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I met with the Science Fiction/Fantasy group at Williamsburg Regional Library last week to discuss steampunk. There’s a real surge of popularity for steampunk in fandom and among designers lately, driven by retro-future romanticism and the fact that steampunk, with its mix of Victorian high style and gleaming gears, glistening clockwork men, blimps, and goggles, looks fantastic on film but is relatively easy for the home costumer or designer to re-create.

The question for our book group was whether or not this aesthetic phenomenon translates to successful literature. Steampunk should be set in a Victorian or Edwardian era past (though not necessarily England), but an alternate history that featured advanced technologies (still usually driven by steam power, intricate mechanics, or some other juiced-up version of science available at the time.) That’s the “steam” part of the name. The “punk” portion of the moniker comes from anti-authoritarian attitudes and individualist aesthetics: Victorian amateur scientists or Wild West adventurers taken to new extremes. Books that aren’t set in the Victorian era, but evoke the same styles and attitudes in another world or time period may also be called steampunk.

The genre’s roots are in works originally published in the Victorian era, particularly those of Jules Verne, whose advanced science in works like Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea presuppose the steampunk aesthetic. Later, works published in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s would inspire and inform the current explosion. These writers include James P. Blaylock (The Digging Leviathan), Paul Di Filippo (The Steampunk Trilogy), Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), Tim Powers (The Anubis Gates), Christopher Priest (The Prestige), Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass), Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age), S. M. Stirling (The Peshawar Lancers), Paula Volsky (The Grand Ellipse), Martha Wells (The Death of the Necromancer), and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (The Difference Engine).

The readers in our group found that the works that inspired the steampunk phenomenon (a nice selection can be found in the two Steampunk anthologies edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer) are worth reading. The current crop of steampunk fiction is a more mixed bag. As with any hot subgenre, some of the work is inspired, but much is derivative. In this case, there’s also the problem that clever technological advances and plucky spirit are only an authorial misstep away from unbelievable pseudo-scientific hand-waving or jarring anachronistic behavior.

Some of the recent authors found advocates in our group. Gail Carriger writes funny romantic urban fantasies about the Parasol Protectorate starting with Soulless. Mark Hodder’s Burton and Swinburne adventures start with The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack and George Mann’s Newbury and Hobbes investigations begin with The Affinity Bridge). China Miéville’s New Crobuzon-set books–Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council aren’t pure steampunk but they have the right aesthetic. Scott Westerfeld, one of many young adult authors exploring steampunk, has found success in the trilogy of Leviathan, Behemoth, and Goliath.

Our group first explored this topic a couple of years ago, but we revisited it because since then, steampunk has been taken up by a slew of new writers. Other authors that those interested in sampling recent steampunk might try include Tim Akers, Meljean Brook, Andrew P. Mayer, Felix J. Palma, Cherie Priest, Lev AC Rosen and Lavie Tidhar. Is it back to the future or forward to the past? I’m not sure, but it certainly stirs something in the creative mind and the romantic spirit.

“People are freer in America.  But there are more tears.”

The sentence above, a quote by Mama Geless, a Danish immigrant in the book City of Orphans. does a nice job of summarizing the theme of this story.  Unintentionally, I have been reading books with similar themes lately including Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (another coming of age novel set in New York City) and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (another novel dealing with children forced to make grown up decisions). 

Also, unitentionally, I find myself reading a crime novel.  This novel was selected for our monthly staff book discussion by our Youth Librarian because it fit the category of Historical Fiction.  However, it does fit my definition of a crime novel and therefore gave me an entry into crime writing for the younger market.

Set in 1893 in New York City, the novel tells the story of Maks Geless, a thirteen year old boy who has left school to sell newspapers (a newsie) in order to help his family survive the economic depression of the times.  Papa and sister Agnes (a tuberculosis sufferer) work in a shoe factory while older sister Emma has a job as a maid in the brand new Waldorf Hotel.  When she is accused of the theft of a gold watch and tossed into The Tombs, Maks takes action to get her released.

The contrast between the Geless’ family poverty and their struggles to hold multiple jobs just to survive is nicely contrasted with the elegance of the Waldorf where bell boys will retrieve your glasses from your hotel room if you forgot them.  Even more sinister, people who are not of the right ilk will be denied entry to the hotel at all, tossed out by the same hotel security who accused Emma of her crime.

In his desperate search for affordable allies, Maks turns to the very interesting Dickensian character Bartleby Donck, a former Pinkerton who now lives in poverty as a tuberculosis sufferer, writing boy detective stories for the papers to survive.  Another touch from that writing style is Bruno, the head tough of the Pub Uglies Gang, a group of boys being used to attack the newsies in order to disrupt distribution of the paper and the message it carries.

The central figure in the whole story that unites it all is a homeless girl name Willa who rises up one day in an alley to defend Maks from an attack.  That earns her his respect, a place in the Geless family and a role in all the future developments in the plot.  The pathos that surrounds this character is a big part of the atmosphere of the book.

In the Author’s Notes, Avi says, “It was a time of great wealth, great poverty, widespread crime, great charity, and major political reform.”  Hmmm, how familiar does that sound?

Ultimately, I may not have the background to say with authority that this book would work as a discussion title for younger readers.  But as an adult reader, I enjoyed the story and believe it does have enough thematic content to create questions for a discussion.  One of the challenges of the novel is it is written in present tense in a colloquial voice and occasionally shifts away from Maks perspective.  I would give it a try if for no other reason that it is just a good story to read in these hard times.

And finally, the last post of all on the best books of 2011! Here are the most frequently mentioned titles in best-of-the-year coverage in the categories of narrative nonfiction (excluding memoirs and biographies, which were featured earlier this week) and the catch-all of how-to, art, cooking, and crafts books.

The final version of the 2011 ABBC (All-the-Best-Books Compilation) is available for download as an Excel spreadsheet via Blogging for a Good Book at Williamsburg Regional Library. The spreadsheet lists 3328 titles published in 2011 in 11 genres and subject categories, each annotated to show which of 237 newspapers, magazines, awards, blogs, and other web sites named them a best book of 2011.

NARRATIVE NONFICTION

35 mentions  Erik Larson  In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family In Hitler’s Berlin

23 mentions  John Jeremiah Sullivan  Pulphead: Essays

Stephen Greenblatt  The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

22 mentions  James Gleick  The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood

21 mentions  Susan Orlean  Rin Tin Tin: the Life and Legend

20 mentions  Michael Lewis  Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

Candice Millard  Destiny of the Republic: a Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President

19 mentions  Joshua Foer  Moonwalking with Einstein: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything

18 mentions  Christopher Hitchens  Arguably: Essays

17 mentions  Daniel Kahneman  Thinking, Fast and Slow

16 mentions  Mitchell Zuckoff  Lost in Shangri-La: a True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Missions of World War II

Jon Ronson  The Psychopath Test: a Journey through the Madness Industry

Adam Hochschild  To End All Wars: a Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

15 mentions  Simon Sebag Montefiore  Jerusalem: the Biography

14 mentions  David McCullough  The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

13 mentions  Charles C. Mann  1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

12 mentions  Karl Marlantes What It Is Like to Go to War

11 mentions  Steven Pinker  The Better Angels of Our Natures: Why Violence Has Declined

Janet Reitman  Inside Scientology: the Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion

10 mentions  David Eagleman  Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain

Amanda Foreman  A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War

HOW-TO, ART, COOKING, and CRAFTS

9 mentions  Yotam Ottolenghi  Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi

8 mentions  Phaidon Press  The Art Museum

David McMillan et al.  The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: a Cookbook of Sorts

7 mentions  Andrew Bolton  Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty

6 mentions  Andrew Carmellini  American Flavor

Mourad Lahlou  Mourad: New Moroccan

Jennifer McLagan  Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal

Annie Leibowitz  Pilgrimage

5 mentions Brad Thomas Parson  Bitters: a Spirited History for a Classic Cure-All

Jacques Pepin  Essential Pepin

Ferran Adria  The Family Meal: Home Cooking from Ferran Adrià

Paula Wolfert  The Food of Morocco

Nathan Myhrhold et al. Modernist Cuisine: the Art and Science of Cooking

Michael Ruhlman  Ruhlman’s Twenty: the Ideas and Techniques that Will Make You a Better Cook

Last week I had the pleasure of attending my colleague Jared’s new science fiction and fantasy book group, Other Realms. While it was at the library it was still particularly enjoyable to be there as a participant rather than as a facilitator.

The group met to discuss Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels, a teen fantasy that won the World Fantasy Award for Fiction (in a tie with Jeffrey Ford’s The Shadow Year) and a Printz Honor Award in 2009.

I am not giving much away in revealing the set-up of Tender Morsels. Liga is 14 at the beginning of the book and after her mother died her father has started raping and impregnating her and even enforcing herbal abortions. But Liga is determined to keep her third pregnancy and her father dies mysteriously on his way back from the witch who has provided the termination powders. Shortly after the birth of her first daughter, Branza, Liga is gang-raped by five village boys.  Liga then becomes the mother of a second daughter, Urdda. Somehow Liga is able to retreat with her daughters from the real world into a magical world where they are all (mostly) safe. Lanagan relays Liga’s plight with lyrical, visceral prose that shares the shape of Liga’s traumas while not showing the readers the acts.

Tender Morsels is a dark fantasy indeed so one of the first questions that the group tackled was is this really a teen novel? Everyone agreed it was not and that marketing it as a teen novel lost the book some of its audience. Then the group explored the themes of the novel, the fairytales that serve as its scaffolding and inspiration. They also asked why a novel that has been called feminist by many (and one reader took vehement offense to this) made the female narration third person while the male narrators were told in first person?

One question kept coming back around through the group–do authors use rape as a metaphor for the worst that can happen to a person and why? Was Liga a victim and was that drawing of her exploitative or not? Or was the sorrow of a loss of true love and connection, in the end, the greatest harm done? We talked about the ways this theme has carried out in other contemporary novels like Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Mary Doria Russell’s The  Sparrow. Is there a right way to write about rape?

The group also talked about some of the humor in the novel and the ways in which the Bears in the story reveal some levity as well as danger. The ending of the novel also drew some different reactions.

Tender Morsels is a provocative novel to be sure and brought out strong opinions and feelings in the group. While not for the faint of heart, if your group is open to fantasy that explores some dark corners of the human experience and psyche, try Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels.

With my brand new e-book reader and time on my hands due to some vacation, I decided to reach out into the world of literature and read something completely different for me.  My book of choice was The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and I chose it for two reasons.  Early reviews had caught my fancy including our own coverage by Misha.  The second reasons was that it was available free from my library’s e-book selections when I needed to download something to my new device.

Serendipity rules. 

What a delightful surprise this book turned out to be.  It is a fantasy, a romance, a Gothic, a work of magical realism.  It is one of those works that is hard to describe especially when trying to append appeal factors to it.  But I am certain of one thing:  no one will lack for questions when putting together a book discussion about this title.

The basic plot of The Night Circus is that two master wizard manipulators are setting up a contest between two budding magicians (for lack of a better word) who are going to be set against each other while not being told what the game is, what the rules are, where it is being played and who their opponent is.  Ultimately, we learn that the battle ground is Le Cirque des Reves, a magical traveling carnival that evolves with the story and includes secondary characters of equal power to the two main combatants.  The parallels between the fates of secondary characters and our two main protagonists enriches the tale.

Morgenstern chose to write this tale across time by bouncing around in a thirty year period and using multiple points of view.  While the plot is not hard to follow there is a challenger in her style.  She is beautiful writer who can be both graceful in execution while being meaningful in her message.  It is both a very dark, sad book while having an uplifting message that self-worth can be a powerful cure for even the most overwhelming challenges.

If I had to use one word to describe this book, it would be:  different.  I felt so refreshed reading this book because it was unlike any other I had read.  That made me want to discuss it with someone and hopefully that is how your book group participants will feel as well.

One of the most frequent queries I receive from other book group leaders is where to find books that use other cultures and countries as a setting.

Here’s a link to a long list of lists of books set in other countries, mostly the Middle East. All the lists were created by Andrea Kempf, recently retired librarian at Johnson County (KS) Community College.

There’s a couple of other lists on this page as well, Anthropology Fiction, World War I and II fiction, and Math and Science novels (!).

What are you waiting for? Go here!

The final version of the 2011 ABBC (All-the-Best-Books Compilation) is available for download as an Excel spreadsheet via Blogging for a Good Book at Williamsburg Regional Library. The spreadsheet lists 3328 titles published in 2011 in 11 genres and subject categories, each annotated to show which of 237 newspapers, magazines, awards, blogs, and other web sites named them a best book of 2011.

I’m concluding coverage of the best of 2011 with five long lists. This post shows the most frequently praised books in two categories: biographies and memoirs, and poetry.

BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS

38 mentions  Joan Didion  Blue Nights

35 mentions  Tina Fey  Bossypants

33 mentions  Walter Isaacson  Steve Jobs

30 mentions  Gabrielle Hamilton  Blood, Bones & Butter: the Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

28 mentions  Robert K. Massie  Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

25 mentions  Andre Dubus III  Townie: a Memoir

21 mentions  Manning Marable  Malcolm X: a Life of Reinvention

16 mentions  Claire Tomalin  Charles Dickens: a Life

13 mentions  Paul Hendrickson  Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

10 mentions  Mira Bartok  The Memory Palace

Brian Kellow  Pauline Kael: a Life in the Dark

Diane Keaton  Then Again

9 mentions  Philip Connors Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

Roger Ebert  Life Itself

John Lewis Gaddis  George F. Kennan: an American Life

Joseph Lelyveld  Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India

Alexandra Styron  Reading My Father

Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith  Van Gogh: the Life

8 mentions  Lydia Yuknavitch  The Chronology of Water

Meghan O’Rourke  The Long Goodbye

Mary Gabriel  Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

Margaux Fragoso  Tiger, Tiger

POETRY

8 mentions  Tracy K. Smith  Life on Mars

6 mentions  Bruce Smith  Devotions

Laura Kasischke  Space, in Chains

5 mentions  Yusef Komunyakaa  The Chameleon Couch

Alice Oswald  Memorial

4 mentions  Adrienne Rich  Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010

3 mentions  Carl Phillips  Double Shadow

Dean Young  Fall Higher

Nikky Finney  Head off & Split

Here’s a debut novel that received plenty of critical kudos and is a great choice for book groups looking for the kind of title no other book group is reading. Amnesia Clinic won the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award and was short listed for the Costa Award for First Novel.

Anti and Fabian are unlikely friends in Quito, Ecuador who share a love for outlandish yarn-spinning and yearn to “discover” something remarkable. While they will talk about everything, one subject goes unmentioned, the deaths of Fabian’s parents.

One night, after too much tequila, Fabian tells the story of his parents’ demise. Anti, sympathetic, yet disbelieving, crafts a false newspaper story to demonstrate his support for Fabian and the fictions that help him get through this tragedy. However, Fabian reads the clipping and also notes the bogus story next to it, one for an Amnesia Clinic serving victims of accidents or kidnappings with no memories of who they are.

Fabian is certain his mother, whose body was never recovered, is staying in the Amnesia Clinic. The boys set off on a journey that will reveal more about their friendship and future than either can imagine.

The compelling story, natural and likeable characters and realistic portrayals of adults are the highlights of this novel. James Scudamore has captured well the sense of wonder and familiarity the boys experience with their shared world and each other. Readers have compared this book to Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

Scudamore’s follow up, Heliopolis, is also set in Brazil and would make a fine choice for book groups.

This year’s Kansas Reads! selection was a home-state favorite, Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen by Joe Drape. It’s the first sports book chosen for the state wide reading project and it was a fine choice because this book isn’t really about sports.

The Smith Center Redmen hold the high school record for consecutive wins, 54 straight games which includes five consecutive championships. Sports journalist Joe Drape followed the team through their perfect 2008 season and their fifth championship. Readers who are not football fans should not fear being immersed in complex game plays and strategies or unusual sports lingo.

Drape’s memoir of a season is not about the game, it’s about the players and how they play the game. The readers at Basehor Community Library, Bonner Springs City Library, and Tonganoxie Public Library saw this immediately and couldn’t wait to talk about it, especially the non-sports fans.

Readers honed in on the Smith Center community’s dedication to raising a team of responsible, caring, intelligent members of society. They talked about the benefits and drawbacks of small town life in an isolated area of the state. They also talked about the dedication to students possessed by professional educators. Finally, readers discussed the definition of “Midwestern values” and concluded they weren’t really all that different from values held all over the country.

As one participant stated, “This book isn’t about preparing to win in life. It’s about preparing to face losses with dignity, respect, and strength.”

Book groups looking for a nonfiction title that will appeal to men and readers of inspirational fiction/nonfiction will find Our Boys a fine choice. However, make an effort to read the trade paperback edition as it provides a coda that will also prompt much conversation.

The final version of the 2011 ABBC (All-the-Best-Books Compilation) is available for download as an Excel spreadsheet via Blogging for a Good Book at Williamsburg Regional Library. The spreadsheet lists 3328 titles published in 2011 in 11 genres and subject categories, each annotated to show which of 237 newspapers, magazines, awards, blogs, and other web sites named them a best book of 2011.

I’m concluding coverage of the best of 2011 with five long lists showing how many mentions the top books received in each category. This post examines the top finishers in young adult fiction, romance novels, and graphic works.

YOUNG ADULT FICTION

27  mentions  Patrick Ness  A Monster Calls

26 mentions Laini Taylor  Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Veronica Roth  Divergent

20 mentions Ransom Riggs Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Maggie Stiefvater The Scorpio Races

18 mentions Libba Bray Beauty Queens

Ruta Sepetys  Between Shades of Gray

14  mentions Franny Billingsley  Chime

10 mentions Moira Young Blood Red Road

9 mentions Lauren Oliver  Delirium

8 mentions Tim Wynne-Jones Blink & Caution

7 mentions Nnedi Okorafor  Akata Witch

Kendare Blake  Anna Dressed in Blood

Anne Aguirre  Enclave

Rae Carson  The Girl of Fire and Thorns

Marie Lu  Legend

Mal Peet  Life: an Exploded Diagram

Maureen Johnson  The Name of the Star

Kenneth Oppel  This Dark Endeavor: the Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein

John Corey Whaley  Where Things Come Back

ROMANCE

7 mentions Joanna Bourne  The Black Hawk

Thea Harrison  Dragon Bound

Loretta Chase  Silk Is for Seduction

Eloisa James When Beauty Tamed the Beast

5 mentions Nalini Singh  Archangel’s Blade

Susan Elizabeth Phillips Call Me Irresistible

Julie Ann Long  What I Did for the Duke

4 mentions Pamela Clare  Breaking Point

Darynda Jones  First Grave on the Right

Nalini Singh  Kiss of Snow

Meredith Duran  A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal

J. R. Ward  Lover Unleashed

J. D. Robb  New York to Dallas

GRAPHIC WORKS

23 mentions  Craig Thompson  Habibi

15 mentions  Kate Beaton  Hark! A Vagrant

14 mentions Anya Brosgol  Anya’s Ghost

13 mentions Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba The Daytrippers

9 mentions  Adam Mansbach  Go the F**k to Sleep

Chester Brown  Paying for It

8 mentions Anders Nilsen  Big Questions

Jim Ottaviani  Feynman

7 mentions  Laura Redniss Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fallout

6 mentions  Art Spiegelman  MetaMaus

5 mentions Daniel Clowes  The Death-Ray

Carla Speed McNeil  Finder: Voice

Jonathan Case & Jeff Jensen  Green River Killer: a True Detective Story

Kagan McLeod  Infinite Kung Fu

Gene Luen Yang & Thien Pham  Level Up

Shigeru Mizuki & Jocelyne Allen  Onward towards Our Noble Deaths

This month our Crime and Mystery Book Discussion continued its survey of subgenres by taking a look at the police procedural.  While it would seem logical that police procedurals have always been a part of crime and mystery writing since the days of Edgar Allan Poe, this is not necessarily true.

While police have had a place in the canon (think:  Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn of the Yard), the reality is that when they did exist, they functioned more as the Great Thinking Detective, the private eye, or as the Lone Wolf–a category for cops who function best when not in the confines of the police department (think:  Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch).

Police procedure needed an advocate if not an inventor.  The man most credited with this was Ed McBain.  Born Salvatore Lombino, he went to work for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency as a young man and was advised to change his name to Evan Hunter.  He then wrote The Blackboard Jungle (1954) and then could become a full time writer in multiple genres including crime.

For his first cop novel, Ed McBain wrote these words as a forward:  “The city in these pages is imaginary.  The people, the place are all fictitious.  Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.” Dedicating himself to understanding police work and sticking to the established legal requirements was a new idea and McBain stuck to it for 55 novels that stretched from Cop Hater (1956) to Fiddlers (2005).  Besides the procedure, McBain also recognized that individual police officers do not work in a vacuum and do not solve cases individually.  So in his mythical Isola (think:  Manhattan) he created the 87th Precinct, staffed by a host of police officers, some of whom will stick around for the entire run of the series.

In Cop Hater, McBain’s main hero Steve Carella is introduced.  When a fellow cop is murdered, the officers need to understand why an assassin would ambush this man.  When that man’s partner is killed, the cops begin to think differently and a third slain officer of the law really pulls all the resources into high gear.  What is still compelling about this first novel is that the city of Isola is as much a character as the people and the oppressive heat that envelopes the whole book is omnipresent and omnivorous.  The number three is important as one of McBain’s other realizations about the way the police work is that they can never concentrate on just one case.  In this book it is three separate cop murders;  in later books the three cases may diverge quite a bit before the end of the novel provides a resolution.

Our group really enjoyed discussing this police procedural and had no problems finding comparisons to the contemporary work chosen for this discussion:  Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell.  Mankell should get credit for being one of the Scandinavian authors who lead the charge in the current wave of crime fiction being imported in the U.S.  His lead character, Kurt Wallander, is a damaged man who might be unable to see anything positive in his self-image and his work as a policeman.

This novel is very much a police procedure.  The case opens when a farmer and his wife are brutally slain in their remote and rural farmhouse with the wife leaving one word as a dying clue:  foreign.  This opens up the whole issue of immigration into Sweden and the stresses that places on their society.  It also reveals ugly racial intolerance that effects not only the people on the streets but the cops who are investigating as well.  Henning has created an ensemble cast for the city of Ystad’s police force and they do follow procedure as they investigate.

The parallels in these two novels proved to be a great way to focus our discuss of the police procedure.  It was also fun to discuss the subgenre that led from Dragnet to CSI.  If fans of the police procedural are looking for adaptations of Mankell, they can view a few of his cases in the original Swedish TV productions or the BBC versions with Kenneth Branagh as Wallendar.

There is no greater endorsement of a book and its power in someone’s life than for a reader to want to reread it. I find this subject fascinating. It is especially interesting to find out what books writers return to for inspiration or the sheer joy of rediscovery.

The Guardian just posted an article in which a group of authors shared their favorite rereads.

You can read more of the writer’s thoughts about their choices in the article, but here is a sampling of some writers and the books they return to:

Hilary Mantel: Evelyn Waugh’s “Sword of Honour” trilogy

John Banville: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Mohsin Hamid: Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart

Ian Rankin: Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Isn’t your interest piqued? Go read the rest, here.

The final version of the 2011 ABBC (All-the-Best-Books Compilation) is available for download as an Excel spreadsheet via Blogging for a Good Book at Williamsburg Regional Library. The spreadsheet lists 3328 titles published in 2011 in 11 genres and subject categories, each annotated to show which of 237 newspapers, magazines, awards, blogs, and other web sites named them as a best book of 2011. I’m concluding my coverage of the best of 2011 with 5 long lists (this is the second) showing how many mentions the top books received in each category. I encourage you to explore the full list for many more hidden treasures for book groups that didn’t quite crack the top of the list.

CRIME NOVELS AND THRILLERS

19 mentions  S. J. Watson  Before I Go to Sleep

18 mentions Louise Penny  A Trick of the Light

16 mentions Alice LaPlante  Turn of Mind

15 mentions George Pelecanos  The Cut

14 mentions Donald Ray Pollock  The Devil All the Time

13 mentions Henning Mankell  The Troubled Man

12 mentions Lawrence Block  A Drop of the Hard Stuff

11 mentions Philip Kerr  Field Gray

Michael Connelly  The Fifth Witness

Kate Atkinson  Started Early, Took My Dog

10 mentions Megan Abbott  The End of Everything

S. J. Bolton  Now You See Me

9 mentions Denise Mina  The End of the Wasp Season

James Lee Burke Feast Day of Fools

8 mentions Keigo Higashino  The Devotion of Suspect X

Colin Cotterrill  Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Daniel Woodrell The Outlaw Album

Jo Nesbo  The Snowman

Peter Spiegelman  Thick as Thieves

G. M. Malliet Wicked Autumn

HISTORICAL FICTION

34 mentions Michael Ondaatje  The Cat’s Table

Patrick deWitt  The Sisters Brothers

33 mentions Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child

24mentions  Julie Otsuka The Buddha in the Attic

22 mentions Paula McLain  The Paris Wife

21 mentions Amor Towles Rules of Civility

15 mentions Denis Johnson  Train Dreams

12 mentions Geraldine March  Caleb’s Crossing

8 mentions Sebastian Barry  On Canaan’s Side

Jonathan Evison  West of Here

7 mentions William Kennedy  Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

Mary Doria Russell  Doc

David Bezmogis  The Free World

Umberto Eco  The Prague Cemetery

Our staff book discussion this month was in the category of bestseller and the leader of the pack decided to reach back in time a select one a huge success from 1943:  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.  Having never read this title, I plunged in with eager glee because this one had been on my lifelong TBR list.

The first thing I had to do in attempting this rather long work was to get used to the style.  My initial reaction was that the book was not all that well written but I think that was more me not getting the episodic nature of the narrative voice than a lack of skill on the part of the author.  My other issue was tone:  while there is at times a Pollyanna-like whimsy to the tale that is counterbalance by sheer brutality in both the behavior of some characters and the circumstances that they are place in.

The lead character in this novel is Francie Nolan who begins the work as an eleven-year-old in a poverty stricken family led by an alcoholic but well meaning father.  From there we learn about her school days, her neighborhood and her coming of age.  More importantly, we learn about her relationship with her father, her strict mother and her younger brother.  Each one of these family members has an impact on her life and the choices that she makes.

To head back to the tone issue, the contrasts between finding joy in the simplest things is contrasted with the devastating effects of no hope.  The dignity that Francie maintains is impressive while she is not shy about showing us her worst decisions as well.  Eventually for me, tone won out over plot and I stuck with this novel all the way to the end–perhaps just to find out how it would all end.

I believe this is still an assigned reading in some high school although I wonder about how any contemporary young person would approach this today after having been inundated with television families and contemporary movies about their contemporary peers doing contemporary things in today’s world.

The final version of the 2011 ABBC (All-the-Best-Books Compilation) is available for download as an Excel spreadsheet via Blogging for a Good Book at Williamsburg Regional Library. The spreadsheet lists 3328 titles published in 2011 in 11 genres and subject categories, each annotated to show which of 237 newspapers, magazines, awards, blogs, and other web sites named them as a best book of 2011. I’ll conclude my coverage of the best of 2011, with 5 posts of long lists showing how many mentions the top books received in each category. I encourage you to explore the full list for many more hidden treasures for book groups that didn’t quite crack the top of the list.

LITERARY AND MAINSTREAM (NON-GENRE) FICTION

64 mentions Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot

58  mentions Téa Obreht  The Tiger’s Wife

54 mentions Chad Harbach  The Art of Fielding

44 mentions Julian Barnes  The Sense of an Ending

42 mentions Ann Patchett  State of Wonder

39 mentions Karen Russell  Swamplandia!

32 mentions Teju Cole  Open City

24 mentions Kevin Wilson  The Family Fang

23 mentions Arthur Phillips  The Tragedy of Arthur

22 mentions David Foster Wallace The Pale King

19 mentions Francisco Goldman  Say Her Name

Amy Waldman The Submission

18 mentions Bonnie Jo Campbell Once upon a River

17 mentions Ali Smith There but for the

Justin Torres We the Animals

16 mentions Jesmyn Ward  Salvage the Bones

Eleanor Henderson  Ten Thousand Saints

15  mentions Dana Spiotta Stone Arabia

Russell Banks  The Lost Memory of Skin

SPECULATIVE FICTION

50 mentions  Erin Morgenstern The Night Circus

46 mentions  Haruki Murakami 1Q84

37  mentions Ernest Cline  Ready Player One

35 mentions Stephen King  11/22/63

32  mentions George R. R. Martin  A Dance with Dragons

29  mentions Lev Grossman  The Magician King

24  mentions China Miéville  Embassytown

21 mentions Tom Perotta  The Leftovers

20 mentions Jo Walton  Among Others

19 mentions Patrick Rothfuss  The Wise Man’s Fear

18 mentions Colson Whitehead  Zone One

17 mentions Neal Stephenson  Reamde

13  mentions Glen Duncan  The Last Werewolf

James S. A. Corey Leviathan Wakes

Daniel H. Wilson  Robopocalypse

Hillary Jordan  When She Woke

11 Deborah Harkness  A Discovery of Witches

Mat Johnson Pym

Charles Stross  Rule 34

10 mentions Kameron Hurley  God’s War

Joe Abercrombie  The Heroes

Here’s the second post on the worthwhile choices brought to the table at a recent meeting of the Williamsburg Regional Library Staff book group. Our theme was books made into films, and most of the book choices were classics.

Sean from Outreach Service selected our most recent book, but I suspect that it too will become a kind of classic, because it deals with a timeless issue. John Krakauer’s Into the Wild is the tale of a young man who felt the call of adventure and the need to rebel against society. Following free spirits like Thoreau and the Beat Generation, he set off on an epic journey to see the world’s wild places and live free of societal strictures. It sounds romantic, but Krakauer’s point is that there is real danger to pursuing such adventures if one isn’t prepared. Chris McCandless didn’t make it out of the Alaskan wilds alive, a victim of silly mistakes that could have been easily avoided with a little preparation. While he liked the film some, Sean preferred the book, as he likes Krakauer’s aside about his own foolhardy adventures and felt the film didn’t give enough background to problems in McCandless’s family relationships.

Gail brought Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit. The book is a marvelous condensation of all things Dickens, with a plucky hero and heroine, mysterious pasts, memorable secondary characters, surprising family connections, pointed satire of government bureaucracy and social class mores, and an ending that turns many tables. The book was captured delightfully in the 2008 BBC miniseries that featured Claire Foy, Matthew Macfadyen, Tom Courtenay, Alun Armstrong, Eddie Marsan, and a slew of other great English character actors.

Our fearless leader Cheryl finished the meeting with two interesting choices. The first was Marie Belloc Lowndes’s atmospheric classic of psychological suspense, The Lodger. It’s an underappreciated classic, first published in 1913, about a husband and wife who take in a strange lodger who may or may not be the serial killer, “The Avenger” (a stand-in for Jack the Ripper). The book has been made into a film five times, perhaps most famously as Hitchcock’s breakout film back in 1927. Cheryl, however, recommends the less dated acting in the version with Merle Oberon, George Sanders, and Laird Cregar made in 1944.

Cheryl also brought Edmund Yorke’s books about battles in the Zulu War, Battle Story: Isandlwana 1879 and Zulu! The Battle for Rorke’s Drift (soon to be updated in a September entry in the Battle Story series). A firm believer that the truth is often more exciting than fiction, Cheryl loves these tales of heroic stands and stiff upper lip in a mistaken war. The two battles have been brought to the screen memorably in 1964′s Zulu, starring Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, and a young Michael Caine and 1979′s Zulu Dawn with Bob Hoskins, Burt Lancaster, and Peter O’Toole.

I loved the mix of fiction and nonfiction that our readers unearthed at this meeting. Talking about film adaptations is successful in most book groups because the lesser time requirements of watching a film mean that more of your participants will have a frame of reference for the work in question. Whether you like the film or not, it’s always a great reminder of how successful the original book was!

Today I attended a workshop on project management facilitation skills. The instructor talked at length about what makes a good facilitator–good listening, neutrality, open-ended questions and an emphasis on supporting processes as opposed to outcomes.

While there wasn’t enough time to delve into how this pertained to certain aspects of our work as librarians, book groups inevitably came up as a topic.

The question that one librarian asked the instructor and the group was whether it is okay as the leader of a book group to share their opinion. One librarian said that they thought that it was best to do as little talking as possible, to let group members talk, and that she did not share her opinion. I shared that I did sometimes give my personal opinion, but also said that I usually waited until the end of the conversation as I encouraged my group to also wait until the end to say whether they loved or hated a book. The librarian who opened the discussion said she offered her opinion last, when she did share it, so as not to sway the group; but she seemed unsure as to whether or not she was doing it right.

But this begs the larger question for me, which is whether or not our role is to melt into the background or occasionally participate honestly as readers as well? What makes a good book group facilitator?

Do you share your opinions or not? Why or why not?

Thanks for sharing!

Numabookface by NAM. This is a mobile installation at Ikejiri Institute of Design in Tokyo, Japan. If you can read Japanese, read more about it here.

Subtitle this post: Many Brides for Many Brothers.

One Thousand White Women (1998) is the debut novel from Jim Fergus and it’s one of my favorite under-the-radar reads to suggest to fans of historical fiction.

In 1875 one thousand women made the perilous trek across the American prairie to become the wives of Cheyenne Indians in exchange for horses. May Dodd keeps a detailed journal of the One Thousand White Women and their adventures, friendships and histories on their mission to “civilize the natives.” Many of the women are former convicts or sanitarium patients. One is homely, one is a destitute Southern belle, and one a zealot. If the women stay married two years and produce children, they may have the option of leaving the tribe. For services rendered each woman will receive a parcel of land. This is a compelling historical novel with many colorful characters and tense situations.

Readers will immediately be drawn to the characters of inquisitive May, proud Euphemia, the rambunctious Kelly twins, and educated and cultured Daisy. May carefully describes the assimilation of the women into Cheyenne daily living, their difficulty learning the Cheyenne language, and the ceremony involving the selection of the brides and by the braves.

Fergus employs a moderate pace to ensure readers do not miss the intriguing details of the Cheyenne culture. The tone is a combination of May’s brisk no-nonsense attitude, innocent marveling at the unspoiled countryside, and curiosity about her new husband’s family. Look also for the beautiful bird paintings adorning each entry and after the last page is turned, carefully view the book’s cover art.

A good choice for book groups that enjoyed the historical detail in These is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 by Nancy Turner or the lively female protagonists in Little Bee by Chris Cleave.

Amor Towles makes quite a splash with his debut novel The Rules of Civility. It’s the story of one year in the life of Katey Kontent, an up-and-coming Manhattanite who is trying to rise out of the secretarial pool with nerve, brains, and the kind of attractiveness that comes from youth, verve, and wit instead of connections or money.

Perhaps Towles’ greatest success is his ability to capture the spirit of the late 30s in New York City: the painful echoes of the depression, the threat of wars in Europe, but most importantly, the optimism of a generation  quivering with the energy of jazz music, new art styles, and an increasing degree of hope.

The story opens almost thirty years after the mail plot line with the older Katey finding two pictures of a young man while walking through a Walker Evans retrospective in 1966, photographs that send her mind spiralling back to New Years’ Day, 1938. That was the day that Katey and her roommate Eve (who is, if possible, even more driven than Katey) stumbled happily into the orbit of Tinker Grey, a handsome young banker. So began a year of love triangles, people found and people lost, social climbing, and the costs associated with that quietly brutal ascent.

The title “rules” are those created by the ambitious young George Washington, which Tinker uses as his guide to charming and conquering the social strata of the New York upper crust. The central question of the book is what kinds of behavior are acceptable when making the climb. Those questions and the proud, complicated characters that Towles draws in elegant detail make this prime book group territory, a lovely small continent waiting for your explorations.