Teen book group leaders looking for an adult book should take a look at Three Girls and Their Brother by Theresa Rebeck. This compulsively readable novel told in four voices will particularly appeal for its subject matter. Three sisters with wildly unusual red hair are tapped for a photo spread in the New Yorker with a renowned photographer. The photo immediately shoots the girls into the stratosphere of notoriety and celebrity.

The youngest sister, Amelia, has no desire to become a famous model/”It Girl” like her older sisters, but the girls’ agent knows that they are a package deal. The older sisters, Daria and Polly, are so obsessed with their impending fame, that they don’t care that Amelia must drop out of school for being a “nuisance.” The girls’ mother is jubilant with the newfound attention and is happy to send her daughters off on “meetings” with movie stars, producers and publicists who ply the young teens with alcohol and drugs.

And who is “the brother” of the title? He is the voice of reason and concern. But his wariness over his sisters’ budding careers as “celebrities of the moment” leads to his own banishment from the family.

The author has done an excellent job of capturing the cadence of adolescent-speak and the bewilderment of teens who think they have gotten what they always wanted.

  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.

  This autumn all five thousand members of Seattle’s largest reading group will be tucking into a hair-raising true account of illegal Mexican immigration, Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. If this compelling book doesn’t engage the minds of the University of Washington’s 2008 Freshman Class with its harrowing, heartbreaking picture of our immigration laws, nothing will.

It’s the story of the Yuma 14, the worst loss of life in border crossing history. Seven years ago, twenty-six walkers set out on the Devil’s Highway, became lost in the brutal terrain under conditions of extreme heat, and were abandoned by their guide. Only twelve survived.

Unexpectedly, the book doesn’t begin with the victims – it begins with forty pages about the men who guard the Devil’s Highway, the Border Patrol. It’s a respectful account of the guys everyone hates, men who love their country but sometimes do some pretty repugnant stuff. An illegal is called a “tonk,” the sound of a flashlight cracking over a human skull. A popular Border Patrol joke is to throw a dead rattlesnake into a truck full of captured immigrants and watch them piss themselves with fear. But Urrea shows both sides of everything, including the Border Patrol, who will pay out of their own pockets for a new device to save lives.

Once you know all the mistakes illegals make and all the tricks and technology waiting to catch them, Urrea begins to introduce the reader to the poor trusting wretches who are optimistically undertaking this journey. They come from faraway Veracruz in southern Mexico. They have no idea what lies ahead. They’re coming so they can send money to a mother or a wife back home, or send a child to school, or pay for a new roof. Urrea begins with the bags that hold their remains, what they were wearing when their bodies were found, their belt buckles, their underwear.

This is a very special kind of non-fiction. It’s the facts, all right, but presented with liberties, convincingly brought to life even though the author wasn’t there and never met the survivors. It’s all imaginative re-creation, educated guesswork, exhaustive research and most-likely scenarios, a novelistic bringing-to-life of the taped interviews and records, infusing the men with the feelings and thoughts of characters. At times The Devil’s Highway does a border crossing of its own between non-fiction and historical fiction, incorporating the strengths of both.

The next-to-last chapter includes an exceptionally surreal moment for non-fiction: Urrea takes you into the fourteen body bags being transported to the medical examiner in Tucson, into the minds of the dead men – an artificial technique that might have seemed strained and unnecessary were it not such a heartfelt memorial to each of the men, name by name, what little is known, a profoundly moving elegy to the trusting men who died. Not many writers could have pulled it off. Not many would have dared to try.

Slowly Urrea draws all his threads together, and the hapless band of illegals set out with the young rocker guide called Mendez. In excruciating detail Urrea lets you know what it’s like to die slowly from a merciless sun, and once you know exactly how it will happen, you watch the men start to go through each stage, slowly cooking to death, deceived by their guide, perishing for their dreams, some of them just as the rescuing helicopters finally arrive.

At the center of the spiderweb is the enigmatic Mendez, the nineteen-year-old guide, who is either a criminal cold-bloodedly leaving twenty-six walkers behind to die in the sun, or else a stupid, reckless young lout who won’t admit he doesn’t know where he’s going, whose failed attempt to be a solo guide turns him inadvertently into a mass murderer.

A nineteen-year-old peer for five thousand college freshmen to discuss!

Lest you fail to appreciate the cost of this border drama in tax dollars, Urrea gives you the sobering figures per body, the skyrocketing costs of hospitalization, transport and burial. But he’s got plenty of surprising facts to leave you with as you close the book, not least of which is how much revenue illegal immigrants bring into this country. As one Mexican politician says, “We have inserted twelve million workers into the United States – it is already Mexico! We have won the war!”

The University of Washington’s challenging 2008 Common Book is a thrilling choice, a provocative, humanitarian examination of an ongoing modern tragedy, a perfect tool to engage students with the struggles of the real world and to stir up passionate dialogue about one of the moral crises of our time.

Seems kind of unusual, asking a book group to discuss a book without text. But I think it’s possible. Especially with The Arrival by Shaun Tan.

This haunting, poignant and compelling picture book tells the classic story of an immigrant coming to a new country. The nameless male protagonist (a husband and father) leave his could-be-anywhere homeland (Europe, perhaps?). His country is threatened by the presence of an unidentified creature. He leaves behind his wife and young daughter and journeys to a peaceful, prosperous city in a new country. He is unfamiliar with the language, currency, environment, culture and even the native creatures.

His new country is a peculiar mix of otherworldly people, animals and objects. In sepia-toned softly shaded pencil drawings, the author renders the inquisitive, frightened and eager emotions of the new resident and his adventures with language, directions, job hunting, friends and neighborhood exploration. This new homeland is an intriguing mix of mechanical devices and old-fashioned dress and folkways. Almost every person our hero meets is also an immigrant and their stories of migration and assimilation are also told.

This powerful,  layered, wordless book full of flashbacks, multiple points of view and intriguing illustrations is ripe for discussion. It’s not as quick a read as one might imagine. Readers will take time to pore over every drawing and absorb the details of the hero’s journey to life in a new world. Discussions  involving the universal experience of merging an old life with a new one–past and present–will invigorate readers who use the finely detailed illustrations to support theories instead of the text.

How do you choose a book if your group has 5000 members?

Some brainy folks are attempting to answer this question for the third time on the University of Washington campus, as the little team of faculty members and librarians on the committee to choose the incoming freshman class’s Common Book for 2008 begin searching for the next campus-wide read. Besides the freshmen, who will have discussion groups and planned activities around the book all year long, the rest of campus reads the book, too, so that the impact of the book is potentially huge.

This will be the third Common Book. The unofficial score on the Common Book selection so far: one win, one loss.

The first book chosen was Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, and a finer book could not have been chosen. Dr Paul Farmer’s attempt to bring medicine to the rest of the world is exhilarating, inspirational stuff, and Kidder is such a warm, fine human being that his appearance on campus, and his slide show of the changes Dr Farmer has been able to make, were enough to make us all want to volunteer on the spot.

The second choice was a mistake. Field Notes for a Catastrophe has an important subject in global warming, but it’s flat, impersonal non-fiction. It’s disturbing information, but not inspirational. It did not bring the thrill of reading pleasure. No one ever said, “Wow, I loved it!” There are still piles of it in the bookstore. Just imagine if the committee had chosen Al Gore’s much more personal and gripping An Inconvenient Truth. We would have had a Nobel Prize-winner speaking on campus!

Ah, well. Here we are on the brink of another choice. The campus bookstore doesn’t get to vote, but the truth is, a number of  professors and librarians on the committee stop in the little branch bookstore where I work and ask for my ideas. So I participate on the sidelines in my behind-the-scenes way, whispering and suggesting, nudging and hoping for the best.

Let’s hope none of them minds if I give away a few of their secrets.

For a while the front runner sounded like it was Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, the moving account of an injured mountaineer who vows to bring a school to the village that nurses him back to health and goes on to build fifty schools throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not brilliant writing, maybe, but extremely touching and motivational in the extreme, with a powerhouse speaker of an author, it was, however, dealt the card of death. It was another book about a white man out to save the world.

Which is probably the card that kills my top choice.

Every year I urge anyone who will listen to choose Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, the personal account of a brave, super-smart 30-year-old Scots historian walking unarmed across Afghanistan in winter, trusting in the Muslim tradition of hospitality. Rory is a top-notch writer, an electrifying speaker, and he lives his truth: he has moved to Kabul and begun the Turquoise Mountain Foundation to restore classic buildings and clear rubble from the streets. My kind of hero, a man who gave up academia to work in a Third World country.

Apparently not a committee favorite.

I’ve also repeatedly urged the selection of Dave Eggers’ What Is the What, the fictionalized autobiography of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. A harrowing glimpse into the realities of genocide, a brilliant job of adopting a persona utterly unlike the author’s, and the profits from the book go to help build a community center in the village destroyed in the story. The University could actually be hands-on participating in Africa. Too long, says the committee.

Okay, then, how about Mohsin Hamid’s SHORT, utterly engaging dazzler, The Reluctant Fundamentalist? It’s about a student from Pakistan becoming extremely successful in the United States until September 11 re-arranges his world. Would it be too controversial to show a student who turns his back on American values when he begins to see exactly what they cost?

Of all the books I’ve quietly nudged the committee toward, one of them has managed to stay afloat as a candidate. Now I’m just keeping my mouth shut and my fingers crossed. It’s Sonia Nazario’s eye-opening Enrique’s Journey, the story of how children in Mexico risk their lives trying to find their working mothers in the United States. The book has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for her superb journalism and one for the heartbreaking photo section. With a brave, compassionate female journalist hero daring to make the trip across Mexico and the border herself, the book opens up the nightmares of immigration, where one country provides the cheap labor force for another.

What a superb goal: to motivate 5000 bright kids to think about solving the injustices of our immigration laws!

The librarians in my children’s department made reading resolutions this year and posted them on a bulletin board.  Mine was to read a chapter book with an animal main character each month.   The character must be a different kind of animal than any read about in the previous months.  So far, I’ve read about cats with Erin Hunter’s Into the Wild and mice with Robin Jarvis’ The Dark Portal.  By December, I’m sure I’ll have run through dogs, horses, pigs, rabbits, bats, and I’ll be looking for that perfect book with a llama main character.  If you know a great book with an out of the ordinary animal character that I shouldn’t miss, let me know.

I have always been one to like specific goals and getting to work my way through a list.  Book club seems like a natural time to discuss our reading goals and how we are progressing on them.  I am thinking of next year asking if book club members would like to share reading resolutions and then we can talk about our progress in our monthly meetings throughout the year.  Resolutions could be serious or zany, specific or general.  One mom I know whose daughter devours books made a resolution to read one book her daughter recommended to her each month.  I love that she’s sharing her daughters’ books and giving her daughter the power to pick books for mom.  Another reader I know made the general resolution that she wanted to take time to read more non-fiction.

So, I know I’m not the only one who likes this kind of challenge.  I have become aware of more and more reading challenges/projects in the blogosphere.  They are all over the map - trying to read 6 authors you’ve never read before in three months (http://bookawardschallenge.blogspot.com/), trying to read your way through the alphabet with an author’s last name or book title for each letter (http://a-zreadingchallenge.blogspot.com/), trying to read all the Newbery award winning kids’ books (http://newberryproject.blogspot.com/),  and even the generic set your own goal Winter Challenge (http://inksplasher.blogspot.com/2007/12/2007-winter-reading-challenge.html).  

I wondered if other book groups out there are participating in these types of challenges and what your experiences have been with them.

In my library there is a shelf of books reserved for members of book clubs to check out.  In years past, it has been all adult titles.  Now, nearly half of the books on the shelf are children’s and YA books for parent and PTA led children’s book clubs.

I thought I’d tell you what is on the shelf this evening which shows just how young book club members are getting.  Books clubs for children using this Chicago surburban library are discussing:

Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night by Cynthia Rylant - an easy reader about the adventures of a boy and his dog

Four Mice Deep in the Jungle by Geronimo Stilton - a beginning chapter book about the adventures of a fraidy mouse in a dangerous jungle

Judy Moody Around the World in 8 1/2 Days by Megan McDonald - a beginning chapter book about a school project and a new friendship

The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin - 3rd/4th grade chapter book about a Taiwanese American girl’s attempts to fit in at school

Granny Torrelli Makes Soup by Sharon Creech - 5th/6th grade chapter about a girl with a wise grandmother who helps her figure out her friendship with the boy next door

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen - 5th - 7th grade chapter book.  A classic survival story of a boy who survives a plane crash to spend 54 days surviving in the wild.

A Corner of the Universe by Ann Martin - 6th -8th grade chapter book.  Stories of Hattie’s twelfth summer in a small town.

Bittersweet 16 by Carrie Karasyov - teen novel about wealthy prep school girls

For those of you who don’t know about LibraryThing, it’s a site where you create your very own library catalog, with book information from Amazon, the Library of Congress, and other sources.   But more than that, “everyone catalogs together,” which  sounds like a staff development activity for tech services librarians until you understand LibraryThing’s social side. Every book you add to your catalog connects you with other people on LibraryThing, so you can see their lists, ratings, and reviews.  In addition, LibraryThing recommends books based on tags that members have applied. 

Besides using the ratings and recommendations to get ideas for books to discuss,  there are other  ways LibraryThing can be part of your book group experience. For example, your group can create its own account.  Or you can join an existing  LibraryThing group. Currently, there are groups for sci-fi readers, fantasy readers, mystery readers, historical fiction readers, children’s fiction readers–even for all you  lovers of medieval history and feminist theory.

We are in what has been called by some a golden age in the publishing of books for teens.  It turns out many of these books are simply great reads and coming of age stories for adults and teens alike  When a book club has a month when many readers are too busy for a long read, I think turning to teen fiction for shorter, faster reads is a great idea.  For my group, this need for shorter fiction happens in December and in the summer months.

The last post mentioned looking at Booklist Editors’ Choice Awards - why not check out the editor’s choice awards for Youth? Booklist Editors’ Choice for Youth

Under the “Older Readers” section you’ll find a stunning biography wartorn Pakistan, a book about Annie Sullivan’s first experiences with Helen Keller, a book about a teen girl with a terminal disease struggling to cram in a life time of experience into a brief window,  a book about a girl on the homefront during the Civil War, and Nick Hornby’s first book written for teens about a skater whose girlfriend is pregnant.  There’s a broad range of reading appeals and voices to be found in teen fiction.  These books often get groups talking about their own coming of age experiences. 

It can be hard to find discussion guides for children’s books on the web.  With more and more parents taking on the leading of children’s book groups or parent/child book clubs, there is an increasing desire for discussion guides for kids’ books.  Luckily, librarians, publishers and booklovers are making more guides available online.

Here are some of the resources I’ve encountered or used to help brave parent book leaders find discussion questions for children’s books for their clubs.

Multnomah County Library  - Book discussion guides for books selected by librarians to work as group discussion books.  I see titles that would work with 4^th – 10^th graders. http://www.multcolib.org/talk/guides.htmlAlso, this library created a list of universal questions to ask on any book (in case questions aren’t available for the title you wish to discuss). http://www.multcolib.org/talk/universalquestions.html

Hennepin County Library - Book discussion guides for books selected by librarians to work as group discussion books.  This is a smaller list than Multnomah with titles ranging in appeal from 3^rd to 8^th grade level. http://www.hclib.org/pub/bookspace/BookListAction.cfm?list_num=468KidsReads.com - Part of The Book Report Network, a commercial group of websites that share book reviews, author profiles and interviews, excerpts of new releases, literary games and contests.  Twenty or so discussion guides to children’s books suited for grades 4^th – 8^th.  These guides are longer and include page numbers for sections to discuss. http://www.kidsreads.com/clubs/

Random House - Publisher Guides. Book discussion guides are organized by grade level with many lower grade level titles which can be hard to find.  This resource has more titles covered than the others.  The guides are designed with teachers in mind and so include curriculum connections along with the discussion questions. http://www.randomhouse.com/teachers/guides/grade/

Scholastic - Publisher Guides. Book discussion guides for both popular and award winning titles from this publisher.  The site includes a guide to the Bone graphic novels and the early Harry Potter books. http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/tradebooks/discussionguides.htm

Powell’s Bookstore - Bookmuse Kids’ Corner. You need to create a username and password to use this resource created by a large online bookstore, but it does have guides to picture books and primary grade level books which can be hard to find (kindergarten to 3^rd grade).  You can browse their guides by grade level which is a plus. http://www.bookmuse.com/pages/notes/kidscorner.asp

The Literary Link - Designed as a resource for teachers, this website features longer discussion guides for books ranging from 5^th grade to teen appeal. http://theliterarylink.com/questions_otherbooks.html