Our next book is Life is So Good by George Dawson

Life is So Good is the unbelievable autobiography of a man who learned to read at age 98. Surviving the hardline segregation of pre-civil rights Texas, George Dawson tells is own century spanning story of determination and love of life.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on January 14th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch. We'll be cobbling together a ballot for our summer reading during this meeting, so have titles in mind you might want to read.

Some thoughts about Love in the Time of Cholera...

- For me, this book was about class as much as it was about love. What are some of the ways that class affected the characters?

- At the time of writing I have 50 pages to go so still I don’t know if Florentino and Fermina get together in the end (!) but considering their adult lives which of the characters do you think had a truer experience of love?

- Is Florentino Ariza a fool?

- How is love characterized as a disease within the book?

Here is a link to Thomas Pynchon’s original review of the book as it appeared in the New York Times:
THE HEART'S ETERNAL VOW

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on December 10th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Love in the Time of Cholera is now ready for pick up

Our next book, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is now ready for pick up at the Main Library return desk.

One of the greatest love stories of all time as told by one the world's greatest living writers. Who can resist?

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on December 10th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about 1491...

I enjoyed this book very much. For me, most the nonfiction books we've read over the past year have petered out towards the end, the authors having said what they had to say in earlier chapters. But this book kept me interested until the very end. I even read the appendices. I am still left with many questions and want to learn more.

- The author criticizes scholars who learned a few facts and then rewrote history around those few facts, but the author himself seems to be guilty of same fallacy. Did anyone else notice this? How should we determine what goes into history textbooks?

- The author cites those who think a revaluation of societies in the Americas before Columbus will have contemporary political or social consequences. Do you think this is true? Why or why not? If we learned with certainty that societies in North America were more elaborate and complex than previously assumed would that change the way we treat Native Americans in the United States? What about Amazonia? If we learned with certainty that Amazonia forest had been agriculturally engineered for centuries would that change our current attitudes about how to utilize it?

- The last sentence of Part Two reads: “The natural world is incomplete without the human touch.” This thought is contrary to what many consider the meaning of the words “natural world.” What do you think he means and why do think he closed the chapter with that sentence?

- Some Native Americans reject archeological explanations of human colonization of the Americas in favor of their traditional explanations. Were you surprised to learn that? What role, if any, should Native American traditions play when determining the historical record?

- The renegade expedition down the Amazon by Francisco de Orellana and Gaspar de Carvajal which Mann writes about in chapter nine was fictionalized by Werner Herzog in the film Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Carvajal’s diary was merely the inspiration for the film and Herzog takes many liberties, but it’s a personal favorite so I just wanted to throw that in there.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on November 12th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Books for Winter / Spring 2009

After a series of televised debates, you voted on books for Spring 2009 and the results are in:

Life is So Good by George Dawson - January 14th

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami - February 11th

Speak, Memory: an Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov - March 11th

Class: a Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell - April 8th

We meet the 2nd Wednesday of every month at noon in Conference Room 3 of the Main Library. Feel free to bring a lunch.

1491 is now ready for pick up

Our next book is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Mann synthesizes many new discoveries about the cultures and civilizations on Western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans. The title made the year end best lists of Time magazine, the Boston Globe, Salon, the San Jose Mercury News, Discover Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, the New York Sun, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on November 12th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about American Gods...

Yeah, I borrowed a couple of these from the reader’s guide in the back of the paperback version:

- Where’s Jesus? Why doesn’t Gaiman include him?

- Does the relationship between gods and humans in the novel have any correlation with the relationship between divine and mankind in reality, or is the relationship between gods and humans devised by Gaiman merely clever conceit he uses to tell the story?

- Is this book a critique or satire of America?

- This definitely a magical fantastical novel, but at same time is clearly aimed at adults. What role can fantasy literature have in the lives of adults?

Here's Neil Gaiman's website which has a lot interesting content if you enjoyed the book: his blog, videos, a plethora of websites endorsed by the author:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/

Here's an hour long talk Neil Gaiman gave at Google headquarters in 2006. It's a little schmoosey but the author speaks in detail about some of his recent projects:


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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on October 8th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

American Gods is now ready for pick up

American Gods earned Neil Gaiman the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Bram Stoker Award. Gaiman reinvents mythology better than any writer I know. Follow his inky of map of the American mythological landscape.


We'll be meeting to discuss this book on October 8th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about The Sheltering Sky...

Is this a horror novel? Does it follow the conventions of the horror genre? How or how not?

Would you describe Kit and Port’s relationship as emotionally healthy? Do they love one another? Why or why not?

Of the three main characters, (Kit, Port and Tunner) which is most in control of their own destiny?

Have the attitudes of United States citizen’s towards Arab Africa changed at all since the initial publication of the novel in 1949? How do the attitudes of the American and the French characters towards the “natives” differ?

The Sheltering Sky is often cited as the precursor to the literature of the Beat Generation. Do you think this is an accurate assessment?

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Here is Tennessee Williams’ original review of the book as published in the New York Times:

An Allegory of Man and His Sahara
By TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

After several literary seasons given over, mostly, to the frisky antics of kids, precociously knowing and singularly charming, but not to be counted on for those gifts that arrive by no other way than the experience and contemplation of a truly adult mind, now is obviously a perfect time for a writer with such a mind to engage our attention. That is precisely the event to be celebrated in the appearance of "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles' first novel.

It has been a good while since first novels in America have come from men in their middle or late thirties (Paul Bowles is 38). Even in past decades the first novel has usually been written during the writers' first years out of college. Moreover, because success and public attention operate as a sort of pressure cooker or freezer, there has been a discouraging tendency for the talent to bake or congeal at a premature level of inner development.

In America the career almost invariably becomes an obsession. The "get-ahead" principle, carried to such extreme, inspires our writers to enormous efforts. A new book must come out every year. Otherwise they get panicky, and the first thing you know they belong to Alcoholics Anonymous or have embraced religion or plunged headlong into some political activity with nothing but an inchoate emotionalism to bring to it or to be derived from it. I think that this stems from a misconception of what it means to be a writer or any kind of creative artist. They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a by-product of existence.

Paul Bowles has deliberately rejected that kind of rabid professionalism. Better known as a composer than a writer, he has not allowed his passion for either form of expression to interfere with his growth into completeness of personality. Now this book has come at the meridian of the man and artist. And, to me very thrillingly, it brings the reader into sudden, startling communion with a talent of true maturity and sophistication of a sort that I had begun to fear was to be found nowadays only among the insurgent novelists of France, such as Jean Genet and Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.

With the hesitant exception of one or two war books by returned soldiers, "The Sheltering Sky" alone of the books that I have recently read by American authors appears to bear the spiritual imprint of recent history in the western world. Here the imprint is not visible upon the surface of the novel. It exists far more significantly in a certain philosophical aura that envelopes it.

There is a curiously double level to this novel. The surface is enthralling as narrative. It is impressive as writing. But above that surface is the aura that I spoke of, intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire. And that is the surface of the novel that has filled me with such excitement.

The story itself is a chronicle of startling adventure against a background of the Sahara and the Arab-populated regions of the African Continent, a portion of the world seldom dealt with by first-rate writers who actually know it. Paul Bowles does know it, and much better, for instance, than it was known by AndrÈ Gide. He probably knows it even better than Albert Camus. For Paul Bowles has been going to Africa, off and on, since about 1930. It thrills him, but for some reason it does not upset his nervous equilibrium. He does not remain in the coastal cities. At frequent intervals he takes journeys into the most mysterious recesses of the desert and mountain country of North Africa, involving not only hardship but peril.

"The Sheltering Sky" is the chronicle of such a journey. Were it not for the fact that the chief male character, Port Moresby, succumbs to an epidemic fever during the course of the story, it would not be hard to identify him with Mr. Bowles himself. Like Mr. Bowles, he is a member of the New York intelligentsia who became weary of being such a member and set out to escape it in remote places. Escape it he certainly does. He escapes practically all the appurtenances of civilized modern life. Balanced between fascination and dread, he goes deeper and deeper into this dreamlike "awayness."

From then on the story is focused upon the continuing and continually more astonishing adventures of his wife, Kit, who wanders on like a body in which the rational mechanism is gradually upset and destroyed. The liberation is too intense, too extreme, for a nature conditioned by and for a state of civilized confinement. Her primitive nature, divested one by one of its artificial reserves and diffidences, eventually overwhelms her, and the end of this novel is as wildly beautiful and terrifying as the whole panorama that its protagonists have crossed.

In this external aspect the novel is, therefore, an account of startling adventure. In its interior aspect, "The Sheltering Sky" is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience. This is not an enticing way to describe it. It is a way that might suggest the very opposite kind of a novel from the one that Paul Bowles has written. Actually this superior motive does not intrude in explicit form upon the story, certainly not in any form that will need to distract you from the great pleasure of being told a first-rate story of adventure by a really first-rate writer.

I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.

December 4, 1949

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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on September 10th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

The Sheltering Sky is now ready for pick up

Our next book The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles is now ready for pick up at the Main Library return desk.

Bowles' existential masterpiece follows 3 westerners into the Sahara desert as slowly the isolation and desolation of the landscape alters their concept of reality.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on September 10th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about The Human Stain...

- I love the title of this book. What do you think it means?

- Is the relationship between Coleman and Faunia immoral or somehow exploitative?

- Should Coleman have apologized for using the word "spooks"? What do you think of his decision to resign?

- Was Coleman's decision to lie about his race justifiable? Was it necessary for him to disown his family?

- Is Les Farley accountable for his actions?

- How, if at all, is this book about Bill Clinton?

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Philip Roth is one our nation's most critically acclaimed novelists. Here's an interview with him:



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The character of Coleman Silk is thought to be based on real life literary critic Anatole Broyard. Broyard's daughter Bliss wrote a memoir, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race and Family Secrets, about her father and learning learn of his racial identity two months before his death. Here's a short feature about her book:



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We'll be meeting to discuss Philip Roth's The Human Stain on August 13th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our next book is The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Philip Roth's The Human Stain earned the acclaimed novelist the PEN/Faulkner Award upon its original publication. What on the surface appears to be an indictment of political correctness and public flares of moral outrage, slowly reveals itself to be far more profound as Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman discovers secrets embedded in the past of dethroned professor Coleman Silk.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book August 13th, at the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon.

Reading List for Fall 2008

Your votes are in! Here is our reading list for Fall 2008:

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles - Sept. 10th

American Gods by Neil Gaiman - Oct. 8th

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann - Nov. 12th

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Dec. 10th

We'll need to pick four new books around October so keep recommendations in mind.

Thanks,
Bryan the Librarian

Some thoughts about Omnivore's Dilemma

- Is this book really a "natural history of four meals," or is it about something else?

- I read reviews of the book praising the author for handling the subject matter in a unbiased manner. Do you think the author was biased in any way? Why or why not?

- There was a long sidebar towards the end of the book about the ethics of eating meat. Did this section sway you at all, or cause you to reconsider your opinions on this matter?

- The author suggests the difference in cost between industrial and organic food could easily be absorbed if people simply chose to budget for it. He uses cell phones as an example of an expense that was once considered a luxury but is now common place. Is this a good analogy?

Here are websites of two companies he discusses in the book:

Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms: http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM): one of the world's largest processors of corn and soybeans: http://www.admworld.com/naen/

Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan now ready for pick up

Our next book, Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is now ready for pick up at the Main Library return desk. Last I checked only a few copies were left so don't miss out.

Critically acclaimed food scholar Michael Pollan explores the origins and implications of the American diet in his award winning Omnivore's Dilemma. Competing media messages about fad diets, the benefits of organic food, and the economic realities at the supermarket are elucidated by Pollan's thoughtful prose and meticulous research. Omnivore's Dilemma was the 2007 winner of the James Beard Award (probably the world's most prestigious food writing award) and named one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book July 9th, at the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon.

Some thoughts about Lakota Woman...

- The author is openly hostile to white society. Is this attitude justified?

- Along the same line of thought, the author is often bitter about perceived harassment by federal authorities. Didn't she take part in many actions that were brazenly seditious to the United States government? Was the government's response to these actions appropriate?

- Many events described by Mary Crow Dog defy, or at least test the limits, of Western science. How should we interpret these events?

- Lakota Woman is often used in classrooms as an example of feminist literature. How would white feminists interpret her decision to become Leonard Crow Dog's wife? Was the second half of the book about her life or her husband's life?

We'll be meeting to discuss Lakota Woman on June 11th at noon in Conference Room 3 of Main Library downtown.

Lakota Woman is now ready for pick up

Our next book, Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog is now ready for pick up at the Main Library return desk. Last I checked only a few copies were left, so get em' while the gettins' good.

Mary Crow Dog was at the heart of the American Indian Movement, a group that played an important part in struggle for civil rights in United States. Lakota Woman sheds light on an often overlooked chapter of contemporary American history. Perhaps more insightful is her perspective as a woman within a movement whose public voice has been predominately male.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book June 11th, at the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon.

Some thoughts about On Beauty

How is the book about race? At the beginning of the novel, do you think Smith intentionally omits the fact Howard is white?

In many ways, On Beauty is a critique of academia. Does Smith portray the academe in a positive or negative light?

Are Howard’s deconstructivist views on art valuable or they just nonsense? Do we gain anything attacking prevailing notions of genius?

One the few relationships in the book that is positive (to me anyway) is the relationship between Carlene and Kiki. How would you define their relationship? Presumably they don’t have anything more in common than their husbands but they seem to hit it off. Why do you think that is?

Here's a short interview with Smith. She discusses her work shortly before the release of On Beauty in Sweden:

We'll be meeting to discuss this book May 14th, at the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith now ready for pick up

Our next book, On Beauty by Zadie Smith is now ready for pick up at the Main Library return desk. On Beauty tells the story of two Rembrandt scholars on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. As their families' lives intertwine, the themes of class, race, gender and, of course, beauty, are artfully explored.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book May 14th, at the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon.

Some thoughts about The Worst Hard Time...

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan was filled with many amazing episodes of survival. When I finished the book, a few things struck me the most:

- Those who chose to tough it out during the Dust Bowl, are they to be admired, or were they foolish and stubborn?

- Is any one person, or group, responsible for the disaster that was the Dust Bowl?

- Are there any parallels between the Dust Bowl and any other man-made ecological disasters in history? Was there ever a time when mankind altered nature for the better?


We'll be meeting to discuss this book April 9th, at the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan now ready pick up

Our next book, The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan is now ready for pick up at the Main Library return desk. Egan chronicles those that chose to stay behind during the Dust Bowl. The title earned Egan a National Book Award.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book April 9th, at the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon.

Some thoughts about The Places in Between...

I'm sure Gael will have many aspects of the book for us to talk about at our meeting, but the following are some things I pondered while reading the book:

- What were the author's motivations for going on such a journey? What were his accomplishments when it was over?

- Do the many cultural differences in Afghanistan parallel the cultural differences in the United States? If someone knew nothing about the United States, and they traveled across it, what would their travelogue read like?

- As U.S. citizens what can we learn from this book?

Come join us to discuss this fascinating book on March 12th at noon in Conference Room 3 at the Main Library.

Places in Between now ready for pick up....

Copies of The Places in Between by Rory Stewart are now available for pick up at the return desk at the Main Library.

We will be meeting to discuss this book March 12th in Conference Room 3.

What This Website is For...

This website exists so people can see:

What books we are reading.

When we are reading them.

Where we are meeting.

About a week before each book club meeting I will try post a few discussion points about the upcoming title. Feel free to leave comments.

I will also post important announcements, e.g. which meetings we will be nominating new titles to read.

cheers,
Bryan the Librarian

Our reading / meeting schedule for Spring/Summer 2008

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart - March 12

The Worst Hard Time: the Untold Story of Those that Survived the Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan - April 9

On Beauty by Zadie Smith - May 14

Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog - June 11

Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollen - July 9

The Human Stain by Philip Roth - August 13

The 2nd Wednesday Book Club meets at the Nashville Public Library, Main Branch, in Conference Room 3.