The Book Club discussion

Please use this folder as a place to share about books that you have recently read or are currently reading that you believe other members may be interested in considering for themselves.

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/5...

If anyone is considering reading:

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Power,

you might want to take a peak at the first chapter discussion at the site above. It is one of the books that has been issuing a siren call to me, but I haven't set sail for its shoals yet.

As some of you know, I had a reading retreat at Kirkridge last weekend. Except that I had a miserable sinus cold Friday and Saturday, it was a good time away from day-to-day, which is what retreats ought to be in my estimation.

The books we used were:

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid.

Good Poems, American Places by Garrison Keillor.

I would recommend any of these three as enjoyable reads. I didn't read the poetry one because I just ran out of reading time -- we didn't decide until just a couple of weeks before to attend. But the poems shared from it around the Franklin Stove in our lodge were good.

The Fitzgerald is his first book, and it is somewhat a coming of age tale and a roman à clef. That makes it rather fun when one knows Princeton a bit. To me, it was amazing to realize that he was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote it.

Shadid was a war correspondent who spent some down time after his divorce restoring an ancestral family home in Lebanon. He weaves a story across decades of economic disruption, political turmoil, emigration, war, cultural fragmentation, and yet continuing multi-generational family and community ties. Sort of like our current 11/22/63, there is a lot of information packed into story form. Sadly, Shadid himself died a few years after remarrying, fathering another child, and returning to his journalistic work -- from an asthma attack while following horses.

Our fourth "book" was a selection of short stories from E.M. Forster. Those would have been less enjoyable without our discussions, which made them interesting -- still, rather strange little fantasies.

Collected Short Stories by E.M. Forster.
"The Curate's Friend"
"The Celestial Omnibus"
"Mr. Andrews" -- can be found online. (So may the others, I didn't check since an ebook with the other two was available w/o charge.)

http://kirkridge.org/about-us/welcome/
http://kirkridge.org/about-us/photo-g...

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

I suggested this as a group read at our January meeting, but it was vetoed by the group. I continue to enjoy it (although I have had to set it aside for some other reading this month), so will continue to suggest it to those who might have found these past reads, of which it reminds me, to have been especially interesting:

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (1/1992)


The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. (2/2002)

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11...

I'm not really "recommending" this -- don't know enough one way or the other. But the reviews tantalize me, especially after our January read.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Some other books that have recently come to my attention. I have read none of these, but they are each among the nominations on the 21st Century Literature board for April and come with enthusiastic endorsements:

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

HHhH by Laurent Binet

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

The Dinner by Herman Koch

(For this last one, the one star reviews are as ferocious as the more favorable ones are numerous.)

Hmmm -- Travel lit, anyone?

Someone on our classics board brought this to my attention this morning:

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Take a look at the reviews if you have a few minutes. Here's a bit from the description:


"In 1933 Patrick Leigh Fermor was eighteen. Expelled from school for a flirtation with a local girl, he headed to London to set up as a writer, only to find that dream harder to realize than expected. Then he had the idea of leaving his troubles behind; he would 'change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp . . . travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps.' Shortly after, Leigh Fermor shouldered his rucksack and set forth on the extraordinary trek that was to take him up the Rhine, down the Danube, and on to Constantinople.

"It was the journey of a lifetime, after which neither Leigh Fermor nor, tragically, Europe would ever be the same, and out of it came a work of literature that is as ambitious and absorbing as it is without peer. The young Leigh Fermor had a prodigious talent for friendship, keen powers of observation, and the courage of an insatiable curiosity—raw material from which he later fashioned a book that is a story of youthful adventure, an evocation of a now-vanished world, and a remarkable unfolding of the history and culture of Central Europe...."

Was browsing the Time list of All-Time 100 Novels Since 1923. This one caught my eye. Anyone among us read it?

Revolutionary Road
Review by Richard Lacayo
Oct. 16, 20050
T100_novels_revolutionaryroad

Author: Richard Yates

Year Released: 1961
Get This Book

We think of Updike and Cheever as the masters of postwar American suburbia, of its sunlit euphorias and its drunken discontents. Add Yates to the master list, just subtract the euphorias. His great novel is a bitterly funny and bitterly unfunny account of lethal disappointment in the Connecticut suburbs in 1955. When they were single and in love, Frank and April Wheeler thought of themselves as different—smarter, hipper, more alive. Then comes marriage and the steamroller of daily existence — his job for a big company, her wife-and-motherhood. The rewards of the material life seem like small compensation for the daily blows to the ego, which eventually detonate their lives. This may sound like a common predicament, but Yates gives it uncommon force. Though none of his six other novels enjoys the enduring prestige of this one, it doesn’t matter. If Revolutionary Road doesn’t make him an immortal, immortality isn’t worth having.

Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10...

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

An interesting review of Wallace's Infinite Jest:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

You probably caught the news of Achebe's death:

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituarie...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/...

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/201...

One of you sent along this link yesterday to an article by Rebecca Skloot, the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opi...

Shared this: http://www.literature-map.com/

Which led to this:

(Terry Pearce): Hmmm... it puts Tim Winton between Annie Proulx, A.S. Byatt and Kazuo Ishiguro. May have to read him now.

which took me here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Winton

This is one I'd love Opera's feedback, if any.

P wrote: "I just finished reading this, and while I enjoyed it, I'm not sure it would be a good group reading choice."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/boo...

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

The choice and considerations of the Moderators for July, 2013, on the 21st Century Lit board are here:

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...

The poll for the members' choice is here:
http://www.goodreads.com/poll/list/59...

Each month this group has two selections of fiction and another of poetry. Each book must have been written after 2000.

I have no particular comments, but will try to remember to bring this information here as another source for those of you who follow what is recently published and generating interest.

Just finished "Call the Midwife" trilogy by Jennifer Worth. Some of you may be viewing the PBS series. Interesting and illuminating stories about the life of a midwife in London during the 1950's. Not particularly good for book club, but an enjoyable read.

Walter Mosley's Futureland was featured by Amazon Kindle today (7/19/2013). Although I don't usually even check out science fiction, this one caught my eye for some reason. Along the way, I discovered Mosley's Blue Light which won NYT recognition as a notable book of the year in 1998 -- in fiction, rather than science fiction category.

All this led me to this one star review which seems to have some interesting things to say about various science fiction authors, so I am reproducing it here:

"Walter Mosley believes science fiction is the next, best hope, for African-American writers. Maybe he's right, but I wasn't persuaded after reading "Futureland". It's a shame his short story collection doesn't quite rise up to the literary heights attained by prominent African-American science fiction writers such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. Mainstream literary critics regard "Futureland" as a splendid collection of cyberpunk fiction. However, it isn't written in as graceful a literary style as any of William Gibson's works, such as his superb short story collection "Burning Chrome". Nor does it have the intriguing ideas to be found in the best of Gibson's, Sterling's, or Delany's work. The only truly memorable tale in "Futureland" is "Voices", which is quite akin thematically to the best New Wave 1960's science fiction written by the likes of Delany, Le Guin, Spinrad or Ellison. It's the only tale where I truly cared about the main character, the subject of a bizarre psychological experiment. In his other tales, Mosley has his characters preach about the shortcomings of their dystopic society in dull, uninspired prose. I've seen more vivid, thoughtful writing about racism and socioeconomic woes in science fiction written by the WASP Californian cyberpunk writer John Shirley in his cyberpunk "Eclipse" trilogy than in "Futureland". Those interested in racial strife and socioeconomic class divisions in science fiction ought to read instead the work of Octavia Butler or John Shirley."
By John Kwok

http://www.amazon.com/Futureland-Stor...Blue Light

Some other links of possible interest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_M...

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06... -- pick any year for book reading ideas!

Janet wrote: "Just finished "Call the Midwife" trilogy by Jennifer Worth. Some of you may be viewing the PBS series. Interesting and illuminating stories about the life of a midwife in London during the 1950's..."

Thanks, Janet.


Call the Midwife Boxed Set: Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse, Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth

From P. at Book Club South:

5/17/13 "I just finished reading this, and while I enjoyed it, I'm not sure it would be a good group reading choice."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/boo...

4/25/13 "I just bought this on my Kindle. Sounds like a fun read. Of course, I won't get to it soon...."

http://www.amazon.com/The-Golem-Jinni...

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry

This just got nominated for the 21st Century Literature group this morning. Looks interesting.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10... __ see if you can catch Alan Newman's and Karen's reviews here. Seem to give some sense of the book.

A list of about 30 summer reads from Huffington Post and D:

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
By Anton DiSclafani
400 pages; Riverhead

Thea Atwell is the headstrong 15-year-old at the center of Anton DiSclafani's sparkling debut novel, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (Riverhead). She's been exiled from her family's 1,000-acre Florida farm to an equestrienne boarding school in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, after a family drama she is at the center of decimates the life they knew. DiSclafani's transporting prose recalls that uneasy time at the brink of adulthood, and reminds us that even the most protective parents can't keep the world at bay.
— Abbe Wright

The Celestials: A Novel
By Karen Shepard
320 pages; Tin House

Morally, this is a challenging book. It takes you back in time to 19th-century North Adams, Massachusetts, where a group of Chinese laborers have been brought in to become unwitting strikebreakers. It's based on a true event I'd never heard of—I'd call it historical science fiction. The author excavates entire ways of seeing through her re-creation of a vanished landscape. There's also a moving love story.
— Karen Russell

A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story
By Qais Akbar Omar
416 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux

If you read only one book this summer, make it this one. It's an astonishing tale of religious barbarians and human hope, of what happened to Kabul before and after the Taliban came to power. A boy and his father survive being bitten nearly to death, not by a rabid dog but by a torturer.
— Jeanette Winterson

The Shining Girls
By Lauren Beukes
386 pages; Mulholland

Beukes's new novel features the greatest time-traveling serial killer. I'm a fan of hers from her work in graphic novels, especially a series I loved called Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom, in which Rapunzel travels to Tokyo to resolve a mystery from her past. This author's got an intriguing style of dealing with slightly surreal things in very real ways. I'm all over it.
— Gillian Flynn

Big Brother
By Lionel Shriver
373 pages; Harper

Most of us want to help the people we love, but what happens when this leads to our own
implosion? In Big Brother, financially successful forty-something Pandora Halfdanarson picks up her older brother Edison at the airport only to find that he's ballooned from a weight of 163 pounds to nearly 400. Cycling from affection, to bewilderment, to disgust, Pandora tries to keep her marriage to her exercise-fanatic husband from falling apart, while Edison lumbers around their house breaking chairs, clogging toilets and—in one exceptionally heartbreaking scene—downing whole bottles of corn syrup in secret. America's skyrocketing obesity problem, clearly, is the issue at stake (Shriver has wrestled other push-button topics, including cancer and child murderers, in previous books) but this line of inquiry never smothers the can't-put-it-down story, especially once Pandora and Edison begin a gonzo liquid-diet together, trying to save his life. We slowly realize, along with Pandora, that the motivation behind his actions are the real problem. Edison is not just fat. He's trying to kill himself by overeating. Though the backstory about the pair's childhood—spent in Hollywood with their successful script-writing father—does distract at times, the moving (and shocking) finale will have you thinking about the "byzantine emotional mathematics" we all put ourselves through when overwhelmed with family responsibilities.
— Leigh Newman

All Decent Animals
By Oonya Kempadoo
272 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux

How am I only now finding out about this writer? It's as if she's inventing her own language, which is incantatory, dense, and lush. The authority and blood pulse of it seduced me. The novel is set in Trinidad, amid the circus-like world of Carnival. You're a hostage in that island world—there's nowhere to go, but you're happy about it.
— Karen Russell

A Hundred Summers
By Beatriz Williams
368 pages; G.P. Putnam's Sons

Lily Dane and Budgie Byrne have vacationed together in Seaview, Rhode Island, since they were babies, and are close in the way only two people who've known each other forever can be. The problem is they don't actually like each other anymore. In Beatriz Williams's fast-paced love story, A Hundred Summers, we meet the now-grown women in the summer of 1938, when the scorching sun illuminates a friend's betrayal and reignites a romance.
— Abbe Wright

The Panopticon
By Jenni Fagan
304 pages; Hogarth

This book isn't a whodunit...it's more about unease, set in a slightly futuristic world and told from the point of view of a teenage girl who is taken to a place called the Panopticon. It's in the Margaret Atwood/The Handmaid's Tale vein—very literary and suspenseful. I like books set in an altered reality—one that feels familiar and yet also deeply unfamiliar, that embodies some of the dailiness of life, and yet slowly reveals itself to be a very different, much more sinister place.
— Gillian Flynn

No One Could Have Guessed the Weather
By Anne-Marie Casey
275 pages; Amy Einhorn/Putnam

In this lush, orchestral debut novel, four women arrive at similar dismal, disorienting moments of total-life paralysis. Lucy has lost everything in the international banking crash. Christy is falling (quietly) in love with her doorman, while still married to her older wealthy husband. Robyn and Julia—furniture-store clerk and TV writer, respectively—have worked themselves into a state of delirium trying to financially support their husbands and families. The group connects through their kids, all of whom attend the same New York City public school. There are quite a few hilarious scenes of the moms and their kids together, including one in which they all attend a horse-therapy course where the skittish animals are supposed to guide the students into new states of emotional awareness. The real story here, however, isn't one that's expected, about female friendship or life in the big city. Instead it's about what happens "when the opportunity for a new life has presented itself." Who takes that opportunity? And who doesn't? Casey has such an understated, believable way of showing how quickly enormous life-altering decisions can be made—without phony drama or fanfare—that you'll find yourself enjoyably surprised. For instance, one of the four women (no names, but she grew up with the kind of mother who would drank three bottles of Chardonnay, then threw Christmas dessert at carolers on the doorstep) chooses to allow herself to finally enjoy her marriage and family because "she was hopelessly codependent, and it was simply love."
— Leigh Newman

Wave
Sonali Deraniyagala
240 pages; Knopf

This is a book about a lifetime of grief after the author loses her parents, husband, and two sons in the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka. How do we learn to live with what we can't come to terms with? I kept thinking of that passage in the Bible: "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it."
— Jeanette Winterson

Spectacle
By Susan Steinberg
160 pages; Graywolf Press

With prose as potent as a shot of Everclear, Susan Steinberg's third collection, Spectacle , surveys busted love, good girls gone bad and disappeared friends. Unconventional and drily funny, these narcotic stories hypnotize.
— Kristy Davis


The Last Summer of the Camperdowns
Elizabeth Kelly
Liveright

In The Last Summer of the Camperdowns, by Elizabeth Kelly, Riddle is the privileged only daughter of a politician and an icy, self-centered former actress -- parents who never put her first. The plot unfolds like the Cape Cod season itself -- beginning lazily, languidly, before heating up and morphing into a fast-paced thriller.
— Abbe Wright

Rockaway
By Tara Ison
208 pages; Soft Skull

How tragic that this book—set in a Queens, New York, beach town that in real life was devastated by Sandy—has a new relevance. Sarah is a California painter who's come east for a retreat she hopes will revive her artistic passion. It's a sheer joy to stay in the company of Ison's voice. There's an unlikely relationship at the center, the kind of encounter that could happen only in the summertime suspension of "ordinary" life.
— Karen Russell

Sparta: A Novel
By Roxana Robinson
386 pages; Sara Crichton

Some books you read because you're looking for that moment when you say, "Oh! Yes! That's me—only more articulately described." Other books you read looking for that moment when you say, "Oh! That is so, so, so not me. But now I understand a little more about the world." For most of us, Roxana Robinson's latest novel belongs in the latter camp. When college-educated 21-year-old Conrad Farrell leaves for the Iraq War, he is a classics major, obsessed with ancient Greek societies and his lustrous girlfriend Claire. When he returns, four years later, to his parents' ramshackle farmhouse in upstate New York, the framed photograph that he finds, of himself at his Marines graduation, is "the only link between the person who'd lived in this room and the person he'd become...There were two pasts, the past of his childhood and the past he'd just come from....They had no connection." Month after month, he struggles to re-enter American society, fighting off headaches, insomnia, nightmares and certain behaviors unique to the war, such as radically swerving away from any small white sedans traveling too fast, or too close, to his car on the highway (in case the driver is a suicide bomber); or sitting with his back against a restaurant wall, to survey the surrounding tables (in case one of the diners is a suicide bomber). For readers, this slow, thorough and utterly believable journey into Conrad's mind has a dizzying affect, mostly due to Robinson's artistic manipulations with language that make the everyday world seem suddenly strange—and scary. The television is "bright liquid images on the screen"; the feel of his parents' cat on his leg is a "soft, hideous brush." It's as if you're experiencing PTSD along with Conrad. This isn't a feeling most of us want to have; except that it does inspire two others that we all might need more of: compassion and awareness.
— Leigh Newman

If You Were Here
By Alafair Burke
384 pages; Harper

This author reminds me of Laura Lippman in the sense that you know you're in good hands with her, and can relax without wondering if things are going to fall apart midway through. Burke is a former prosecutor, and this book starts out as an investigation. A reporter chasing the story of a woman who saved a teenager on the subway tracks realizes the rescuer may be a friend who'd disappeared. Burke's female characters are always very involving, with big, strong voices.
— Gillian Flynn

List of Summer Reads (2013) from Huffington Post and D. continued:

I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp
By Richard Hell
304 pages; Ecco

A lovely memoir—modest, arrogant, and aware of what it means to dream. An inspiration for the Sex Pistols, Hell takes us on a tour of his own life, from the suburbs of 1950s America to Debbie Harry—until 1984, when he should have died. He made music and broke lives, mostly his own. Then he cleaned himself up and started again.
— Jeanette Winterson

The Interestings
By Meg Wolitzer
480 pages; Riverhead

In Meg Wolitzer's lovely, wise The Interestings, Julie Jacobson begins the summer of '74 as an outsider at arts camp until she is accepted into a clique of teenagers with whom she forms a lifelong bond. Through well-tuned drama and compassionate humor, Wolitzer chronicles the living organism that is friendship, and arcs it over the course of more than 30 years.
— Abbe Wright

Fools
By Joan Silber
256 pages; W.W. Norton

In terms of craft, I was amazed. The six stories are so well made and pleasurable. I love a linked story collection because it's like visiting an archipelago. There are all these interconnected islands. The book asks: When is it wise to be a fool for something? I didn't know Silber's work previously, but she kicks ass.
— Karen Russell

Love All
By Callie Wright
272 pages; Holt

Try and find an American who doesn't like a small town. Sure, not everybody wants to actually live in one, but they do fantasize about the requisite porch swings, clapboard and July 4th fireworks. In this winsome debut novel, Cooperstown, New York, home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, is the village around which the plot turns. Just about every member of the Obermeyer family is in a thinly disguised state of relationship meltdown. The most complex story belongs to Hugh, principal of Seedlings preschool, who has just (almost) slept with the mother of one of his 4-year-old students. Back home, his wife Anne's mother has just died; his father-in-law, suffering from dementia, has moved in; and, his teenage daughter is secretly in love with her best friend. On top of all this, a copy of a racy, long-forgotten novel called The Sex Cure has surfaced, dredging memories and anger from the real live townspeople on which it was based. Wright is a sure-handed writer who's at her strongest when describing the vicissitudes of marriage, which she does with great heart and originality. For example, Anne reflects on Hugh's boxers as "bought by Anne at a mall reached in Hugh's car while Anne's was in an auto-body shop at Fly Creek that Hugh despised because they overcharged but it was Anne's car, although Hugh's name was on the title because Anne had points on her license from when she was caught speeding—80 in a 45—on the way to the airport to pick up her parents." All of which so aptly sums up Anne's conclusion that, "Their lives were knit together in ways she could only begin to imagine." As a reader, you can take and apply this reflection to every character in the book, be that husband, wife, father, mother, child or grandparent. Love All is a study in intimacy—how we create it, how we bungle it; and, most of all, how we yearn for and require it, no matter how small or large our daily geography.
— Leigh Newman

She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me
By Emma Brockes; 320 pages

A hybrid book—part mystery story, part memoir—about the author's mother's life in South Africa during apartheid. Brockes always knew her mother had a past, but only after her death did the author start to understand why she was always packed and ready to run in case there was ever a knock at the door.
— Jeanette Winterson


Godforsaken Idaho
By Shawn Vestal
224 pages; New Harvest

Godforsaken Idaho, Shawn Vestal's slam-dunk debut, casts a cinematic shadow on the American West. In "Winter Elders," a Mormon missionary stalks a former church member to devastating effect. The doubters in these stories lose religion but find that "nothing that happens has to be real, and anything is possible."
— Kristy Davis

Brilliance
By Marcus Sakey
452 pages; Thomas & Mercer

Sakey is one of the best—his writing is perfectly paced. Talk about suspenseful! He wrote a novel a couple of years ago, The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, that I keep putting in people's hands. This one is set in the near future, when a certain percentage of humans are "brilliants" who can do strange things like read body language with total accuracy or sense patterns in the stock market. You pick up one of Sakey's books and it's like, I will now disengage from my world and go into his.
— Gillian Flynn

Bobcat and Other Stories
By Rebecca Lee
256 pages; Algonquin

Sometimes you reach the end of a story and go quietly, "Oh." And sometimes you gasp and go, "Holy guacamole!" Not because a building fell down or a character died, but because the unexpected yet completely understandable came to pass—and made you fall off your chair. Again and again this happens in Rebecca Lee's slim, sly, brilliant book Bobcat. The co-ed who plagiarizes her paper not only evades punishment, but also ends up celebrated in an academic symposium. The marriage that's supposed to break up at the dinner party is so, so, so not the marriage that breaks up at the dinner party. What makes this book really crackle, however, are the people who make the surprises possible. Lee's heroes live on the edges of their very sheltered world. They're the watchers and dreamers, the ones who sidestep their way into the tussle of human relationships only to end up alone with a trifle and a splintered heart. Her trifle is no metaphor, either. It's the dessert, prepared without the usual "bright childish tastes" in favor of the complexities of the "mysterious-seeming—anise, raspberry and port." Such tastes result, she claims, because the trifle-maker "knew how to live a happy life and had put in what she loved and left out what she didn't.” In fiction, such a recipe would be disastrous; any exploration of the human condition requires a little of what we don't like. In Bobcat, thankfully, that ingredient comes layered with brio, bravado, hilarity and a dollop of whipped intelligence. Dig in.
— Leigh Newman

Note to Self
By Alina Simone
256 pages; Faber & Faber

This one is about a late-blooming 37-year-old who's looking for love online. I was laughing out loud reading lines like "Kudos to you... It's not easy to eroticize a cabbage leaf." Simone's is a wisecracking, mordantly observant, wide-awake voice. Even when the humor is bitter, there's something joyful in it—like hearing a direct dispatch from a neurotic person's consciousness.
— Karen Russell

We Are Taking Only What We Need
By Stephanie Powell Watts
221 pages; BkMk

Winner of the 2012 Ernest J. Gaines Award, Stephanie Powell Watts writes about "dirt roaders," working-class Southerners who live large and dream safe, in We Are Taking Only What We Need. The stories celebrate real people and their tenacious ability to break down life's locked doors.
(Reviewer not known)

Bad Boy: An Artist's Coming-of-Age
By Eric Fischl, Michael Stone
368 pages; Crown

By the acclaimed painter, a story about the deceptions of life and the truth of art. About drink, fame and not-fame, forgeries, forgetting. And there are some hand grenades lobbed at some of his contemporaries. As Fischl says, "All artists have to find ways to lie to themselves."
— Jeanette Winterson

Visitation Street
By Ivy Pochoda
320 pages; Dennis Lehane/Ecco

It is partly because of Dennis Lehane that I wrote my first book, Sharp Objects. After reading his book Mystic River, I was like, Oh—that's how that's done. I really admire his whole body of work. That's why I'm excited about Ivy Pochoda, whom he picked for his new book imprint. You know that if he's given her his stamp of approval, the book is going to be good, and with the setting of Red Hook, Brooklyn, that it's going to have a true, strong sense of place.
— Gillian Flynn

This Is Paradise: Stories
By Kristiana Kahakauwila
240 pages; Hogarth

This Is Paradise, by Kristiana Kahakauwila, navigates an ocean of tension between tourists and islanders in paradisiacal, paradoxical Hawaii. Gritty, haunting and suspenseful.
— Kristy Davis

I Want to Show You More
By Jamie Quatro
224 pages; Grove Press

Jamie Quatro's I Want to Show You More dives beneath the surface of everyday life to access subverted desire, spiritual yearning, and unrequited lust. In "Georgia the Whole Time," a woman dying of cancer graciously accepts that it might be easier to "make the wreckage look beautiful than to keep fighting and lose."
— Kristy Davis

Double Double: A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism
By Martha Grimes, Ken Grimes
213 pages; Scribner

In this latest thoughtful twist on the recovery memoir, crime-writer Martha Grimes and her son, Ken Grimes, tell parallel stories of their individual addictions. Martha was a five-martinis-a-night drinker; Ken, a pot smoker who didn't mind downing a six-pack...or three. While each story is meaningful on its own, how the two play off each other is what makes the book so worth reading. We see how Martha's parenting— involving multiple moves around the world and alcohol-fueled wit and rage—influenced Ken's choices as a teenager. And we get to see how Ken's teenage drug use influenced Martha's life as a mother and writer. In places, their tales overlap, such as when Martha gives her version of the time "Ken stole $500," then Ken gives his. (Neither, thankfully, shies away from taking responsibility.) Most illuminating about the whole process is that both parties can really write. Martha's passages are meditative, focusing on the need for—and difficulty of— staying sober, bedecked with exquisite and pithy observations, such as, "There was a point Jim Beam and Gordon peeled themselves off the labels and came down to sit beside me." Ken, on the other hand, provides an intimate look at his own crash-and-burn—and the realization that he had to address the thing "so entrenched in my psyche I can't tell where the drink on the bar ends and the rest of me begins." You don't have to be an ex-anything to be moved by this memoir.
— Leigh Newman

If there is any meaning as to for what I have provided links, it was some faint preference of personal interest. But this has been done too hastily for that to have much, if any, significance.

Book read suggestions and ideas from 8/17/2013 meeting:

The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison (from C.B.)

Review from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin ( Shopgirl was BC selection December 2001) (from J.S.)

Once We Were Brothers -- Ronald H. Balson (from D.G.)

The Radleys by Matt Haig – not a book club read, but enjoyable read.
Audio is also enjoyable. (C.C. & D.G.)

HHhH by Laurent Binet -- meta book, not of interest to group on reading of description, was highly regarded on 21st Century Goodreads board.

This will be a work in progress for a week or so. D.G. sent us a flowchart with some reasons to read and suggested books. I don't think I can figure out all of them, but I'm going to give it a start.

Going down the list of "To sound smart at parties" we have:

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (8/2010)

(I own this, but haven't gotten around to reading it. It was a big deal when Obama bought it right as it was released, on vacation on Cape Cod, if I remember the story. For all the hoopla, the follow-up has seemed lackluster, so I've never bumped it up my TBR.)

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (2011)

I gave Dave this one for Christmas -- in 2011. He gave it back to me after he had it several months. Neither one of us has gotten the tome read, although it is interesting. I sorta went to the movie instead, which of course isn't the same thing.

The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan by Michael Hastings (6/2011)

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (2008)

I think we read this, didn't we? I'll have to check to be certain. No, we read his The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference in May, 2002. His latest is David and Goliath (2013)

Something about Columbine that I can't read --- ok, it seems to be:

Columbine by Dave Cullen (2009)

All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean (2010)

Doesn't look like the same book cover, so uncertain? Given the circle "The financial crisis thoroughly explained," I think this is the book Maier intended. But, it looks like this is the one for which she grabbed the cover:

All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook

Entries in list appear a little dated for the stated purpose -- publication date in ().

This is one leg of the flowchart. Will start another post for the next one.

The flowchart by Dana Jeri Maier can be found here: http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn...
in perhaps a little larger format.

Her goodreads profile is here: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1...

Okay, to give a try on the leg "To feel less alone":
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We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider

Maier marked this a personal favorite.

Continuing down the flowchart "If you are particularly depressed":

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

For non-fiction:

The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten

(Another favorite of Maier.) I would presume this includes the Joshua Bell playing in the subway story.

And while on this trail, she suggests:

The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris

These last two are in a little circle on "humanity" that Maier has in the next flow. I'll not repeat them.

Next flow: "To understand humanity better."

Most of these suggestions are already included in the messages above. See the flowchart to figure out where:

http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn...

This one for "just a certain human in particular":

The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

We did this one back in August, 2009.

Maier states here that Lionel Shriver is a favorite author for her. She includes another of Shriver's books among her selections on her flowchart and has favorite quotations marked on her profile.

I just blew it. Had four books in this series entered and hit the wrong tab. No recovery except re-entry. One of the reasons Goodreads gets my goat at times!

Anyway, while on the roll, for the flow "No particular reason. Just in the mood for a good page turner":

Maier presents seven books, characterizing them along a continuum from light to dark, "Light and breezy, please" to "Darker the better!"

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

(A Maier favorite.)

The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters by Chip Kidd

(Another Maier favorite.)

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Goodreads doesn't want me to re-edit the previous, at least yet -- it has delays sometimes, so I'll continue in a new message. The previous got me to a point of recovery.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

I own this one. It has had excellent reviews for years now. I've tried to read it at least twice. It is dark. We read his In the Lake of the Woods in September, 2001.

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

This is Maier's second suggestion from Shriver. Maier seems perhaps to have a particular interest in what happened at Columbine (two selections in this chart). I own this book; intended to read it until our group selected the other Shriver book for discussion. After that and by that time, it had moved down my TBR. Reportedly well written in the reviews I have seen.

This is the far end of Maier's "dark" spectrum.

Finally, "To pass a very large and otherwise dull stretch of time":

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

Or, Maier wraps back around to We Need to Talk About Kevin for "...if you can handle a harrowing experience."

Come on, give me a break. That was also at the dark end of her page turner list??? Did Maier have tongue in cheek at this point?

Of course, we all know Rowling as the author of the Harry Potter series.

For this criterion, why not back to Steve Jobs ?

A list of "50 Essential Historical Fiction Books":

http://www.abebooks.com/books/feature...

Brought to my attention on the Western Classics board.

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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed ......(Goodreads Author) 315pp 2012 Goodreads Choice in Memoir and Biography.

A friend read this and discussed it with a local f2f book club. She was quite enthusiastic. Sounded interesting.

http://www.mademan.com/25-books-every...

"25 Books Every Man Should Read"

Some interesting choices here.

Came to my attention tonight via a reader on the Victorian board -- current writers of interest:

The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif Man Booker Prize Shortlist (1999) (529 pp)

In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif (816 pp) (~1992 or '93)