New URL for 2nd Wednesday Book Club blog!

Exciting news: we have a new URL for the book club!

http://2ndwednesdaybookclub.nashvillepubliclibrary.org/

If you are reading this after 10/13/09 click the link above to find out the latest book club happenings.

Some thoughts about the first part of Team of Rivals

- The author calls Lincoln a "political genius." How do you define political genius? Does this mean simply achieving your political goals, or is it something more? Do any of Lincoln's actions strike you as "genius"?

- Goodwin goes out her way prove that Lincoln was NOT depressed and NOT homosexual. Why would she do this? What would the significance be if he was depressed and was homosexual?

- Would contemporary political campaigns be better if candidates did not actively make new speeches or take new policy positions?

- Lincoln and Jackson were very similar in that they were both Western lawyers and perceived as men of the people. If we take this comparison further does it begin to fall apart?

- Do Seward, Chase and Bates have any contemporary equivalents? Let the games begin!

We'll be discussing part one of Team of Rivals on October 14th. We meet in the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Ballot for Books - Spring 2010

Below is the ballot for Spring books. Please choose four in order of preference and email me your choices, or vote in person during our October meeting. The city is celebrating the works of Mark Twain through May, so if we want, why not read some Twain.

War Dances - Sherman Alexie

Columbine - Dave Cullen

Valis - Philip K. Dick

Zeitoun - David Eggers

The Vagrants - Yiyun Li

1776 - David McCollough

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock-n-Roll - Nick Tosches

Letters from the Earth - Mark Twain

Poor People - William T. Vollmann

Our current book is Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. We meet the 2nd Wednesday of every month in the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our next book is Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

That's right! Our next book is Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. Goodwin gives us Lincoln like no one else before Her portrait of our sixteenth president's infighting cabinet won her unanimous praise. Later this fall the holds list on this book is going to explode, so come check out a copy now from the Main Library returns desk. Just ask for the 2nd Wednesday Book Club Book. It won't be due back until after our discussion in November.

Team of Rivals is a long one, but it is conveniently broken into two parts. We'll be discussing part one on October 14th and part two on November 11th.

We meet in the Main Library in Conference Room 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about the second half of 2666...

- Now that we have finished, this question has more definitive answers. How do the different parts of the book relate to one another? Do you see any common themes? How does Bolano bring it all together?

- Gael brought up the issue of homophobia. Homophobia is a recurring theme. What role does it play in the book? What about women? How are women portrayed?

- Do you think Hans/Archimboldi killed his wife Ingeborg? There are a lot of murders in the book even without the girls in Santa Theresa. How is murder portrayed?

- Both Hans and Ingeborg are accused of insanity. Do you think either of them are insane? What about Klaus Haus? Even if not a murderer, he seems something of a sociopath. Why did he turn out that way? Bolano seems to paint his parents as excessively normal.

- The Frechman who rents Hans/Archimboldi his first typewriter says (pg. 786) "There's nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty." Is this true? Is this true of Hans/Archimboldi?

We'll be meeting to discuss this on September 9th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about the first half of 2666...

- How do the different parts of the book relate to one another? Do you see any common themes? How might Bolano bring it all together?

- Were you surprised about how the love quadrangle between Espinoza, Morini, Norton and Pelletier played out? What role did Edwin Johns play in their relationship?

- Is Amalfitano losing his mind? What's up with geometry book on the clothesline?

- At the end of "The Part About Fate," I was very confused as to what was happening. I wasn't sure if Guadalupe Roncal, the journalist assigned investigate the murders, to had flown back to Mexico or stayed with Oscar and Rosa. Did anyone make sense of these passages?

- The city of Santa Teresa is a fictional version of real life city of Juarez which borders El Paso on the American side. The unsolved murders of hundreds of women there are also based on actual events. At least two books have been written about unsolved murders: The Daughters of Juarez by Teresa Rodriguez and The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women by Diana Valdez. Sadly, the attention paid the serial murder of female factory workers in Juarez has been overshadowed recently by the outbreak of violence between narcos and police.

We'll be meeting to discuss the first half (to approximately pg. 445) of this on August 12th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

2nd Wed. Book Club Fall Reading Schedule 2009

Reading Schedule Fall 2009:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño - (first half) August 12th

2666 by Roberto Bolaño - (second half) September 9th

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin - (first half) October 14th

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin - (second half) November 11th

Home by Marilynne Robinson - December 9th

Our next book is 2666 by Roberto Bolano

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa a fictional Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared. The work earned Bolano the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

We'll be meeting to discuss the first half (to approximately pg. 445) of this on August 12th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about American Lion...

- When Meacham's book was first released many asked why we needed another biography of Andrew Jackson, and then book got great reviews and became a best seller. Do you see any parallels between contemporary presidents and Jackson?

- I am speechless about the Margaret Eaton fiasco. Did Jackson have a way out of the situation that would have not resulted in the break up of his family and the dismissal of his cabinet?

- How should history remember a figure like Jackson with so many contradictions and flaws? The elephant in the room is the exile and de facto genocide of Cherokees. Is our country any different than any other when acknowledging the mistakes of our past?

Here is a link to a Fox 17 news story about how Cherokees commemorate the Trail of Tears in Tennessee today.

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

Our next book is American Lion by Jon Meacham

American Lion illuminates one of our most significant yet dimly recalled presidents. Andrew Jackson was a battle-hardened warrior, the founder of the Democratic Party, and the architect of the presidency as we know it. His story is one of violence, sex, courage, and tragedy. With his powerful persona, his evident bravery, and his mystical connection to the people, Jackson moved the White House from the periphery of government to the center of national action, articulating a vision of change that challenged entrenched interests to heed the popular will–or face his formidable wrath.

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

Some thoughts about Exiles

- Exiles is a hybrid of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Does this heterogeneous nature hurt or help the text?

- Hansen characterizes Hopkins' faith this one way (pg. 102):

His faith was a faith that found hope and sturdiness even in the face of mystery, paradox, and philosophical difficulties. Because he'd felt God's love and tenderness so often in the past, he knew there was no meanness in him. There was justice, yes, and authority, and an awesome power that was greater than weather, greater than worlds. But usually there was just an airy mystery, and on the bleakest occasions a sense of God watching with slack interest but resisting any temptation to intercede.

Do you think this is the sort of faith typical of someone who joins a religious order?

- Would Hopkins' life have been easier had he chosen not be a Jesuit?

- Was the childlike Sister Aurea (who was of questionable intelligence) the type of person who should enter a religious order?

- What did you think of the poem?

Here's a clip of Hansen reading from Exiles at Eastern Michigan University. Though is his performance leaves something to be desired, he reveals some interesting tidbits about his research process at the beginning and end of the segment:


In this segment, Hansen reads the section in which the Deutschland hits the sandbar:


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

Our next book is Exiles by Ron Hansen

With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of “elected silence” with an outpouring of dazzling poetry. Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would die young, an exile from the literary world. But as Hansen’s gorgeously written account of Hopkins’s life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling.

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

Some thoughts about Death with Interruptions

- Did the government make the right decision in choosing to deal with the maphia?

- Why does Saramago make the formal choice not to capitalize names?

- Why does Saramago have death fall in love with a musician? Is there any significance to this?

- Why make death fall in the love at all? Saramago’s intention in the first half of the book is pretty obvious; i.e. to show what would happen if people stopped dying. Second half is more mysterious and far more poetic. Does anyone have any hunches as to what Saramago’s intention with the second half of the book was?

Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. Here's a link to his Nobel Lecture.

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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on May 13th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our next book is Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago

Saramago's philosophical page-turner hinges on death taking a holiday. And, Saramago being Saramago, he turns what could be the stuff of late-night stoner debate into a lucid, playful and politically edgy novel of ideas. For reasons initially unclear, people stop dying. There's much debate and discussion on the link between death, resurrection and the church, and while the clandestine traffic of the terminally ill into bordering countries leads to government collusion with the criminal self-styled maphia, death falls in love with a terminally ill cellist. Saramago adds two satisfying cliffhangers—how far can he go with the concept, and will death succumb to human love? The package is profound, resonant and—bonus—entertaining.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on May 13th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about Class

- On page 18, Fussell states, “Americans find Knowing Where You Stand harder than do most Europeans.” He thinks because America is (at least on paper) a classless society we are more conscious of which class we belong to, and often have anxiety about fitting into the class of our choice. Do you agreed with his analysis?

- Fussell also asserts that class is not about money, but far more about taste, knowledge, and perceptiveness (presumably about class signals). What are some of the implications of this?

- One of the meatier sections of the book concerns the educational system. The author quotes Paul Blumberg (p. 134) “ ‘The educational system has been effectively appropriated by the upper strata and transformed into an instrument which tends to reproduce the class structure and transit inequality.’ ” True or not true?

- Fussell defines ‘prole drift’ (p. 172) as “the tendency in advanced industrialized societies for everything inexorably to become proletarianized. Prole drift seems an inevitable attendant of mass production, mass selling, mass communication, and mass education, and some of its symptoms are best-seller lists, films that must appeal to virtually everyone (except the intelligent, sensitive, and subtle), shopping malls, and the lemming flight to the intellectual and cultural emptiness of the Sun Belt.” Is culture really going in that direction? Isn’t Fussell’s complaint that of every generation about the generation that comes after it? AND any thoughts about his characterization of the Sun Belt?

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

Our next book is Class by Paul Fussell

In Class: A Guide Through the American Status System Paul Fussell explodes the sacred American myth of social equality with eagle-eyed irreverence and iconoclastic wit. This bestselling, superbly researched, exquisitely observed guide to the signs, symbols, and customs of the American class system is always outrageously on the mark. Class is guaranteed to amuse and infuriate, whether your class is so high it's out of sight (literally) or you are, alas, a sinking victim of prole drift.


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

Some thoughts about Speak, Memory...

- The seminal event in Nabokov's adult life was the Russian Revolution. How would you describe the role of the Revolution in his life, and the structure of Speak, Memory?

- In chapter six (pg. 94-95 of the Everyman edition), he draws a parallel between nature and art:

When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. ‘Natural selection’ in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of ‘the struggle of life’ when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic sublety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

Do you agree that art a game of enchantment and deception? What about nature?

- Though dedicated to his wife Vera, Speak, Memory seems to an appreciation and exoneration of his father Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. How does he represent his father? What about his mother and his brother Sergey?

- In Chapter 13 (pg. 205 in Everyman edition) , Nabokov sees an indirectly proportional relationship between someone's politics and their aesthetic taste:

All cultured and discriminating Russians knew that this astute politician had about as much taste and interest in aesthetic matters as an ordinary Russian bourgeois of the Flaubertian épicier sort,… but Nesbit and his highbrow friends saw in him a kind of sensitive, poetic-minded patron and promoter of the newest trends in art and would smile a superior smile when I tried to explain that the connexion between advance politics and advanced art was purely a verbal one (gleefully exploited by Soviet propaganda), and that the more radical a Russian was in politics, the more conservative he was on the artistic side.

Is this true or not true? The more radical someone's politics the more conservative their taste in art?

- What does anyone know about the writer Sirin which Nabokov notes as one of his favorite Russian émigré authors.

I found this old footage of Nabokov and Lionel Trilling on a 1950s TV show. Of course, they are discussing Lolita, but Nabokov's vicious wit is on display. Can you imagine this being on television today:



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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on March 11th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Reading Schedule for Summer 2009

Our reading schedule for summer 2009:

Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago - May 13th

Exiles by Ron Hansen - June 10th

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham - July 8th

2666 by Roberto Bolano - (first half) August 12th

2666 by Roberto Bolano - (second half) September 9th

We meet the 2nd Wednesday of every month at noon in Conference Room 3 of the Main Library downtown.

Our next book is Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

One of twentieth century's master prose stylists tells his story as only he can. The late Vladimir Nabokov always did things his way, and his classic autobiography is no exception.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on March 11th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle...

- Is Toru irresponsible? Are any of the bad things that happen to him his fault? At the very end (pg 605) he says, “I guess I just figured if I went on living in the usual way, things would kind of work themselves out all right. But they didn’t, did they? Unfortunately.”

- Is Toru justified in hating Noboru Wataya so much? Really, what did he ever do to him?

- How is this novel about Japan, its culture, its history?

- In many ways the what is factual and what is true in the book get confused. When Toru thinks this about Cinnamon’s stories (pg 525): “He inherited from his mother’s stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assuming that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. The question of which parts of story were factual and which parts were not was probably not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story.”

- The setting and landscape of the book slowly change very normal and suburban into a surreal dreamscape, where nearly all the action is taking place in dreams and all the characters seem to possess psychic powers. What is Murakami getting at? I am working on the assumption we are not supposed to take this literally alá a sci-fi adventure novel. Many things are left unexplained. What could be meaning of some of the plot elements:

~ The well?
~ The baseball bat?
~ Mr. Honda and empty whiskey bottle?
~ The blue mark that appears on his face?
~ The “thing inside” others Nutmeg and Toru can heal?
~ Cinnamon’s dream about the wind-up bird and, presumably, his father’s heart?
~ Who / what are Malta & Creta Kano?
~ Why is Creta concerned with water?

Let’s discuss these things!

Here's a link to reviews of all Murakami's books that have appeared in the New York Times .

Murakami always references music in his books. This has inspired many musical artists. Here's a link to the band Aeroplan's album they wrote based on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle . You can download the whole thing for free. I'm not endorsing this music, I just think it is interesting that it exists.

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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on February 11th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

We'll be voting for our summer reading list, so if you haven't voted already via email make sure you show up and vote in person. Cheers!

Our next book is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat, and his wife. His search for his wife and cat introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters in which mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. An entrancing mystery by on of Japan's most acclaimed writers.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on February 11th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch

Ballot for Summer 2009 selections

2666 - Roberto Bolano

Amospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House - Jon Meachum

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer - Kai Bird

The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Taleb

Death with Interruptions - Jose Saramago

Exiles - Ron Hansen

The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters - Lorraine Lopez

Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates

Shadow Country - Peter Matthieson

Email me your top four selections in order of preference before our meeting on Feb. 11th, OR make sure to come to the Feb. 11th meeting and vote with a paper ballot. In the event we elect to read both 2666 and Shadow Country, I will choose to save one for our fall selections so we don't have to read two very long fiction books back to back. (I'd love to read both these books, don't hesitate to vote for them.)

cheers,
Bryan

Some thoughts about Life is So Good...

When George & Richard browse the newspaper archive, George tears up because he realizes many of the stories in the newspaper are not true. Do newspapers tell the truth now?

George’s father tells him that “Everyman is born to die... so always do the right thing.” Is this good advice?

Though racial conditions are better in other places George travels to, he eventually always wants to go back home. What is the allure of home? Why would he want to go back when knew social conditions there were so unjust?

What gave George his stoic, if not positive, view of life? Why do you think he had such good health and such a good memory long into his 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.