WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU BEEN READING?  I tried something new at my book group meeting last week — scheduling 10 minutes at the end of the session to talk about other books the participants have read recently.  This isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept, as book group members often refer to other books during the discussions, but I thought it would be interesting to see how they would react if I encouraged them to comment on other titles, as a way of making their colleagues aware of some new reading possibilities.  It turned out to be a great idea, as several participants eagerly shared information about books they thought their compatriots would enjoy.  One reader had discovered the novels of Pat Barker, who writes compellingly about World War I.  She’d picked up Barker’s latest work, Life Class, and that led her to previous Barker volumes,, such as Regeneration and The Eye in the Door.  Another person in the group has been reading the “Nursery Crime” tales of Jasper Fforde, fanciful mysteries featuring detective inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant, Mary Mary.  She recommended The Big Over Easy (about Humpty Dumpty’s tragic fall) and The Eyre Affair (particularly for those who love Charlotte Bronte).  Since this new feature of the book discussion session was so well received, I definitely plan to continue it!

BOOK CLUBS FOR KIDS:  The library where I volunteer, Arlington Heights Memorial, is offering two book discussion opportunities for children this summer.  “Pizza, Books & More:  Pictures of Hollis Woods,” is open to all, including those who are blind or visually impaired.  The books are available at the Kids’ World desk in advance of the meeting, and youngsters are invited to come have a pizza, make a craft, and share their ideas about the book (which was recently dramatized on TV’s Hallmark Hall of Fame, featuring famed actors Sissy Spacek and Alfre Woodard).  “The Read and Meet Book Club: Lord of the Rings” is a series of events — a lively discussion group that explores J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels.  This month, the members are urged to read The Fellowship of the Ring, then watch the movie on their own, and join the book club to discuss the book versus the movie.  This activity is recommended for ages 11 and up.  I share this information in case you are involved in developing programs for children and are looking for a book discussion angle.  Perhaps you can adapt and expand upon these ideas!

ANOTHER BOOK TO READ, WATCH AND DISCUSS:  Following up on Kaite’s recent buzz about well-known books coming to the big screen this fall — especially books that have been popular with discussion groups — I’d like to add to the list The Secret Life of Bees.  This novel, by Sue Monk Kidd, has been a book group favorite ever since it was published, and it will soon be in movie theaters, in a celluloid version starring Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson, and Alicia Keys.  Those names ought to attract the interest of plenty of movie fans, who will probably be clamoring for the book, if they haven’t already read it — and if they have, perhaps the movie will send them back for a second look!

More buzz about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Yesterday a review in The Christian Science Monitor;  this morning an interview on NPR with one of the authors, Annie Barrows, who finished the book after her aunt, Mary Ann Shaffer, died.

I have to say I don’t absolutely love this book, which I reviewed for Booklist.  I think the first section, when Juliet is still in London and on the receiving end of all those wonderful letters from the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,  is delightful. The second part, when Juliet goes to Guernsey,  seems to deflate a bit.  One of the difficulties is the epistolary form, which doesn’t work quite as well once most of the letters are being written by Juliet herself.   I also think the second part has a few problems with tone.  It’s still a great reading group choice, however, because it can be approached from so many angles. In that way, it’s a bit like Water for Elephants, another imperfect book that provides multiple avenues for discussion.  

  If Disney has taken the pulse of modern day culture correctly, then the new Tinkerbell movie is a gamble that little girls are still innocent enough to have fairy fantasies. Sure, I can believe that, the dear little things.

However, Stephenie Meyer has recently proved to the publishing industry that girls just slightly older have something a whole lot hotter and dirtier in mind – like the bloody teenage love of a vampire, with a little werewolf action thrown in.   The Twilight series – three brick-size, black volumes – is the current teenage rage sweeping through American junior high and high schools that some think will rival Harry Potter, a teen romance for girls of the classic bad boy variety, something any female reader can really tuck into with gasps and tears of identification.

All three current titles in the series have rocketed up the bestseller charts. This coming Friday at midnight bookstores across America will be packed with teenage girls ready to pounce on volume four, Breaking Dawn, the last to be narrated by the current heroine. Oh-oh, why is she stopping? We’ll soon know. The first book, Twilight, will be released as a huge holiday movie on December 12. Seriously, next time you see a flock of teenage girls gabbing together on a streetcorner, check out that huge black paperback they’re all lugging around like New Age Bibles. That’s it, the book I’m talking about. The Twilight series.

A whole new generation is learning the fatal charms of the bad boy. Now check out a similar situation just across the ocean in Japan.

Natsuo Kirino takes the bad boy mythos out of fantasy altogether and places it simply and believably in present teenage reality. Unlike the vampire series, her new novel, Real World, is written for adults.   Her four Japanese teenage girlfriends live in Tokyo, share secrets, and cram for exams, much like their American counterparts dodging vampire fangs in Forks, Washington, but these girls don’t become fascinated by otherworldly superboys. Instead they become spellbound by the neighbor’s son of one girl, a teenager who violently murders his mother one morning and then steals the girl’s cell phone as he goes on the run, to later contact her and her friends. It’s thrilling, unputdownable stuff, with an uncomfortable realism. These teenage girls are in over their heads and don’t know it. They see the troubled boy as just a sad, dangerous peer on the run. In the war between teenagers and adults, they choose their own side.

There’s always been an undeniable romantic fascination with the bad boy, from Healthcliff to American Psycho. Kirino adds a dangerous bit of Raskolnikov into the brew. Ryo, the troubled young murderer that the girls nickname Worm, really believes that his mother deserved to die, and has a Dostoevsky-like complexity. He’s a scary lad, just vulnerable enough to make him slightly sympathetic, far more cunning than these four girls who think they can play with him.

Each of the friends becomes implicated with the young killer in a different way. Toshi doesn’t report the loud shattering sound she hears next door. Yuzan loans the young murderer her bike to escape. Pretty Kirinin meets him and decides to go with him. Only brooding, complicated Terauchi would ever dare to actually phone the police.

But what exactly is the right thing to do? Don’t be so sure you know. Kirino leaves the reader with no comforting answers. Simple actions have hugely complex moral repercussions in Kirino’s honest, head-on look at young people today. Her four friends are trying to grow up in a world where they’ve learned to see through adult lies, where they’re desperately cramming for exams while navigating the treacherous waters of social cliques. These kids are living under pressure of parental expectations in a world where none of the parents ever really understands what’s going on, where adults try to trap the girls into simple answers that are lies. Why would they start trusting adults now?

This fascinating novel reads like a bullet. The prose is simple and clear and utterly real. The moral decisions are subtle. The consequences catch you off-guard, unexpected and yet feeling completely true. Written from five different points of view, Real World leaves plenty of room for interpretation as it swiftly spins out its disturbing cautionary tale of four ordinary, everyday girls who think they can dabble in evil without consequences.

It’s the August book club selection at University Book Store in Seattle.

Anyone interested in messing with the heads of their book group members should suggest The Heroines by Eileen Favorite.

This fanciful debut novel is full of literary humor poked liberally at the dramatic, tragic, soap-operatic heroines of the classics.

Budding teenager Penny Entwhistle is helping her mother, Anne-Marie, operate a home-based bed and breakfast business in a small Illinois town in 1974. Most of the guests are typical tourists, but every once in a while a special guest stumbles out of the woods or the rain and onto the Entwhistle door step. It is a heroine from classic literature seeking temporary respite from her tumultuous story.

Penny’s mother dutifully administers warmth and comfort, but no advice, to the heroines. For the most part, Penny doesn’t mind the demanding, whiny heroines, until the arrival of the most troublesome heroine of all, Deirdre of the Sorrows.

Deirdre is proving to be quite a handful. She is monopolizing all of Anne-Marie’s time and attention and has taken up residence in Penny’s bedroom. In fury, Penny runs to the forbidden woods behind her home and comes face to face with a Hero—or is he a Villain?—determined to steal Deirdre back to their tale.

Penny’s report of King Conor’s presence in the woods behind the bed and breakfast meets with a horrified reaction from her mother and well-meaning protection in the form of a psychiatric ward for hysterical and wayward girls. Now Penny must rely on her own heroic qualities to escape the hospital and summon her own Hero to her rescue.

Book groups can have a lot of fun with this title. Bring in copies of Madame Bovary, Gone With the Wind, Franny and Zooey, The Scarlet Letter and Wuthering Heights for members to peruse when the heroines make their appearance. Or offer a quick literary quiz to members about the demise of all the visiting heroines. Consider discussing the heroic qualities of Penny, Anne-Marie and Gretta, in comparison to the escaped heroines. Don’t forget to ask what happens when well-meaning individuals attempt to meddle in the pre-determined fates of others. For a real treat, listen to the audio.

What’s happening to me? Usually I read a couple novels a week. Now I’m lucky to finish even one. I haven’t turned in any book reviews to Shelf Awareness. I missed my last blog on Book Group Buzz. My pick-of-the-month for University Book Store was supposed to be announced last Monday, and hasn’t even been chosen yet.

It’s the sun. I’m doing my best. If you live in Seattle, you blame things on the weather. It rained all through June. When this blue-gray city suddenly goes bright with sunshine, it’s so distracting you wonder how people with much sun in their lives ever get anything done.

I could blame it on the weather, but I won’t. I have to admit something else is happening to me that’s hard to deny, as I find myself sliding deeper and deeper into an unexpectedly intense and intimate friendship. We haven’t even dared to kiss yet but I think it won’t be long, and I notice how very much less time for reading novels those unfortunate readers have who are lucky enough to be in love.

The table where I put the books I’m going to read next has degenerated to toppling piles of unread advance copies. This is unheard of. These are all reading experiences I’m not having. Why not? Because I’m not reading fast enough. If I don’t catch them now, they’ll be buried in a matter of weeks by even more new titles.

So, snap out of it, boy! What novel is my reading group going to enjoy this August? What novel will my bookstore feature next month? I’ve got to decide. I’ve got two novels beside me, and I think one of them is it. I just don’t know which one.

  At first I was going to go with Rawi Hage’s first novel, De Niro’s Game, the story of two friends in Beirut that has just won the biggest prize a book can win in this world, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for $156,000. I’ve only read the first 60 pages. I’m a plot-and-character man not much into fancy writing, but I can tell you the language is so gorgeous, so lean and image-rich, that I read slowly and went back to enjoy some sequences over again, just for the words. Super high quality stuff. But do I really want to follow a book about Bosnia with a book about Beirut? How much beating-up will my book group take? A plus is that the book comes out in paperback next month. A minus is that it isn’t released until August 5^th, which gives it a week-late start for featured selling at the bookstore.

Then yesterday an alternate suddenly appeared.   It was a book I’d ordered for the bookstore shortly before it appeared on the cover of the New York Times Book Review – Natsuo Kirino’s novel of Japanese teenagers and murder, Real World. My sampling of the opening paragraphs quickly turned into page-turning. She sucked me right into the story. It’s not poetic, attention-getting language, it’s swift-flowing, limpid prose that reminds me of Banana Yoshimoto. An incredibly effective technique of the narrator trying to ignore an ominous string of coincidences makes the reader uneasy from the outset. Then we switch to a more savvy narrator in the second chapter, another teenager, this one a closet lesbian and much more worldly wise. And the third chapter, just pages away, will be told by the seventeen-year-old boy who has just killed his mother. This gets more and more compelling.

If it’s good all the way through, my group could read Real World next month, and then read De Niro’s Game in September.

As soon as I finish writing this blog, I’m going to sit out on my porch in the last of the sunshine, with a couple scoops of wild blackberry ice cream, and read as much of Real World as I can.

 

I’m eagerly anticipating this week’s release of the new film version of Brideshead Revisited.  By all accounts, it is just as successful as the 11-part series that aired on  Masterpiece Theatre almost 30 years ago (who would sit still for an 11-part series these days?). For book groups, there’s a short Brideshead Revisited discussion guide at LitLovers. You can find information about the author and his work on An Evelyn Waugh Web Site

Some fascinating nonfiction on top level play in two brainy boardgames would be good selections for your next book group meeting.

Paul Hoffman’s The King’s Gambit: A Son, A Father, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game mixes the author’s memoir of his relationship with his dishonest father with a tale of returning to competitive chess as an adult after years away from the board. The best parts of the book, however, are his recounting of the mixture of genius, mental instability, and bad behavior through the history of top level play. Hoffman looks at Paul Morphy, Bobby Fischer, and many other champions and grandmasters whose brilliance at the board was ultimately overshadowed by insanity. He also follows top contemporary players, both men and women, through high pressure matches and tournaments. The chapter where he attends a World Championship in Libya as a second for a Canadian grandmaster and journalist makes for great suspense: as an American Hoffman was followed continuously by the Libyan security service.

Stefan Fatsis wrote a similar book a few years ago, Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, which stays with me in detail. Instead of chess, this book covers Fatsis’s attempt to join the top ranks of professional Scrabble players. The same mixture of geniuses, hustlers, oddballs, and crazies also inhabits this world. Fatsis is becoming a kind of contemporary George Plimpton: his new book, A Few Seconds of Panic, recounts his attempt to get playing time as a kicker in the NFL.

If you are not a game player, these books may read as a fascinating visit–sometimes funny, sometimes creepy–to a kind of contemporary freak show. If you enjoy games of any kind, you’ll find the competitive urges of these master players both appealing and appalling. If you are especially skilled at any competitive endeavor, you’ll probably see a little of yourself in the personalities involved. No matter who you are, these are compulsively readable books that are hard to put down. 

Do you ever consider using  novels that are marketed as YA in your book group? Interesting essay in The New York Times the other day about the fine line between adult and YA novels. 

Among the authors the essay mentions is Peter Cameron, who has written several adult novels and thought he was writing Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You for adults as well,  only to have it published as YA.  In his Booklist review,  Michael  Cart suggests that Cameron’s book will appeal to both teen and adult readers.

Stephenie Meyer is another crossover author. Her hot-selling Twilight series is YA, but she makes her adult-market debut with her latest book,  The Host.  Jennifer Mattson’s Booklist review recommends buying duplicate sets of this and Meyers’ other works, one for  adults and one for YAs.

Michael Cart, who is quoted in the NYT essay,  is working on an article on crossovers for Booklist.

  I’ve just been crying over the new collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi stories. It’s called Good-Bye – nine unflinching, realistic portraits of postwar Japan told in the style of my childhood comic books. All I did was open the lovely new book from Drawn and Quarterly and read the first page of the first story. It slightly confused me, and I felt compelled to read the next page, and then the next. Five pages later I realized I had no intention of going back to work, and sank down into my reading chair for wallop after wallop of thrilling art-plus-words storytelling.

Every reading group will have one or two members reluctant to take the plunge into graphic storytelling – as though enjoying the comic book format were somehow betraying the necessary rigors of verbal literature. I was one of those objectors.

My introduction to the art of graphic storytelling came in a moment of open-mindedness, as I looked at the second frame of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.   What caused the lightbulb to blink on in my head was Satrapi’s playful use of the cartoon framing device. She tells us the little girl on the left of the group photo is herself, but the figure on the end is mostly cut off. She’s not much more than an arm and a hand. Like a little epiphany, the humor of that placement opened up the staggering possibilities of non-verbal storytelling in graphic art.

  I was somehow left untouched by my few forays into Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Maus, a comic book based on his parents survival of the Holocaust. Who knows why a reader connects with some books, and not others? Persepolis, on the other hand, worked immediately. It was a shock, an introduction, and a preconception-breaking example of mixing several arts together and coming up with something new. From then on I was open to an exciting new art form.

Rutu Modan’s superb Exit Wounds   – a love story that arises from a terrorist bombing in Tel-Aviv – and Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie’s delightful Aya,   a problem comedy about a teenage girl growing up in Ivory Coast, both demonstrate a capacity for contemporary relevance and plot complexity in a film-like series of visual sequences. The two books each end with a gasp. As does the New York Times Best Book of the Year, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,   which tells the story of her father’s death with a dazzling flurry of literary references and a Proust-like circuitous plot that builds with musical intensity to an emotional peak in the last frame.

I’ve been converted. I’m used to graphic brilliance and non-verbal plot points and the sheer emotional punch that good graphic art can deliver. I just don’t expect the horrors of Hiroshima, not to mention prostitution and cross-dressing, to be sensitively dealt with in comic book art from over thirty years ago. Yet that’s exactly what Tatsumi does. He was a pioneer in graphic realism. His heroes are poor everymen, his situations the grinding trials of everyday life. This new collection features a couple of real masterpieces.

The opening story, “Hell,” is the one that unglued me. A reporter to Hiroshima after the war finds an image of a woman and her son scorched into a wall, and his photo of that hideous reminder launches a media phenomena veering farther and farther away from the surprising truth. “Woman in the Mirror” tells the story of Ikeuchi, the effeminate boy who can’t play football and dresses in his sisters’ clothes, recounted with an astonishingly modern understanding. “Life is So Sad” chronicles the life of a faithful bar hostess whose brutal husband in prison is convinced is being unfaithful. And the final, title story, “Good-Bye,” is the cynical story of streetwalker Mariko’s savage revenge on her needy, hypocritical father.

Tatsumi’s embrace of life’s small defeats and darknesses was ahead of its time, and over thirty years later his graphic short stories deliver a shudder of recognition in their frank, honest humanity. For meaty summer fare that’s easy to finish and yet provocative enough to fill a reading group meeting, any club with an open-minded attitude toward graphic novels and an interest in Japan should jump on Tatsumi’s Good-Bye.

Here’s why I love a thematic approach to book groups: one of my groups met last night. The topic was immortality and rejuvenation. We’re a science fiction and fantasy group, but my readers are a perversely quirky bunch with strong penchants for picking the surprising book and following the conversation wherever it may go.

Bud, our best historian of the genre, got us started with an overview of the theme of immortality. He and Jim immediately got into an interesting debate about whether living forever would be boring or fascinating, lonely or fulfilling.

My job, when I choose to accept it, is to keep the meetings moving, so I opened with Cory Doctorow’s delightful Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a quick reading bit of science fiction with admittedly thin characters, a mystery that is fairly easy to solve, but so many fun speculations about the future that it will make your head dance.

Bob sang the praises of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germain series, which follows a regal vampire across many historical periods. The books can be read in any order. In Bob’s mind (and mine) this is the vampire series that should have found mobs of fans instead of Anne Rice’s work.

Dan had Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night, the work which the author later expanded into The City and the Stars, a strong early example of why we should mourn Clarke’s passing.

Jim also took us back to a golden age writer, reviewing the first of Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long books, Methuselah’s Children, in which the author explores his trademark issues of family structure and libertarianism while as usual tweaking his nose at society’s conventions.

A turn to fantasy was next, as Andrea had Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris, which explores, among other ideas, an immortality in which one can’t really die but constantly feels the cumulative pain of every injury ever sustained (and as a result is eventually driven to eternal insanity or catatonia.)

Randall brought in The Skinner, by Neal Asher, a fast-paced race through an aquatic planet where the evolution of sea creatures has proceeded quickly and the survivors (including some pulpy pirate captains) have been toughened beyond all proportion by their kill-or-be-killed world.

Carolyn, who loves Victorian era horror was pleased at the chance to bring in her beloved Dracula, which led to a rousing side debate on whether the Winona Ryder/Gary Oldman adaptation of the work is faithful to its source (and the trouble one is probably in when a movie includes the adapted writer’s name in its title.)

Mary took us for an even more literary turn when she pulled out Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which led into another film conversation, this one more positive, about the divine nature of Tilda Swinton.

Gary also stayed in the past with H. Rider Haggard’s classic African adventure, She. Along the way we had a birthday celebration, introductions of new members, confessions of regulars who hadn’t finished a book, Dan’s monthly round of themed punning, and spirited diversions on topics including copyright, the beading and knitting projects that members were working on, Hellboy 2, and spray-can pancake batter. Our quick trip through fantasy, science fiction, and classic literature on immortals left everyone with more books on their list of things to read and an appetite for our usual post-meeting Mexican dinner.

Thematic groups are a great way to balance the diverse tastes, social needs, busy schedules, and curious natures of book lovers.

Way back in May, Kaite wrote a post about a book that would make perfect August reading. Well August is almost here, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is starting to get a lot of buzz.  It was featured on NPR as part of Booksellers’ Suggestions for a Summer Afternoon, and an article about the book’s writing team appeared recently in The Wall Street Journal. Nora Rawlinson tells us on her blog that Dial Press is shipping over 100, 000 copies, though “libraries show light ordering” so far.  

For a book group, the book offers lots of possibilities. There’s the book-club-within-a book-club angle, the novel-in-the-form-of-letters angle, the historical fiction angle, and the Masterpiece Theatre angle (based on the series from a few years back called Island at War, which also dealt with the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands).  

You can find a reader’s guide with discussion questions on the Random House site.

FEMME FATALE:  WOMEN AND CRIME 

September 25, 2008:  FALLING OFF AIR by Catherine Sampson. 

October 23, 2008:  CALIFORNIA GIRL by T. Jefferson Parker. 

November 20, 2008:  ROSE by Martin Cruz Smith. 

January 22, 2009:  OUTSIDE VALENTINE by Liza Ward. 

February 26, 2009:  HIDDEN by Paul Jaskunas. 

March 26, 2009:  DEATH FROM THE WOODS by Brigitte Aubert.  

April 23, 2009:  MURDER NEVER FORGETS by Diana O’Hehir.   

May 28, 2009:  DISORDERED MINDS by Minette Walters. 

So the anxiety of picking the titles is now over for one more year.

Now I can start the anxiety of wondering if the group will enjoy the titles I picked. 

Each year in May I give my group a selection of potential crime and mystery books we could read.  The list is huge, maybe fifty or sixty books long.  Most of these books are crime and mystery titles that got starred reviews in Booklist or other review sources.  Most of them are not series titles, as I find reading series books a little problematic in an ongoing discussion like ours.

From the list the group highlights as many titles as they care to and then I total up their votes.

Then I pick the ones I want to lead a discussion on if they fit into a general theme.  This year’s theme came about because of one person’s comment that we read more books by men or about men than the group should considering they are all women.  

Some are award winners.  The Parker title won the Edgar in 2004 while the Aubert title won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, thus proving that I have learned nothing from last year and failed to listen to the “no award winner” protest.  

All of this stress comes from the fact that I never read a title in advance of the discussion because I want to play along with the group.  I know this violates all the tenants of leading a book discussion but I can’t help it.  It is one of the ways the groups has stayed fresh for me for over fifteen years.  

I guess we all pick our own poison, so to speak. 

Harking back to suggestion #8 in Neil’s list of “how to beat the book club doldrums,” here are some books-into-movies that are coming soon to a book club/movie theatre near you:

Book club favorite from 2003, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is scheduled to open around the holidays (dates, of course, subject to change due to the whim of those movie-types). Readers enjoyed the deft mix of science fiction time travel with romantic love story. The structure of the novel intrigued other fans. The author would jump from time to time, much like her hero, to tell a very non-linear story that had an easy-to-follow narrative. Topic to discuss: How well did the movie capture the novel’s narrative structure? Did it work?

Critical darling, Pulitzer winner and Oprah pick, The Road by Cormac McCarthy will be coming to the big screen in November of 2008. The post-apocalyptic drama boasts a stellar cast. This title is great book/movie bait for those discussion groups wanting to reel in some of those twenty- or thirty-something readers.

Pair the books, pair the movies: James McBride’s Miracle at St. Anna, slated to open in  September 2008, is a first-rate military thriller set in World War II Italy. Consider making this title the star of a book group “event,” a double discussion/viewing of Flags of Our Fathers. Read the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers and consider discussing how all the authors/filmmakers view “the greatest generation.”

For those book groups and movie goers who relish a challenge, get ready for Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. A very literary novel full of dramatic relationships and conflicts. Look for the film version in August of this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does this happen in your book discussion group?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just what exactly should a study guide be?

For decades of my life, study guides meant only one thing: a zebra-striped, yellow-and-black series of pamphlets called Cliffs Notes that were generally used for cheating. The Cliffs Notes version became a way of disparaging any condensation or expurgated version of a story, a kind of cheapening by shortening. Teachers hated them. Sleepy students smelling like last night’s party were the ones who bought them.

  Then when book clubs became sighted by the publishing industry as a potent new customer base, the study guide had a rebirth. Suddenly every new trade paperback was defaced with a little announcement that questions were waiting for you at the end of the novel. No longer did the hostess have to fuss over what to discuss; she could concentrate on the hors d’heurves and have her list of questions readymade. As a bookseller, I’m used to pooh-poohing the study guide craze.

But their usefulness is genuine. I’m a great user of notes – my own. I always take notes when reading a stimulating book. And I offer these notes – usually a chapter-by-chapter outline of the plot, with all the characters listed by their first appearance and identifying traits – called Nick’s Notes in my monthly email for University Book Store. I encourage my readers to just kick back and enjoy the story, and know that when they forget a character, they’ve got a handy reference sheet all set to go. When I launch the Gay Classics book club in six months, I’ll be creating study guides for each book. I’ll want them to be informative and useful. I’ve got to decide what they should include.

Just to push this discussion of study guides one step farther, two days ago I received an email from the marketing department of Grove/Atlantic. Because of my online review of their book, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, in Shelf-Awareness, my article about the author, Sasa Stanisic, here on Book Group Buzz, and my choosing the book as the July Nick’s Pick for University Book Store, I was asked to create the Grove/Atlantic study guide for the book.

Exactly the kind of study guide I’ve always pooh-poohed.

  Time to re-think this, as I get ready to make one. What should a study guide really try to achieve? I’m thinking a study guide has three functions:

1. Memory refreshing. It includes a summary of the basic plot points and the names of the characters, to facilitate discussion.

2. Thought provoking. It includes provocative thought questions: why are there seven narrators? Why does the story start twice?

3. Background enrichment. When does the story take place in history? What factors of the Bosnian war affect the way the story unfolds? How is Sasa Stanisic’s personal history reflected in his novel?

Grove/Atlantic will be sending me some sample study guides, to show me what they’re looking for – and in the meantime, I’ll be considering different methods of organization, looking for the format that works best. I’m starting with the basic template that I use for Nick’s Notes. Rather than separating out the chapter plot summaries from the character names and the interesting quotations, I blend them all together in a chronological outline, so that each chapter summary is followed by the characters introduced there and the passages to remember. But we’ll see. There are many different methods of doing this, and I’m going to construct the most effective memory-stimulus package I can design.

As book discussion leaders, have you found that sometimes what you planned to focus on in the discussion isn’t always what your group members want to talk about?  During the past two weeks, I’ve led two discussions — one at the library, with my regular group, and the other at Dominican University, with a class of library science students.  I’d done my usual preparation — reading, research, and formulation of discussion questions — but in both cases, the groups chose topics to discuss that I hadn’t thought of.

The first discussion was on The Birth of Venus, Sarah Dunant’s absorbing tale of forbidden love in Renaissance Florence, and even though I came with plenty of thought-provoking questions to raise about the story, the group was interested in exploring contemporary parallels to the mistreatment of women described in the book.  We had a stimulating discussion nevertheless, and I made a mental note to add “contemporary parallels” to my list of potential discussion topics for future books.

But when I met with the library science group to discuss Raymond Chandler’s classic hardboiled detective story, The Big Sleep, a week later, the students didn’t want to talk about contemporary parallels — they were fascinated by the cinematic aspects of Chandler’s writing style.  One participant compared the book to film noir, and I hastened to explain that The Big Sleep, which was Chandler’s first novel, was published before the wave of film noir dramas that swept through 1940s cinema and actually may have contributed to the development of the style, in that it was later adapted into a famous Bogart-Bacall star vehicle.

The students weren’t particularly concerned with the rough treatment of women depicted in The Big Sleep — it was “sort of what you’d expect for that era” — which showed me once again that what especially intrigues one group may have minimal interest for another.  This element of unpredictability — it’s always there, no matter how hard one tries to figure out how the discussion will flow in advance — plays a major part in keeping book discussions interesting and challenging for the leader.  You learn something from every discussion experience, and you fervently hope you can apply the lessons later on.