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

Do you ever consider using  novels that are marketed as YA in your book group? Interesting essay in The New York Times the other day about the fine line between adult and YA novels. 

Among the authors the essay mentions is Peter Cameron, who has written several adult novels and thought he was writing Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You for adults as well,  only to have it published as YA.  In his Booklist review,  Michael  Cart suggests that Cameron’s book will appeal to both teen and adult readers.

Stephenie Meyer is another crossover author. Her hot-selling Twilight series is YA, but she makes her adult-market debut with her latest book,  The Host.  Jennifer Mattson’s Booklist review recommends buying duplicate sets of this and Meyers’ other works, one for  adults and one for YAs.

Michael Cart, who is quoted in the NYT essay,  is working on an article on crossovers for Booklist.

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. 

No, this isn’t a 12-step support group for people who read too much and the folks who love them. But it would be an interesting name for a book group that put the “lib” in “libation.”

Over at Omnivoracious they’ve been speculating on pairing books with beers. Quite a few writers weighed in the topic of “hops and writing chops.”

From “foodie” fiction to “beery” books. Where are we headed next?

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.

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.

Yesterday afternoon I watched a classroom of nineteen sophomores and juniors from Washington and Idaho, all young writers, as they listened to me reading aloud “My Cancer Summer,” slowly realize that the author of the essay – the man sitting in front of them reading – didn’t have cancer. He had HIV.

I’d hurried over from the bookstore at 10:30, up the ramp into the Mechanical Engineering Building on the University of Washington campus, and upstairs into an institutionally green, cement-block classroom on the second floor, with trucks and buses roaring by the open windows.

I like young people. I chatted with a couple of them before the class was officially brought to order by their instructor, Steve Garmanian, who introduced me with gusto to the Young Writers Workshop of the Puget Sound Writers Project. Steve enthusiastically showered me with credentials, some of which (director, screenwriter, actor) I hadn’t even earned yet.

The students were bright and attentive. When I asked if they knew what first-person narrative was, they groaned. Ah, perfect. Smarties.

I started out talking a little about what an essay was, defining it as a short story-length composition which can contain narrative but which is organized around ideas instead of plot. Then I tried to suggest the therapeutic effects of honestly translating your experience into words and seeing where that leads you. Whereas in a novel or short story language is used to create a beautiful illusion, in a memoir or essay language is used to try to nail down the truth, a much harder task.

With that established, I read the essay, “My Cancer Summer.” The students were appropriately attentive and quiet for the cancer diagnosis. Then a tight silence gripped the room when the topic of HIV was raised. The air stopped moving. The buses became silent. I managed to make it through without too many voice quavers.

They clapped at the end, and I could see that some of them were genuinely moved. The discussion began awkwardly, the young writers hesitant to venture their opinions. One by one they raised their hands. Joel felt that the vulnerable, honest voice of the essay showed the author’s trust in his reader. Attractive Lea with long blond hair had grown up with a mother who did HIV research – she knew well the stigma HIV-positive people faced. Leandro noticed that people with incurable illnesses often developed other strengths. A kid in the back whose nameplate I couldn’t see confessed he hadn’t known you could catch HIV from just one slip.

Dark-eyed, intense Sophie was the one who asked, “Did your partner know?” It was a loaded question, because until then the sex of my partner had never been disclosed.

 “Yes, unfortunately, he knew.”

The pronoun did the trick. I became very aware of being a gay man sitting before young people, a specimen of a lifestyle that maybe one or two of them would follow. Only one boy actually seemed troubled by my presence, the best-looking boy in the class, slumped down sullenly in the front corner.

The great debate finally centered around the last paragraph. Was its tone different from the rest of the piece? Joel felt it should be separated from the text by an asterisk. Christian liked the final paragraph, but Sophie and Catherine felt it could be omitted, with the essay ending on the words “barbequed ribs.”

All thoughtful, provocative suggestions. Then came the moment when the discussion had to end, and they were allowed twenty minutes to write their own essays. What change had unexpectedly altered their life? When they were done, with the last dwindling minutes of classtime, a few of them read their essays out loud.

Joel had to watch his father physically degenerating without motor neurons. Sierra’s mother had been forced to abort a damaged fetus, incurring scorn and disapproval. One by one they told or read of their unexpected changes, the beloved older brother who ran away, the beloved older sister whose baby died.

Unfortunately the bell cut us short. We went overtime, and then had to scramble vacating the room for the subsequent class, who were all waiting in the hall. I tried to say goodbye, to refreshing Natalie in her summery green dress, to witty Raghav, to bright-eyed, perceptive Charlie.

As Steve Garmanian and I walked down the stairs into the glaring sun of the afternoon, we passed Leandro, one of the kids that all my instincts told me would become a writer. Leandro had written an elaborate beginning building up to some unwritten revelation. “I’ll bring it by the bookstore when it’s done,” he promised before zipping away on his bike. I think he will.

Here’s another tool to add to your reading group and readers’ advisory toolkit. 

Nora Rawlinson’s collection development philosophy for Baltimore County Public Library, known as Give’ em What They Want, radically altered the way librarians approach the selection of materials.

Nora went on the become editor Library Journal and Editor-in-Chief of Publisher’s Weekly. Now she has a Web site, Early Word, with a blog called, appropriately, Give’ em What They Want: News for Collection Development and Readers’ Advisory Librarians. 

The blog is full of book buzz–information about bestsellers,  film adaptations,  one-book programs,  and much more. There are also links to publisher catalogs, reviews, and podcasts of readers’ advisor extraordinaire Nancy Pearl’s reviews for NPR. 

Take a look–this could be a great resource for identifying titles your book group will want to read and talk about.

Every summer for the last twelve years, high school students interested in writing from all over Western Washington have attended a two-week program at the University of Washington called the Young Writers Workshop of the Puget Sound Writers Project. For many of those years, I’ve been invited to be a guest writer for a couple hours, using whatever I’m working on at the time as a springboard for a writing exercise.

One year we did a classroom reading of a new play of mine, a four-character werewolf version of the Red Riding Hood story called Red. Another year I demonstrated the step-by-step process of transforming the classic novel of Frankenstein into a theatrical adaptation, a romantic version seen from Elizabeth’s point of view. Another year I worked through the structure of Seattle Ghost Story, my third novel, showing how certain characters were chopped out and why. You get the picture. Whatever I’m working on, I throw something together that I can share with young writers.

This year I’m confronted with a challenge. What I’ve been working on is a very personal sequence of twelve essays, dealing with some new issues in my life after a traumatic last summer. It means opening up in a way I never have before. I’ve selected the second essay of the collection, “My Cancer Summer,” as the piece I’ll share with the students. The topic of the essay for class discussion is how unexpected change can alter the course of your life.

Their instructor, Steve Garmanian, has taught English for the past twenty years at Cascade High in the Everett School District and has been published in a variety of literary magazines. He’s guided the summer youth workshop for twelve years, and will be putting the twenty-two students enrolled this year through an intense two weeks of writing. My date for sharing with the workshop is next Friday.

Steve and I have discussed how we’ll arrange the experience. Steve wants to start with me reading the essay. He wants each student to have the text. I’ll have twenty-two copies, but I’ll hand them out after the essay has been read. You see, I haven’t been completely up front with Steve on this. He thinks he knows what the essay is about, because of the title, but he doesn’t.

Instead of me reading it aloud, I’m going to ask Steve to read the essay. I keep trying to read it myself, but I get so choked up I make these embarrassing noises and can’t talk. I have buried emotions here that I haven’t dealt with. I’m not emotionally detached yet. So I’m going to introduce the series of essays, and explain how I came to write them, and then throw Steve and the students into the experience blind.

Afterward, I’ll pass out copies of the text, we’ll discuss how the essay was constructed, the devices used to create a sense of realism and honesty. I’m sure we’ll also discuss what the essay is about. The students will be given a brief session to write down their own short, spontaneous essay on an unexpected change that altered their own lives. Then we’ll hear some of them read aloud. This could be electrifying.

The text of my 1500-word essay, “My Cancer Summer,” will be my next blog. And then I’ll tell you what kind of experience it triggered in twenty-two high school writers.

I have a new favorite book group tool: How to Read Novels Like a Professor.

I enjoyed Thomas C. Foster’s delightfully informative first “how to,” How to Read Literature Like a Professor, but I think this latest entry tops the first. I actually laughed while reading this book and wished I’d had Dr. Foster in college.  

For any book group member who has despaired that he or she doesn’t “read like the rest of the group” and wonders “where are they finding all that stuff” in the text, this is the literary guide book you’re looking for.

So far my favorite chapter is Chapter 15, “Fiction About Fiction” or, to my mind, “what is this meta-fiction term all the cool kids keep bandying about?” Dr. Foster explains it all for you and he goes back much further than the McSweeney’s crowd. He takes us back to Homer, Virgil, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, pointing out where all the current writer-hipsters have picked up their influences.

Second most useful portion of the book is the list of eighteen things you can learn about a book just by reading the first page. Look for it in Chapter One, “Pick Up Lines and Open(ing) Seductions.”

Lest you think the good literate doctor is getting too literary, I should point out that he states, unequivocally, that Chuck Jones, of Warner Bros., animating fame is the “first postmodern genius.”

See? We needed Dr. Foster in our undergrad days. He references Bugs Bunny and makes it relevant to reading.

I am curious about what other book group leaders do to prepare themselves and their groups for discussions.  There are so many aspects to “preparation,” so I am just going to share one.

Every month, one week prior to our meeting, I send out an e-mail reminder.  Because it is a Library book group, I find that this helps tremendously.  This way I hear from members if something has come up, if they have gone on vacation, or if they need an extra push to get through the book.

It is also my chance to provide some background materials for discussion.  When I hand books out the next month’s books, I generally provide discussion questions that I find online or that I create myself.  But when I send my one week reminder, I like to send articles or interviews that will enhance their reading experience.   Sometimes, too, group members will get inspired to do some searching themselves on an author or book, and take this as an opportunity to share with the group.

Next week we are discussing Richard Yates’ 1961 classic Revolutionary Road.  Since a film directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet is slated to be released later this year, I found an article by a Yates biographer about Yates’ own tragic relationship with Hollywood during his lifetime.  I also shared an NPR “You Must Read This” spot and audiofile entitled “An Emotional Journey Down ‘Revolutionary Road.’”

One reader responded to me with a 1972 interview with the author in “Ploughshares” which I forwarded to the group.

So what do you do to enrich your group’s experience?  What do you do to prepare?  Do you share articles, interviews, biographical essays?  Do you compare the book and the movie? 

And if you have anything to share with me or my group about Richard Yates or Revolutionary Road in particular, you have one week.

Has anyone else seen this commercial? It opens with a trim, perky blonde woman talking to the audience about how much she loves books and reading and talking about reading. She’s so excited because she just found a book group where the women (apparently the group is solely composed of women. Is that redundant? A women’s book group?) always choose the best books. She can’t wait to talk about these great books with these intelligent women! By now she’s got her hands in little fists and she’s pumping them excitedly. Her hair is swinging around, all bouncy and perfectly cut. I’m scowling at the television because I am not lithe and blonde and I need a haircut and I should be reading, not zombieing out in front of the cable box. So I grab my remote and I’m about to channel surf this Oprah-tastic broad right off my screen when she gets pouty and says the women in the book group nudged her out because she actually read the books and wanted to discuss them.

My heart and grip on the remote melted. I felt for her. I do. How many book groups have I gone to where steering conversation to the book is like driving Ben-Hur’s chariot? And then, I knew I could be in a book group with this gal. What does she do to make herself feel better? She busts out the spreadable cheese and crackers and lobs a joke at the viewers at home. She gets it. Books and food are a winning combo. She’s gonna keep on reading. To heck with those gossipy hens.

And Madison Avenue? When did those marketing culture vultures learn that book groups could be used to sell product besides books? Today, smoothy cheese and crackers. Tomorrow,  beer and pick-ups. Woot.

The publication of Steampunk, an anthology of reprinted stories and excerpts, provides a great opportunity for adventurous book groups looking to explore an unusual theme.

“Steampunk” derives its name from its mixture of steam-driven 19th century technologies and a punk attitudes that subvert the staid social and political conventions of those times. Stories and novels in this style feature intrepid inventors, genteel lady adventurers and social activists, frontier dandies, and other period characters using airships, mechanical robots, and other contraptions in science fiction and fantasy settings. This hot subgenre is spawning books, films, music, fashion, and even lifestyles. Even the NY Times has noticed the trend: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/fashion/08PUNK.html
 

The anthology Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer is a collection of stories originally published between 1971 and 2007 by the likes of Michael Moorcock, Michael Chabon, Mary Gentle, and Neal Stephenson. Combined with brief essays that define the subgenre’s scope and history, it makes a fine introduction.

But a book group would be well-served by handling this subject as a theme, encouraging members to read other superb steampunk such as Tim Powers’ Anubis Gates, China Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels (such as The Scar), Jane Lindskold’s The Buried Pyramid, or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass) or Sally Lockhart (The Ruby in the Smoke) series. Michael Chabon has edited two collections for McSweeney’s (Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories and Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales) with all-star casts of writers that largely fit within the steampunk framework.

Other readers might choose speculative fiction classics by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, or H.P. Lovecraft originally written in or near the period to which contemporary steampunk hearkens back. The visually-oriented might choose to review Alan Moore’s graphic novels about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, films like The Illusionist or The Prestige, or a season of The Wild Wild West on DVD. Those with a less speculative bent could read historical fiction or nonfiction that reflects the era and provide comparison or contrast.

Steampunk provides a fine blend of fun, alternate history, and social engineering that will please many readers. Let your book group join the ranks of those who are finding it can be good to get steamed!

In honor of my recent visit to Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, a veritable mecca for booklovers, I thought I would share some of their unique resources for book groups.

Powell’s has staked its reputation over the years as a robust independent bookseller with knowledgeable staff and one of the biggest general collections of new and used books in the world.  They have been boosting their online presense over the years, and have begun a series of author interviews from their extensive reading series.  I often send their interviews along to my group members before our discussion to give them additional insight into an author or title.  And with interviews with the likes of Sherman Alexie, Jodi Picoult, Ian McEwan, and Aimee Bender, there is something for every group out there.

Another section in Powell’s Author section that may be useful are the INK Q & A columns.  Powell’s also features some Original Essays from authors that can also round out your reading experience.

Powell’s also has a blog and we love those, don’t we?  But one of my favorite Powell’s perks is their “Review-a-Day” e-mail service where you receive a book review in your e-mail inbox each and every day.

So there you have it, my homage to one of the best book stores out there, bar none!

This weekend the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art hosted its second book group for members. I mentioned this project a couple of months ago and wanted to let everyone know how it turned out.

On Friday night, registered readers gathered at the Visitor’s desk and were brought to one of the museum’s special events rooms. Guests mingled and chatted while nibbling on the platter of international cheeses (mostly French) and drinking wine. Museum staff had thoughtfully piped in French music of the late 19th century to add ambiance.

After a quick greeting from the project leaders, the guests were taken on a brief tour of the Museum’s Impressionist Galleries. The docent discussed the rise of the Impressionist movement and had the participants carefully examine certain paintings for differences in the work of the artists and examples of Impressionist brush strokes. She also pointed out why this movement caused such a stir among the French art community.

The tour concluded, guests were led back to the main room and a lively discussion of Luncheon of the Boating Party ensued. Participants were very eager to discuss the roles of women, in both the painting, the novel, and French society, the meaning of la vie moderne and what it meant to the models and Renoir, and how the author also “captured a moment” by only writing about an eight week period in Renoir’s life and the brief, intense relationships formed between his models.

The tour and presentation about the place held by Impressionism in art history lent an added depth to the discussion of Susan Vreeland’s well received historical novel. Our musuem’s gift shop purchased trade paperback copies and sold them with a discount to Museum members. I created a powerpoint presentation with other Renoir paintings featuring model/characters from the book and also put the discussion questions on the slides for all the attendees to read, thus cutting down on the amount of paperwork I felt I had to bring along.

Consider moving the book group out of the library or coffee shop and taking it to a related location that may stimulate more discussion. It’s a partnership worth pursuing at any size library. Cost is minimal and entertainment value is high.

Last week I highlighted book group support web sites where discussion leaders can find reading guides and discussion questions for their book club selections. Another excellent source for these are the publishers themselves. Most major publishers of literary fiction have figured out that distributing reading guides is a good way for them to increase word-of-mouth and sales for their new titles.

It’s too bad that a wider variety of genre fiction and nonfiction publishers aren’t cluing in to the value of including reading guides as well. Book clubs would love to take on their books in larger numbers with a little encouragement. If a publisher does not have a discussion guide for a book you would like to use, I would suggest that you send them an email request or letter. But I digress…

To locate online discussion questions, either find your book’s publisher and visit their web site or use the magic keywords at Google or your favorite search search engine: Add “reading guide” after the book’s title. I experimented with this method for all of the publishers below, and the discussion guides consistently came up in the top twenty hits.

Because of the consolidation of the publishing industry into huge conglomerates, most of the discussion guides can be found on a few big web sites, but “smaller” publishers like Beacon’s , Hyperion, or Algonquin also have reader guides. I can’t list all of the sites here, but here are some of the larger collections. These sites are also good places to browse when you’re selecting the next book.

HarperCollins has about 800 titles with discussion questions at http://www.harpercollins.com/Readers/readingGroups.aspx. Their imprints include William Morrow, Amistad, Eos, and Avon. The guides can be browsed by interest area. You can also invite their authors to an event, sign up for a monthly newsletter of reading group books, or sign up to get word of author events near you.

Random House, which includes imprints like Bantam, Dell, Knopf, Vintage/Anchor, Crown, and Doubleday, has around 700 guides on their site, http://www.randomhouse.com/rgg. Their list can also be subdivided into particular reading interests.

Penguin, which is also home to Riverhead, Signet, and Daw, has guides for over 600 books collected at http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/readingguides.  Like other sites on this list, they also have newsletters, contests, and advice for starting a group.

Simon & Schuster counts Baen, Atheneum, Downtown, Fireside, Free Press, MTV Books, Scribner, and Atria among their imprints. They have over 500 reading guides and other goodies for book groups at http://www.simonsays.com/content/index.cfm?pid=523081&tab=7.

MacMillan collects nearly 300 reading guides at http://us.macmillan.com/macmillansite/categories/General/Guides/Guides. Their imprints include Picador, St. Martin’s, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Tor/Forge, and Metropolitan Books.

Houghton Mifflin has over 100 reading guides. For fiction, visit http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/fiction.shtml and for nonfiction try http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/nonfiction.shtml.

If none of the publisher sites work, try the NoveList database (assuming your library has access.) Their site includes over 500 discussion guides.

All told, that’s over 3500 reading guides on just a few web sites. Maybe your group will need to meet more often!

There is no doubt that I write a lot about Seattle and The Seattle Public Library, where I work.  Chances are, I will go on writing about both of these topics again and again, so please forgive me.  Today I wanted to draw your attention, dear reader, to a relatively new blog called Shelf Talk.

 Shelf Talk is The Seattle Public Library’s staff blog.  Library staff (meaning not just librarians) have been contributing posts about books, culture, library resources and services and local interests.  The posts are varied, informative and fun.  It’s another great way for us to serve our patrons near and far.

So what’s it to you?  Well, it’s yet another web resource for your book group, another place to look for new and interesting titles to consider.  Take, for instance, Duan’s post on Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, or this post about reading on local buses, or Jen’s article about parallel stories, or Hannah’s post on books for new moms, or even David Wright’s post on “evil scary children” in literature (sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?)!

Library staff at The Seattle Public Library keep coming up with great ideas that could benefit your book group in brainstorming new books to try.  So sign up for an RSS feed, put us in your list of links, and stop by often.  And please share links for the rest of us of some other stellar library blogs!

This week I have immersed myself in Seattle Reads The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu.  Incidentally, Mengestu’s book recently won the LA Times First Fiction Award.

My week started with the Book-It Reperatory Theater’s staged reading of excerpts from the book.  The actors brought such life to the characters and to the words on the page.  Not being much of a play-goer, I forget how inspiring such performances can be.  I walked away invigorated for my book group discussion the next day.

When my group discussed Dinaw’s book, we talked about the immigrant experience and about the melanchony and loss that pervades the book.  The book’s main character, Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant, lives in Washington D.C. and owns a corner shop in Logan Circle, a neighborhood that is starting to change.  Sepha lives a quiet life; in fleeing the violence in his home country, he did not move to America with any grand plans or expectations.  But when Judith, a white academic, and her biracial daughter Naomi move into the neighborhood and restore and old mansion, it awakens in Sepha a sense of what has been missing in his life.  He longs for connection, but fears it.

We talked about the positive and negative aspects of gentrification.  Some members questioned the main character, Sepha’s, actions and choices, his inactions.  Why did Sepha decide not to write back to Naomi? Was the ending hopeful or not?

The following day I saw Dinaw speak.  He answered questions from the audience and was so poised, well-spoken and thoughtful, wise beyond his 29 years.  I should have expected this from his book; he is able to write about old age and nostalgia and melancholy with the depth and wisdom of someone much older.  As I listened to the audience’s questions and Dinaw’s thoughtful responses, I wished that my book group could have been there.  So many of the questions that had been asked the day before were illuminated or touched upon in a new way by the author.

At one point in the novel Naomi brings The Brothers Karamazov into Sepha’s store for him to read to her (she chooses it because it is a big book and will keep him reading).  Several readers questioned Dinaw as to why he chose that book, and he explained his love of the book and how the quotation that Sepha memorizes provides a turning point for him:

“People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.  If a man carries such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

These beautiful words from Dostoevsky’s masterpiece resonate in a wholly different way in Mengestu’s book–illuminating the immigrant experience and the disappointment, hardship and loss that every human being experiences in life.

Encouraging your group to expand their experience beyond just the monthly discussion, to see an author read or watch a film or see a dramatic adaptation, can be so valuable.  It needn’t be your city’s One Book program (if you have one).  But in this case, I was so grateful to have so many opportunities to celebrate Mengestu’s book on my own and with others.