Not everyone cries easily over fiction. I do. All it takes is a little too much caffeine in my system and a sad parting (like the sergeant saying goodbye to his beloved mule at the end of The Mule) or an unexpected moment of coming together (the bus stop blessing at the end of Gilead) and my eyes and cheeks are wet in no time.

  But that hardly describes how I came emotionally unglued at the end of Jean-Claude Izzo’s final novel, A Sun for the Dying. I didn’t have wet eyes. I was sobbing. And since he is often described as the author who can make grown men weep, I can’t help but wonder in retrospect what it is in Izzo that moves me quite so deeply.

I’m talking about a contemporary French author, son of an Italian immigrant, who wrote five novels before passing away in 2000 at the age of fifty-five, all of them taking place in his beloved home city of Marseilles. The first three are referred to as the Marseilles trilogy, are considered mystery novels with moody noir settings rather than actual noirs. When the first volume, Total Chaos, came out in 1995, Izzo became immediately famous throughout Europe.

  The last two novels are out-and-out noirs, or tragic crime novels. The Lost Sailors, published two years ago, was my introduction to Izzo. I was blown away. It was like Albert Camus and Joseph Conrad had collaborated on a tale of an ill-fated friendship on a grounded ship in Marseilles harbor. All five novels are defining volumes in a modern genre evolving in Europe called Mediterranean noir – the values and structure of the classic crime novel but with an added dimension of social corruption as well, the crime of economic injustice as a backdrop for the individual crime drama, with all of it sun-cooked in Mediterranean sensuality.

This morning I finished reading A Sun for the Dying. I wept all through the final chapter. I had to keep wiping my eyes to read the pages. One thing this book made clear. I go through many books, and many of them are good novels. This one is a notch above that. This is literature. This has real depth of vision and one masterly touch after another. Brilliant scene after brilliant scene.

  The novel is written in third person, but on page 35 the reader is startled by the sentence, “That’s where I met Rico.” From then on, a first person narrator surfaces periodically, a brief flicker and gone, with no explanation. Then two thirds of the way through the story, the book breaks into Part Two, which takes place a year later and is told by Abdou, a thirteen-year-old Arab boy, the novel’s most delightful and touching character. The sheer genius of emotionally topping his story by intertwining it with this boy mourning his lost father and his lost country of Algiers, holding the introduction of the boy back until the last third of the book – I never would have dared to try it. But it works. It ups all the stakes of the story and pushes the emotional content of the action right through the ceiling.

So why am I crying as I close the book? Because his vision of life, though unspeakably sad, rings true. Izzo tells his melancholy tale of a fallen man’s last days so that it looks and feels like existentialism but without the Sartrean nausea and despair, with more of a Byronic heroic stance right out of classic Romanticism – his Mediterranean vision is a candid, unflinching look at the unfairness of modern life, but done with grand, larger-than-life characters who stand up to their operatic fates with noble, near-suicidal defiance.

  What a writer! I’ve now read both of Izzo’s two stand-alone novels. What’s left? The Marseilles trilogy. Today I brought home from the bookstore the first volume, Total Chaos. And so here I am, with the three-day weekend just beginning, holding in my hands this extraordinary author’s masterpiece…

What was England like during and after World War II for children?  What must it have been like to come-of-age during a time of rationing and bombing?  Anyone who has seen John Boorman’s film “Hope and Glory” realizes the power a child’s-eye view can provide in our understanding of a particular place and time.

I happen to love coming-of-age stories, and while there are a multitude of adult fiction depictions of this, there are also countless books written for children that do this just as well or better that, may I add, are worthy of consideration and discussion for book groups for adults.

Two such books are Rumer Godden’s An Epidsode of Sparrows and Jane Gardam’s A Long Way From Verona.

The New York Review of Book reprinted Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows (the world reprint is like an aphrodisiac for a librarian!).  Set in post-war London, where children’s playgrounds were the husks of bombed buildings, it tells the story of Lovejoy Mason, a girl who befriends a tough neighborhood boy, Tip.  They plant a garden together and it brings some light to their grey world.

Jane Gardam’s A Long Way From Verona follows Jessica Vye who at 13 discovers she is detined to become a writer.  Set during the war in rural England, when bombing and rationing were the norm, Jessica sets out to tell us about the year that changed everything for her.

Both of these books features winning protagonists, and their stories are told with a charming lack of sentimentality.  They would be a good paired read, as well.  Perhaps throw in J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun for another WWII coming-of-age from a boy’s perspective of the war in China.

Recently I was pleased to learn that the Villa Park (IL) Public Library, where I served as the administrator for over 20 years before retiring in 1999, held a Staff Development Day that featured book discussions.  The library has been offering book discussions for the public for many years and currently has three groups meeting every month — one of which focuses on mysteries.  The Staff Development Day program was, however, the first time staff members were involved as discussion participants.

The Head of the Readers Advisory Department, Candy Smith, came up with the idea and organized the event, which was only one part of the all-day development experience. (There were also segments on community recycling, water conservation, and chair yoga.)  Candy decided there were enough staff members to form four different groups.  She then encouraged the staff to help select the books to be used in the discussions by posting information about possible titles online and asking everyone to vote for their four favorites.  The books that were chosen were The Time Traveler’s Wife (Fiction) by Audrey Niffenegger; Nickel and Dimed (Nonfiction) by Barbara Ehrenreich; Greywalker (Young Adult) by Kat Richardson; and Things Not Seen (Science Fiction/Fantasy) by Andrew Clements.

The discussions were led by three members of the Readers’ Advisory Department (Candy, Jean Cooper and Marna Rundgren) and a Young Adult Librarian (Lee Rabi).  Each session ran for one hour, and the groups met simultaneously in various areas of the library.  This was possible because the library was closed for Staff Development Day.  Multiple copies of the books were obtained for the program utilizing interlibrary loan.

One of the main objectives of the program was to mix the library departments.  Thus, in the sign-up process, each group had a designated number of slots for each department (e.g., three slots for Circulation Department members, two for Adult Services members).  Surprisingly, since it was “first come, first served,” everyone got either their first or second choice of groups.

The staff seemed to enjoy the experience, Candy reports, and the discussions continued, even after the sessions were over.  Organizing the event was somewhat time consuming, according to Candy, but worth the effort because it was a great way for staff to mingle and learn more about book discussions, one of the library’s most prominently featured activities.

Looking for a new way to enliven and enrich your staff development event?  Why not try a book discussion (or several)?

“I don’t like short stories.” How often have I heard that in our book club and in the bookstore? Reading addicts often want to be entrenched in a long narrative, caught up in the rushing current of a strong plot, immersed in the heady waters of suspense and surprise, returning again and again to the new predicaments of favorite characters. And on to the sequels. Longer is better.

None of those are operating values in short stories.

The pleasures offered by stories are significantly different. A short story is like a crossword puzzle or an equation in algebra, a condensed and concise experience boiled down to its essence and fitted tightly together, a turning-point moment in a life, the essence of a character in a single incident or choice. A story is best read at a sitting, a concentrated experience, not in random chunks on the bus and in line at the supermarket.

  If the story collections that I revere were gathered separately, they’d make a very short shelf. In my domain, the queen of all short story writers is Flannery O’Connor, and there’s no collection of stories that more bears re-reading than her Complete Stories. I’ve read it twice, and the second time I felt like I’d never read the stories before, they’re so rich. Who would I dare to place next to her? Well, everyone has their favorites, and I hear cries for Ernest Hemingway and Guy de Maupassant, for Grace Paley and Alice Munro, but none of them has had much impact on me.

  The first contemporary collection that broke through my short story barrier was Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, those awesome tales of Vietnam.   More recently, Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s thrilling collection of Thai stories, Sightseeing, in which every single story is a gem and ending with that superb novella. If the teller of the tales is a bright enough intelligence, that alone can be the unifying factor for my personal reading experience. If the stories have a theme, or all take place in the same location, or all deal with the same industry or nationality, so much the better.

Well, now I’m going to add one more collection to my very short list. Last night I finished reading the final tale in Sana Krasikov’s collection of Russian immigrant stories, One More Year.    I’ll say this for starters: there’s not a single dull page in that book. Not only do all the stories have their major turning points and surprises, but there are dozens of fascinating women characters, hundreds of little delights sprinkled throughout, unforgettable lines like, “He was black and, like all cats, a little obnoxious.” Even a cat lover like me had to laugh at her wisdom. Or how about this: “She could not be bothered with small talk. To her, friendship still meant coming face-to-face with another’s unmediated existence. It was exhilarating, Lera thought, but also exhausting.”

Sana Krasikov doesn’t hesitate to call it the way she sees it. She’s a native of the Ukraine and grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. She writes in English, with a Joseph Conrad-like precision but instead of ships and sailors she’s describing the interactions between husbands and wives, children and their parents.

I can’t remember the last time I encountered so many fascinating women characters in one book. I think that will be my next blog: all the multi-dimensional, unpredictable, unsentimentalized females that come to life in One More Year!

I’m late again. How is that possible? My promotion materials were due in the marketing department on Monday. I always used to be on time. I should have announced the September book of the month three days ago, and I still don’t even know which book it will be.

  Xiaolu Guo’s Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth has dropped to third place. It’s the prettiest package, I admit, the best cover, with the best sales potential for the bookstore. My bookseller’s lust to have good sales figures wants me to choose this book. It’s light and airy, maybe sometimes too light, a young person’s novel skimming over the surfaces of life with grace.

I’ve been sitting on my front porch this afternoon reading the book in second place, which is really the book that should be in first place, Jean-Claude Izzo’s masterful last novel, the anxiety-inducing A Sun for the Dying. I notice I keep taking breaks while I read. Jump up to get a drink. Jump up to send an email. His novels make me nervous. He’s so forthright as a writer, so fearless in looking at the human condition without fantasies or sentimentality, that I never know what to expect from him, but I know I’ll believe it.

  Izzo has just introduced a new character I find delightful, Felix, a good-natured halfwit who looks and acts like a teenager with a football he’s never without. His wife left him and he’s been a street person ever since. He and the central character Rico have just settled down in front of the television to watch cartoons. It’s a strangely touching scene. And it will lead somewhere, I know (I’m worried about that football – what if someone takes it away from him?) because I’m in the hands of a master.

But dang it, the book has a wretched cover. No one will buy this book. It has cover art that turns off even me, a wretched homeless man in a half-fetal position on the ground. That’s a big strike against it. But I’m so bonkers over this guy’s writing I’ve just ordered his most famous work, the Marseilles trilogy – Total Chaos, Chourmo, and Solea – for our little bookstore. I’m saving his best work for last.

And what’s the front-runner for September’s book of the month? There’s a new title in the number one spot, and it’s a real dark horse, because it’s a collection of eight stories. Stories are a genre many readers avoid. However, in this case, the stories are unified by theme, and the theme’s a compelling one – they’re about immigrants from war-torn Georgia, and they’re as finely crafted fiction as I’ve stumbled on in some time.

  The brand new book is Sana Krasikov’s One More Year. Two of the stories I’ve read have wonderful set-ups that I didn’t spot until they paid off at the end. One story, “Maia in Yonkers,” caught me so off-guard by it’s ending that I found myself crying in surprise. Krasikov is a Ukraine native writing in English, and in powerful, concise, illuminating English at that. The cover isn’t as pretty as Twenty Fragments, and the philosophical depth is no match for A Sun for the Dying, but there’s a humanity to these Russian immigrant women making their new lives out of compromises and memories. And at the moment Georgia certainly has the world’s attention.   Krasikov is a brave young talent, and whereas Izzo has passed away, Krasikov as a writer has her future before her. If the other stories are as good as the ones I’ve read, well then – guess I’ll have found my book.

Yeah, but for the moment I’m going back to reading Izzo on my front porch so I can make sure Felix still has his football…

  A book’s attractiveness matters. Pretty books attract the eye and are picked up more often in bookstores. I know because I’ve ordered books for the little bookstore on the north campus of the University of Washington for over thirty years. I’ve watched excellent books with bad covers fall unnoticed by the wayside, and mediocre books with great covers soar to the top of our sales chart. I’ve made it my mission to help people find the good new books, to feature and promote the best new titles, the ones that really provide a satisfying reading experience. But my zeal to let the world know about the best new literature being created today is limited by one big unavoidable factor. The books need to sell.

To achieve that goal, to get the good ones to sell, for the last seven years I’ve been doing a bookstore promotion featuring the best new book of the month. Helping readers find the good ones is extremely satisfying when it works. It doesn’t always work. The publishers have to do their part. A book cover is competing with a store full of other covers.

Take Animal’s People, a perfect example. The British cover captured the novel completely – the delightful boy narrator’s face, the teeming marketplace, the flavor of India. Check out the American cover.   It looks like a white book that was dropped in the mud. I was so incensed I wrote passionately to the publishers. Some dimwit in the Simon and Schuster marketing department thought the new cover design looked like a chemical spill. Never mind that the spill in the novel is a gas, not a drippy, splattery mess like this dreadful cover, surely a nominee for worst cover of the year, and the sales destroyer of a warm-hearted, huge-souled novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a bestseller in Britain. Our bookstore couldn’t give away the American copies.

Okay, don’t get me started on how publishers destroy their own products through insane packaging. Let’s just look at the decision ahead of me right now. I need to choose the September book-of-the-month. I’ve just read one that would fill the bill very nicely – Xiaolu Guo’s Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.   The cover is eye-catching, the girl is drop-dead lovely, the title is too long to remember but with a cover like that, it won’t matter. With the large young Asian population on the University of Washington campus, I could sell this one easily. It’s short, practically begs you to pick it up, the title lines are comically bent, as though typed by a very poor typewriter. It’s a charmer. The story is light as froth but somehow affecting, the characters are forgettable sketches but effective at the moment, the book is a first novel by a very young writer who is utterly sincere. I was sold on Twenty Fragments until yesterday.

  Then I began reading Jean-Claude Izzo’s newly-released final novel, A Sun for the Dying. Well, Izzo is a master, and this was his last book before an untimely death, and he’s at the top of his craft, the creator of the existential Mediterranean noir now so greatly imitated, the crime novel that takes on social inequality as well as crime and does it with such artistry and passion it feels like it was written by Albert Camus. Instantly there’s no doubt – I’ve hardly begun turning the pages, and I know that this is a real novel, with teeth and guts and wisdom, that it’s going to take on the human condition. A couple chapters, and I’m completely choked up. I’m starting to remember how blown away I was by Izzo’s The Lost Sailors, the last one Europa published, and how wrecked I was by the ending.

Well, this new one is about a homeless man who’s best friend, another homeless man, has just been found dead, and Rico has decided to return to his own favorite spot (and the author’s beloved home), Marseilles. At the top of the second chapter we get the line, “If he was going to die, he might as well die in the sun.” Considering the title, this doesn’t sound like it’s going to end well. No, it’s no teen comedy, definitely not beach reading, and to make matters worse, the cover shows a wretched homeless man huddled up on the ground.

Well, dang it, that’s a big problem. That cover is going to kill it. This novel is already five times the novel that Twenty Fragments is, and yet the bookstore won’t sell a single copy. I should make Izzo’s last novel my September book-of the-month, except – is this really the cover I want on my back-to-school signage? What was Europa thinking to put such an unattractive, bleak cover on such a superb novel that could have used a little help in the marketing department?

Enough ruminations on the poor choices of publishers and the injustices of life. The morning is young, the wild lilacs are shoving their purple blossoms in through the open window, my cat is sprawled comfortably beside me, and A Sun for the Dying is within reach…

I’ve just finished reading two new books back to back, and I can only say that both reading experiences were completely satisfying, both were modern Asian novels, both were short, both were written by women, both were just published, and these two books couldn’t possibly be less alike.

Natsuo Kirino’s Real World   follows four teenage girls in the outskirts of Tokyo who are locked in a safe, playful friendship until a boy who has killed his mother steals one of the girl’s cell phones and begins calling them. It’s feminist crime noir, so realistic and low-key you believe it could have happened, written in a breathless, headlong style so effortless the book’s two hundred pages rush past in a blur of suspense, with genuine caring on the reader’s part for four very realistic girls. It’s easy to shed tears over happy endings or any kind of sentimental overload, I do it all the time, but it’s been a long time since I actually cried from pure grief and sadness. The novel delivers a double punch ending that leaves you wet-eyed and gasping.

  Conversely, there are no punches anywhere in Xiaolu Guo’s subtle, delicate Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. The short novel is a slight, almost plotless sequence of sketches of modern Beijing through the eyes of Fenfang Wang, a seventeen-year-old who runs away from her provincial mountain home in Ginger Hill Village and learns how to live in Beijing as a film extra. With frequent invocations to the Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, Fenfang wrestles for ten years with a series of boyfriends, writes her own screenplay about a simple, ordinary man, and struggles against nosy neighbors who label any girl who veers even slightly from the norm as a prostitute. Fenfang weighs the joys and sorrows of life in this touching little mosaic of sketches, and as she lands a string of non-speaking walk-on roles, she grows increasingly independent and endearing, all the while eating, since she’s always ravenously hungry. The characters are quick sketches, their personalities only hinted at, and yet the reader still cares in this sequence of episodes drawn with swift, light strokes.

What do these two very different novels have in common? In both of them, the city where they happen in almost a character, dominating the novel in mood, whether it’s Tokyo or Beijing. In both novels, women defy the restrictions of their gender and push adventurously into the competitive, male-dominated world of higher stakes. And both novels are seen through the eyes of the next generation, young women shaking off the restrictive roles of the past and trying to make their own decisions in the complex, contradictory modern world.

The order matters. Alluring books get readers to come to meetings. The sequence of books discussed becomes a chronicle of the growth of the reading group. Start off a book club with three bad choices, and chances are you no longer have a club. The beginning is where you get reader commitment.

  Which novels or memoirs will work the best as an introduction to the many faces of gay literature? What we call our culture as gay people often has its roots in the many psychological defenses we’ve created to survive persecution by straight society. The coming out novel. The social justice novel. The moral problem novel. Get rid of intolerance, and a prominent chunk of gay literature is left by the wayside. Young gay people today have a hard time even imagining a pre-Stonewall gay life.

Much of our literature so far involves the individual gay person and his/her method of growing up and dealing with a society that disapproves of gayness.    The development of integrity, the ability to be honest to yourself and about yourself in spite of social disapproval, is often the value that culminates a gay memoir or novel. It’s called coming out of the closet, and for many gay authors that’s the self-defining step. But is it for young people who don’t know what the closet is? One of the questions of our book club will be: how is gay culture more than simply a response to oppression?

  Gay people who read (not casually, like read magazines, but passionately, as though books matter and might change you) are a particular minority sub-culture. But we exist. We’re often solos, on the outskirts of gay society. Once I realized homosexuality was a mortal sin in the Catholic Church, reading became my frantic attempt to make sense out of my crumbling morality. Reading was my salvation, as I desperately tried to figure out what was “wrong” with me and why I had such an unusual attitude toward boys. I dived into psychology looking for answers. I gobbled up books by gay authors, people who were like me, to see how they dealt with the unfair blows and the gnawing secrets and the unspoken passions.

  Those books anchored me. Those authors assured me I belonged to a tribe of sane and good human beings. Which is why I want this club to succeed. It’s my give-back. It’s my heritage, these thrilling and revealing books, these monuments to gay giants, and I want to pass them on. I’m trying to design an ad campaign to get the attention of those lonely solo readers out there on the outskirts. I want to gather them to Dunshee House to discuss great books together.

  So this Wednesday we’ll shoot the studio photo that will become the postcards and the posters and the newspaper ads: two naked guys in a yin/yang position reading. The motto of the ad will be “Let’s Read Them Together” and the naked models will be doing just that. The bottom of the ad will list the first six books we’ll be reading. Which are…?

  I need to decide. I have to make a call on the order of those first six books. I need to start with the books that will attract the most readers to this project. My instincts are to hold back on my favorite novels till I have a core of strong readers – Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters. Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire will each have particular challenges. Robert Musil’s Young Torless and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice are darker visions to save for later. I had thought to begin with one of my all-time favorites, E. M. Forster’s Maurice, until I heard it dismissed as “that boring British movie.” Yike. When I first read it in 1972 it was a jolt of reality. But then, after all, it’s Edwardian gayness. Okay then, not Maurice, and not the European classics. Maybe that’s the clue, then – maybe the way to get this group on its feet is to start with the American experience.

With that in mind, I hesitantly come up with this first list of six books, open to revision, to start off the 2009 Gay Classics book club in Seattle:

January 28   The City and the Pillar by GORE VIDAL

February 25   Rubyfruit Jungle by RITA MAE BROWN

March 25   A Boy’s Own Story by EDMUND WHITE

April 29   Becoming a Man by PAUL MONETTE

May 27   Bastard Out of Carolina by DOROTHY ALLISON

June 24   A Single Man by CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

The Kansas City Star has developed an interesting twist on the community-wide book group. Since 2000, the Star’s FYI Book Club has been profiling books, interviewing authors, gathering diverse readers, hosting discussions and then reporting the process. It’s one of the most popular activities/features in the newspaper.

In 2003 I was invited to be one of the Star’s Book Club participants. We read Rick Bragg’s All Over But the Shoutin’. As an added treat, our book group met Mr. Bragg while he visited Kansas City on a book tour for this title.

Group leader Deborah Shouse invites new readers from all over the city to participate in the book group every couple of months. Rarely do any of the readers know each other and they all hold a variety of reading preferences. It’s never the same group of readers twice.

Star Books Editor, John Mark Eberhart profiles the discussion selection with a great synopsis and evaluation and throws in a couple of book excerpts and a lengthy author interview. Interested newspaper readers can pick up the book at any of the Kansas City metro area libraries and read along. 

About six weeks after the book’s introduction in the FYI section, excerpts from the reading group’s discussion will be posted along with photos and short bios of all the readers. In September, readers will gather to discuss the National Book Award finalist, Then We Came to the End. This debut novel by Joshua Ferris was a surprise bestseller, charming critics, readers, and cubicle dwellers across the nation.

For anyone who has ever wasted an afternoon gossiping with those folks in Accounting or shot rubber bands over the cube walls or completely dismantled a vacationing coworker’s cube, your tribe is captured between the covers of this sardonic, sad and snort-worthy novel.

Were you one of the many folks who loved the National Book Award-winner, Three Junes?   Sure, I read that one, too. It had some great scenes. I remember that the first June was a good story and a nice set-up. And the second June was the heart of the novel, and the part everyone loved, and you cried at the end of it. And then there was the third June. I would ask one person after another, “What was the point of that third June?” Maybe I just asked all the wrong people. I sure didn’t get it. You could sum it up as: leftover, uninteresting secondary characters almost connect and don’t. That’s about it. Sure, it was clever that they almost figured out who each other were but didn’t quite – but who cared? The story of the second June was over, we’d wept, and there was nothing more worth saying. Why did Julia Glass include that third section?

That’s how I feel about Part Three of Rawi Hage’s first novel, De Niro’s Game, which this year won the biggest prize you can win in the literary world, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for $156,000.   The book comes out in paperback next week, and I was so blown away by Parts One and Two, so dazzled by the language and grabbed by the images and impressed by the concision and grace of the writing that I’d read some parts over repeatedly. I was traumatized by the culmination of Part Two. The slaughter of the Palestinians in the airport refugee camps was almost unbearable. I had no idea where Part Three could go from there. I suspect neither did the author.

The Part Three that follows – taking the young narrator, Bassam, out of Beirut and putting him in Paris – contains the only overindulgent poetic nonsense in the entire book, long, run-on artiness of the worst kind. The plot stops to make room for dreamy fantasies. The colorful cast shrinks to one, the author, who indulges in pages and pages of stream-of-consciousness posing. How disappointing! It was like Rawi Hage’s younger brother wrote Part Three.

  Finally, at the end of it, the author includes the scene that should have concluded Part Two, which you don’t realize has been held back until now to conclude Part Three. Everything in between – the whole long pointless Paris sequence with Bassam stalking George’s sister, who may or may not like older men to beat her – is wasted energy, because we haven’t grown to care about these new characters.

We care about Bassam’s best friend, George, even though he’s changed into a murdering militia man. At the end of the book the author tries to tell us that George had become a Mossad double agent – oh, please. Way too little, way too late. We do finally learn the hideous meaning behind the book’s title, but the scene that bears it out is underwhelming and strangely without emotional effect.

So, should a book club read De Niro’s Game? The first two parts of the novel, the first 180 pages, are so good they alone almost warrant discussion. It’s a searing portrait of Beirut as hell with bullets whizzing and bombs exploding and motorcycles roaring, written by a guy who survived nine years of the Lebanese civil war. It’s unforgettable. The authenticity of the Beirut portions of the novel is so intense it makes other books look like they’re standing still. Then the action moves to Paris. Maybe some readers won’t hate Part Three as much as I did. Maybe they won’t mind the narrator turning into an asshole, stalking and mugging other characters. In spite of Part Three, I would still recommend the novel to anyone interested in Beirut. But I won’t be using it for my club, and that’s surprising, because I was absolutely certain I would.

Two-thirds brilliant is very attractive in a novel, and more than most books have to offer. But for a book to be satisfying, the threads need to come together in some kind of significant way. If you bother to read a book, when you finish it you deserve to be satisfied.

After finishing John Dufresne’s most recent novel, Requiem, Mass., I reflected on some of its parallels to one of his earlier novels, Love Warps the Mind a Little.  I suppose there aren’t so many similarities to speak of, although both novels are about writers.

The pile for September was twice as high as the pile for August, new fall releases of every color and style, thick and thin, from all over the world. The pile was actually too high. I was afraid my cat might accidentally knock it over, so now there are two piles for September. Well, that’s too many for a blog. Let’s winnow it down a bit, whittle out a couple that look fairly predictable, get rid of one that’s so thick I’ll never finish it, and here are the ones that look the best:

Home by Marilynne Robinson.   Here comes her anticipated companion novel to Gilead, which many of us read in our book groups, the Pulitzer Prize-winning saga of three generations of small town ministers. Now the same story will be told concurrently from the point of view of the Reverend John Ames’ dearest friend and neighbor, Reverend Robert Boughton, whose prodigal son, Jack, figured so powerfully in the first novel. Gilead wasn’t for everyone, and ever since Marilynne Robinson attacked Richard Dawkins over his God Delusion she’s fallen from my personal pantheon of respected writers. Still, if this new book contains any scene half as powerful as the blessing of Jack at the bus stop in Gilead, it will be worth grabbing. Reading the two novels back-to-back in a reading group would be a compelling double-header.

The Book of Murder by Guillermo Martinez.   The new novel by the Argentine author of one of the surprise delights of 2005, The Oxford Murders. If you haven’t tried that one yet, grab it before the movie comes out. It’s a thrilling, intellectually-teasing homage to the great mystery classics, and I smile just remembering it, an elegant tour-de-force that’s part Arthur Conan Doyle, part Jorge Luis Borges, dizzyingly original, refreshingly smart, with a whipcrack of an ending you’ll never forget. Go along with the 22-year-old graduate student from Argentina as his stay at Oxford turns into a treacherous puzzle, where the mysterious mathematical genius, Arthur Seldom, pits his wits against Inspector Petersen of the Oxford police in their pursuit of a serial killer which leads them from Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to Pythagorean mysticism. You don’t need a scrap of math to enjoy this straight-faced romp. Let’s hope the new one is as good!

The Only Son by Stephane Audeguy.   A first-person narrative told by the lost brother of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a bad boy who ran off to Germany and disappeared from history, leaving his famous brother as the only son. This new French novel tells the other side of the story.

Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire by David Mura.   The novel begins with an utterly captivating opening scene – a Japanese-American father shaving with his two little sons, who cuts himself to prove to his children that razors are dangerous. I’m not sure where it’s going, and I don’t like to read back cover copy, but I’ll return to this one for sure.

Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle.   A graphic memoir account of author Delisle’s assignment serving the government in Myanmar, where he takes his wife and baby, and their experience living under a dictator in a world of censorship.

Other Lives by Andre Brink.   Three interconnected stories taking place in Cape Town. The opening story, about a schoolteacher deciding to quit his teaching career to pursue his passion for painting, has a compelling opening. The South African novelist has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize

The Road of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam.   In 2005, one out of every forty girls born in Cambodia was sold into sex slavery. The author spent a decade of her girlhood in the trade until she became a powerhouse activist and began raiding brothels, rescuing children, and starting schools.

Recovering Charles by Jason F. Wright.   Some people get tears in their eyes at the mention of 9/11, but for me it’s Katrina that causes a catch in my throat, and that tragedy is what this novel takes on, as a man goes back into the wreckage of New Orleans to come to terms with something about himself and his father. Sounds potent.

The Wonder Singer by George Rabasa.   A famous opera soprano is found drowned in her bathtub with her eyes opened wide in wonder and her lips in an enigmatic smile. The novel centers on the ghostwriter of her autobiography, left on his own without her now, determined to write the book anyway.

The Angel of Grozny by Asne Seierstad.   Her most famous work, The Bookseller of Kabul, continues to draw new readers. She’s one of those fearless reporters who face bombs and snipers to get the real story, and this venture into Chechnya looks like no exception.

What a literary feast! And that isn’t including any of the hot new books still remaining in the pile for October…

They’re piled so high now I’ve forgotten the ones that are underneath. Advance reader copies from publishers, the new titles about to be released, the new Jose Saramago, the new Marilynne Robinson, new Spanish novels and French novels and several from Argentina, well, and those are just some of the ones I remember. It’s high time I started looking through the galleys. After all, it’s very likely I’ll be choosing our next book club selections from these very books. Let me share with you a preview of the titles that sound most exciting. But first I’d better gather them up, armful by armful of new arrivals, and start sorting them by release date. Okay, the August ones over here, September in this pile…

Several hours later, after giggling in delight and talking to myself, I snap out of it to find I’ve got three big piles for August, September, and October, with a few advances trailing on beyond. Well, let’s just start with the August titles. I’ll weed out a few more, a couple familiar-looking memoirs and two exotic Middle Eastern romances I can skip. Which brings it down to six. Well then, here are the six titles coming up next month that look most promising to me:

Martin Caparros. Valfierno.   A novel about the man who stole the Mona Lisa in 1911. Looks quite entertaining, an imaginative recreation of the whole art-world-shaking event, written in a flashy European style.

Jean-Claude Izzo. A Sun for the Dying.   The last novel written by the brilliant French author from Marseilles, who reads like a combination of Joseph Conrad and Albert Camus. He can be a tad downbeat. The guy has a real sense of urban tragedy, like an old black-and-white noir, but he’s a superb stylist who can really tell a story.

Antonio Munoz Molina. A Manuscript of Ashes.   A Spanish novel translated by the top translator, Edith Grossman. Looks like a Saramago novel, big blocks of text, few paragraphs. I did spot some quotation marks. Elaborately written, but looks intriguing, it takes place in the late Sixties.

Xiaolu Guo: Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.   Short 165-page novel. This young author got a lot of press for her novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, because it began in very faltering English and improved over the chapters. I found it gimmicky and unreadable, but this new one looks like something by Banana Yoshimoto, swift and simple and clean, quite appealing.

Samson Kambalu: The Jive Talker.   Memoir. Engaging opening pages about a skinny African boy whose father is obsessed with Nietzsche.

Kira Salak. The White Mary.   A novel based on the author’s true-life solo trek through the jungles of Papua New Guinea. I adored her two non-fiction travel thrillers, Four Quarters, about that very jungle trek, and The Cruel Journey, about her 600-mile solo kayak trip up the Niger River to Timbuktu. I remember that she was called “the white mary” on one of those trips. The woman can write like an angel (I got so worked up I sent her a fan letter!) but I’m afraid to find out if it makes any difference when the plot is made up. We’ll see. She’s a good bet for a thrilling literary experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For years, I have been hearing how marvelous Shirley Jackson novels are from friends and patrons.  Of course, I read her famous short story “The Lottery” in high school.  Who didn’t?  This week I finally picked up Jackson’s classic chiller, The Haunting of Hill House.

I knew it was going to be a little bit creepy, a little bit eerie, but nothing could quite prepare me for the quality of Jackson’s writing or the clarity of her voice.  The first paragraph truly sucks you in:

No live organisim can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.  Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The writing took my breath away.  Sure, the book has some fantastic passages and scenes of psychological terror, but it’s the language and the character development that had me reading into the wee hours of the morning.

 In a nutshell, four people come to spend time together in Hill House to observe whether it really is haunted.  Dr. Montague, a scholar of the paranormal, invites the heir to the home, Luke, and two young women with some paranormal experience, Theodora and Eleanor, to live in the house with him, taking notes of any occurances.  Eleanor becomes the center of this novel, and becomes the focal point of the house’s strange powers.

Trust me, you don’t have to wait until October to read this one with your group.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The table where I put the books I’m going to read next has degenerated to toppling piles of unread advance copies. This is unheard of. These are all reading experiences I’m not having. Why not? Beca