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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I’m about to re-read my favorite new book of the year, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Our book club discusses it one week from today, and a couple months have passed since I first made the acquaintance of Balram Halwai, entrepreneur. What a guy. I’m looking forward to having him try to hustle me again.

  Today I’ll dive in, and I’m eager for the pleasures that lie ahead, but the experience won’t be quite the same. Reading and re-reading look similar, they’re achieved by the same process, your body is in the same position, the pages turn the same, but what happens is something else.

I re-read a book in the hope of recapturing some of the pleasures of my first experience. Sometimes, with the best literature, you discover new depths and levels. Re-reading Proust was a humbling experience, to see just how much my thick head had failed to perceive. Re-reading Joseph Conrad or Iris Murdoch provides that same sense of “how much I missed the first time.”

First-time reading provides a one-time-only addictive thrill that re-reading can never hope to equal, but that first reading doesn’t reveal the mechanics and geometry of the book, which only become apparent looking back from the other side of the book’s ending. If the set-ups were successful, they were invisible the first time – the second time they glow like fluorescent flags.

I remember how Balram tells me at the end of the first chapter that he will cut his master’s throat. I was tempted to put the book down – I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend a whole book in the company of a murderer – but it was too late. I liked Balram. I had to know what would bring him to do that. What would make a character I liked do something so dreadful – and do it to the only other likeable character, the only one to treat Balram kindly? Disturbingly enough, in reading The White Tiger, you learn just exactly that.

Re-reading has its limitations. It doesn’t work as well in buses, for instance. It isn’t as effective during the little breaks of the day. That’s when I need the “And then, and then” lure of new narrative. Bus rides and coffee breaks aren’t for thoughtful re-evaluation of technique. They’re for inducing reading hypnosis. They’re for escape from the present. The unknown works best.

The emotions in re-reading will be different than the first time. They will probably occur in new places. There will be an additional depth that wasn’t there before, the pre-knowledge of events, my emotional footprints from the first reading.

A thin layer of memory from now on will always be part of The White Tiger. I’ve recorded my personal set of emotional responses into the narrative. I won’t be caught by surprise. I know in advance what happens to Balram and his boss. But where the element of surprise is lost, the elements of form and pattern and technique will become a new part of my reading pleasure. I’m about to see how it all the parts of the novel fit together.

When vacations, families, and the great outdoors call, book groups can quickly take a back seat. Here are ten ideas to help your group avoid doldrums and dog days:

1) OPEN UP THE POSSIBILITIES

Instead of assigning a particular book, select a broad topic like mysteries, romances, or thrillers. When they have choices, your members may find it easier to squeeze a book into their schedule.

 2) LIGHTEN THE LOAD

By all means pick books that are easier in the summer months. That could mean shorter page counts or it could mean lighter subject matter. For a very light month, you could even allow your members to pick a short story.

3) PICK A SUMMER TOPIC

Beach books or travel stories make good choices in the summer when everyone’s mind turns toward a vacation, even if they can only take one on paper. Find out where some of your members will be traveling this summer, and pick a schedule of summer books set in the those locations.

 4) SPREAD A BIG BOOK OVER TWO MONTHS

Take a month off from meeting, but assign that big book that your group has always wanted to try. If you try this, send a few email tidbits about the book to your members a couple of times during the off month to encourage them to get the reading done. 

5) RE-READ A FAVORITE

Make your theme for the month the re-reading of a favorite novel or a return to a book that you read in your school days. Re-reading usually takes less time and if need be, you can always cheat a little by talking about an old favorite without re-reading it.

6) REVERT TO CHILDHOOD

Try reading a young adult novel or some children’s books for your summer meeting. While you’re at it, talk about the books that got you excited about reading as a kid.

7) CHANGE UP YOUR LOCATION

Take advantage of summer weather to meet at a restaurant with a patio or the backyard of one of your members. Pick a book that matches with your location.

8 ) TRY A FILM ADAPTATION

If a movie from a book is playing in the theaters, go see that one month. Go out for dessert afterwards and discuss the book. Or for an even easier approach, read the book one month, then watch the film the next month. If the movie isn’t in theaters, hold a screening at a member’s house or pass around DVD copies.

9) GET GRAPHIC

Graphic novels are usually quicker reading. Put together a small list of possibilities for different types of readers and have each member try one that looks good to them. Make sure you bring these books to the meeting to pass around, as looking at them is half the fun.

10) PUT THE BOOKS AWAY (gasp!)

If your group needs extra incentive to attend try putting the books aside for a month. Throw a party. Go out to dinner. Go out to a ball game. Share your vacation photos or plans with each other. If you want to stick to bookish topics, spend a meeting planning your schedule of books for the next six months.

These are a few of my ideas. Do any of your groups have summer meeting ideas that you’d like to share?

  I really need a committee. Sure, I can choose and assemble the titles on the reading list, and I can put together a few sample study guides, and facilitating the discussions is no problem. I can figure out how to write grants, I suppose, but it’s going to take time to learn how to do it right. And I can learn how to place ads in the local weeklies – that shouldn’t be too difficult, but it’s likely to be expensive. And I know how to write news releases, but figuring out who to mail them to can be time-consuming. I can do it, of course, but at the same time I’ve got to be reading a half dozen key books I haven’t read before, and re-reading twice as many that are fuzzy or forgotten. You would think there was enough time – our launch date is January 2009. But the Pride Foundation’s deadline for applications is August 29. So maybe not that much time.

I know how to do this stuff because I’ve created a group at University Book Store. It’s lasted five years. But I’m used to having a marketing team behind me. I’m used to turning in copy and having a poster appear. Now I’ve got to figure out how to market this club. I’m convinced that letting people know a reading group exists is the key act in forming one. The first step needs to be done right. Outreach is everything. Those readers who are longing to discuss books are out there, if I can just notify them. 

Our project, the “Gay Classics – Let’s Read Them Together” project at Dunshee House, has become a two-year plan. Coming up with the top 24 books was much easier than the top 12, and I’ve got a great list (see future blog). But the order of reading them needs to be left fluid. I’ve decided to only announce the first three titles with the launch, so that I can have some flexibility in matching book content to group dynamics. Those first three titles need to be easy access, big name, compelling experiences. My goal is to make this book club into a provocative new gay social event in Seattle. 

I’ve got a photographer who’s just about ready to commit to donating his services. We’ve discussed what I want – I need a poster and a postcard with an image no gay man can fail to notice. The image for “Gay Classics – Let’s Read Them Together” is two attractive naked young men in a yin-yang position suitable for mutual oral sex – except that they’ve each got an open book in front of the other’s equipment. They’re curled together reading. They’re more interested in their books.

Around them will be floating names – Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Gore Vidal, Yukio Mishima, Jean Genet, Rita Mae Brown – the names of the most familiar and beloved of the selected authors. 

At the bottom will be the dates for the first three meetings to discuss the first three books. The compelling question now is: which ones? How do we start?

The more ambitious novels I’ll hold back till the group is more confidant – The Counterfeiters and Pale Fire and Orlando. But I’ll want three big guns to get this going. My instincts tell me one of these needs to be about women, and I think I’ve stumbled on the greatest lesbian novel ever written (see future blog). I would have thought Maurice would be perfect for younger gay men, until I heard a young male reader shrug it off as boring. Boring! When it was first released from its time vault and published in 1972, I took it home from the bookstore the day it arrived and read it in one sweat-and-tear-drenched night. But maybe not today. Maybe something younger, like Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story. And for older gay readers, maybe Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. Or Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. 

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that a volunteer who helps facilitate one of the support groups at Dunshee House knows about grant writing. I’ve emailed him about my project. A man who volunteers for one thing might volunteer for another. Maybe I’ll get one more person on my team, a desperately needed member. Then with Jacob the photographer and Brad the literary historian and David the future head of Dunshee House, maybe with these guys and one or two more, I’ll be able to get this dream project on its feet and give the Seattle gay community a thriving and vital book club.

“I hated, hated, hated this book!”

Those words are probably not what most book discussion leaders are hoping to hear when they convene their group — and yet, that response comes up often enough, so that leaders have to be ready to deal with it.  But what happens when everybody in the group (or almost everybody) feels this way?  How do you keep the discussion moving along in a manner that can be enjoyable — and rewarding – for the participants?

 I suggest tackling the problem head on.  Ask people what they didn’t like about the book   — and why.  Once the reasons have been established, ask them if they think the author actually intended the average reader to respond negatively and if there was some purpose in doing that.  Could it be possible that the author wanted to upset you?  And if the aspects of the book that you found so irritating were changed or removed, what effect would that have on the book?

Readers always need to think about what the author was trying to achieve, and then deciding for themselves if he was successful.  Yes, perhaps he wants us to think his central character is a despicable person.  We need to consider whether or not the author is asking us to see this character as standing for all people of a particular type, or perhaps just an unusual and extremely difficult individual.

Something else to think about — and talk about — is whether or not there is an ideal audience for this book, readers who would respond to it positively, just the way it is.  Or, if it were revised, what changes would improve it, and then, what kind of a book would it be?

Readers need to become aware of what they find especially satisfying in books and why this brings them pleasure.  By talking about their tastes with others, they also come to know that other people may like the very quality in the book that they despise, and learn why it works so well for the other person.

So it is possible to talk about a book that nobody seems to like, and to talk about it at length.  But before closing the discussion, it’s always worthwhile to ask if there wasn’t something, some tiny little thing perhaps, that people did like about the book.  By this time, the group has purged itself of its anger, disgust, contempt, and whatever other negative emotions they came into the room with — and maybe there’s just a little bit of grudging enthusiasm for some part of the book that after all, was chosen because the leader, having read the good things the critics had to say about it, naively thought it would be a great choice for a discussion.

If you’ve been in a book group for long, you’ve been there: the choice for next month’s meeting is announced and it’s a book you would never choose to read on your own. A book that you don’t expect to enjoy. A book that is ODD.

A thought will pop into your head at this moment, as your mind charges into fight-or-flight mode: Maybe next month, I will stay home. I think my toenails will need trimming that evening. It’s the season finale of Meandering and Floundering with the Stars.  My second cousin’s child’s best friend has an important wiffleball game that I should attend. Yes, next month, I will definitely stay home.

This is a plea to reconsider that thought. I’ve noticed over the years that the best book group meetings often happen when you least expect them. If you make a habit of dodging too many of the books that you don’t expect to like, you’ll miss out on one of the great joys of group reading: stretching your horizons and finding new sides of your own reading interest that you might not have know you have.

One group that I read with often chooses classics, the kind of book that I don’t seem to find time for now that I’m not in school. In that group, we take turns selecting the books, and the tastes are diverse. One member, in particular, tends to pick works with a reputation for being dark or difficult: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Albert Camus’ The Plague, or thick biographies of historical figures. My first reaction is usually to run screaming from the room, but I try to hang in there and read the book (admittedly with gritted teeth in some cases), as do most other members of the group.

The surprise comes with such books when the group reassembles to discuss the reading. Almost inevitably, one or two of us discover that to our surprise, we liked this book, we like it a great deal. Perhaps it was much more readable than its reputation led us to believe. Perhaps it was less dated and more relevant than we had thought. Or perhaps it was ODD, but in a way that worked for us. In other cases, people don’t love the book, but in discussing why we don’t like it we learn something about ourselves or our reading interests. Clarifying exactly why you don’t like something can be surprisingly rewarding.

Another example came from my science fiction/fantasy book group meeting this week. I approached the meeting with dread because our topic for the evening, nanotechnology, had yielded a set of suggested books that was entirely missing the usual suspects, the authors that our group members love to read and re-read. The topic was technically advanced in a way that I feared would baffle us. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a couple of our members had enough background with chemistry to open the door to some fascinating science. Many of our readers had discovered midlist authors: Kathleen Ann Goonan, Alistair Reynolds, Mike Shepherd, Joel Shepherd, and Travis Taylor to name a few, that they really enjoyed. By the time we left, I couldn’t help thinking that the topic that had elicited groans when first introduced had yielded one of our best meetings of the year.

So at that moment when you start planning next month’s schedule of alternate activities in startling detail, STOP. Remember that one of the reasons you joined a book group was to challenge yourself a little and find new pleasures. That unlikely book, that ODD book, is just the book that is likely to yield new experiences.

An international author arriving for the first time in his life on the West Coast isn’t likely to find his internationally bestselling novel for sale at the airport bookstore. Sure, everyone in Germany may be reading the novel, and sure, it may be a phenomenal, prize-winning success throughout Europe, but that doesn’t mean squat when it comes to airplane reading. Air travelers want it light, easy, fast and American.

  Except when Sasa Stanisic stepped off the plane at the Sea-Tac International Airport, he walked into the bookstore and found, to his amazement, the American edition of How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, in hardback, on the rack for sale!

It’s an easy book to spot, because it has one of the most unforgettable covers this summer. A framed photo, hanging against floral wallpaper, shows an apparently deserted stretch of beach where two dogs are running across the sand while a lone young accordion player faces the viewer, playing. 

It took our author’s Dutch publisher to point out that the accordion-player in the copyright-free photo used on the American book cover was actually the author Daniel Handler, better known by his pseudonym Lemony Snickett, creator of the thirteen-volume children’s epic, A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Sheer goofy coincidence.  

Stanisic, the thirty-year-old author of this year’s winner of the German Book Prize, was in Seattle to speak at another bookstore, and made time to meet with me at University Book Store the afternoon before – although he was an hour late, since his taxi delivered him to the wrong bookstore. It was worth the wait.

Having escaped from Bosnia with his family at the age of fourteen, and currently living in Germany, Sasa (pronounced Sasha) speaks fluent English and is a great fan of Seattle music. Besides an obvious love for Nirvana and Pearl Jam, his current favorite band is Death Cab for Cutie. His novel, an autobiographical recapturing of the Bosnian village where he grew up, presents a harrowing slice of history, and makes its heartbreaking points about what happened honestly, but intermixed with the horrors are the light-hearted best of humanity. 

I went out of my way to meet this guy because his novel literally sucked me in and wouldn’t let me go. I didn’t mean to read it. The first chapter alone is breathtaking. Stanisic is way too gifted for his age. What he’s done is a kind of deconstruction of storytelling. In the aftermath of war, stories have become broken fragments. The narrative is in literal pieces. “Storytelling can heal a lot,” Stanisic said to me today, “but it cannot restore the past. We don’t need storytellers anymore, we need the truth.”

His book may be a bit of a reach for some readers. There are unfamiliar Slavic names, and lots of them. Events seem to be told chronologically, but then the chronology starts up all over again halfway through. Nevertheless, there are so many obvious flashes of brilliance on almost every page that I’ve decided to make it our book club’s July selection. I’m convinced that the heart of the work – the childhood voice of Aleksandar – is so emotionally honest that it can reach and touch anyone, and that everyone who reads this novel will be glad they did.

Book lovers need to know about the social networking and wiki tools that are popping up around the Internet. Sites like Library Thing (http://www.librarything.com) and Shelfari (http://www.shelfari.com) offer a suite of tools that allow readers everywhere to document personal book lists, libraries, and reading experiences.

At their most basic, these sites allow readers to collect a virtual shelf (or list) for display online. Cover illustrations from several editions of most books are available. The books on these shelves or lists can be given any “tags” or identifiers that the reader wants, marked as favorites, rated on a five star scale, reviewed at length, or sorted. You can also identify friends and link to their shelves, join group discussions, ask those who have read a particular book if it should be tried, or take advantage of other features.

Of the two, Library Thing came first and currently seems more aggressive about adding new features. It does, however, have a small fee if you want to add more than 200 books (which is surprisingly easy to do!) Although both are great sites, I chose Shelfari because it is free and currently seems to load a little faster. The rest of this post refers to specifics from Shelfari. For a sample, check out my shelf at http://www.shelfari.com/nhollands/shelf.

Shelfari has many applications for book groups as well. For starters, some folks are isolated from others in various ways that makes an online choice like Shelfari the best option for joining a book group. Browse around the groups on Shelfari, (http://www.shelfari.com/explore/groups) particularly within the “Book Clubs by City” and “Reading Life” categories and you can find a group to fit almost any description (although many of these groups seem to have limited activity).

For most, online book groups don’t serve the variety of needs that a face-to-face group can satisfy.  Your face-to-face group should, however, consider building a shelf that can serve as an archive of the books you have discussed in the past. When new members join, or if your group reaches the longevity of some I attend, you’ll find it’s handy to have an easy, visual archive of the books you’ve selected in the past. Another shelf could collect books that you think the group should consider for future reading (and could be added to easily by members when the idea of trying the book occurred to them). The “widget” features on Shelfari allow you to import these shelves onto most other websites and blogs.

If members of the group join Shelfari as individuals, they can compare each other’s reading interests. Some groups operate on a tight time table, and online communication would be a great way to supplement those quick-moving monthly meetings. The communication tools would also allow a means of notifying members about new book choices and upcoming meetings (although you might want to consider a group page at http://groups.yahoo.com or http://www.meetup.com or a blog through Wordpress, TypePad, or Blogger for these purposes, as they have more complete and secure tools for giving your group a free web presence.)

I’m sure there are other creative uses of Shelfari and Library Thing for book groups that I haven’t thought about yet. If you know of some, please comment. If these tools are new to you, sign up for a shelf and see what you can do!

  The gay district of Seattle, once clustered on Capitol Hill, is disintegrating. Broadway, the colorful centerpiece street, has been swallowed up by supermarkets. The Gay Pride parade has been diverted from its historic street and transplanted into Seattle Center. Rents have skyrocketed. Bars and gay social services have had to close their doors to make way for condos.

Among the endangered is Dunshee House, the oldest Seattle HIV/AIDS support group, founded in 1986, now barely afloat financially. It’s a grand old house with a round front porch and white columns, its living rooms and bedrooms converted into meeting rooms and offices. Every day of the week support groups gather there. Thanks to pharmaceutical advances, the bequests from AIDS deaths that formerly funded social services like Dunshee House have dwindled to nothing. Dunshee House’s big annual Christmas tree sale tries in vain to fund the entire year. Following the trend of other HIV services, Dunshee House has branched into support groups for those wrestling with substance abuse to qualify for government grants. Which is some help, but not enough. Every year the doors nearly close forever.

Dunshee House is seeking new ideas. I offered one. What about a community-oriented reading group for the gay classics? Once a month Dunshee House could open its doors to discuss one of the gay masterpieces that define us. Isn’t there money out there somewhere for literacy and community education?

  I got the idea from the Dalai Lama. In his recent visit to Seattle I found myself baffled as to why he was making such an effort to reach out to children. Then I got it. If you have any kind of spiritual legacy to leave behind, you leave it with the young. Well, at my age, the young are everyone else. What do I have to leave? My passionate love and respect for good books. Does my crumbling gay community here in Seattle know about the literary heritage that unites us? Maybe not. Maybe that’s my gift to them, the very best books ever written about people like us. Maybe the way to keep social services alive for HIV is to invite the rest of the gay community into discovering and celebrating our common literary tradition.

I’ll need help. At the University Book Store, the head buyer in Used Books is a short, witty, amply-sized autodidact with a Santa-sized beard and Google-sized recall of literary history named Brad Craft. Brad is able on demand to provide instant thumbnail sketches of all major and minor literary figures, with colorful opinions included. He enthusiastically signed on as my historical background expert for each of the titles we discuss.

Which brings us to the most important decision of all: which titles?

  Easily found online is the famous Triangle list of the 100 best gay and lesbian books. Some of titles included are hilarious (Little Women!) but most of the important gay masterpieces are there. I decided not to go back to those wonderful early dialogues of Plato or the fragmentary delights of the Satyricon. Due to sheer size, I regretfully omit Marcel Proust and Armistead Maupin. I haven’t quite got it down to the top twelve yet, but I managed to choose a top fifteen. Brad was an enormous help, but I take full blame for this first list, the best fifteen reading experiences I can offer to the gay community:

1. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

2. Maurice by E. M. Forster

3. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

4. Orlando by Virginia Woolf

5. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

6. Becoming a Man by Paul Monette

7. A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White

8. If It Die by Andre Gide

9. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

10. Young Torless by Robert Musil

11. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

12. Falconer by John Cheever

13. Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal

14. Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

15. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

16. The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin

A literary feast! Next up: how do we fund the project? Looks like it’s grant writing time.

The publication of Steampunk, an anthology of reprinted stories and excerpts, provides a great opportunity for adventurous book groups looking to explore an unusual theme.

“Steampunk” derives its name from its mixture of steam-driven 19th century technologies and a punk attitudes that subvert the staid social and political conventions of those times. Stories and novels in this style feature intrepid inventors, genteel lady adventurers and social activists, frontier dandies, and other period characters using airships, mechanical robots, and other contraptions in science fiction and fantasy settings. This hot subgenre is spawning books, films, music, fashion, and even lifestyles. Even the NY Times has noticed the trend: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/fashion/08PUNK.html
 

The anthology Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer is a collection of stories originally published between 1971 and 2007 by the likes of Michael Moorcock, Michael Chabon, Mary Gentle, and Neal Stephenson. Combined with brief essays that define the subgenre’s scope and history, it makes a fine introduction.

But a book group would be well-served by handling this subject as a theme, encouraging members to read other superb steampunk such as Tim Powers’ Anubis Gates, China Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels (such as The Scar), Jane Lindskold’s The Buried Pyramid, or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass) or Sally Lockhart (The Ruby in the Smoke) series. Michael Chabon has edited two collections for McSweeney’s (Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories and Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales) with all-star casts of writers that largely fit within the steampunk framework.

Other readers might choose speculative fiction classics by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, or H.P. Lovecraft originally written in or near the period to which contemporary steampunk hearkens back. The visually-oriented might choose to review Alan Moore’s graphic novels about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, films like The Illusionist or The Prestige, or a season of The Wild Wild West on DVD. Those with a less speculative bent could read historical fiction or nonfiction that reflects the era and provide comparison or contrast.

Steampunk provides a fine blend of fun, alternate history, and social engineering that will please many readers. Let your book group join the ranks of those who are finding it can be good to get steamed!

  What if it’s great up till the last ten pages, and then goes totally corny? Do you figure that ninety percent good is good enough for a reading group choice? Or does that total misstep at the end invalidate all the excellence that’s gone before?

It certainly sours the experience.

Endings are the hardest part of storytelling. Notice how horribly, horribly wrong as great a novel as Huckleberry Finn can go. Wrapping up the narrative so that it’s satisfying, so that it feels earned, not forced, is an art in itself. An old professor of mine used to refer to bad endings and last-minute fudges as the Siberia Clause because of the famous ending of Crime and Punishment, where Dostoevsky loves his murderer Raskolnikov so much that he’s willing to wreck the entire book to save the character’s soul in a last chapter redemption scene in Siberia. 

I’ve just finished the new French novel, Eldorado by Laurent Gaude. Up until the last five pages I thought I’d found the July selection for our book club. It takes place in Sicily, Libya and Morocco, and is a sometimes heartbreaking, often surprising short novel about illegal immigration. It begins with a mysteriously familiar woman tracking Captain Salvatore Piracci through his Sicilian hometown of Catania until finally he recognizes her – she’s a woman he rescued from a boatload of dying immigrants at sea. Until now, the Captain has led a life of sea patrols and escorting terrified immigrants to detention centers. She sets him straight, tells him how her baby died in her arms, and asks him for a gun to have her revenge on the captain who abandoned them.

With that as its gripping beginning, the narrative switches track to an alternating plot, that of young Suleiman and his brother Jamal leaving behind everything they know in their poverty-stricken home to gamble on reaching Europe. When they’ve gone too far to go back, Jamal reveals he has AIDS and isn’t really going, he’s just making sure his kid brother gets on that truck and takes a chance on life.

By now I’m crying.

Two strong storylines that will somehow converge. I’m intrigued.

But as everyone knows who reads a novel with two alternating plot threads that are destined to somehow converge, the value of the novel often becomes synonymous with how well that convergence occurs. (Stop reading here if you don’t want to know the ending.) Gaude’s convergence is a lame one, but it is cleverly plotted, so that when it’s finally revealed in the last chapter, you realize that it’s actually already occurred and you just didn’t know it. It’s a far-fetched coming together of the two plots – in a small town marketplace, Suleiman mistakes the haggard, speechless, homeless Captain for Massambalo, the god of immigrants, and when the Captain nods, Suleiman is encouraged on his journey. Weak, forced, but it sorta kinda works at least emotionally.

And then Gaude ruins it. He has the Captain 1. somehow realize that he has just changed someone’s life, 2. conclude that the whole point of his journey was just to be there at that moment and give encouragement, and 3. decide he’s going to continue to encourage other immigrants from now on in the same way. It’s such a leap of understanding and self-congratulation that it takes the breath away. Besides way overrating his effect on the plot. The Suleiman story continues to be thrilling and brave, regardless of the Captain’s encouragement. Suleiman has discovered what brotherhood really means. He would have made it anyway. The Captain’s part of the story, on the other hand, has been pointless. His burning his identification card and aimlessly setting out to be homeless and beaten and suicidal hardly makes him a figure to be encouraging others as the god of immigration. He conveniently steps in front of a truck two pages from the end, and is smashed into a painless other place where he continues his melancholy philosophizing until he dies.

Half a dozen powerful scenes and a provocative look at immigration argue for sharing the book with my reading group, letting them decide for themselves. On the other hand, my job as group chooser is not only to provide the foundation for a provocative literary discussion, but to give members a satisfying literary experience as well. Provocative and occasionally very moving this novel certainly is. Satisfying it is not.

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

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

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

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

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

PHILIPPE CLAUDEL

BY A SLOW RIVER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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