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

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

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

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

From his own memories of Afghanistan and the stories he heard, Hosseini fashioned the character of Mairam.  Mariam is the illegitimate product of a union between a successful theater owner and his servant.  Forced away from the city and his legitimate family, Mariam and her disgruntled mother live in a small impoverished village which receives an occasional visit from the father as a token of his responsibility.  To bury his shame, the father negotiates an arranged marriage for Mariam, at age fifteen, to an older, unattractive shoemaker named Rasheed.  Their relationship is never steady, as Rasheed longs to replace the son he lost and Mariam dreams of a love that is romantic as well as true. 

Because the book covers a number of years, we eventually are allowed to see Rasheed replace Mariam with a fourteen year old wife named Laila by bringing her into their home as a second wife.  Laila’s life, though short, has been filled with Soviet soldiers, a love torn from her side, and a rocket attack that leaves her helpless, thus bringing her to Rasheed.  By now Rasheed is a man to be feared by the women and the actions of their keeper will force each of the women to make a choice that proves to be one of the strong themes of the book. 

These two women characters are keys to understanding and enjoying the book.  There inability to counteract the failure of their country to protect them from harm and their need to deal with an oppressive patriarchal society will provide plenty of opportunities to develop questions for the book discussion. 

All of this is set against a curtain of constant conflict as Afghanistan struggles to find a national identity while dealing with the Taliban, the Soviets and eventually the Americans.  Here are more areas where questions can be found.

This is an unrelentingly tragic story.  It should remind everyone who reads a newspaper or watches the nightly news that behind the shifting maps and the body counts, individuals who love, raise families, go to work, sing and dance—they suffer with each bomb and every bullet. 

It should be easy to develop a discussion, but if help is needed, there are discussion questions to be found at http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/thousand_splendid_suns.html.  You might also like to visit the author’s website at http://www.khaledhosseini.com/index.html.

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!

With the help of Book Group Buzz (or possibly, sniff!, some other minor resource) you’ve selected the next choice for your book group. Where can you go to get more information?

Many publishers make it easy these days, with discussion questions and author interviews included in the back of the book. When that fails, we all know about reader reviews and other material on the sites of online booksellers like the BookSense consortium, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. Your library should have access to great book and literature databases that will help with author bios, reviews, literary criticism, and readalikes for the upcoming title. Adding the word “review” or “blog” to the title of the book on Google can also reap a quick and easy bounty.

But if discussion questions aren’t in the back of the book, you aren’t out of luck. Several websites specialize in collecting these reading guides. Let’s take a quick look at five collections and how to search them.

After experimenting with a garage door remote, various intonations of “Open Sesame,” and several varieties of Gregorian chant, I can report that the most useful keywords to help you find questions are “reading guide.” Add them to the title of the book (and if the book title is simple or bland, add the author’s name as well) and Google away. If there’s a guide out there, this search string is likely to find it. Other terms like “discussion questions” or ”book group” were much less likely to bring the guides to the top of the hit list.

The most extensive site is http://www.readinggroupguides.com. I couldn’t find a count of all the books that they have guides for, but there are 135 that begin with just the letter “A”. They cover a diverse set of books, feature original discussion questions, and include plenty of other advice for groups. There’s even a blog you might read (after you’re finished here of course). If they don’t have a guide for you, they have some lists of default questions broken up by the book’s genre or type.

The next best bet is http://www.readinggroupchoices.com, a site connected to annual books that collect the same content in print. Their archive includes original questions for over 500 books. The bad news is that the guides at this site don’t make it into search engine results without extreme contortions in your searching. Instead, visit the site itself and search for the title as a second resort if a broader search comes up empty.

BookBrowse, http://www.bookbrowse.com, is a good all-purpose book site that includes a variety of tools, reviews, lists, and other bookish doodads. They have over 500 discussion guides that turn up high on search engine lists. These are not, however, original questions: they’re reprints of materials from the publisher.

Book Movement, http://www.bookmovement.com, has a large archive of books and comes up in search engine results, but the guides here often lack discussion questions. When they do have them, they are publisher retreads. But this site has a large constituency and bears further watching for improvements.

Finally, BookMuse, http://www.bookmuse.com has good original discussion guides, but you must register (free) to access them and they didn’t come up in my experimental searches. The archive here is not large, with only 71 books on this viewing. The new titles here aren’t very new, and this site may be dying out.

There are two other major sources for discussion questions: publisher web sites and online databases. More about those in next week’s blog. Meanwhile, if you know of other large collections of original discussion guides, don’t hesitate to post a comment below.

I’m dipping into my handy bag of book tricks again as I prepare for another workshop on book groups: facilitating, feeding, and tattooing. 

One of the gems I like to draw attention to is A Year of Reading by Elisabeth Ellington and Jane Freimiller.

Published in 2002, this trade paperback-sized treasure is great for folks who are just starting a book group and need help with basic preparations. It’s also suitable for the facilitator on the fly who needs to cobble together a reading plan tout de suite.

Using “classics and crowd pleasers,” Ellington and Freimiller take each month of the year and offer five titles for possible discussion, a good synopsis of each title with topics for reflection/discussion, multi-media and internet resources, and readalike suggestions.

I like to use this books an inexpensive source for library staff to delve into when time and money are at stake. These reading suggestions are tested successes for most book groups and all the prep work is present.

And I’ll admit it here and now. I also use this book when I’m lazy and need to be rescued from title selection and idea generation. Hey, it happens to everyone.

Recently I gave a workshop on Book Group Basics–starting, facilitating, choosing titles, that sort of thing. Don’t look at me like that. There are still folks out there who don’t belong to a book club and think it might be nifty to start one.

One of the print resources I bring with me is The Readers’ Choice: 200 Book Club Favorites by Victoria Golden McMains.

Ms. McMains, a book reviewer and book group member, published a monthly column, “Book Club Favorites,” in the Press Democrat. Many of those columns are collected in this compilation, and while most of the entries will be recognized by long-time book group denizens, there are more than enough unfamiliar titles to include on a new reading list. 

All the entries are arranged alphabetically by author last name. McMains includes a good synopsis of each book and mixes fiction with nonfiction, biography and memoir primarily. She also includes a discussion topic to get readers thinking and talking. The best use of this topic is to give it to participants as they check out the book. It’ll fuel conversation later as readers have something to ponder as they read.

Each entry is only a page in length. The only quibble I have with this resource is its age. It’s time for an update. This is easily one of my favorite tools and it’s very affordable. Unfortunately, it’s also out of print, last time I checked.  So if you have one, hold onto it. And if you don’t, you can get one easily at your favorite online used book source.

The Long Embrace:  Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman (Pantheon, 978-0-375-42351-2)

For book groups looking to discuss a work of non-fiction, this title might work.  The reason why I say might is that I am not sure what weight Raymond Chandler carries in the world anymore.

When I was a young man attending college, I was primarily a science fiction reader.  I spent most of my undergraduate years taking political science courses and relaxing with survey courses in science fiction, fantasy and utopian fiction.  To be honest, I saw them as fun blow-off courses while the English majors were grieving over each word in each book. 

When I ran out of the fun stuff, I took a survey course with some generic name like Mystery and Detective Fiction.  The first book we read was The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.  That novel still resonates with me today and I have re-read it many times including leading a book discussion or two.  I tell anyone who will listen that Raymond Chandler is my favorite dead author. 

My favorite living crime writer is Michael Connelly.  Oddly, Connelly is not shy about mentioning his love of Chandler and acknowledging the debt of gratitude he owes to Chandler for his interest in crime fiction and the use of the Los Angeles area as a base for his writing.

Now that I have spent the last thirty plus years obsessed by crime and mystery fiction, it seems logical to me that there would be an interest in a master craftsman like Raymond Chandler.  Obviously, so did Judith Freeman.  Freeman has written four novels prior to taking on Raymond Chandler.  Her interest in this writer was piqued when she began to read his letters, having polished off his novels in short order.  But what really grabbed her interest was the intriguing relationship that Raymond Chandler had with “Cissy.” 

Pearl Eugenia Hurlburt was born in Perry, Ohio, in 1870.  When she moved to New York City as a young woman, she altered her name to Cecilia, which was shortened to Cissy.  After a brief marriage to a salesman named Leon Brown Porcher, she married a classical pianist named Julian Pascal (alias:  Goodridge Bowen). 

Throughout his entire life, Chandler would claim he saved Cissy from an unhappy marriage.  While some biographers including Freeman cast doubt on that statement, no one has yet proven that Chandler, at the time he married Cissy, had absolutely any idea his wife was eighteen years older than he was.  Even at her passing, Chandler fills out her death certificate with the age of sixty-eight, when Cissy was really eighty-four.

Freeman works with that intriguing nugget and expands it into an analysis of their relationship.  There were a number of things that challenged what most observers said was a happy relationship.  They moved every six months and only bought there first permanent home late in their marriage.  Raymond Chandler was an alcoholic who needed a buzz in order to feel special.  Alcohol also made him randy and he turned occasionally in his life to other women to fulfill his self-image as a gentleman, yet ladies’ man. 

Of course, while this rather prim accountant like person with his older wife was living a nomadic and friendless life, he was writing some of the best hard-boiled fiction ever.  However, his success in America did not bring him the attention he wanted while he could not connect to the European audience who adored him.

Freeman also injects herself into the narrative.  Her attempt to view every home that Chandler shares with Cissy takes her on a crisscross journey across greater Los Angeles, into neighborhoods that resonate for her on a personal level, not just because of Chandler.  But the sense of excitement the reader shares with her when Freeman gains entrance into some of the homes is easily understood to any fan.  

If that does not intrigue a book discussion group, or the group is still dealing with Raymond Chandler as an unknown quantity, perhaps this book could be combined with a discussion of The Big Sleep and/or a viewing of the great Howard Hawks film of the same name.

Here are some suggested questions for a discussion of The Long Embrace:

How would you describe the relationship between Cissy and Chandler?

Did, or did not, Raymond Chandler understand the age difference between Cissy and himself?  Why does he put a false date on her death certificate?

Chandler needed alcohol to be created at periods of his life (The Blue Dahlia / Playback), yet he wrote one of his best novels (The Long Goodbye) sober, while Cissy was dying.  What defined his need for alcohol?

Why would Chandler burn all of Cissy’s letters after her death?

Chandler tried to commit suicide twice in his life?  What do these attempts tell you about the man?

Now that you know about the man, what does it explain about the literature?  How could this man have created Philip Marlowe?  What characteristics of Marlowe does Chandler share, and which does he not?

Those reading guides that publishers provide in the backs of trade paperbacks are an interesting lot of pages, aren’t they?

If you read the guide, you run the risk of encountering some spoilers (”At what point did you realize that Hortense was completely crazy and pouring her heart out to a shrink instead of her diary?”) or graduate seminar level topics (”Examine the use and significance of the feather quill, travel mug and dromedary by Jeremiah Hackwith. Is one item more life affirming than another? What meaning can be applied to the colors the author has assigned to each item, i.e. chartreuse, indigo and tangerine?”) or just plain silliness (”Would this book make a good movie? Who should play the leading characters?”).

Some publishers are including more than just suggested topics for discussion. There are author interviews, summaries, lists of activities to engage in before the discussion, and in one case, a short description of a book’s journey into print.

How best to use all this extraneous material that is supposed to make our jobs as book discussion facilitators easier? I can’t tell you how to use all that information, but I can tell you how I use it.

I don’t. Much. First of all, there’s usually too much material back there for me to use. I’ll never get through all those  questions, no book group could. So I treat them as a jumping off point and usually rewrite the provided questions into topics that fit my group’s personality and discussion level. Occasionally I find that the hapless publishing assistant charged with writing those guides has neglected something very significant in the story and I eagerly pounce on that and make sure my group talks about it.

My group members are divided on who reads the extra material and who does not. Those that read the material are better prepared to discuss the book. They do more thinking about their reading. Those that don’t may go back and read the discussion topics, but frequently once they’ve reached the end of the story, they are done.

As for author interviews, reactions are mixed on those in my reading circles. Some readers enjoy hearing how an author was inspired to write this particular story. Others could care less that the author penned bits of the story in between scrubbing the bathroom, arguing a court case, or while suffering insomnia.

Hands down the best “extra bits” I’ve found thus far in a book followed the end of I am Not Myself These Days by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. The author asks readers to take a multiple-choice quiz about his life in lieu of reading yet one more “I write in my pajamas with the cat on my lap at 3 am” interview and also provides a list of “Music to Read Memoirs By.”

Now, this is stuff that will generate conversation.

Many groups start by reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but I think To the Lighthouse is another great one to start with. It focuses on the Ramsey family and their summer guests in the Hebrides. Here are some discussion questions I came up with when I could not find any elsewhere:

1. What distinguishes Woolf from other writers? What is her writing style?
2. Woolf often employs stream-of-consciousness in her writing. Why do you think that she does this through multiple and shifting perspectives in this book? What does this accomplish?
3. Mr. Ramsey is described by Mrs. Ramsey and Lily with violent and domineering imagery. What does this say about him in relation to the two women? What does Woolf want to say about relationships between women and men?
4. Time is a major theme in this novel. How does Woolf and her characters approach the passage of time?
5. How does Mrs. Ramsey affect those around her? How do you view her designs for other people’s lives? What is her role or sphere of influence?
6. What is the nature of the relationship between Mrs. Ramsey and Lily? How does it change? How does each woman view friendship?
7. Maturity and striking out on your own are recurrent themes in the novel. Mr. Ramsay remarks that he wants his children to know that life “requires courage, truth and the power to endure.” What are Mrs. Ramsey’s views on how to approach and live life? What are the author’s views?
8. “If only she could out them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.” Lily wants to capture the Ramseys and her time with them. Can artists, can art, capture truth? Are truths universal or subjective?
9. What does Lily, does Woolf, think about the role of art in exploring life and human relationships?
10. How is gender and male and female roles explored throughout the novel? What do Mrs. Ramsey, Mr. Ramsey and Lily embody?
11. What does the Lighthouse, and going to the lighthouse, represent?

There are two things Librarians don’t do on the job. The first is read. Sorry. Gotta dispel that myth right now. And if you still believe that one, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn tucked in the side pocket of my overcoat to sell you.

The second thing Librarians don’t do is take a lunch. Unless we are forced to leave the building in search of the fabled two-martini repast because there are only so many ways we can fix the printers, Internet and fines.

All this is a ’round about way of saying how I spent my “eating work time” in front of the computer sussing out a new website devoted to book groups and the readers who love them.

LitLovers is a one-woman bandwidth of all sorts of great book group related stuff in one place. To be honest, there’s not much on the site that the experienced web trawler hasn’t seen before on reading groups. There’s the usual material: book reviews cobbled from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, yours truly, and other sources; reading guides with discussion topics that have been lightly reworked from other sites; some book group basics such as how to facilitate wisely and well, how to select books and how to get the conversational ball rolling.

The section of the site I valued most was LitCourse. Ten easy lessons on literature and how to read it for maximum value with an eye towards discussing. Each lesson takes about ten minutes to read completely and a “student” needn’t read the recommended novel or short story to understand the point of each mini-course. There is also information on starting and maintaining children’s and teens’ book clubs.

LitLovers has been up and running since October of 2007. It’s easy to navigate and the text style is chatty and welcoming and substantive. And if you don’t want to talk about it, then shop about it at LitShop.

Okay, I must have memoirs on the brain. But the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s powerful graphic novel memoir (or “graphic memoir”—a more apt term must exist or be created) is coming out shortly and is already generating critical acclaim.

In 2006, The Seattle Public Library chose Persepolis (1 & 2) as our “Seattle Reads” book. The entire city was invited to meet the author and engage in community discussions about the book and its themes. I facilitated several community discussions and was thrilled to see how readers took to Satrapi’s work. For many, it was their first exposure to the graphic novel format. It is such a dynamic book that I left most discussions buzzing with all of the things we didn’t get a chance to talk about. Sometimes an hour is just not enough!

If your group has never tried a graphic novel, put Persepolis on your list for 2008. Better yet, take your group to see the film afterwards! And check out the fantastic Reading Group Toolbox created by the Washington Center for the Book for discussion questions, author information and more. For extra fun, your group can also check out our Podcast!