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.

  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.

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.

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.

I am writing to convince book groups everywhere that your group should try Jane Gardam’s oddly titled novel, Old Filth.  Do not let your group members be deterred by the strange-sounding title or the rather stately Europa Editions (wonderful publisher, by the way) cover.  (I rather prefer the current UK cover, myself–see below).  Old Filth is a funny and heartbreaking book by a writer in her prime.

Old Filth tells the story of Sir Edward Feathers, a distinguished lawyer now in his 70’s, who coined the phrase “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong” which is where he received his own moniker.  Old Filth was a child of the Raj, part of a generation of expatriate children who were more or less orphans, sent back to their homeland to be educated, abandoned to relatives or foster parents and boarding schools.  Born in colonial Malaya, his mother died in childbirth and his distant father left him to be raised by natives and then shipped him off to a foster home in England at the age of four and a half.

This eminent Hong Kong lawyer and judge retires with his wife, Betty, to Dorset, where they expect to live out their days in rural isolation.  But when Betty dies, Old Filth finds himself adrift and memories of his childhood rise to the surface.  This cold, buttoned-up man begins acting oddly, and what comes of his adventures and his reliving of his past will delight and surprise.

What Jane Gardam achieves in this novel is a complex character and a story that will unwittingly captivate readers to the end.  I love what this Guardian reviewer had to say:

“Are you interested in venerable lawyers, the relic of empire? You will be. Do you want to know about the Far Eastern Bar? A reader of Old Filth, despite its unpromising title, will become passionately curious about such matters. This novel is surely Gardam’s masterpiece. On the human level, it is one of the most moving fictions I have read for years.”

What makes Gardam’s book a good book for discussion is how many aspects of this man that are left to the imagination.  Her prose is tight and economical yet so evocative.  My father-in-law, originally from London, just read it on my recommendation, and he said that for once he did not want the book to end; he wanted to know more, wanted the book to be longer (and this from a reader who mainly devours police procedurals, and this book is definitely not that).  Gardam is the kind of writer who leaves you wanting more, and that, in this case, is a very good thing.

Have you discovered Laura Lippman yet?  I just finished reading her superb 2007 crime novel,  What the Dead Know, and I can’t say enough good things about it.  I think it would be a great choice for a book discussion.

Previously I’d read an earlier Lippman book,  No Good Deeds, the most recent entry in her Tess Monaghan private investigator series (it was published in 2006).  I enjoyed it — it was well written, with a strong sense of place (Baltimore) and sharply defined, interesting characters, plus a twisty, engrossing plot.  But it didn’t stay with me for long, and it didn’t prepare me for the complexity and power of What the Dead Know, which is not another Monaghan adventure.

What the Dead Know tells the story of two young girls who visit a Baltimore mall on a Saturday afternoon and mysteriously disappear.  The case goes unsolved for over 30 years — until a middle-aged woman is involved in a hit-and-run accident and when questioned by the police, suddenly reveals that she is one of the missing girls.  But is she telling the truth?  Where has she been, all this time, and what happened to her sister?  Maddeningly, the woman refuses to answer all of the questions that are put to her, and the people who are investigating the case — three police officers, including one who had tried to solve the mystery at the time the disappearance occurred; a social worker; and a lawyer — painstakingly pursue every clue that is offered to them as they try to learn once and for all what really happened.

What makes this such an involving story is the way it is told — from multiple points of view, flashing backward and forward in time — getting into the minds of many different characters, including the two sisters and their parents, as well as the investigators.  The voices of the characters are so vividly presented, and there is such a wealth of fascinating detail provided about times past and present that a reader can’t help but be caught up.

There’s a twist at the end that I certainly didn’t see coming — I wonder if you will…

As one reviewer put it, one aspect of the book that makes it so distinctive is the disturbing way it explores “different perspectives on the nature of grief.”  What a treat — I was expecting a fairly diverting but ordinary detective story, and what I got was a multi-layered psychological novel that I can’t stop thinking about.  Please read What the Dead Know — and talk about it.

  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 week my book group discussed Philip Roth’s Everyman.  The novel is loosely based on a 15th century morality play that some of the members also read.

Everyman starts at a gravesite at the funeral of the main character.  His children are gathered there, his second wife, and his brother.  His daughter and brother offer eulogies that provide our first glimpse into the hero’s life.  Dirt is dropped onto his coffin and the mourners leave.  This sentence concludes the graveside scene: “Of course, as when anyone dies, though many were grief-stricken, others remained unperturbed, or found themselves relieved, or, for reasons good or bad, were genuinely pleased.”

From there the book is narrated by the main protagonist.  So from his death we begin to learn about his life.  We begin to learn about the man as a boy, and through his life how his death evinces differing reactions in those left behind.  Roth’s protagonist is a largely selfish man, characterized as a “receiver” or more pointedly a “taker” by members of the group.  From a happy childhood where his mother and father, a Jewish owner of a jewelry store, did everything they could to provide for their two sons, comes a man who lives more for himself than others.  He marries three times (and has many affairs), leaving behind him two angry, betrayed sons and a doting daughter, and finds himself, in his 70s, alone, with failing health.  It is towards the end of his life that he begins to examine and reflect.  One beautiful passage, in my mind, is this one about aging and memory:

“But how much time could a man spend enjoying the best of boyhood?  What about enjoying the best of old age?  Or was the best of old age just that–the longing for the best of boyhood…”

Roth explores an average man with an average life, with hopes, dreams, fond remembrances, mistakes, and triumphs, a man who faces mortality and the approach of death with the unwavering will to live.

The conversation in my group really took off when one member railed against the way that women are portrayed in the novel.  We discussed the line between the protagonist and the author–whose view was being portrayed?  Readers familiar with other books by Roth said his other male characters (and possibly the author himself) see women in this way–as objects, ciphers, etc.  We only had one male group member at the meeting, so remarks were qualified with “We know not all men are this way,” etc.  But I am curious how Roth has been received by other groups, women and men alike.  And is the way Roth writes his male and female characters really representative of men today, or of his generation?  Whose “everyman” is he?  All intriguing points to discuss.

What the group did agree on was the beauty and depth with which Roth explored the themes of time and aging.  And you cannot deny the power of this now oft-quoted line from the book: “Old age isn’t a battle, old age is a massacre.”

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.

While I don’t get the opportunity often, every once in a while I get to be a book group sub.  This week I got to discuss Lisa See’s Peony in Love with the Nikkei Book Group.  This group of Japanese American ladies has been meeting for years now, focusing on Asian-themed literature.

While I did write my thesis years ago on Asian American literature, I am still out at sea when it comes to Asian history and culture.  Luckily, these ladies were just as at sea with this book as I was.  Peony in Love is the story of a young girl, Peony, growing up in 17th century China and the famous play “The Peony Pavilion” which inspired her and many other young girls to starve themselves so as to die a lovesick maiden.  The play introduced a love story between a ghost girl and human man whose love makes the girl come back to life.  Peony narrates most of the novel as a ghost, detailing the intricate Chinese beliefs about ancestor worship and the afterlife.

Much of our discussion revolved around the group questioning some of these beliefs, and the women trying to recall what the Japanese believe about the afterlife.  We really would have benefited from someone with more background on Chinese history, and perhaps I should have done my homework a bit better!

 Overall it was a good discussion and while the group did not love the book, I encouraged them to try Lisa See’s other novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which I think is an even more successful book for discussion.

What subbing reminds me of, though, is how comfortable I have become with my own group.  It has taken me some years to become confident in my skills as a facilitator, and some of this confidence has come from getting to know my group, coming to understand what they expect from me.  Meeting with a new group can challenge you a bit, make you aware of how much you coast sometimes of familiarity or habit.  I enjoy meeting with other groups because it awakes new parts of my brain and makes me work a bit harder.  But what I love most is just seeing a glimpse of another group of readers who take the time to meet and talk about books.  After all, book groups are in and of themselves inspiring.  They are people voluntarily coming together to talk about stories and ideas.   I am humbled and proud to be a part of such a fine tradition.

  Laughter. Reading groups need it. Like in that last novel about Bosnia.

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic is a brand new novel about the young author’s childhood in Bosnia circa 1991, just as life turned into a nightmare and neighbor turned against neighbor. It includes some harrowing stuff. But it’s all seen through the eyes of young Aleksandar, naively optimistic, and every other page is laugh-out-loud funny. With charming characters you genuinely care about, Stanisic lures you into going anywhere and enduring anything.

Yes, the book has teeth. Yes, it leaves its mark on your mind. Especially an unforgettable soccer game near the end of the novel between Bosnian and Serb boys who grew up together, at ceasefire, in between fighting each other on opposite sides of the war. But for every heartbreaking incident there is a compensating comic jewel, the opening scene, for instance, where a little boy at his grandfather’s funeral believes his magic hat will enable him to awaken his grandfather from death, and a hilarious, deeply touching fishing story about two bickering, endearing arch-rivals. The author’s sheer narrative delight and the young hero’s determination to be affirmative triumph over the story’s heartbreaking content.

I tried to follow that book with one I’d been looking forward to for months.

  Written by Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest, Say You’re One of Them is comprised of three short stories and two novellas told in first-person by African children. The gorgeous, heartbreaking cover shows a little girl running away, and combined with the title immediately brings to mind your worst fears of Rwandan-style genocides.

It’s definitely important and sincere. I read the first story.

A mother is helping her baby sniff glue to kill his hunger pains, while waiting for her twelve-year-old daughter to come home from streetwalking, so maybe they’ll have enough money to buy food for Christmas dinner. It was beyond sad, it was quietly appalling. When I turned the page and saw that the following novella was about a man determined to sell his children, I’m embarrassed to say I closed the book.

I urge others to read it. Akpan is a smart, concise stylist. He shoots from the heart. But as a choice for a reading group, I hesitate. Asking a group of readers to take an emotional nose-dive is asking a lot, and sometimes my instinct for emotional self-preservation puts on the brakes.

But for important books you take a chance.

  I’m glad I took the chance of reading Daoud Hari. I would personally urge any reader interested in memoirs or Africa to read his superbly humble The Translator: Memoir of a Tribesman of Darfur. He’s the guy who, after surviving the first wave of massacres, decided to use English as his weapon and guided the major news media into the horrors of Sudan, alerting the world to what was happening. The last eighty pages of the book, as the documentary filmmaker and Hari are caught and imprisoned, beaten and tortured, were so gripping I was sitting straight up in my armchair, a psychological wreck. It’s a short, brave, important book. It took me days to shake it off. If Africa or current events are a group interest, there could be no better introduction to the situation in Darfur. It’s written by a relentlessly upbeat guy, utterly likeable, who plays down the scenes where he’s tortured with a shrug, and has a big-hearted weakness for camels. You endure the horrors because Daoud Hari goes with you.

It’s a trick to see the human comedy when you’re suffering. In the midst of pain and loss, it’s hard to be honest and grapple with multi-sided reality and still include laughter as part of the mix. Which is why of all the novels I’ve read lately, none remains quite as respected and genuinely loved as Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.   It’s quick and tight and wildly funny, dealing with the deadly repression of caste in a realistic, modern day India. Balram Halwai, chauffeur, tells you from the start that he’s taken his employer’s life, but you read relentlessly to find out why, since his boss seems to be the only guy who’s nice to him. Balram is a hustler, determined to make you like him, and he keeps you laughing. You see through him, and you only like him more. I’m still pondering what he does and what happens afterward. The novel is morally brilliant like Vanity Fair is morally brilliant. In fact, I’m eager to re-read it before our group discusses it at the end of June.

Through humor, Adiga relaxes my moral guard and lures me into understanding why Balram acts the way he does. This book will get a different response from every member of our group, because every reader’s reaction to Balram will be so personal. One thing for sure: everyone will finish this one, because yes, it’s a story with sadness, it’s about the unfair darkness of the world, but Adiga’s glimmer of genuine laughter and provocative storytelling keep you helplessly turning the pages right through the utterly satisfying, morally confusing ending.

For the spring conference of the Wisconsin Association of Public Librarians, I led a book discussion on Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.  There is nothing easier than doing a book discussion for librarians who lead book discussions.  When I train, I always talk about the perfect book discussion or what I refer to as the tennis match.  In the perfect discussion, the leader becomes the tennis judge, rotating his or her head back and forth as people discuss the book without much guidance.  This book proved to be one of those titles. 

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965.  His father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and History at a large high school in Kabul.  When the Afghan Foreign Ministry assigned Hosseini’s father to Iran in 1970, the family accompanied him, and they lived in Tehran until 1973.  That year, Afghan king Zahir Shah was overthrown in a bloodless coup, leaving the government unstable and the country vulnerable.  In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris.  They were ready to return to Kabul in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army.  The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States.  In September of 1980, Hosseini’s family moved to San Jose, California.  Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1988.  The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego’s School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993.  He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.  Hosseini was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004.

While in medical practice, Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, in March of 2001.  In 2003, The Kite Runner, was published and has since become an international bestseller, published in 38 countries.  Hosseini’s fiction is inspired by his memories of growing up in pre-Soviet-controlled Afghanistan and Iran, and the people who influenced him as a child.  The Kite Runner introduces readers to life in the pre-Soviet Afghanistan of the author’s childhood and honors his memories of Hazara servant Hossein Khan, who worked in the Hosseini household during their years in Tehran and taught the young Hosseini to read and write.

A trip to Kabul in 2003 provided Hosseini with the inspiration for his second novel. As he explained to in Publishers Weekly, he witnessed Afghan women “‘walking down the street, wearing burqa, with five or six children, begging.’” Talking to these women, Hosseini heard stories that both shocked and saddened him.

From his own memories of Afghanistan and the stories he heard, Hosseini fashioned the character of Mairam.  Mariam is the illegitimate product of a union between a successful theater owner and his servant.  Forced away from the city and his legitimate family, Mariam and her disgruntled mother live in a small impoverished village which receives an occasional visit from the father as a token of his responsibility.