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.

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.

Book group leaders who have access through their libraries to the superb reading resource database NoveList are probably already familiar with the book discussion guides it offers.  Those who don’t know about NoveList should check with their libraries to find out if the library makes it available and if they can view it (there is an annual subscription fee charged to the library).

The discussion guides, like others of their kind, provide information about the author, a summary of the work, and suggestions for further reading, but the most valuable aspect is a collection of questions, with lengthy and thought-provoking responses, which delve into the most complex issues examined in the books.  I recently referred to the discussion guide for Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season (which my group discussed last week) and was greatly impressed by the useful information it contained.  The guide was developed by Nathan Anderson, who at the time he wrote it — January, 2002 — was a doctoral student in English literature at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Here is the prefatory passage that introduces the Questions section, which I find to be an extremely thoughtful and philosophical approach to the endeavor of book discussion preparation, one well worth remembering: “While answers are provided, there is no presumption that you have been given the last word.  Readers bring their own personalities to the books that they are examining.  What is obvious and compelling to one reader may be invisible to the next.  The questions that have been selected provide one reasonable access to the text; the answers are intended to give you examples of what a reflective reader might think.  The variety of possible answers is one of the reasons we find book discussions such a rewarding activity.”

Amen!

  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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.