It's Monday! What are you reading?

 

This event is hosted by Sheila from Book Journey. Go check out her blog. Meanwhile, here's what I'll be reading this week. I'm feeling ambitious:

Lipstick Jungle by Candace Bushnell (I need to get in a book where I don't have to think after Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson, which I finished over the weekend. If you've read this book you probably understand.)
Rereading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. I've assigned this to my high school literature class to read over spring break. I hope they're enjoying it.
Z by Therese Anne Fowler (I can't wait to start this one!)
Charles Dickens by Simon Callow (I saw the play in London back in the fall.)

It's Monday! What are you reading?

 

This event is hosted by Sheila from Book Journey. Here's what I'll be reading this week:

Finishing All Quiet on the Western Front for class discussion Thursday 
Continuing with Tender is the Night, my audiobook in the car
Starting Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson. My book club is waiting on me to read it so we can all discuss.
And, I'm very excited to be reviewing Jill McCorkle's latest novel, Life After Life

Better World Books Book Club

My favorite non-brick and mortar place to buy books is Better World Books. Their staff does a great job of making an online company feel more like the close-knit community with the personal attention you might get at an independent bookstore. Through their online presence on their website and blog, and on Facebook and Twitter they create a conversation for book lovers.

Each month, BWB hosts a book club discussion on their blog. Each quarter, BWB, headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, hosts an in-person book club discussion for anyone able to attend. Last week, 45 of us who had read Same Kind of Different As Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moor with Lynn Vincent, met at City of Refuge, a shelter for women and children in the Vine City neighborhood of Atlanta. Some of us served dinner to the women and children who are part of the residential program. Some headed out to two areas in the neighborhood to serve a hot meal to anyone in need. Afterward we gathered back at City of Refuge to talk about this book that has homelessness at its center.

I read it over New Year's weekend and enjoyed the true tale of two men who couldn't be more different but became best friends. Ron is a fine art dealer whose wife convinced him to volunteer with him in a Fort Worth homeless shelter. Denver is the former sharecropper turned homeless man who becomes his best friend. The friendship doesn't happen overnight, though it is helped along with encouragement from Ron's wife Debbie.

In a couple of hours of service followed by a good discussion about the book and about homelessness, our group certainly didn't solve the world's problems. It was an eye-opening experience though and I'm glad BWB is the kind of company that puts events like these together that spark the discussions we all should be having. 

After the event, BWB posted a guest blog post from Ron Hall.

Book Club

Fellow reader, book club member, freelance writer and blogger Lori summed up the year in our Atlanta book club so well that I don't need to reinvent the wheel. You can read her blog post here.

Thinking of starting a book club in 2012? Read this first to guarantee success.

Holiday Book Club 2011

Last night my book club met for our last meeting for 2011. The book up for discussion was rated by all who attended as a fantastic read. I have not been able to put down Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Now that I've finished it, I'm sorry I don't have more to read about this American missionary family with four daughters in 1960s Congo.

I'm still turning the book over in my head. It's a dense one, filled with literary references (I made some of my own comparisons as well), clever plays on words and invented words, politics, cultural misunderstandings and a family with the kinds of complication relationships that just seem to me to be so difficult to navigate, yet throughout everything the family presses on. We know it's not going to be a pretty story from the get-go. Each awful thing that happens to the family was a blow to me as the reader but kept me hanging on for more.

Well, that is, until the last 75 pages or so. I was all set to give this book one of the few five star ratings on Goodreads that I've had all year. If only the book had ended before I'd had to read too much about the sisters' adult lives! A couple of book club friends agreed with me that if we each read this book again, we'd stop reading at the exact place we felt the book should end and skip the rest so we get out of it exactly what we want next time. Have you read this book? What was your reaction?

As a side note, last night was the second Christmas book club party where we celebrated by making mandarin lanterns (a bit blurry, but still festive). Here's mine:

Happy holidays!

Booktoberfest

Last night my book club had the event we've been looking forward to for months: Booktoberfest. We ate bratwurst, German potato salad, schnitzel and German chocolate cake, all washed down with root beer. We discussed a book that all of us quite enjoyed: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. If you haven't yet read this book, consider doing so. If you're particularly into World War II-era stories, you'll probably like this. After really enjoying The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Postmistress earlier this year, I was already in the mood, though The Book Thief is, I think, considerably darker.

My thoughts:

• I enjoyed reading a story about what was going on with regular families on a regular street in a regular neighborhood in Germany during World War II. I've done so much reading of similar stories with characters (fictional and nonfictional) from Allied countries that it was a nice change to read about what was happening on German soil. The only other book I've read about Germany from that time period that I can remember is The Good German and it took place just after the war in Potsdam with plenty of Allied soldiers present. 
• I was struck by Hans Hubermann, foster father to the main character, Liesel Meminger. Hans has a heart of gold and hasn't become hardened to the harsh world around him as everyone else has. His ability to see past all the things that divide us as people and see people as what they truly are is a gift, especially considering the time in which he lived. Thanks to Hans, I will probably think of him for the rest of my life each time I see or hear an accordion.
• In places, The Book Thief is extremely difficult to read because of all the injustices the characters are subjected to. Though I've done lots of World War II reading, this really gave me a new perspective of the awfulness and inhumanity of that time. 

Have you read this book? What did you think about it?

Speech and Language: Themed Reading

I love how an idea from one book can lead me down a path exploring a certain theme, author, time period, etc. What I sometimes love even more is how I can accidentally pick books with common themes that I discover somewhere in the middle of the second such book. In the past couple of weeks, I've read three books where speech and language are at the forefront: Bel Canto (P.S.) by Ann Patchett, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi.

The first one, Bel Canto (P.S.), turns out to be one of the best books I've read so far in 2011, and it was a book I had not heard of other than its mention on NPR's list of Best Beach Books Ever, so I put it on my to-read list. In it, party guests are held hostage at the home of a vice president of a South American country. Most of the women are soon released, except for Roxanne Coss, an American opera singer known throughout the world. Those who remain are held so long that they have the chance to form meaningful relationships and bridge the gap between gender, ethnic, social and cultural differences. The most important part of what the hostages and their captors learn from each other, in my opinion, was to speak each others' languages. This book was so powerful that I cannot imagine how I have gone this far in my life before reading any of Patchett's work. Now all the rest of her novels are on my to-read list too. This summer Patchett visited Oxford, Mississippi's independent bookstore, Square Books. A podcast of her visit is featured on the store's blog.  

My book club chose to read The Sparrow for our September meeting, which was last night. This is one of those books I probably never would have chosen to read on my own. One of the things I love about book club is branching out and reading things like this. It's a science fiction, futuristic book about a group of Jesuit anthropologists who find life on an asteroid and visit to learn about its people. The book is full of memorable, fantastic characters, and I became attached to most of them as I read. One of the main characters is Emilio, a Jesuit priest and linguist. When his group of earthlings encounters those living on Rakhat for the first time, he is the one who steps forward to speak to them for the first time and begins to understand their language. Russell wrote a sequel to this book called Children of God (Ballantine Reader's Circle). I hope to be reading that one soon while all the details from The Sparrow are still fresh in my head.

The third book is related to the Oscar-winning movie, which I saw in the theaters and absolutely loved (I almost never go to the movies. I wait and watch everything on Netflix. Based on what's going on there, that may soon change!). I usually read the book before I see the corresponding movie, and 95% of the time the book is better. I have to say I was disappointed in this book. As it turns out, the book was written by King George VI's speech therapist's grandson, who began researching their relationship out of curiosity after the movie was already in production. I didn't think the book was particularly well-written, as this is a topic that I'm all over and frankly, I was bored in places. I did like that it expanded upon the relationship between the king and his coach in places where the movie couldn't. The movie built up to King George's speech to the British people when Great Britain entered World War II. As the book explains, the king's relationship with Logue lasted for years, and Logue was called upon to help the king with many, many speeches. If you're particularly interested in this, read the book; otherwise, just watch the movie again.

The next couple of books I'm planning to read will also deal with language but in a slightly different way. A post on that will be coming soon.

Better World Books Book Club

I missed the Atlanta Better World Books Book Club meeting Thursday night because I underestimated the time I'd need on a project for a client. I hated to miss. The next morning I looked at BWB's Facebook pictures where everyone looks to be having so much fun. Then I read their blog post about the event and then I knew for sure they'd had fun without me. Oh, well. I'm hoping to participate in next month's online book club for one of my top five books from 2010, The Help.

I read this month's book club selection, The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novograntz, and it was interesting and made me think a lot. However, there was a lot more I wanted to know about Novograntz's childhood and adolescence. What steered her toward philanthropy and microeconomics? We got glimpses of this but nothing concrete enough for me. Also, I have to admit I grew frustrated each time I read that Novograntz went out jogging again and again alone. When that's something I'm very careful about in the American suburbs, it was hard for me to grasp why she kept going out alone. I felt so sorry for her, though, when she did relate her experience being mugged in broad daylight while others were close by. Also, I liked that that didn't break her spirit and wasn't enough to send her packing back to the safety of the United States.

Much of the book focused on Novograntz's early experiences with philanthropy in African and Asian countries and the challenges she faced as a young, white American only beginning to understand the cultures of these other places. Then there was a big jump to her present life as the founder and CEO of her nonprofit organization, Acumen Fund. I imagine there were some experiences in the middle part of her career that steered and molded her. What were they? I hope she'll write another book and tell us all about it.

Atlanta area book club meeting with Better World Books

This Thursday, August 25, Better World Books is hosting its first-ever book club meeting for The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz. The event is to be held at Park Tavern in Piedmont Park from 6-8:30 pm. I'm going, and if you've read this book, you should too!

Author Reading: Ann Napolitano

Last night I went to a reading by Ann Napolitano, author of the brand-new book, A Good Hard Look, which has Flannery O'Connor as its central character. The event was sponsored by the Georgia Center for the Book and hosted by First Baptist Church in Decatur. Napolitano talked about her process while writing the book, which is something I'm always interested to hear more about. She discovered O'Connor while in college and read some of her work. Then, she put O'Connor's work away for about a decade before realizing that she needed to write a book about her. Until that point, she'd been working on a book that had Melvin Whiteson as a main character. The story took place in New York City and she said the plot wandered and wandered. She couldn't seem to make it work. She had an epiphany and knew she should stop working on that book and start writing one about O'Connor. The interesting thing she did, though, was bring Melvin over as a character in the new book to interact with O'Connor. Their relationship in A Good Hard Look is what the rest of the novel is built around. It took her seven years to write this book, and it sounds like she wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages that ultimately didn't make it into the final published version.

My favorite thing Napolitano said last night summed up O'Connor's fiction so well, and made me think of my fellow book clubber who was jarred by her short stories. The author said, "Flannery's fiction is abrasive. It knocks you around....You don't curl up with Flannery O'Connor." Indeed.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Earlier this week I finished reading a delightful book, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. It's an epistolary book (written solely in letters), and I didn't feel, not even one time, that this kept me from getting in on the action or getting to know the characters as well as I wanted to. The book takes place first in London where author and journalist Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger living on Guernsey (an island in the English Channel) asking for assistance in finding a certain book in London. Juliet obliges and her correspondence with the reader leads her to write letters back and forth with several of his friends, all part of the organization in the title of the book. Later, Juliet, convinced she may be able to write a story about these charming people on this island, visits Guernsey to see them for herself. Guernsey had been occupied by the Germans during World War II and its English residents had been cut off from the rest of the world. The book takes place in the first few years after the war when everyone in Europe is getting back on their feet.  

This book fits in so well with my current World War II obsession, and since I'm doing a lot of reading on this topic at the moment, I was glad to have some perspective. Some parts of the book wouldn't have meant quite so much otherwise. For example, the grandson of one of the letter writers from the island has recently returned to Guernsey after spending the War years on a farm in Yorkshire to escape German occupation and potential danger. Not all the children in Guernsey were sent to the mainland. The grandparent reports, "It was a terrible thing to decide - send your kiddies away to live among strangers, or let them stay with you? Maybe the Germans wouldn't come, but if they did - how would they behave to us? But, come to that, what if they invaded England, too - how would the children manage without their own families beside them?" (p. 122).

I've heard members of the Greatest Generation talk about gathering around a household's only radio each evening to hear news of the War. Anne Frank and her fellow housemates knew what was going on during the War because they listened to forbidden stations on the office radio. This brings me to one of my favorite parts of the book when Juliet tells her publisher of the stories she's hearing about life during the War for Guernsey residents: "A reporter asked a Guernsey Islander, 'What was the most difficult experience you had during the Germans' rule?'....The Islander told him, 'You know they took away all of our wireless sets? If you were caught having a hidden radio, you'd get sent off to prison on the continent. Well, those of us who had secret radios, we heard about the Allies landing in Normandy. Trouble was, we weren't supposed to know it had happened! Hardest thing I ever did was walk around St. Peter Port on June 7, not grinning, not smiling, not doing anything to let those Germans know that I KNEW their end was coming. If they'd caught on, someone would be in for it - so we had to pretend. It was very hard to pretend not to know D-Day had happened'" (p. 135).

And, two more of my favorite lines include: "Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true" (p. 10) and "That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason that sheer enjoyment" (pp. 11-12).

Sheer enjoyment is what I got out of this book. If Juliet were a real person, I'd want her to be my friend. My book club is discussing this book next week, and I can't wait to see what smartness we can come up with during discussion.

Animal Dreams and Erin Brockovich

I'd been wanting to read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for a couple of years before I finally did recently. And I've known I should read some of her other stuff too, as I've been told she's a fantastic writer and storyteller. I think the first time I knew of her was when Oprah chose her book The Poisonwood Bible for her book club in 2000. During my book club's December meeting we exchanged used books Dirty Santa-style and I ended up with Kingsolver's Animal Dreams and I finished reading it a couple of weeks ago.

I really enjoyed it. It turned out to be one of my favorite kinds of stories, the kind when a female character, in need of a life change, takes a chance and good things come about. While all that was going on, the main character, Codi Noline, who graduated from medical school but never became a doctor, discovered while wading around in a creek with her high school biology students, that the living microorganisms that should have been flourishing there aren't. She sounds the alarm and gets the women from the local Stitch and Bitch Club riled up and they all start doing something about it.

It reminded me so much (in a good way) of the movie Erin Brockovich that I ordered it off Netflix and watched it the other night. The same kind of thing is going on. A mom, desperate for a job, begs for one at a small law firm, and is both pushy and likable enough that she both convinces her boss to keep her and convinces the residents of Hinkley, California, to trust her to help hold the nearby corporation that was ruining the environment and their health. She even earns the respect she deserves from this evil corporation, its attorneys and anyone else who doubted her from the get-go.

Jane Eyre Movie

I've been pretty excited about the Jane Eyre movie coming out. I've been looking forward to it for months and I've done several things to get prepared. First, one of my book clubs chose it as the March book, so I reread it a couple of weeks ago. Second, Goodreads has been promoting the movie as well by holding a contest where you read the book, take a quiz and register to win free movie tickets. Well, guess what? I won two tickets to the premiere which was last night, and took a friend with me.

As I reread the novel, I enjoyed it so much more than when I read it for school (both in high school and graduate school I think) - very much like my reread of Age of Innocence, The Great Gatsby and other classics I've reread in the past couple of years. I had a hard time putting it down, which worked out well since the second half of the book was read while I was on vacation and I had some extra time to devote to reading.


Finally, I went to see the movie last night and was very satisfied with the way it was done. I like the creative license taken with the arrangement of the movie - the movie opens near the middle of the book. And, a long book was condensed into a two-hour movie. Though some things, like Jane's relationship with the Rivers family, was glazed over, nothing was left out so much that I felt the book wasn't being done justice. And, even with being shortened everything still made sense. The ending was done a bit differently from the book but worked I'd say. And even though I've just reread the book, it took seeing the movie to remind me what a creepy story it is (old creaky house, storms, crazy lady in the attic, etc.). 

I'll be seeing it again with my book club Monday night, followed by a discussion of book versus movie. Good thing I liked it as much as I did!

Ian McEwan Novels

Years ago my grandmother asked me if I'd ever read any of Ian McEwan's novels. When I told her no, she came back with something along the lines of, "Well, you'd better." Jump ahead a few years to the release of the movie Atonement. I read the novel in preparation and then saw it with two friends. I enjoyed both immensely, and this one is right up there in the plot-twists-I-never-saw-coming category.

This year I nominated another McEwan novel, Saturday, as a book club pick for one of the groups I'm in, and the book didn't get chosen. It's still on my own list to read though. Then, at a recent used book sale at the Decatur Library, I found Amsterdam for 50 cents (winner of the Booker Prize in 1998). It's less than 200 pages and I breezed right through it in a couple of sittings. The plot in this one's twisty too, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But then again, I seem to love any story that involved ethics decisions in journalism (Almost Famous, All the President's Men, etc.). Read and enjoy!

Buckhead Book Club

I have mentioned from time to time the book clubs I'm in. I love reading a book at the same time as someone else, and being able to dig in and discuss it when we've finished. There is a great deal of community to be found amongst readers, and since reading is a pretty solitary activity, I think that's great. Recently, I had the good fortune of gaining a freelancing gig with the new Simply Buckhead magazine. It comes out six times per year, and in each issue I'll be writing a story that is both Buckhead- and book-focused. The January/February issue was published last week and my first story ran about a book club in Buckhead that was formed about 45 years ago. It was fun to talk to the club's coordinator who has been around since the beginning.

Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle

One of my book clubs met at my house on Monday night. Our book discussion was Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, which has turned out to be one of my favorite reads of the year, and one of the best book club discussions I've participated in.

Here's how I reviewed it in Goodreads: "This book is both amazing and entertaining. It's told from the point of view of a daughter from a crazy, crazy family. I found myself laughing aloud at some of the ridiculous family adventures; then I'd catch myself because I remembered that these actually happened to this family, and then I couldn't believe how hard this family's lives were. This is definitely one of my favorite reads of 2010."

After our lively discussion about this family, their misadventures and every bizarre thing they experienced, I was motivated to start looking online to see what I could find about Walls, this book and Welch, WV, the town where much of the book took place.

Here are a few things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welch,_West_Virginia (Steve Harvey is also from Welch)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H91_E8RwPu8 (Video of Hobart Street. The family lived on Little Hobart Street. I'm not sure if these are the same streets exactly, but it gives you a good idea of what the town looks like.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIqPov5UbRE&feature=related (Interview of Jeannette Walls on Craig Kilbourne. She has a great laugh!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQqMpqimURo&feature=related (Photos from Welch)

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

In one of the book clubs I'm in, we've just discussed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Most of us had never read it before, though we were familiar with the idea of the book. It made for pretty interesting discussion. If you haven't read it, it's short enough to be considered a novella, so it won't take you long to read. Luckily one of our book clubbers had her laptop with her, so we did a few YouTube searches to see what was out there on the book. John Barrymore's movie version from 1920 is available in its entirety. We discovered that a few years ago, David Hasselhoff acted in a Broadway musical based on the book. You can see a clip of him here.

The Girls Who Read the Stieg Larsson Trilogy

About a month ago I borrowed Stieg Larsson's runaway bestseller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, from a friend. I read the book mostly in two sittings during a weekend, unable to put the book down. Both of the book clubs I've recently joined selected the book for discussion in August. I've now sat through two discussions of this book, and I have Larsson's second of the trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire, sitting on my nightstand, and I'm ready to begin reading it. Yet, I'm still struggling with how I feel about the first book.

In both book clubs, there were those who loved the book and those who didn't like it enough to even finish it. I liked it, but I thought it was difficult to read in parts due to the violence and misogyny. I'm fascinated by Lisbeth Salander, as I think she's the most complex characters I've ever read about, but I thought Mikael Blomkvist came up a bit short. Perhaps my thoughts on him will change as I read the second and third books.

Have you read it? What did you think? Will you read the rest of the trilogy?

Another take on Wuthering Heights

Last night was my second meeting with a new book club started by my friend, Lori. An excellent meeting it was, as we had two new faces there. We discussed this month's book, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Somehow I made it all the way through high school English and two English degrees without ever reading this one in class. At some point I picked up a copy at a used bookstore and read it, so this was a reread for me.

It feels rather sacrilegious to say that WH really isn't a favorite of mine, a decision I came to the first time I read it and that didn't change upon reading it this time. I just don't find myself loving the characters, and both time I've been disappointed that the book doesn't end on a more positive note. Maybe it's because I've recently reread Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and I love how everyone gets paired off at the end. In that case, perhaps WH just isn't for me, huh?

Back in late spring, I ordered Jack Murnighan's Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits from Better World Books (if you haven't ordered anything from them yet, what are you waiting for?). I haven't yet had a chance to delve into this one, but flipped through to see if WH was one of the 50 and what Murnighan had to say about it. I'm picking and choosing here, but here's a sampling of what he said about the novel:

"Heathcliff...is the perfect embodiment of vindication."
"WH has the dubious distinction of having...not only the biggest wuss but literally the most annoying character in the entire history of literature." (In reference to Linton, Heathcliff's son)

And, Murnighan calls Heathcliff "one of literature's great bad-boys."

What do you think?

Another book club

I recently attended my second new book club meeting with a group of women who have met monthly for a few years. They have great taste in books and are reading many of the things I've either just read or plan to soon, so I decided to join up with them.

Last week I attended my first meeting where we discussed Jamie Ford's Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. I had picked up the paperback a few months ago when I was visiting my favorite bookstore, Quail Ridge Books. It caught my eye as the setting is Seattle, one of the two places my husband and I visited on our honeymoon.

Hotel is a beautifully layered love story, told from two time periods 40 years apart. It tells readers a lot about Seattle in the 1940s, evacuation of Japanese Americans during World War II to camps, tensions between the Chinese and Japanese around the same time and how different generations can struggle to identify themselves ethnically. Four things I didn't know too much about before reading. This is one of the best books I've read all year.

Here's what the Book Lady had to say about it a few months ago. She's on my regular blog-reading rotation. Here's a link to the Author Jamie Ford's home page. I can't wait for him to write something else for me to read.