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.