterful last novel, the anxiety-inducing A Sun for the Dying. I notice I keep taking breaks while I read. Jump up to get a drink. Jump up to send an email. His novels make me nervous. He’s so forthright as a writer, so fearless in looking at the human condition without fantasies or sentimentality, that I never know what to expect from him, but I know I’ll believe it.

  Izzo has just introduced a new character I find delightful, Felix, a good-natured halfwit who looks and acts like a teenager with a football he’s never without. His wife left him and he’s been a street person ever since. He and the central character Rico have just settled down in front of the television to watch cartoons. It’s a strangely touching scene. And it will lead somewhere, I know (I’m worried about that football – what if someone takes it away from him?) because I’m in the hands of a master.

But dang it, the book has a wretched cover. No one will buy this book. It has cover art that turns off even me, a wretched homeless man in a half-fetal position on the ground. That’s a big strike against it. But I’m so bonkers over this guy’s writing I’ve just ordered his most famous work, the Marseilles trilogy – Total Chaos, Chourmo, and Solea – for our little bookstore. I’m saving his best work for last.

And what’s the front-runner for September’s book of the month? There’s a new title in the number one spot, and it’s a real dark horse, because it’s a collection of eight stories. Stories are a genre many readers avoid. However, in this case, the stories are unified by theme, and the theme’s a compelling one – they’re about immigrants from war-torn Georgia, and they’re as finely crafted fiction as I’ve stumbled on in some time.

  The brand new book is Sana Krasikov’s One More Year. Two of the stories I’ve read have wonderful set-ups that I didn’t spot until they paid off at the end. One story, “Maia in Yonkers,” caught me so off-guard by it’s ending that I found myself crying in surprise. Krasikov is a Ukraine native writing in English, and in powerful, concise, illuminating English at that. The cover isn’t as pretty as Twenty Fragments, and the philosophical depth is no match for A Sun for the Dying, but there’s a humanity to these Russian immigrant women making their new lives out of compromises and memories. And at the moment Georgia certainly has the world’s attention.   Krasikov is a brave young talent, and whereas Izzo has passed away, Krasikov as a writer has her future before her. If the other stories are as good as the ones I’ve read, well then – guess I’ll have found my book.

Yeah, but for the moment I’m going back to reading Izzo on my front porch so I can make sure Felix still has his football…

Peace.  Richard Bausch.  Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.  978-0-307-26833-4. 

Richard Bausch is just a few years older than I am so I am going to claim that he and I are of the same generation.  I suspect that his father’s experiences fighting in World War II may have influenced his son as Bausch grew up with sensibilities imparted by his father that in part were honed on the battlefields of the last great war. 

I know that was true of my own father.  A small town boy from Wisconsin who ended up in the South Pacific battle zone, he rarely spoke of his service years until near the end of his life.  Then, as an old man looking back, he went on a mission to trace his service record.  The hunt eventually proved futile when he discovered all his records were lost in a fire years ago in St. Louis warehouse where they were stored. 

I cannot imagine any reader not being touched by the writing at the end of chapter twelve when the young Marson is doing his leave taking with his family.  There must be many Americans today who could write their own chapters on this sad subject. 

My father was a disciplined and at time hard individual.  Once a close cousin of mine said his family forgave my father for some of his attitudes because they knew he had been a Marine in the Pacific.  I had to laugh because my father was just a Sergeant Major in the Army, or as I said at the time, “He was no Marine—just a son-of-a-bitch.”

Why do I think Bausch may be writing about his father?  Bausch was born on April 18, 1945 at Fort Benning in Georgia.  The second part of the dedication of Peace says, “In loving memory of my father, Robert Carl Bausch, who served bravely in Africa, Sicily, and Italy.”  And lastly, the third part of the dedication states, “With deepest gratitude, love and admiration to George Garrett, who for almost twenty years kept after me to write this story.”

There is a quote on the Literature Resource Center page from Bausch that says, “I grew up listening to my father tell stories–he is a great story-teller.” 

Whether this particular story is exactly the one Robert told Richard, we can say one thing for sure.  The son tells it better than his father ever did.

The basic plot of this novel is that Corporal Robert Marson is a part of a reconnaissance mission in Italy near Cassino.  Recon missions require men to go out and find the enemy, remain unseen, and then get back and report what they saw.  When his unit comes upon a cart pulled by two Italians who scurry away, Marson and his men are not cautious enough.  After tipping the cart, a German officer tumbles out who shoots two American soldiers before being shot by Marson.  A woman, who accompanied the officer in the cart, is summarily executed by Sergeant John Glick without remorse.  Of this, Glick’s only remark is to say, “This is all one thing.”

It may very well be as the next piece of action finds Marson and two privates named Asch and Joyner assigned to climb a mountain to find the enemy.  As they begin their ascent, they are joined by an Italian guide named Angelo who proves to be an enigma.  Asch is fearful that the mission is cursed as revenge for the killing of the woman while Joyner feels everything is justified by the death of the two Americans.

While only taking 171 pages to tell it, Richard Bausch manages to create an oppressive atmosphere out of so many factors.  The condition of war would be enough if not combined with constant rain that turns to snow as the men gain altitude.  Each man suffers a physical aliment which impedes his thinking but also reinforces the theme of the novel.  In the way that Bausch unfolds this tale, the sheer physical brutality of fighting the war equals the moral horror of being a participant. 

But to me the most compelling story this short novel tells is how citizen soldiers are so unprepared for what they will experience on the battlefield.  Forced to make split second decisions truly about life and death, sent to war without enough training and placed in command when it is contrary to a character’s nature are just samples of some of the challenges faced by the men in this novel. 

These are the types of things that molded our fathers into the men they became when they raised boys like me.  At a time when we know our citizen soldiers are in the same situations again in far flung foreign lands, I cannot help but think this book would make a great book discussion title for any library.

Here are some suggested questions that I thought of as I read this novel:

Glick says, “This is all one thing.”  (pg. 6)  How is he right and where is he wrong?

Why do the men not report the incident when it happens?

Why do the men become obsessed with the incident when it is over?

What is the sense in the men’s mission to climb the mountain?

Why is Asch the one who is shot?

Why do the men trust Angelo as a guide?

Does Marson make the right decision regarding Angelo’s fate?

Is Glick a murderer?

Is Marson a murderer? 

What does it mean when Marson’s father says, “Do your duty”?

 In honor of my visit to Minneapolis/St. Paul this week, I want to do a little shout out to the downtown library in Minneapolis.  I was blown away by this library, its spaces, displays, collections and staff.  The children’s department was a real gem, and their vibrant, whimsical displays created by local firm Blue Rhino Studio were a delight.  I am sure that anyone who had the pleasure of visiting for PLA will say the same.Even though the Minneapolis city system merged with the Hennepin Country system a year ago, I was still able to score some old-school “MPLS” shirts and baby blankets.  Score! 

Here’s another installment of four questions that a book group leader or concerned participant should be ready to use when the discussion is lagging.

Question 1: What is the central conflict in the book?

When to use it: When discussion of the book is scattered and missing the main point

A few odd comments can send your group tilting at tangents while the main ideas of what they’ve read are lost. Some kind of conflict, tension, or central problem is usually there at the heart of a book, driving the action, generating suspense, and leading to the behaviors and emotions of characters. In good writing, the central conflict is often the engine that makes everything else in the writing go. Getting group members to discuss what they view as the central conflict may also help readers understand each other’s reactions when interpretations of the book differ.

Question 2: What other books would you recommend to someone who liked this book?

When to use it: When you’ve run out of things to say about the book itself; when you want to make connections to other reading experiences

If conversation of the book itself is dwindling this is a handy question to ask. It’s especially useful when reading something from a subject matter or genre with which only some of your members are familiar, as they can provide guidance for others who like the book but don’t know where to turn next. Between them, a group of readers can quickly make a web of connections to similar reading experiences.

Question 3: What does this book say about the time and place in which it was written?

When to use it: When you want to connect your reading choice with the rest of the world

If you’ve read an older book, or a book by an author from another culture, it’s important and interesting to study it in the context of the time and place from which it emanated, not just from your current perspective. If the book is from your group’s own time and place, it’s philosophically interesting to think about what the book says about our contemporary world. Another way to phrase this question might be to ask what a reader from another place or time would think about us if they were to study the book from their perspective.

Question 4: What emotions did this book bring up in you?

When to use it: When the discussion is too abstract and lacks feeling; when your readers are struggling with how to phrase their reactions

Our core reactions to a book–a flash of anger, the flush of excitement, nagging worries, a swoon of rapture, even feeling bored or upset–are more honest and often more interesting to discuss than all of the literary analysis our big brains can produce. Sometimes we may not even be able to explain the reaction that a book creates in us, but by sharing these reactions with a group, we may come to understand them better.   This little question can be a quick tool to unlock these reactions and add fire to a lifeless discussion.

Next week, I’ll be back with one more set of four questions. Collect ‘em all and trade them with your friends!

Like most book group leaders, I’m always looking around for something interesting to do with my faithful attendees to keep the gathering fresh and fun and unpredictable.

There have been plenty of great suggestions in this blog for how to spice up the meeting when chat has taken a u-turn into dullsville. I’ve used most of them.

Recently I was culling the titles on book groups I’ve collected over the years and ran into this little gem, Literary Trivia: Fun and Games for Book Lovers by Richard Lederer and Michael Gilleland. I’ve been a fan of Lederer’s since I was a kid. Reading Lederer led me to 1066 and All That by W. C. Sellar and Spoonerisms, Sycophants and Sots by Donald Black.

I found oodles of trivia, games and mind benders to tease my discussion group. There are lots of first-line, last-line guessing lists, along with “name that fictional location.” But my favorite, and the one I can’t wait to spring on my group is from the chapter, Still Hot Off the Press.

A sampling: King Kills his Father, then Marries Woman Old Enough to be his Mother–And She Is!!

Marooned on Coral Island, British Preppies Kill Each Other!

Woman Knits Whole Wardrobes During Public Executions!

and my favorite: Lord of Manor Frightened to Death by Giant Phosphorescent Dog!

Consider writing your own faux news headlines from the books your group has read in the past year and let everyone guess at the year end round up.

If you need answers, just let me know.

  A book’s attractiveness matters. Pretty books attract the eye and are picked up more often in bookstores. I know because I’ve ordered books for the little bookstore on the north campus of the University of Washington for over thirty years. I’ve watched excellent books with bad covers fall unnoticed by the wayside, and mediocre books with great covers soar to the top of our sales chart. I’ve made it my mission to help people find the good new books, to feature and promote the best new titles, the ones that really provide a satisfying reading experience. But my zeal to let the world know about the best new literature being created today is limited by one big unavoidable factor. The books need to sell.

To achieve that goal, to get the good ones to sell, for the last seven years I’ve been doing a bookstore promotion featuring the best new book of the month. Helping readers find the good ones is extremely satisfying when it works. It doesn’t always work. The publishers have to do their part. A book cover is competing with a store full of other covers.

Take Animal’s People, a perfect example. The British cover captured the novel completely – the delightful boy narrator’s face, the teeming marketplace, the flavor of India. Check out the American cover.   It looks like a white book that was dropped in the mud. I was so incensed I wrote passionately to the publishers. Some dimwit in the Simon and Schuster marketing department thought the new cover design looked like a chemical spill. Never mind that the spill in the novel is a gas, not a drippy, splattery mess like this dreadful cover, surely a nominee for worst cover of the year, and the sales destroyer of a warm-hearted, huge-souled novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a bestseller in Britain. Our bookstore couldn’t give away the American copies.

Okay, don’t get me started on how publishers destroy their own products through insane packaging. Let’s just look at the decision ahead of me right now. I need to choose the September book-of-the-month. I’ve just read one that would fill the bill very nicely – Xiaolu Guo’s Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.   The cover is eye-catching, the girl is drop-dead lovely, the title is too long to remember but with a cover like that, it won’t matter. With the large young Asian population on the University of Washington campus, I could sell this one easily. It’s short, practically begs you to pick it up, the title lines are comically bent, as though typed by a very poor typewriter. It’s a charmer. The story is light as froth but somehow affecting, the characters are forgettable sketches but effective at the moment, the book is a first novel by a very young writer who is utterly sincere. I was sold on Twenty Fragments until yesterday.

  Then I began reading Jean-Claude Izzo’s newly-released final novel, A Sun for the Dying. Well, Izzo is a master, and this was his last book before an untimely death, and he’s at the top of his craft, the creator of the existential Mediterranean noir now so greatly imitated, the crime novel that takes on social inequality as well as crime and does it with such artistry and passion it feels like it was written by Albert Camus. Instantly there’s no doubt – I’ve hardly begun turning the pages, and I know that this is a real novel, with teeth and guts and wisdom, that it’s going to take on the human condition. A couple chapters, and I’m completely choked up. I’m starting to remember how blown away I was by Izzo’s The Lost Sailors, the last one Europa published, and how wrecked I was by the ending.

Well, this new one is about a homeless man who’s best friend, another homeless man, has just been found dead, and Rico has decided to return to his own favorite spot (and the author’s beloved home), Marseilles. At the top of the second chapter we get the line, “If he was going to die, he might as well die in the sun.” Considering the title, this doesn’t sound like it’s going to end well. No, it’s no teen comedy, definitely not beach reading, and to make matters worse, the cover shows a wretched homeless man huddled up on the ground.

Well, dang it, that’s a big problem. That cover is going to kill it. This novel is already five times the novel that Twenty Fragments is, and yet the bookstore won’t sell a single copy. I should make Izzo’s last novel my September book-of the-month, except – is this really the cover I want on my back-to-school signage? What was Europa thinking to put such an unattractive, bleak cover on such a superb novel that could have used a little help in the marketing department?

Enough ruminations on the poor choices of publishers and the injustices of life. The morning is young, the wild lilacs are shoving their purple blossoms in through the open window, my cat is sprawled comfortably beside me, and A Sun for the Dying is within reach…

I’ve just finished reading two new books back to back, and I can only say that both reading experiences were completely satisfying, both were modern Asian novels, both were short, both were written by women, both were just published, and these two books couldn’t possibly be less alike.

Natsuo Kirino’s Real World   follows four teenage girls in the outskirts of Tokyo who are locked in a safe, playful friendship until a boy who has killed his mother steals one of the girl’s cell phones and begins calling them. It’s feminist crime noir, so realistic and low-key you believe it could have happened, written in a breathless, headlong style so effortless the book’s two hundred pages rush past in a blur of suspense, with genuine caring on the reader’s part for four very realistic girls. It’s easy to shed tears over happy endings or any kind of sentimental overload, I do it all the time, but it’s been a long time since I actually cried from pure grief and sadness. The novel delivers a double punch ending that leaves you wet-eyed and gasping.

  Conversely, there are no punches anywhere in Xiaolu Guo’s subtle, delicate Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. The short novel is a slight, almost plotless sequence of sketches of modern Beijing through the eyes of Fenfang Wang, a seventeen-year-old who runs away from her provincial mountain home in Ginger Hill Village and learns how to live in Beijing as a film extra. With frequent invocations to the Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, Fenfang wrestles for ten years with a series of boyfriends, writes her own screenplay about a simple, ordinary man, and struggles against nosy neighbors who label any girl who veers even slightly from the norm as a prostitute. Fenfang weighs the joys and sorrows of life in this touching little mosaic of sketches, and as she lands a string of non-speaking walk-on roles, she grows increasingly independent and endearing, all the while eating, since she’s always ravenously hungry. The characters are quick sketches, their personalities only hinted at, and yet the reader still cares in this sequence of episodes drawn with swift, light strokes.

What do these two very different novels have in common? In both of them, the city where they happen in almost a character, dominating the novel in mood, whether it’s Tokyo or Beijing. In both novels, women defy the restrictions of their gender and push adventurously into the competitive, male-dominated world of higher stakes. And both novels are seen through the eyes of the next generation, young women shaking off the restrictive roles of the past and trying to make their own decisions in the complex, contradictory modern world.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve led many workshops that attempted to hone the skills of fledgling book discussion leaders.  In spite of starting out with the same outline and notes, no two workshops ever turned out quite the same way — rather like multiple discussions of the same book.  These programs have a way of taking on a life of their own, as the attendees become immersed in the specifics of the training and begin asking questions about each aspect of the activity as it is introduced.  After experiencing this process a few times, I knew I needed to find a way to keep myself (and my students) on track, and thus I came up with what I call the “Five Easy Pieces” approach — five areas of discussion leading that must be covered in the time allotted, regardless of tangents the group tends to take, following the topics (and sub-topics) that especially interest them, but which may not be the most important points we need to explore.

This is how the “Five Easy Pieces” break down — and I realize they might not be so easy for every discussion leader to achieve.  So that’s what we particularly emphasize, how to make these essential pieces easier than anyone ever thought they could be.

          1.  Choose discussable books.

          2.  Going into the discussion, be as familiar as you possibly can be with the book and also, background information about the author.

          3.  Prior to the discussion, prepare a list of thought-provoking questions to get the discussion started and to reenergize the discussion should it begin to lag.

          4.  During the discussion, make an effort to get everyone in the group to participate, at least once.

          5.  Be prepared to control anyone who tries to take over the discussion and makes it difficult for others to participate.

No matter how you start talking about leading book discussions, these are the primary topics you always find yourself coming back to.  These are the matters that discussion leaders most want to explore over and over again, because they seem to be at the very core of planning and leading a successful discussion.

So the crucial topics may be easy enough to identify — but is dealing with them all that easy?  How do you define “discussable” books?  What aspects of the story (and the author’s background) are most important to know in detail in terms of presenting them to the book group?  What kinds of questions stimulate the most satisfying discussions?  How do you interact effectively with reluctant participants as well as dominating know-it-alls?

Perhaps you have success stories to share — victories achieved through trial and error.  If so, we’d like to hear them.  All of us can learn from experience — our own, as well as others’.  Tell us how you organize your discussions and make them work.  And I won’t be surprised if they fall into a pattern similar to ”Five Easy Pieces.” 

Most of you have already heard the term “cozy.”  It’s a term coined for the type of books you can easily hand your grandmother–they’re mostly free of (or light on) sex, violence, profanity or those pesky open or sad endings you find in most contemporary fiction.

The April 2007 issue is particularly good.  It’s chock full of book group related links and blogs–so check it out!

Whether you are the official leader and facilitator of a book group or just a helpful participant, it’s important to have resources to which you can turn when the discussion isn’t working. Here are four useful questions to keep ready in your conversational toolbox.

Question 1: To whom do you think this book would appeal? To what kind of reader would you recommend it?

When to use it: When the discussion seems unduly or lopsidedly critical

It’s OK if your group doesn’t love every book it reads, but simply piling on negative comments isn’t constructive or interesting. Also, it may offend group members who liked the book but haven’t had a chance to defend it. Instead of simply talking about why you don’t like the book, it might be more interesting to look at who the appropriate audience is, and what they might be seeing in the title that you are not.  

Question 2: Which character did you find the most interesting?

When to use it: When the discussion slows or is lacking in specifics

The behavior of people is almost always interesting, and the choices that characters make are often the key to a book. Learning, through vicarious experience, to understand ourselves and other people may be one of the most important things that we can get out of reading. This is an easy question for most readers to answer that quickly leads to more specific discussion of the book. Instead of “interesting,” you could also ask which character is the most frustrating, dull, frightening, or funny. Make sure you follow up after the first answer and ask if anyone else has a differing opinion.

Question 3: What do you think the author was trying to achieve? What feelings did she/he intend to create in the reader?

When to ask it: When the group is missing the point; when they are critical of a book for creating exactly the reaction that the author intended

Great books aren’t always warm and fuzzy. Look back at your reading history: You will discover books that you didn’t like on first reading because they made you angry, frightened, confused, sad, or otherwise upset. But there’s a good chance that those books have stuck with you. Reading them created feelings in you and made you more alive. The books may have helped you to understand your emotions, undergo catharsis, or handle difficulties when they occurred in real life. When a book creates a negative reaction in your group, stop and think about it: Are you criticizing the author for achieving exactly what they intended? Regardless, examining the author’s choices is fruitful ground for discussion.

Question 4: Do you see any of the author’s personal experience reflected in the book?

When to use it: To add depth to your discussion; to get a broader look at the author’s life and work

Of course asking this question assumes that somebody in your group looked up the author’s biography or has read some of their previous work. If this isn’t happening, you might want to do more homework in the future. After reading a book, particularly if you like it, it will be natural to be curious about the author’s life and other works. Such discussion will always add depth, and on some occasions, (look at the lives of Anne Perry, Gore Vidal, Ian Fleming or Lisa See, for instance) will make the discussion of their books MUCH more interesting. 

I’ll be back with more questions for enlivening a flagging discussion next week.

The order matters. Alluring books get readers to come to meetings. The sequence of books discussed becomes a chronicle of the growth of the reading group. Start off a book club with three bad choices, and chances are you no longer have a club. The beginning is where you get reader commitment.

  Which novels or memoirs will work the best as an introduction to the many faces of gay literature? What we call our culture as gay people often has its roots in the many psychological defenses we’ve created to survive persecution by straight society. The coming out novel. The social justice novel. The moral problem novel. Get rid of intolerance, and a prominent chunk of gay literature is left by the wayside. Young gay people today have a hard time even imagining a pre-Stonewall gay life.

Much of our literature so far involves the individual gay person and his/her method of growing up and dealing with a society that disapproves of gayness.    The development of integrity, the ability to be honest to yourself and about yourself in spite of social disapproval, is often the value that culminates a gay memoir or novel. It’s called coming out of the closet, and for many gay authors that’s the self-defining step. But is it for young people who don’t know what the closet is? One of the questions of our book club will be: how is gay culture more than simply a response to oppression?

  Gay people who read (not casually, like read magazines, but passionately, as though books matter and might change you) are a particular minority sub-culture. But we exist. We’re often solos, on the outskirts of gay society. Once I realized homosexuality was a mortal sin in the Catholic Church, reading became my frantic attempt to make sense out of my crumbling morality. Reading was my salvation, as I desperately tried to figure out what was “wrong” with me and why I had such an unusual attitude toward boys. I dived into psychology looking for answers. I gobbled up books by gay authors, people who were like me, to see how they dealt with the unfair blows and the gnawing secrets and the unspoken passions.

  Those books anchored me. Those authors assured me I belonged to a tribe of sane and good human beings. Which is why I want this club to succeed. It’s my give-back. It’s my heritage, these thrilling and revealing books, these monuments to gay giants, and I want to pass them on. I’m trying to design an ad campaign to get the attention of those lonely solo readers out there on the outskirts. I want to gather them to Dunshee House to discuss great books together.

  So this Wednesday we’ll shoot the studio photo that will become the postcards and the posters and the newspaper ads: two naked guys in a yin/yang position reading. The motto of the ad will be “Let’s Read Them Together” and the naked models will be doing just that. The bottom of the ad will list the first six books we’ll be reading. Which are…?

  I need to decide. I have to make a call on the order of those first six books. I need to start with the books that will attract the most readers to this project. My instincts are to hold back on my favorite novels till I have a core of strong readers – Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters. Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire will each have particular challenges. Robert Musil’s Young Torless and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice are darker visions to save for later. I had thought to begin with one of my all-time favorites, E. M. Forster’s Maurice, until I heard it dismissed as “that boring British movie.” Yike. When I first read it in 1972 it was a jolt of reality. But then, after all, it’s Edwardian gayness. Okay then, not Maurice, and not the European classics. Maybe that’s the clue, then – maybe the way to get this group on its feet is to start with the American experience.

With that in mind, I hesitantly come up with this first list of six books, open to revision, to start off the 2009 Gay Classics book club in Seattle:

January 28   The City and the Pillar by GORE VIDAL

February 25   Rubyfruit Jungle by RITA MAE BROWN

March 25   A Boy’s Own Story by EDMUND WHITE

April 29   Becoming a Man by PAUL MONETTE

May 27   Bastard Out of Carolina by DOROTHY ALLISON

June 24   A Single Man by CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

When I started Steve Martin’s autobiography, Born Standing Up, I didn’t expect to think it might be a good book for discussion.  But when I finished it, getting misty on the Metro bus, I began to think otherwise.

Funnyman, comic, writer, playwright, and actor Steve Martin is as much a topic for discussion as any other subject.  Born Standing Up finds Martin reliving his hungry days, 18 years of honing and perfecting his unique take on new comedy.  From his upbringing in California in the 1950s, his fraught relationship with his father, and his life on the road, Martin shows us just how serious comedy can be and how much his rise cost him. 

Years ago, I had seen his play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, performed in a small Vermont theater house.  At the time, I had no clue that the “wild and crazy guy” I knew from Saturday Night Live had writing talent up his sleeve.

Then novels like Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company started coming out.

But what really caused me first to take a second look at Steve Martin was an essay that he wrote about his father’s death for The New Yorker.  That article remains one of the most moving, emotional pieces about a father-son relationship that I had ever read, made more striking for the effort and release it obviously must have provided for the writer.  Parts of this essay ended up incorporated into his memoir, but the essay is still more powerful to me.

It wasn’t until I saw Jerry Seinfeld’s 2002 documentary, Comedian, that I realized how much work and thinking is involved in comedy.  I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that is like any other art. 

But Steve Martin grew up in a different time, and his brand of comedy took years to create and perfect.  Martin also talks about how and why he left stand-up and got into filmmaking, and after following him on his arduous journey, you understand why.

Born Standing Up would be a wonderful book for discussion.  It could be paired with one of Martin’s novels or plays, or could be enhanced by listening to one of his comedy albums.  You could discuss and watch Shopgirl, in which Martin also acts.  The possibilities are limitless.  And if your group chooses to do so, let me know how it goes.

 Weather is the subject of dreary and banal small talk, right?

As I enter another hurricane season in my transplanted southern home, I can’t help but wonder if this is true. We get a mixture of vicarious terror and a shiver of schadenfreude joy from reading about disastrous weather. The other night as I drove to a book group, I was listening to Timothy Egan’s National Book Award winning Dust Bowl saga The Worst Hard Time in my car. Egan follows the history of dozens of people through the worst of the Dust Bowl years, explaining how human behavior created a weather disaster. The book is full of memorable characters and events, all made that much more intriguing by the fact that their stories are true.

As the narrator told the tale of Black Sunday–August 14, 1935–the day in which the worst dust storm ever obliterated the sky in large sections of Nebraska, Oklahoma, and the Texas panhandle, I was driving into the jaws of my own storm. Flashes of lightning seemed to point directly to the house where my group would be held. The fear, excitement, and anxiety that my own little storm created in me helped underline the terror, dread, and mental instability that must have been experienced by the people who suffered through five years of no crops, no money, depression, and illness created by the dust-filled air. As I listened to the tale of a family who drove through drifting dunes, choking dirt, and engine-killing static in Model A Fords so that they could bury a grandmother and daughter who died from dust pneumonia on the same day, only to be turned back by a vicious wall of dirt, I thought about how much I took the environment for granted. Bad weather is a humbling experience.

The Worst Hard Time would make a great book group choice for the hot and stormy months of late summer. Read it with Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath to understand both what the “Okies” were fleeing and what they faced when they got to California. Try comparing it with the modern panhandle depicted in Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole. Mix it with other wonderful stormy reading: Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm, David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard, or Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, for instance.  Or try a book about how contemporary policy and practice are changing weather patterns such as Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers or Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe. You might even be inspired to read more about Franlin Delano Roosevelt and his responses to the Dust Bowl and Great Depression in books like FDR by Jean Edward Smith or Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time.

There are dozens of approaches to this material, all prime ground for discussion. Maybe there’s a good reason after all, why so many people talk about the weather.