A Fresh Start

Welcome back to Lakeland Public Library’s book discussion group blog!!

If you’re interested in joining any or all of LPL’s book discussion groups, check out the previous post, How Do I Get a Copy of a Book Club Title? : http://lplbookgroups.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-do-i-get-copy-of-book-club-title.html.

LPL’s Book Discussion Groups on Goodreads

If you can’t make it to our book discussion meetings, try us online at Goodreads:

• http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/38326.Book_Sandwiched_In_Books
• http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/49408.Discussions_at_the_E

Free Audiobook and e-Book Downloads

Check out the many downloadable audiobook and e-book titles Lakeland Public Library offers for library card holders: http://www.lakelandgov.net/library/Services/OnlineResources/eBookseAudioeVideo.aspx.

 

LPL also has free e-book downloads for Kindle users with a library card. Instructions on how to download to your Kindle can be found here: http://www.lakelandgov.net/Portals/Library/Downloading%20eBooks%20to%20a%20Kindle%2010-11.pdf.

All library cards are free--if you live within Polk County. If you don’t have a library card, detailed information on how to get your free card can be found on our website: http://www.lakelandgov.net/library/Home/LibraryCards.aspx.

 

Even more websites offer free audiobook and e-book downloads:

• http://www.feedbooks.com/publicdomain
• http://www.librivox.com/
• http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ http://m.gutenberg.org/ (for mobile users)
• http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project
• http://www.freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html

If you have no clue about e-books and/or e-readers, Manatee Public Library System offers a cheat sheet on e-books and e-readers:

https://secure.soita.org/docs/eReader%20Overview%2012%2014%202010.pdf.

 

 

Happy Reading!!

 

 

 

 

 

Summer 2010 Recap

I offer apologies for the delay in posting book reviews and summaries. Here’s a recap of the Lakeland Public Library’s book groups summer titles:

BSI April 2010 selection

American Stories by Nagai Kafu

The fictional American Stories, written in 1908, affords us the opportunity to see America, turn of the century America, through other eyes.

How much have we changed? What has stayed the same?

A near contemporary of Natsume Soseki (Soseki’s Heredity of Taste was reviewed in this blog here ), Kafu could be considered a black sheep in Japan’s roster of modern literary greats.
Kafu and his work Yojohan fusuma no shitabari was the subject of several landmark censorship trials in Japan. Another of his works, Rivalry: a Geisha’s Tale , was also closely scrutinized.

An excellent article on Nagai Kafu is found at the Japan Times website in two parts: here and here.



DATE April 2010 selection

Mary, a Novel by Janis Cooke Newman

Swept up. Swept away.

Both terms are appropriate when talking about Mary, a Novel by Janis Cooke Newman . Newman has done an excellent job weaving facts and fiction in this telling of Mary Todd Lincoln’s life.  She re-imagines the love story between Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd; their married years with births of their beloved and doomed children and the effect of Lincoln’s assassination had on Mary’s behavior.

Mary, a Novel begins with Mary Todd Lincoln’s documented commitment to an insane asylum  for genteel women. Newman lets Mary reveal the circumstances surrounding her commitment. The reader hears of Mary’s childhood and her sorrow over her relationship with her single surviving son, Robert. The novel imparts an understanding and empathy for one of America’s more misunderstood First Ladies.

For more information on history’s Mary Todd Lincoln, try these books: Madness of Mary Lincoln by Jason Emerson,  Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave by Jennifer Fleischer,  Mary Todd Lincoln: a Biography by Jean Baker,  Mary Todd Lincoln: Her life and Letters by Justin G. Turner,  and The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage by Daniel Mark Epstein. 


BSI May 2010

The Far Field by Edie Meidav

The Far Field is a dense exotic read. It follows American Henry Frye Gould, one-time minister, spiritualist, and now Buddhist, bent on creating his own utopian society in 1930’s colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka). A self-described anti-missionary, Gould is really on a mission to prove himself—to his estranged wife, his son, his guru and ultimately to himself. Yet there is many a slip twixt cup and lip; and Henry’s journey turns out to be even more momentous than he imagines.

Novelist Edie Meidav lived and worked in Sri Lanka as a Peace Corps worker.

DATE May 2010

Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky

The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Fire in the Blood is Irene Nemirovsky’s second posthumous novel is a slim book, 138 pages including a Translator’s Note, A Note on the Text and a Preface to the French Edition. However in that small quota of pages, she has packed a compendium of the human heart. Nemirovsky aimed to a novel about the “purity of parents who were guilty when they were young” and how parents are incapable of “understanding that ‘fire in the blood’ that had led to their youthful transgressions”.  She succeeded.

A Fire in the Blood  is set in the insular French village Issy L'Eveque, based on the Burgundy village where Nemirovsky and family fled to from Paris in 1940. The novel follows the lives of Silvio, his sister Helene and her daughter Colette and resounds with knowledge that past always shapes the present and future.

Although Nemirovsky was an established writer during her lifetime, she is currently most known for first posthumous novel, Suite Francaise, which won the 2004 Prix Renaudot.

BSI June 2010

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Where were you when you first read The Catcher in the Rye? How old were you when you first read The Catcher in the Rye?

The Catcher in the Rye  is a classic for a reason. Salinger does an excellent job embodying how young people think and act currently—even though Catcher was originally published in 1951 and parts of it written as early as 1946. Salinger captures that sense of existential angst we all suffer from at times, especially in adolescence.


DATE June 2010

The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle
Aryn Kyle offers a coming of age novel in her first work, The God of Animals. Yet she defies that straight forward description by producing a jewel of a debut novel.

It is summer in Desert Valley, Colorado. Twelve year-old Alice Winston copes with the drowning death of a schoolmate in nightly phone conversations with her English teacher. She spends her days working long hours beside her father Jody on their failing horse farm and struggles to cover the absence of Nona, her newly-eloped 16 year-old sister and their mother who retired to her bedroom shortly after Alice's birth. In the ensuing year, Alice will desperately reinvent herself and shake the long shadows cast by her sister and mother.




BSI July 2010

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie has produced a miracle of a semi-autobiographical book. He makes the reader angry, laugh out loud and even cry as you follow Junior’s search for himself and a better life.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian tells the story of Junior, a member of the Spokane tribe. Junior writes–and draws cartoons--about his life in his diary: the difficulties of being poor; the trial of being small and sickly; the alcoholism that dogs his entire tribe and his quest to break out of reservation. It is his yearning for a better life which gets him branded as a part-time Indian. He succeeds in attending a high school outside the reservation, but will he find acceptance outside the rez and be able to recover his belonging inside the rez? Junior lives and tells his tale with much humor.

Both The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian and Ten Little Indians, another book by Alexie, share the same kind of wry dark humor, spot-on commentary about American society and excellent writing. A reader’s guide for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, which won the 2007 National Book Award for Young Adult Literature , can be found here. Sherman Alexie  is poet, stand-up comedian, novelist, screenwriter, and director.

DATE July 2010

The Photograph by Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is known for her quiet excellent fiction and The Photograph is no exception. The novel poses the question “How well can you know someone?” and follows it in the wake of an unearthed photograph. Glyn, a landscape historian, discovers a photograph of his deceased wife Kath and an unknown man holding hands while searching through old research notes. Well seasoned in the ways time alters landscapes, Glyn uses his historian skills to excavate the terrain of his marriage.

Multiple mysteries of heart coexist in this novel. Lively reveals them through a deftly written medley of narratives which include Glyn, Kath and Elaine, Kath’s older sister. The Photograph captures “the many ways the past intrudes upon the present and the present alters the past”.

BSI March 2010 selection

There are two mysteries wending through A Far Country by Daniel Mason; one for the reader and one for Mason’s main character, Isabel.

The reader’s mystery is a straightforward one--where the story takes place. Mason deliberately keeps the location vague--Is it Mexico? Africa? Indonesia?--which can engender conflicting emotions toward the story. One either becomes frustrated with a story boiled down to a miasma of images. Or the story and its characters transcend place and even time--ultimately becoming timeless and current.

For Isabel, Far Country’s main character, the mystery is the disappearance of her beloved brother Isaias. She endures extreme poverty and peril at home as well as in the capital city where she is sent to join her brother and cousin Manuela.

It is in the capital city where the story (and Isabel’s life) slows and changes, swerving off into an unexpected, but not unbelievable, path. Does she find her brother in the wasteland of urban life? Does she find herself and her place in this new world? Only time and the story’s end will tell.

Daniel Mason belongs to the long established trend of doctor-writers.  A few of the more famous and current crop of doctor-writers include:


Ethan Canin
Robin Cook
Michael Crichton
Tess Gerritsen
Khaled Hosseini

Mason's first book, The Piano Tuner, has been made into a play and an opera. It has also been optioned for a movie. His latest work is Death of the Pugilist, or The Famous Battle of Jacob Burke and Blindman McGraw, a book of short stories.  A Far Country was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction  in 2007.

Reading group questions for A Far Country can be found here.

DATE March 2010 selection

The dream for most writers, fiction or nonfiction, is for their labor of love--their work--to get published in whatever format--print, online, e-book, etc. If somehow that work also gets turned into a movie, whoopie!

Imagine being a writer having both things happen on your first attempt. That’s the fairytale scenario that produced Julie Powell’s book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (also titled Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously). It began as a blog, The Julie/Julia Project, which still exists online hosted by Salon.

Powell prefaced that blog with the following:

"The Book:

"Mastering the Art of French Cooking". First edition, 1961. Louisette Berthole. Simone Beck. And, of course, Julia Child.  The book that launched a thousand celebrity chefs. Julia Child taught America to cook, and to eat. It’s forty years later. Today we think we live in the world Alice Waters made, but beneath it all is Julia, 90 if she's a day, and no one can touch her.

The Contender:

Government drone by day, renegade foodie by night. Too old for theatre, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge. And in the Julie/Julia project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats’ well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment.

365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.

How far will it go? We can only wait. And wait. And wait…..

The Julie/Julia Project. Coming soon to a computer terminal near you."

The blog quite understandably revolves around Julie and her life. She presents a glimpse into her somewhat neurotic inner life and her quest to conquer Mastering the Art of French Cooking--and by extension her own self.

The focus of the book Julie and Julia is expanded to include Paul Child’s letters as chapter openers, which is where the book shines.  The love story of Paul and Julia Child may send you to another couple of books, Appetite for Life by Noel Riley Fitch and My life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme, for more.

Julie and Julia—the movie version—opens the reader/viewer even more to Julia Child’s life with its struggles and triumphs. Readers and viewers get to know Julia Child before she becomes her iconic self, before Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We briefly meet Child’s co-writers, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. Even Irma S. Rombauer of Joy of Cooking fame makes an appearance.

Julie Powell's current blog, What Could Happen?: Musings from a "soiled and narcissistic whore."  Her new book, Cleaving, explores yet another food related venture, butchering—and more on her life and marriage. She is also working on an unnamed novel.

Discussion questions for Julie and Julia can be found here.

DATE February 2010 selection

"There are no streetcars in Oblivion." reads the first line in Horace Afoot by Frederick Reuss. Horace, an independently wealthy Luddite, chooses on a whim to relocate to the small Midwestern town of Oblivion because of its dearth of streetcars and quite possibly its name.

Horace is in search of “a state of complete detachment” and the Greek ideal of autarkeia (complete autonomy). He is deliberately anonymous.  As the novel unfolds he tries on and discards names and personas of various poets and philosophers: Chidiock Tichborne, William Blake, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Lucian of Samosata.

In Oblivion he accompanies his name change with a rebirth ritual of sorts; he walks out the back of his rented home and into the woods, disrobes, buries all of his clothing including shoes and returns home naked, reborn.

But for all of Horace’s avoidance behavior, life finds him. Before Horace Afoot ends, Horace is befriended by Mohr, the head librarian who is terminally ill; stalked and harassed by a young thug and reluctantly saves a bound and gagged naked woman he encounters as walks past a cornfield.

Frederick Reuss has said he is fascinated with characters whose lives are in a state of dislocation. He espouses the idea that identity is not a fixed thing--“a given”--but that which we construct on our own from memory. In effect, who we are is what we’ve read or what is found in the prevailing culture.  Reuss uses this central idea in Horace and also in his other novels, The Wasties and Henry of Atlantic City.

Philosophy and poetry wend their way throughout Horace. (Break out the dictionaries, history and philosophy books to better understand Horace.) Reuss, who holds a philosophy degree, uses it all to offer a way to examine society and self. Some readers may find Horace Afoot lacking in physicality and plot movement, but it more than compensates with wry and rigorous intellectual action.

Reuss, once a freelance researcher at the Smithsonian, is now a full-time novelist with four published novels: Horace Afoot (1998), Henry of Atlantic City (2001), The Wasties (2003) and Mohr: A Novel (2006).

Readers of Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder and The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery would enjoy the philosophical bent of Horace Afoot.  If the Horace Afoot's odd sense of place and time engages, try The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.

BSI February selection

An Outline of the Republic by Siddhartha Deb  is a murky atmospheric tale of shifting politics and emotional ambivalence.  Amrit Singh, a nonpracticing Sikh and atheist, works half-heartedly as a journalist at a Delhi-based English language newspaper, The Sentinel.

In The Sentinel's news morgue, Singh stumbles across a photograph of two insurgents and their hostage, a young woman to be assassinated for being a porn actress. Singh journeys to the border region between India, Burma and Tibet in search of information about the alleged porn actress.

The physical and emotional terrain of Outline projects the reader into an existential no man’s land. Heroes and villains are conjured from rumors and rumors of rumors. What is real and true about the young woman, the saintly but shadowy Malik and even Singh himself is never exactly settled. The reader is left to make his or her own conclusions.

Siddhartha Deb  is the author of two novels, The Point of No Return (2002), which was a New York Times Notable Book, and An Outline of the Republic (2005), known as Surface in the UK and India. Aside from two novels, he is a regular book reviewer and journalist for the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Guardian and others.

Deb won the 2007 Dublin IMPAC award for Outline. He is currently a Radcliffe Institute fellow at Harvard University and is working on Do You Know Who I Am? Stories of Wealth and Poverty from the New India, a nonfiction book dealing with contemporary Indian society.

BSI January 2010 selection

The lost specimen of an extinct bird, 18th century love affair, a 20th century treasure hunt, and cryogenically preserved DNA.

Martin Davies’ debut novel, The Conjurer’s Bird, encompasses all of these components and tells a romantic tale which incorporates the real-life disappearance of the “mysterious bird of Ulieta”, a bird collected during Captain Cook's second voyage to the South Seas.

The novel hovers between two main characters and time periods: the 18th century naturalist Sir Joseph Banks and the fictional modern-day John Fitzgerald, a conservationist, taxidermist and researcher of extinct birds.

Davies’ novel manages to address both social issues and gender politics in the 18th and 20th centuries without losing its allure as an enjoyable easy read that will appeal to both men and women. A reader’s guide to The Conjurer’s Bird can be found here.

Fans of Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett and Easter Island by Jennifer Vanderbes will thoroughly enjoy The Conjurer’s Bird.
For those who might prefer nonfiction treatment of the topics addressed, try Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit,  Joseph Banks, a Life by Patrick O'Brian or at websites here, here , here and here.