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.

I just saw this Guardian article in which American comic book writer and editor Danny Fingeroth rates his top 10 graphic novels. Here are Fingeroth’s top 10:

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…

Films adapated from novels usually take lumps from bibliophiles. Sometimes this criticism is unfair. The book does come first and becomes fixed in a certain way in the mind of each reader, mental pictures that cannot be recreated for each of them by one film. The novel is often an internal medium that is difficult to translate into pictures. A screenplay is also only about 120 pages long, which means that parts of longer books will always have to be left out. These are just a few of the reasons why adapting a novel into film is a tough, thankless business.

Regardless of your position on the subject (and I have to admit, I usually like the book better myself), adaptations make for a fabulous discussion and a marvelous theme for a monthly book group. I had the pleasure of attending one such group last night. Fifteen minutes in, a thunderstorm left us without power, but the lightning, rain, and hail didn’t distract us as we talked on into the darkening night.

Epics received mixed reviews. Ros loved Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s Italian epic The Leopard, but didn’t care for the film (which oddly features Burt Lancaster speaking Italian). Howard was surprised to find that he actually liked the film of Dr. Zhivago better than Pasternak’s classic novel. In this case, the visuals did a better job of transporting him and drawing out his emotions. Mary brought up Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, which are remarkable in that they pleased even hardcore Tolkien fans, a group that may have had the most exacting expectations ever for an adaptation.

Carolyn had The Secret Garden, which spurred a debate about which of three film versions were the best. Everyone agreed however, that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved book was best of all.

Tom had read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which launched us into a heated discussion of whether or not Decker is a replicant in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner. I had to share a related story about a remarkable Philip K. Dick robot (and artificial intelligence) that was used in trade shows. On a flight home, the head went missing and is still at large.

Norman had Richard Bradford’s beloved New Mexico coming-of-age story Red Sky at Morning. The 1971 film, which featured Richard “John Boy” Thomas, Desi Arnaz Jr., Richard Crenna, and Claire Bloom among others, is unfortunately not available in DVD.

Finally, I pulled out William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. The film is one of my all-time favorites (”As you wish”: I cry; “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”: priceless; Wallace Shawn and the poison: hilarious) but I like the book even more because of its clever framing story surrounding Goldman’s claims of adapting S. Morgenstern’s book and the delightful way in which he characterizes himself as a true jerk.

In addition to his novels, Goldman is an accomplished screenwriter. If you find the subject of adaptation interesting, cap your reading with his Adventures in the Screen Trade, or Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade. His credits include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, All the President’s Men, Misery, Marathon Man and Maverick. The books are fascinating both for the wisdom they impart about the screenwriter’s craft and behind the scenes stories of working with film greats like Newman, Redford and Olivier.

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.

WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU BEEN READING?  I tried something new at my book group meeting last week — scheduling 10 minutes at the end of the session to talk about other books the participants have read recently.  This isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept, as book group members often refer to other books during the discussions, but I thought it would be interesting to see how they would react if I encouraged them to comment on other titles, as a way of making their colleagues aware of some new reading possibilities.  It turned out to be a great idea, as several participants eagerly shared information about books they thought their compatriots would enjoy.  One reader had discovered the novels of Pat Barker, who writes compellingly about World War I.  She’d picked up Barker’s latest work, Life Class, and that led her to previous Barker volumes,, such as Regeneration and The Eye in the Door.  Another person in the group has been reading the “Nursery Crime” tales of Jasper Fforde, fanciful mysteries featuring detective inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant, Mary Mary.  She recommended The Big Over Easy (about Humpty Dumpty’s tragic fall) and The Eyre Affair (particularly for those who love Charlotte Bronte).  Since this new feature of the book discussion session was so well received, I definitely plan to continue it!

BOOK CLUBS FOR KIDS:  The library where I volunteer, Arlington Heights Memorial, is offering two book discussion opportunities for children this summer.  “Pizza, Books & More:  Pictures of Hollis Woods,” is open to all, including those who are blind or visually impaired.  The books are available at the Kids’ World desk in advance of the meeting, and youngsters are invited to come have a pizza, make a craft, and share their ideas about the book (which was recently dramatized on TV’s Hallmark Hall of Fame, featuring famed actors Sissy Spacek and Alfre Woodard).  “The Read and Meet Book Club: Lord of the Rings” is a series of events — a lively discussion group that explores J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels.  This month, the members are urged to read The Fellowship of the Ring, then watch the movie on their own, and join the book club to discuss the book versus the movie.  This activity is recommended for ages 11 and up.  I share this information in case you are involved in developing programs for children and are looking for a book discussion angle.  Perhaps you can adapt and expand upon these ideas!

ANOTHER BOOK TO READ, WATCH AND DISCUSS:  Following up on Kaite’s recent buzz about well-known books coming to the big screen this fall — especially books that have been popular with discussion groups — I’d like to add to the list The Secret Life of Bees.  This novel, by Sue Monk Kidd, has been a book group favorite ever since it was published, and it will soon be in movie theaters, in a celluloid version starring Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson, and Alicia Keys.  Those names ought to attract the interest of plenty of movie fans, who will probably be clamoring for the book, if they haven’t already read it — and if they have, perhaps the movie will send them back for a second look!

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? Because I’m not reading fast enough. If I don’t catch them now, they’ll be buried in a matter of weeks by even more new titles.

So, snap out of it, boy! What novel is my reading group going to enjoy this August? What novel will my bookstore feature next month? I’ve got to decide. I’ve got two novels beside me, and I think one of them is it. I just don’t know which one.

  At first I was going to go with Rawi Hage’s first novel, De Niro’s Game, the story of two friends in Beirut that has just won the biggest prize a book can win in this world, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for $156,000. I’ve only read the first 60 pages. I’m a plot-and-character man not much into fancy writing, but I can tell you the language is so gorgeous, so lean and image-rich, that I read slowly and went back to enjoy some sequences over again, just for the words. Super high quality stuff. But do I really want to follow a book about Bosnia with a book about Beirut? How much beating-up will my book group take? A plus is that the book comes out in paperback next month. A minus is that it isn’t released until August 5^th, which gives it a week-late start for featured selling at the bookstore.

Then yesterday an alternate suddenly appeared.   It was a book I’d ordered for the bookstore shortly before it appeared on the cover of the New York Times Book Review – Natsuo Kirino’s novel of Japanese teenagers and murder, Real World. My sampling of the opening paragraphs quickly turned into page-turning. She sucked me right into the story. It’s not poetic, attention-getting language, it’s swift-flowing, limpid prose that reminds me of Banana Yoshimoto. An incredibly effective technique of the narrator trying to ignore an ominous string of coincidences makes the reader uneasy from the outset. Then we switch to a more savvy narrator in the second chapter, another teenager, this one a closet lesbian and much more worldly wise. And the third chapter, just pages away, will be told by the seventeen-year-old boy who has just killed his mother. This gets more and more compelling.

If it’s good all the way through, my group could read Real World next month, and then read De Niro’s Game in September.

As soon as I finish writing this blog, I’m going to sit out on my porch in the last of the sunshine, with a couple scoops of wild blackberry ice cream, and read as much of Real World as I can.

 

I’m eagerly anticipating this week’s release of the new film version of Brideshead Revisited.  By all accounts, it is just as successful as the 11-part series that aired on  Masterpiece Theatre almost 30 years ago (who would sit still for an 11-part series these days?). For book groups, there’s a short Brideshead Revisited discussion guide at LitLovers. You can find information about the author and his work on An Evelyn Waugh Web Site

Some fascinating nonfiction on top level play in two brainy boardgames would be good selections for your next book group meeting.

Paul Hoffman’s The King’s Gambit: A Son, A Father, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game mixes the author’s memoir of his relationship with his dishonest father with a tale of returning to competitive chess as an adult after years away from the board. The best parts of the book, however, are his recounting of the mixture of genius, mental instability, and bad behavior through the history of top level play. Hoffman looks at Paul Morphy, Bobby Fischer, and many other champions and grandmasters whose brilliance at the board was ultimately overshadowed by insanity. He also follows top contemporary players, both men and women, through high pressure matches and tournaments. The chapter where he attends a World Championship in Libya as a second for a Canadian grandmaster and journalist makes for great suspense: as an American Hoffman was followed continuously by the Libyan security service.

Stefan Fatsis wrote a similar book a few years ago, Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, which stays with me in detail. Instead of chess, this book covers Fatsis’s attempt to join the top ranks of professional Scrabble players. The same mixture of geniuses, hustlers, oddballs, and crazies also inhabits this world. Fatsis is becoming a kind of contemporary George Plimpton: his new book, A Few Seconds of Panic, recounts his attempt to get playing time as a kicker in the NFL.

If you are not a game player, these books may read as a fascinating visit–sometimes funny, sometimes creepy–to a kind of contemporary freak show. If you enjoy games of any kind, you’ll find the competitive urges of these master players both appealing and appalling. If you are especially skilled at any competitive endeavor, you’ll probably see a little of yourself in the personalities involved. No matter who you are, these are compulsively readable books that are hard to put down. 

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

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

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

Amen!

Rereading has been the topic of numerous essays and books.  Anne Fadiman edited an anthology of essays about rereading, entitled Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love.  Or there’s Wendy Lesser’s Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering. 

I was reflecting on this topic the other day when a woman in my book group, Edythe, gave me a recent New York Times article, “Agee Unfettered,” about a new interpretation of James Agee’s classic novel A Death in the Family.  Because Agee’s book was assembled and published after his death, it makes perfect sense that another scholar would want to revisit the work and envision and interpret it.  But in reading the article, each editor’s visions sound very different, not surprisingly. For one, in the new version, published by University of Tennessee press and edited by Michael A. Lofaro, the book starts in an entirely different way than that of the David McDowell edited book published in 1957.  The first version begins with the lyrical “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.”  That section is in the new version, just simply placed deeper in the novel.  It also sounds as though the new opener presents writing not included in the former, a passage more strange and unsettling.  Here is how the article describes it: 

Certainly, the two editions of the novel couldn’t start more differently. While the McDowell version opens with the famous prologue, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” a free-floating evocation of a summer dusk in that Southern city, so beguiling in its rhythms that Samuel Barber set it to music, “A Death in the Family” now begins with a nightmare in which the grown-up protagonist drags the decomposing corpse of John the Baptist through the streets of that same Knoxville. The rotting body is treated with the lyricism Agee normally lavishes on men watering their lawns in the twilight. When John’s head goes rolling down the street, the protagonist feels an agonizing tenderness. “He could not endure to chase and corner and trap it as if it were some frightened animal but gently shoring its escape with both hands, trying by the gentleness of his hands, without speaking, to assure it that it need not fear him, slid both hands beneath it and lifted its cold and gritty weight as if it were a Grail.”

So what is a book group to do?  Can and should we read the new version?  Has anyone ever done something like this?  What if more versions and interpretations keep coming out?  Which do you choose?

I also have to say, UTenn should totally have tried to come up with a more compelling cover. 

  I’ve just been crying over the new collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi stories. It’s called Good-Bye – nine unflinching, realistic portraits of postwar Japan told in the style of my childhood comic books. All I did was open the lovely new book from Drawn and Quarterly and read the first page of the first story. It slightly confused me, and I felt compelled to read the next page, and then the next. Five pages later I realized I had no intention of going back to work, and sank down into my reading chair for wallop after wallop of thrilling art-plus-words storytelling.

Every reading group will have one or two members reluctant to take the plunge into graphic storytelling – as though enjoying the comic book format were somehow betraying the necessary rigors of verbal literature. I was one of those objectors.

My introduction to the art of graphic storytelling came in a moment of open-mindedness, as I looked at the second frame of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.   What caused the lightbulb to blink on in my head was Satrapi’s playful use of the cartoon framing device. She tells us the little girl on the left of the group photo is herself, but the figure on the end is mostly cut off. She’s not much more than an arm and a hand. Like a little epiphany, the humor of that placement opened up the staggering possibilities of non-verbal storytelling in graphic art.

  I was somehow left untouched by my few forays into Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Maus, a comic book based on his parents survival of the Holocaust. Who knows why a reader connects with some books, and not others? Persepolis, on the other hand, worked immediately. It was a shock, an introduction, and a preconception-breaking example of mixing several arts together and coming up with something new. From then on I was open to an exciting new art form.

Rutu Modan’s superb Exit Wounds   – a love story that arises from a terrorist bombing in Tel-Aviv – and Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie’s delightful Aya,   a problem comedy about a teenage girl growing up in Ivory Coast, both demonstrate a capacity for contemporary relevance and plot complexity in a film-like series of visual sequences. The two books each end with a gasp. As does the New York Times Best Book of the Year, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,   which tells the story of her father’s death with a dazzling flurry of literary references and a Proust-like circuitous plot that builds with musical intensity to an emotional peak in the last frame.

I’ve been converted. I’m used to graphic brilliance and non-verbal plot points and the sheer emotional punch that good graphic art can deliver. I just don’t expect the horrors of Hiroshima, not to mention prostitution and cross-dressing, to be sensitively dealt with in comic book art from over thirty years ago. Yet that’s exactly what Tatsumi does. He was a pioneer in graphic realism. His heroes are poor everymen, his situations the grinding trials of everyday life. This new collection features a couple of real masterpieces.

The opening story, “Hell,” is the one that unglued me. A reporter to Hiroshima after the war finds an image of a woman and her son scorched into a wall, and his photo of that hideous reminder launches a media phenomena veering farther and farther away from the surprising truth. “Woman in the Mirror” tells the story of Ikeuchi, the effeminate boy who can’t play football and dresses in his sisters’ clothes, recounted with an astonishingly modern understanding. “Life is So Sad” chronicles the life of a faithful bar hostess whose brutal husband in prison is convinced is being unfaithful. And the final, title story, “Good-Bye,” is the cynical story of streetwalker Mariko’s savage revenge on her needy, hypocritical father.

Tatsumi’s embrace of life’s small defeats and darknesses was ahead of its time, and over thirty years later his graphic short stories deliver a shudder of recognition in their frank, honest humanity. For meaty summer fare that’s easy to finish and yet provocative enough to fill a reading group meeting, any club with an open-minded attitude toward graphic novels and an interest in Japan should jump on Tatsumi’s Good-Bye.

Way back in May, Kaite wrote a post about a book that would make perfect August reading. Well August is almost here, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is starting to get a lot of buzz.  It was featured on NPR as part of Booksellers’ Suggestions for a Summer Afternoon, and an article about the book’s writing team appeared recently in The Wall Street Journal. Nora Rawlinson tells us on her blog that Dial Press is shipping over 100, 000 copies, though “libraries show light ordering” so far.  

For a book group, the book offers lots of possibilities. There’s the book-club-within-a book-club angle, the novel-in-the-form-of-letters angle, the historical fiction angle, and the Masterpiece Theatre angle (based on the series from a few years back called Island at War, which also dealt with the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands).  

You can find a reader’s guide with discussion questions on the Random House site.

FEMME FATALE:  WOMEN AND CRIME 

September 25, 2008:  FALLING OFF AIR by Catherine Sampson. 

October 23, 2008:  CALIFORNIA GIRL by T. Jefferson Parker. 

November 20, 2008:  ROSE by Martin Cruz Smith. 

January 22, 2009:  OUTSIDE VALENTINE by Liza Ward. 

February 26, 2009:  HIDDEN by Paul Jaskunas. 

March 26, 2009:  DEATH FROM THE WOODS by Brigitte Aubert.  

April 23, 2009:  MURDER NEVER FORGETS by Diana O’Hehir.   

May 28, 2009:  DISORDERED MINDS by Minette Walters. 

So the anxiety of picking the titles is now over for one more year.

Now I can start the anxiety of wondering if the group will enjoy the titles I picked. 

Each year in May I give my group a selection of potential crime and mystery books we could read.  The list is huge, maybe fifty or sixty books long.  Most of these books are crime and mystery titles that got starred reviews in Booklist or other review sources.  Most of them are not series titles, as I find reading series books a little problematic in an ongoing discussion like ours.

From the list the group highlights as many titles as they care to and then I total up their votes.

Then I pick the ones I want to lead a discussion on if they fit into a general theme.  This year’s theme came about because of one person’s comment that we read more books by men or about men than the group should considering they are all women.  

Some are award winners.  The Parker title won the Edgar in 2004 while the Aubert title won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, thus proving that I have learned nothing from last year and failed to listen to the “no award winner” protest.  

All of this stress comes from the fact that I never read a title in advance of the discussion because I want to play along with the group.  I know this violates all the tenants of leading a book discussion but I can’t help it.  It is one of the ways the groups has stayed fresh for me for over fifteen years.  

I guess we all pick our own poison, so to speak. 

Harking back to suggestion #8 in Neil’s list of “how to beat the book club doldrums,” here are some books-into-movies that are coming soon to a book club/movie theatre near you:

Book club favorite from 2003, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is scheduled to open around the holidays (dates, of course, subject to change due to the whim of those movie-types). Readers enjoyed the deft mix of science fiction time travel with romantic love story. The structure of the novel intrigued other fans. The author would jump from time to time, much like her hero, to tell a very non-linear story that had an easy-to-follow narrative. Topic to discuss: How well did the movie capture the novel’s narrative structure? Did it work?

Critical darling, Pulitzer winner and Oprah pick, The Road by Cormac McCarthy will be coming to the big screen in November of 2008. The post-apocalyptic drama boasts a stellar cast. This title is great book/movie bait for those discussion groups wanting to reel in some of those twenty- or thirty-something readers.

Pair the books, pair the movies: James McBride’s Miracle at St. Anna, slated to open in  September 2008, is a first-rate military thriller set in World War II Italy. Consider making this title the star of a book group “event,” a double discussion/viewing of Flags of Our Fathers. Read the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers and consider discussing how all the authors/filmmakers view “the greatest generation.”

For those book groups and movie goers who relish a challenge, get ready for Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. A very literary novel full of dramatic relationships and conflicts. Look for the film version in August of this year.