I know I’ve blogged numerous times about Luncheon of the Boating Party and the book discussions I’ve attended for it, but it occurred to me last night how very differently readers will approach a book.

This is nothing surprising for any of us who facilitate book groups, but how often do we get to see this postulate in action? For the fourth time this year, I lead discussion on Susan Vreeland’s wildly popular fictional account of the summer Renoir spent painting his masterpiece.

The local AAUW book group was completely fascinated with the characters assembled for the painting. They loved the act of flipping back and forth from the pages of the book to the reproduction of the painting provided. While doing this, one of the attendees piped up that she thought the painting was also a character in the novel.

She pointed out that the many emotions and actions of the models, on and off the canvas, were qualities that contributed to the development of the painting. She had us all convinced when she pointed out the dramatic change in the painting once Circe was removed from the scene. Both the painting and the other models’ lives were impacted with the absence of this pivotal woman.

I was hooked. I hadn’t heard this theory before, but it worked for me and the rest of the group. I have so much discussable material on this book that came from all the groups, that I don’t know if I’ll ever use the publisher provided reading guide again.

Last night I watched the film version of John Burnham Schwartz’s harrowing novel, Reservation Road, which is about a tragic hit-and-run accident and its devastating effects on two families — that of the driver, and also his victim, a young boy.  The movie stars Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, and Jennifer Connelly, each of whom gives a powerful, heartwrenching performance.  It’s directed by Terry George, acclaimed for his previous film, Hotel Rwanda.  I’m not sure why this film didn’t receive more positive attention when it was originally released last year — perhaps because the subject matter is so dark — but it’s well worth seeing on DVD.

Watching it brought back memories of when I led a discussion of the Schwartz novel several years ago.  It was a challenging experience — some people don’t want to talk about the death of a child — but I was determined to dig into the book because I felt it was well written and dealt with important themes:  how people cope with grief; what it means to make bad choices; the need to forgive, even when one is overwhelmed with feelings of hatred and the desire for revenge.

Here is a story that centers on the worst experience that can happen to a parent, and it is very hard to read; but ultimately I believe it is worth examining, because the incident sets up such a dramatic chain reaction of very discussable issues, as one man struggles with his fear and guilt and another desperately seeks justice and retribution, even in the face of his crumbling marriage.  This is a book that asks, finally, “What does it mean to be a human being?”  You should seek it out, read it, and discuss it.

Setting is an important appeal factor to many readers, but wise book group leaders should give it special consideration.

A book with a strong sense of place lends itself well to discussion because it offers so many conversational entry points for readers. Even readers who are not good at discussing their reactions to a book often have interesting stories related to particular locales. If they haven’t been to the place in question, that’s fine too: discussion can compare the location of the book to other places they know better. A fresh setting also offers a chance for readers to speculate about what life is like elsewhere. Who knows? that wonderful feeling we call empathy might even result. 

For book group leaders looking to moonlight as travel guides, I heartily recommend the website BiblioTravel (http://www.bibliotravel.com). It’s the simple but inspired creation of two Canadian librarians, Fiona Scannell and James Schellenberg. Type in the name of a city, country, state, or region, and you’ll get back a list of books that are set there. As of this writing the archive contains 3165 books set in 1609 locales. New York City and London lead the list, with over 200 books each, but dozens of other places are well represented. Perhaps best of all, any registered user can submit additions to the collection. This is a fine example of the kind of massive undertakings that librarians and other readers can manage with ease if they harness the power of online collaboration.

You can search the site by author, title, or genre as well, and most of the titles also include the year the book was written, the point in history when it is set, and a brief review. This is a wonderful opportunity for readers to learn, enjoy, and most important, participate. The site is very much active and will only grow and improve with your input. Take your own tour of BiblioTravel some time soon!

As soon as the book was handed to me by a bookseller, I was in love. It had a luscious painting on the cover, and was otherwise gray. I found myself holding a beautifully constructed paperback, with wallpaper from the era of the original printing of the book on endpages. It was just what I was looking for.

I am relatively late in discovering Persephone, as is evidenced by a couple of Bookslut posts here and here. And this Stuck in a Book blog post.

Now I feel as if I have stumbled upon a huge treat, and I can’t wait to get my hands on more of Persephone’s dovegray reprints. Persephone Books is dedicated to reprinting “forgotten twentieth century novels, short stories, cookery books and memoirs by (mostly) women writers.” Persephone Books’ reprints are for “the discerning reader who prefers books that are neither too literary nor too commerical, and are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget.”

That, my dears, is quite the mission statement. Persephone Books is the brainchild of publisher Nicola Beauman. Her book, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39, originally published by Virago Press, explores the writings of many of the authors Persephone Books now republishes.

What makes me so smitten? These are authors who deserve to be rediscovered, celebrated and discussed.

Dorothy Whipple’s Someone at a Distance blew me away. Its simple premise, the dissolution of a marriage, is drawn in a subtle, skillful way. Whipple draws you into post-War rural England with an artist’s hand, taking you into the lives of the North family with deft, compassionate insight.

The principal characters are Avery and Ellen North. Avery works in London at a publishing house, and his wife, Ellen, a woman happily consumed with the daily tasks of keeping house. Ellen has little interest in entertaining or attending the literary events at Avery’s work. Even though it might be her duty as a publisher’s wife, she soon realized that “she didn’t look important and nobody wondered who she was,” and decided she was not missed.

Avery and Ellen and their two children lead an idyllic life. It is to all eyes a charmed family. But everything changes when Old Mrs. North, Avery’s demanding mother, hires a French girl, Louise, as a companion and language coach. Louise is a fine piece of work, a girl smarting from an affair to a man in a higher social class in her hometown, who is hellbent on exacting her revenge–success. One Louise sets her sights on Avery, things get complicated.

Whipple explores family relationships, human motives and happiness with the kind of compassion and finesse that you don’t see nearly as readily in contemporary fiction.

I should mention that Persephone Books may not be easy to find. Some of them are available in America, but others you will have to order. If your book group is looking for some forgotten classics, it is well worth the hunt.

EarlyWord, the Web site that includes Nora Rawlinson’s Give ‘em what They Want blog, has just added a new feature called EarlyWord Kids. Contributor Lisa Von Drasek, librarian for the Bank Street Colllege of Education in New York, started posting last week about books for children and young adults.  Look for this tag on the site:

to identify new EarlyWord Kids posts and to access the EarlyWord Kids archive.

  In five years of hosting a reading group, I’ve never seen anything like it. Slowly I watched the faces around the table last night losing their confidence as we waded deeper and deeper into our discussion of Carmen Laforet’s Spanish classic, Nada. It was like discovering you had read the wrong book. One person would make a statement, the next person would completely disagree with it. One member announced it was her favorite book of the year. Another couldn’t get past the first forty pages. But what’s it about? No one agreed. Why is it called Nada? No one agreed. And why are we having such a hard time trying to pin this book down?

  More than any book I’ve ever seen discussed, we all slowly realized that every one of us had read a different book – different Nadas because we ourselves had interpreted it. Sure, the reader always collaborates to an extent with the author, but in Nada we’re piecing together clues, trying to figure out what’s happening, and those clues can be read in more than one way. Was Roman a dangerously powerful man or the most vulnerable character? Was Ena intentionally revenging her mother, or was it just a young girl’s curiosity? Just how hungry was Andrea really? Was Gloria a perpetual victim or a survivor? And was she a prostitute, or was she really going to her sister’s house to play cards? And who was really responsible for that death at the end? One by one, we realized that none of us agreed. A few members got red faces. They began interrupting each other. It was very confusing.

  Well, blame it on good writing. It was due to Laforet’s fascinatingly ambiguous style. Sure, she tells you stuff, but she’s telling you through the mind and words of an eighteen-year-old virgin who is completely thrown when she receives her first kiss. Just how reliable is Andrea? Is she really seeing things the way they are? Mario Vargas Llosa analyzes it this way – in Nada, what’s most important is what doesn’t get said. We are given data, but only data, and it comes through an imperfect, inexperienced filter that unintentionally distorts the data. Just how good a friend is Ena, really? Or does she have ulterior motives right from the start that Andrea can’t see?

  Laforet may have been only a young twentysomething when she wrote Nada, but she knew exactly what she was doing. As one character warns the young writer Andrea, “As for the rest of it, don’t make up any novels about it: Our arguments and shouting don’t have a cause, and they don’t lead to any conclusion…”

We all came away from the meeting slightly humbled and quietly thrilled. Seldom had a book been such a mirror to show us our own interpreting quite so clearly. I can’t recommend Nada highly enough for book groups. Sixty years after it was first published, readers are still fascinated looking through the eyes of that innocent young country girl at that dark house on Calle de Aribau where secrets from the past are constantly erupting into violence.

Here’s hoping your reading group has as rich an experience as we did!

I’m on a mission. I’m not certain what the point of the mission is. But I want to see where the journey takes me.

I am going to visit as many of Kansas City’s book clubs as possible and record the experiences here for posterity. I’m hoping to gather some new rejuvenation tools, new titles to discuss, and get excited all over again about talking about books.

Tonight I started with the Linda Hall Library’s Periodic Roundtable book group. This experimental gathering was pulled together in January of 2008 and their focus is on popular science books. They’ve discussed, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Physics of NASCAR and the latest, Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam.

Rocket Boys, the inspiration for the popular movie, October Sky, prompted plenty of discussion on the place of science in today’s educational system and the encouragement of curiosity and exploration in children when they live in a world that tries to protect them from every evil.

The usual “memoir” dilemma was broached, how much of this book is fabrication and fact? We also discussed the influence of Hickam’s parents on his development as a young scientist. It’s obvious Homer’s mother was determined that her second son should live a life outside of the shabby company-owned coal mining town of
Coalwood. But a few readers felt Homer’s father played a large a part in his development as his mother.

Readers also discussed Homer’s precarious hold on his passion for science. One reader pointed out that Homer could have been “lost” to science a number of times in his childhood but for the encouragement and support of his family, a beloved teacher, and some unusual townspeople who believed in Homer and his “Rocket Boys.”

Jenny led a lively group that included two students, community members and Friends of the Linda Hall Library. What thrilled attendees most was Hickam’s upcoming visit to Kansas City on November 6. It’s free and open to the public. Readers expect to continue the discussion with the author himself that night.

Fun fact: October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys.

Stephen Shore.  Uncommon Places:  the Complete Works.  Aperture, 2004.

One of my passions is photography and I took a continuing education course recently that included a stop at the Haggerty Museum of Art on the campus of Marquette University to see a traveling exhibition called Biographical Landscape:  the Photography of Stephen Shore, 1969–1979.I realized as we walked amongst the photographs that each image created its own discussion, not unlike a book discussion.  One of the powerful things about Shore’s photographs of common places turned uncommon is that each seems to write its own story. 

If the images are not enough, Shore himself is a fascinating person to discuss.  At age fourteen, he had three of his photographs sold to Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art.  Three years later, Shore was hanging out at The Factory with Andy Warhol.  The photographs that make up the exhibit I saw were created on a number of odysseys taken back and forth across the country in an automobile, making the average and unremarkable into time capsules of who and what we are as a nation. 

The question becomes:  could you schedule a book discussion on a work of photographs?  I think Uncommon Places may lead to an uncommon book discussion. 

  Yesterday two different designers showed me their layouts for the postcard announcing the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club. Both postcards were handsome, and both hammered home to me the same message: these particular books and these particular dates were about to be written in stone. Once the postcard goes to press, I’m committed for twenty-five evenings and six titles in one irreversible order. So, of course, I wouldn’t be who I am if I weren’t doubting and re-evaluating every decision, trying to conjure up the ultimate first six books to perfectly launch this new reading group.

Is it just fussing, or does it really matter?

What called all my decisions into question was a conversation I had last Thursday with a lesbian bookseller who’s a voracious reader. I showed her my choices for the first six months, and she wasn’t that impressed by my two choices for women.

“What would you suggest, then?” I finally asked.

“What about Fun Home?” 

  It took my breath away. Why hadn’t I thought about Alison Bechdel’s mindblowing graphic memoir myself? It was a Nick’s Pick at University Book Store when it first came out, before it went on to win Book of the Year awards at Time Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. Not only is it brilliant and complex and hilarious and heartbreaking, it’s one of the very few books that contains a believable portrait of both a lesbian and a gay man.

So my list has changed. I realize that my June slot, the book club selection for the month filled with Gay Pride activities, will now be the festive, funny, celebratory Fun Home. Which means something has to come off the list, either Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt or Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man.

  More and more decisions, and the clock is ticking. And I’ve got to remember, the best books don’t always provoke the best conversations.

  I’m beginning with Breakfast with Scot by Michael Downing, the lightest of the titles I’ve chosen. I’m hoping it will be less threatening to discuss. It takes on gender roles in a refreshing way. Downing has a tight, clean style, if occasionally smartass, and though the plotting is sometimes a little busy and the book’s dramatic arc only lasts for thirty pages, the book’s heart is simple and clear and funny enough to endear it to straight people as well as gay. (Nagging doubt: wouldn’t Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story be a classier way to begin the club?)

I’ve decided to drop Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle from the list. At first I thought it would be ideal, those opening chapters are so startling and funny. But Molly Bolt gets a little full of herself in the second half, and the quality of writing descends to arch chattiness. Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina also used to be on the list. Though many women praise it highly, one too many has described it as “the most depressing book I’ve ever read” for me to be eagerly diving into its three hundred pages. So it’s been moved back a bit, waiting for its time.

Each of the first six selections gets four Wednesday meetings, but just due to the way the calendar falls, the April selection gets five. Which book warrants that extra day? I’ve got Gore Vidal slotted there. We can use the extra day to show a documentary, or maybe his excellent screenplay for Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, or even a fun evening watching the film of Myra Breckinridge.

  Interestingly enough, had Gore Vidal retained the original horrific 1948 ending to The City and the Pillar, I wouldn’t have chosen it. The Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club will be reading his 1965 revision, which brings the novel to a very realistic, non-sensational ending. But I suspect we may be able to persuade the book club’s literary historian, Brad Craft, to educate us with an interpretive reading of that hair-raising original climax.

  The biggest question for me now is whether to keep Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man as the May book, or Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. The Isherwood is arty and lovely and intellectual, the Highsmith is a romantic lesbian thriller. The Isherwood is shorter, the Highsmith easier reading. The Isherwood has a nice documentary to go with it. The Highsmith evens up the reading list, three gay book and three lesbian books.

I’ve got about twenty-four hours to make up my mind.

I’ve been frustrated and irritable all week. Our bookstore’s part-time cashier actually asked if he was annoying me. Sure, he’s a noisy chatterbox and I’m frantically reading in between customers, but it was more than that.

I should have known at the beginning of the week my November book, and I didn’t. What book would I be discussing in my book club and promoting at University Book Store? It needs to be a book worth discussing, worth buying, worth promoting. I get to choose twelve new books each year, and each one matters to me. They’re each an opportunity to give the very best reading experience, to direct attention to writing of quality. It’s never a light decision for me.

Some months are easy. The choice leaps out at me. This month wasn’t. I had an ominously growing shortlist, and no obvious winner.

  My first thought was Licinio de Azevedo’s The Train of Salt and Sugar, but I’ve already documented my hopes and fears for that book in my last blog.

My interest perked when I noticed that the author of Corelli’s Mandolin had a short new novel which one reviewer said was comparable to On Chesil Beach. Now that sounded promising. And the first chapter of Louis de Bernieres’ The Partisan’s Daughter is so gripping and believable and funny and touching, I was blown away. The voice is an utterly authentic male voice. Then I read the second chapter. It’s from the woman’s point of view. I didn’t believe a word of it. This wasn’t my book.

Then last Thursday my eye was drawn in the bookstore to a slim new Europa paperback with cartoon characters on the cover. One glance at the hilarious title, one peek inside, and my hopes soared. I thought my problems were over. I had discovered Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio.

  The idea completely charmed me. Eleven different police testimonies as various immigrants – an Iranian cook, a Dutch film student, a Bangladeshi grocer, an Arab who sells fish – explain themselves and misunderstand each other in a Roman piazza. The novel been embraced by modern Italian literature as an authentic Italian work by a non-Italian, and the author, like the central character, is an Algerian who has made Italy his home.

We meet various regulars in the piazza – Benedetta, the prejudiced old concierge, Marini, the arrogant Milanese professor, Elisabetta Fabiani, the eccentric whose adored dog Valentino has gone missing – and slowly realize why they’re all giving testimony. Amedeo, a character that every one of them genuinely loves, a happily-married translator who has befriended them all, is mysteriously missing and has become the prime suspect in a murder that’s happened in the apartment house elevator, the stabbing of a young tough known as the Gladiator whom everyone genuinely hates.

Much of the novel is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a darkly comic spin on the immigrant mindset, as well as a mystery, a satire, a burlesque, a noir – in short, it’s frothy and fun and breaks all the rules.

Unfortunately, the novel stumbles when it tries to be a murder mystery. Though this reader didn’t guess who-done-it, the crime and the criminal are so little explored that it’s patently only a plot device and hard to take seriously. As a whole, the little novel is definitely charming, literate, and good for a laugh, but the characters come a hair too close to caricatures, and the murder mystery frame is a flimsy one. If I’m going to promote a book, if I’m going to ask others to read the book, it needs to be more than that.

And then I stumbled on the Finnish novel, The Howling Miller, by Arto Paasilinna.

  Hooked. Suddenly I’m worried about this crazy miller. I had no idea a character in a novel was about to get under my skin so completely.

Gunnar Huttunen has been ruined by a fire that took his mill and the life of his wife. Now he’s bought the old mill on the Suukoski rapids, and already he’s got the saw working. He’s tall, lean, and handsome, not to mention a strong and skillful miller, but sometimes at night, particularly in winter, he feels a need to howl – long, wolf-like howls that drive the dogs crazy and keep the village up all night. Until a few powerful, wealthy villagers decide something has to be done.

What an unusual book! Delightfully droll, with all the fierce independence, dryer-than-dry humor and grumpy good-heartedness that are quintessentially Finn, packed with dozens of great scenes, including how to get your savings out of the bank with a shotgun.

Escaped from a mental hospital, pursued by the police and the military, Huttunen becomes a legendary renegade hermit, befriended by the faithful old constable and the drunken postman, loved by the pretty 4H adviser who’s always feeding him vegetables, and hated by the wealthy farm holders who are given permission by the police chief to shoot to kill.He’s part-Robin Hood, part-Robinson Crusoe. He’s such a likeable, down-to-earth character that it’s no surprise Jesus Himself even has a chat with him, offering advice on the best way to burn down a church He never really much liked.It’s written with deadpan starkness and a mythic simplicity. You can’t stop reading. You chuckle out loud as you anxiously turn the pages, worrying about a loveable eccentric who seems to have stepped straight out of legend and is surely headed straight for hell.

As I neared the ending, I became so worried over the inevitable outcome of Huttunen’s brave little rebellion against society that I went to bed rather than read the last two chapters. A lot hangs on how a book ends. Endings separate a craftsman writer from a genius writer. When the governor sends in the military, how can one man honestly stand against it? I would never reveal how it ends, but I’ll put all fears to rest: this defiant little novel builds to an uncompromising, utterly unexpected and completely satisfying end. It’s a choke-in-the-throat surprise, a quiet stroke of genius.

Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Man is the November book club selection at University Book Store in Seattle.

I have never planned or coordinated a “One Book, One City” discussion program, although I have participated in such an event as a discussion leader.  Now that these programs have been around for a while, I’m wondering if any research and reporting have been done in regard to the experiences of participants — both leaders and readers.  Do the planners typically ask for feedback from those who come to discuss the book, and what happens to this information after it’s been gathered?  Is the data ever shared with others who are interested in mounting similar events?

Here are some of the questions that have been buzzing around in my head.

1) Why do people decide to sign up for these discussions — as opposed to other programs that are not designed to involve participants city-wide? 

2) If the program is offered annually, what percentage of participants return for another go-round?  Is there evidence to show why they decide to come back?

3) Do the participants ever share why they choose one venue over another — library setting over church hall, book store over coffee house, etc., — or is it just a consequence of where they are when they decide to sign up?  Is the setting for the discussion important in the minds of the participants — and does it in any way affect the quality of the discussion?

4) How much planning and effort goes into training the discussion leaders — is everyone given the same set of questions and background material, and are they encouraged to add their own questions, or shape the ones that are given to them?  Is there an attempt made to try to insure that all the discussions follow the same format — or are the leaders given considerable latitude to form the programs according to their own preferences?

5) What goes into choosing a book that will be offered to an entire community for reading, reflection and discussion?  Is there a set of characteristics developed at the outset to help determine which titles will possibly fill the bill, while others will be quickly ruled out?  When there are several books that could be chosen as “The One,” what qualities are pinpointed to establish the winner?

I’m sure there are other issues that bystanders like myself have been curious about.  I think it would be jolly good fun (and helpful, too) if some of our blog readers who have had experience with these programs could respond to this post with comments about what they’ve learned — and perhaps, add some questions of their own.

It’s clear that the “One Book, One City” concept is a success and will undoubtedly be utilized again and again in communities throughout our country.  Knowing more about the actual experience of providing these programs will only help to make them stronger and more effective when newcomers to the field decide to become involved. 

Tomorrow, I’m giving a talk at the annual Virginia Library Association conference called “The Many Faces of Fantasy.” It’s a talk I’ve given in a previous form to the Connecticut Library Association as well.

Fantasy is a complex genre with enough different kinds of books to both please and annoy any individual reader. It’s not, as some mistakenly believe, a genre written only for the purpose of escape. In fact, the fantasy context is often a great place for writers to explore big concepts: love, revenge, the costs of war, bigotry, obsession, addiction, the battle between duty and desire and so on, all in a milieu that avoids treading on certain cultural senstivities. It’s also a genre that in its best instances blends many elements of good fiction writing: strong characters, detailed settings, intricate plotting, and elegant language. As a librarian, a reader, or a book group leader, it’s important to sort out differences between the subsets of the genre so you can pick the right books for the audience and get full enjoyment from your fantasy reading.

I don’t have space here to define the sixteen categories into which I divide the genre, but I thought it might be fun and useful to at least share part of my talk: the sixteen categories and three works–two familiar (to genre fans, at least) and one newer title or series–deserving your attention. In each case, I’ll list the newer work last. Any of these titles (or first books in the series listed) would make a good choice for a book group:

EPIC HIGH FANTASY

• J. R. R. Tolkien  The Lord of the Rings 
• Guy Gavriel Kay   Tigana
• Patrick Rothfuss   The Name of the Wind

COMING-OF-AGE FANTASY

• J. K. Rowling   Harry Potter series
• David Eddings   The Belgariad
• Michael Scott   Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series

POLITICAL FANTASY

• Lois McMaster Bujold   The Curse of Chalion
• Robin Hobb   The Farseer Trilogy
• Daniel Abraham   The Long Price Quartet

ALTERNATE HISTORICAL FANTASY

• Guy Gavriel Kay   The Lions of Al-Rassan
• Susanna Clarke   Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell
• Emma Bull   Territory

“REALISTIC” EPIC FANTASY

• George R. R. Martin    A Song of Ice and Fire series
• K. J. Parker   The Engineer Trilogy
• David Anthony Durham   Acacia

HEROIC FANTASY

• Fritz Leiber   Lankhmar series
• Robert E. Howard  Conan series
• David (and Stella) Gemmell   Troy series

PARANORMAL ADVENTURE

• Jim Butcher   Dresden Files series
• Rachel Caine   Weather Warden series
• Rob Thurman  Cal Leandros series

DARK FANTASY

• H. P. Lovecraft   Cthulhu mythos
• Clive Barker   Weaveworld
• Christopher Golden  The Veil series

FANTASTIC ROMANCE

• Sherrilyn Kenyon   Dark-Hunter series
• Mary Janice Davidson   Undead (Queen Betsy) series
• Lois McMaster Bujold  The Sharing Knife series

ROMANTIC FANTASY

• Jacqueline Carey   Kushiel series
• Juliet Marillier   Sevenwaters series
• Maria V. Snyder  Yelena (Study) series

HUMOROUS FANTASY

• Terry Pratchett   Discworld series
• William Goldman   The Princess Bride
• Austin Grossman   Soon I Will Be Invincible

LITERARY FANTASY

• John Crowley   Little, Big
• Mark Helprin   A Winter’s Tale
• Keith Donohue   The Stolen Child

NEW WEIRD OR SLIPSTREAM

• China Mieville   New Crobuzon novels
• Gene Wolfe   Book of the New Sun
• Jennifer Stevenson   Trash Sex Magic

FABLES

• Robin McKinley   Beauty
• Ellen Datlow & Terry Windling   most story anthologies
• Shannon Hale   The Book of a Thousand Days

MYTHIC EXPLORATIONS

• Charles de Lint   Newford series
• Neil Gaiman   American Gods
• Catherynne M. Valente  The Orphan’s Tales series

SCIENCE FANTASY

• Anne McCaffrey  Dragonriders of Pern series
• Robert Silverberg   Majipoor series
• S. M. Stirling   Emberverse series

If you need help sorting out the books in any of the series listed and their sequence, Fantastic Fiction, http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk is a good resource.

Over at the Book Examiner, they’re taking their reading and drinking very seriously. Face it, people will always eat and drink while they read. And what better way to start a conversation at a party or a bar than to start talking about books?

Someone’s taking a pull off a pint o’ Guinness? Ask if he’s read Ulysses by James Joyce or a biography of Sid Vicious.

The lady will have a gin and tonic? Maybe she’s also had a few pages of The Great Gatsby or Julie and Julia.

Attending a wine tasting? Over a malbec why not ask the sommelier if she’s sampled any Jorge Luis Borges?

Pouring vodka at the end of a tough day for the colleagues? No question, break out the deep discussions on Tolstoy and Nabokov.

The pairing possibilities are endless. Could give rise to a whole new profession bibmelier or mixbrarian.

Finn by Jon Clinch.  Random House, 2007.

This novel begins with a body floating down the Mississippi River, skinned and bloated, face up in the water until discovered by some boys.  “I’ll bet it is old Finn,” says one of them until another, with superior knowledge of the ways of the world, announces that it must be a woman as it is floating face up.  Men always float face down. 

From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Clinch has taken as his inspiration the scene wherein Huck and Tom find a man dead in rather bizarre circumstances.  Because Tom does not allow Huck to see the dead man’s face, Clinch has decided that the man is none other than Pap Finn, Huck’s notorious father. 

In speculating on Pap’s fate, Clinch has created an entirely new novel that begins with the death of a woman, wanders back and forth through time, and ends with an explanation of how Pap ends up floating face down on a bed in a sea of chaos in his ruined shack. 

While along the way we have many chances to re-learn what happened to Huckleberry, this novel is really about the ominous and amoral presence of Pap Finn.  He is an alcoholic and abusive man, racist and misogynist as well.  Surviving by trap fishing on the river, he sells his stock for a meager amount of supplies and a major amount of booze.  Under the constant shadow of his disapproving father James Manchester Finn, or The Judge, Finn also has a peculiar and slightly criminal relationship with his brother Will, the town’s lawyer.  One of the ironies of the book is the question of whether The Judge is really any better a father than his evil son. 

The challenging use of time in this novel allows us to see Finn as a young man, long before he becomes a father.  Shockingly to everyone, Finn takes up with a black runaway named Mary and the two decide to name their mulatto child Huckleberry.  The complexity of dealing with Finn and Mary’s relationship, especially regarding his obvious racism and his mistreatment of all, is just one of the parallel elements established by Clinch in this novel.  The many parallels will make amble opportunity to develop challenging questions for a book discussion group. 

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is a line in the sand that separates the two communities of Lasseter, Illinois, and St. Petersburg, Missouri.  In one, blacks can live free.  In the other, they must deal with being considered no better than a piece of property.  Setting is key to this novel, with the river a constant reminder of the ebb and flow of circumstances.  Clinch is masterful at never letting the reader forget where this novel is taking place. 

For those who might want to try this book for a discussion group, there is a reader’s guide available at the publisher’s website:  http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/finn

Blue Pills: a positive love story is a memoir by Swiss comic artist Frederik Peeters. Frederik tells the story about how he meets the love of his life, Cati, years before at a party. She was vivacious, full of life, and beautiful. But it wasn’t until years later, after she married, had a child, and divorced, that they met again and started a relationship.What starts out to be a typical love story is anything but. Over dinner, Cati tells Frederik that she is HIV positive and so is her son.

The Seattle Public Library has just announced its 2009 selection for the Seattle Reads program: My Jim by Nancy Rawles.

Some of you might recall that I wrote about My Jim in a previous post. At the time, I was assisting in the selection process, and as soon as I read Rawles’ powerful book, I knew it was the one.

My Jim will not be without controversy. It speaks to our country’s history of slavery, a subject that is fraught with emotion, whose repercussions are felt today. Rawles’ book is also based on Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book that has been banned and challenged nearly every year since it was published.

I am looking forward to discussing this book in our communities, hearing what they have to say.

The dialogue has already begun.

Four years ago, when Bush won reelection, I was crushed; I was an emotional zombie for weeks. A friend of mine who was similarly effected decided to start a book group so that progressives could get together and emotionally and intellectually cope with four more years of the Bush administration. The object of the group was also to help us think of ways we could learn about politics, big and local, and how we could turn our rage and confusion into positive change and engagement.

We started by discussing George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. It was a good place to start, as it helped us reflect on the rhetoric used in contemporary politics, and it provided some background on the idealogical underpinnings of both the Democratic and Republican parties.

From there we went on to Paul Rogat Loeb’s book of essays, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. 

Then Cornell West’s Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. I enjoyed West’s book a lot, as it incorporated the ideals and writings of Herman Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others, into a discussion of the corrosive politics of 21st century America. West calls for  “Socratic questioning,” “prophetic witness” to the justice and love that are absent in political discourse, and offers a “tragicomic hope” for our future.

We also pledged to read chapters of Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States every month.

Additionally, we did personal reading and shared it with the group. I read Paul Wellstone’s book, The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda. While I found his death in 2002 so upsetting, I found that reading about his life was inspiring. Wellstone was a maverick in the true sense of the word.

The book group created a space for all of us to discuss, vent, explore and learn. It was the right book group at the right time. It didn’t last but a year, and I was, I must admit, a fairweather member. But I was thankful for having that resource. My apologies to any readers out there who may not share this feeling with me, but I dearly hope that progressives have no need for a book group of this kind come November.

Barbara Mead of Reading Group Choices tells us that Reading Group Choices 2009: Selections for Lively Books Discussions is ready. This guide, whichis marking its fifteenth anniversary, has over 75 new titles, among them works by Leif Enger, Barbara Kingsolver, Sue Miller, and Ann Patchett.

To order, visit Reading Group Choices or call 1-866-643-6883.

  I began reading The Train of Salt and Sugar convinced I would like it, and I was almost right. It has all the ingredients of a thrilling epic movie.

Based on a true incident that occurred in 1987, it opens in the midst of the savagely brutal Mozambique civil war, in which no passenger train has been able to cross the country for three months. Now three trains, with a military escort, will attempt to make the deadly crossing through enemy territory, along with several hundred railway workers and civilians who are willing to work for their passage, repairing the tracks as they go.

It has all the makings of a disaster epic, constantly cutting from one point of view to another, from train to train – you meet Mariamu, trying to get her salt to the markets of Malawi, the beautiful young Nurse Rosa risking her life to get medical supplies, the good-hearted young Lieutenant Taiar who’s not afraid to do the right thing, the Muslim conductor who has drunk contaminated water and become deathly sick, the pregnant woman who’s nearing her time, the religious zealot engine stoker who begins gathering followers, the jealous and vicious Second Lieutenant Salomao who chooses whatever woman he wants, the frightening enemy Commander Baboon who stalks the railway lines, and the brave expedition’s own nearly mythic Commander Seven Ways who leads the trains, turning his back contemptuously on bullets and calculating the whereabouts of the enemy by birdsong.

Sounds like my kind of novel! So why am I discontent with it? Why won’t I be choosing it for next month’s book club selection?

I’m dissatisfied with how the threads are finally assembled at the ending. Because they aren’t assembled. Why have an ensemble plot and follow so many different characters if we’re not even going to find out if they lived or died? At the beginning, Mariamu plays a major role, and in fact it’s her salt that she’s bringing to market to change into sugar that gives the novel it’s name. She is the friend of the hero and heroine, she learns how to assist at nursing, and two-thirds of the way through she vanishes from the story inexplicably. So does the dreadful, drunken bully Salomao, the frightening and violent antagonist, who may or may not have shot the young lieutenant treacherously in the back. And what about the legendary Commander Seven Ways? Waving his magic wildebeest’s tail, impervious to a rain of bullets, indestructible even by a landmine, he strides out of the story and is nowhere to be seen at the end. Only the young lovers dominate the conclusion.

Oddest of all is leaving out the scene where the young lieutenant is shot. We watch him heroically save the day. And an asterisk later, he’s being brought in wounded. It’s like you’ve missed a chapter. The major turning point of the plot is not described. I supposed there’s something to be said for leaving out a possibly clichéd confrontation between Taiar and Salamao, but doing such a climactic moment off-stage left this reader perplexed and emotionally underwhelmed.

I so want to support 30 Degrees South, the handsome little book’s South African publisher. I truly couldn’t put the book down. It’s got a dramatic situation and a cast of characters that a good screenplay writer could make into a superb movie. But although the novel is a swift, clean read and I don’t regret the experience, The Train of Salt and Sugar left me ultimately feeling baffled and unsatisfied.

Has anyone ever walked into a book group meeting expecting to be wildly bored? You didn’t select the reading, it didn’t thrill you, and you’d rather be at home reading something else, except you need to lead tonight’s discussion. That’s how I felt at the start of the evening. 

Last night I attended one of the liveliest, most insightful discussions I’ve ever experienced. What were we excited about? Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”. This short story is book group ready with plenty of great discussion topics, interesting author background, and even humor. 

Most culturally literate readers know who Gregor Samsa is even if they haven’t Kafka’s masterpiece.   It’s not a long story and you’re not cheating very much if you read the graphic novel adapted by Peter Kuper.   They didn’t even need me. The eight readers who gathered at my table couldn’t wait to get started. They all started to speculate on what Gregor had done to turn into a giant insect. One reader suggested he’d led a joyless life and another piped in stating that Kafka thought this was a humorous conceit and she’d laughed at the absurdity of it all.  Then we discussed the humanity of all the characters. We were intrigued that Gregor retained his human-ness even though he’d lost his ability to communicate with his family. We marveled at the family’s gradual loss of humanity through the ordeal and while we understood why, we still felt uncomfortable with the family’s actions. The charwoman fascinated a couple of readers very much since she was the only character to talk directly to Gregor and assumed he understood her.