Well, I was at my wits’ end, trying to find a short, upbeat book for December to read in my book group and feature in my bookstore, and I figured anything goes, maybe I’ll just do something completely different and go back one hundred years to a comic classic I’ve never read, always meant to, and have heard praised throughout my reading life and bookselling career.

  I’m talking about Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). Connie Willis, one of the really literate science fiction writers of our time, used Jerome’s subtitle as the title of one of her own novels. The little British classic has been released in kazillion different editions, all of them with charming covers and many with illustrations, so you’d think it was some kind of adult Wind in the Willows. In fact, I had two very pretty versions to choose from, and since I couldn’t decide, I read a page in one, a page in the other, enjoying the pictures in both.

  I already knew Jerome K. Jerome as one of the great Victorian ghost story writers. I had heard his style in Three Men in a Boat compared to P. G. Wodehouse, no idle compliment. I was perfectly willing to surprise everyone by choosing a book first published in 1889 and maybe even featuring it in different attractive editions.

Then I began reading it.

  And though the writing style is elegant and economical, and it’s bristling with wit and the idea is essentially a funny one, I promptly had a problem. All right, I’ll admit, the dog Montmorency is a delightful character – but the throwaway scene where he kills a cat and the owner screams “Murderer!” is played for laughs and the building laughter of the scene died in my throat. That’s not funny. In another scene, the dog is disciplined with a frying pan. Ouch. No laugh from me. These must have played differently one hundred years ago. They don’t generate chuckles now.

  But what became increasingly less and less funny were the characters. I’d always heard that Harris, George and J were delightful. They’re three twentysomethings who decide to rent a boat and take a journey on the River Thames from Kingston to Oxford. You watch them plan. You watch them pack. They’re like male ditzy blonds. What slowly starts to rankle is the humor of their upper-class idleness and helplessness. These three young gents haven’t a care in the world and can hardly drag themselves out of bed. They have no interests other than dining and drinking. Yes, we’ve already been assured by the author that they are going to get into many comic bungles, but I don’t see them as charming clowns. They’re lazy, aimless and privileged, they’ve never worried about money in their lives, they have no idea of real hardship or danger. I sincerely hope by the end of the journey they wake up to the reality of life, but I won’t be sailing with them long enough to know.

Dang it, I don’t think either one of these is going to work. I’ve been reading two new non-fiction books this weekend, hoping I’d find our group’s book for December, and neither one quite fills the bill.

  I had high hopes for Daniel L. Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, as my last two blogs must have made quite clear, but halfway through yesterday I developed serious doubts. There continued to be only two great narrative sequences, near the beginning of the book. The family then fades to the background, and the rest of the book has continued to be anthropology with hearty doses of linguistics. Too hearty. The Piraha people couldn’t be more interesting – they have no concept of a supreme or creator god, they don’t have words for numbers or colors, and anger is the cardinal sin – but Everett is way more interested in linguistic patterns than I suspect any member of our reading group will be.

  As a consequence, I’ve spent most of today with Russell Banks giving me a tour of racism in this country in his first book of essays, Dreaming Up America. It’s a lovely book, nicely made, gorgeous cover, and the essays are thought-provoking, with a sprinkling of little insights – the first immigrants to dream of returning to their homeland and not assimilating were the Cubans, for instance. I don’t have any problem choosing a superb collection of essays for our discussion book – that worked excellently with Laura Kipnis’ funny, provocative Against Love.

  But ultimately Banks’ essays are only okay. I’m not exhilarated from reading them. They’re liberal and literate and quite lovely, but not engaging enough to be special.

The search goes on.

A recent blog post from Seattle’s own University Bookstore got me reflecting on the books I am truly thankful for in recent memory.

For one, I am thankful to Mary at the main store for handing me Dorothy Whipple’s Someone at a Distance. The Persephone Books edition is so lovely to hold, that I keep picking it up at random even though I finished it weeks ago.

I am grateful for Stewart O’Nan’s slim, perfect Last Night at the Lobster, which just came out in paperback. I want to buy the world a copy of that book.

I am grateful for Arnold Lobel’s delightful Frog and Toad books. Reading them to my son, I am reminded of my own childhood enjoyment of them. My husband and I think they are so charming and hilarious, and appreciate that they are devoid of the schmalzy sermonizing some children’s literature panders. “Cookies” and “A Swim” had me in stitches.

Okay, and departing from giving thanks to solely books, I am thankful for Goodreads where I have connected with so many other readers and voyeuristically browsed so many virtual bookshelves.

“Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul/When hot for certainties in this our life!”–George Meredith

My father-in-law introduced me to Rosamond Lehmann. He sent me a copy of “The Heart of Me,” a film starring Paul Bettany, Olivia Williams and Helena Bonham Carter, a film based on Lehmann’s novel The Echoing Grove. Rosamond Lehmann was a British, 20th-century author who wrote incisively about women’s interior lives. Her writing is deft, accomplished, and, at times, a little melodramatic. Her characters live life large, their emotions strong and formidable, and they dream and love big even as reality thwarts and sometimes destroys them.

Lehmann’s first novel, Dusty Answer , published in 1927, delves into a young woman’s life and mind in an emotional coming-of-age story. It also explores the then taboo theme of homosexuality.

Judith Earle grows up in rural England with mostly indifferent parents who homeschool her. In the house next door, a group of cousins comes periodically to stay with their grandmother. The Fyfe children, Roddy, Julian, Charles, Martin and Mariella, absorb and enchant Judith’s life and daydreams, unbeknownst to them. The passages in the beginning of the novel float in a realm of memory and obsession:

She saw it all with the quivering overclear sense of exhaustion. It was too much. Roddy’s pale pace was all at once significant, even Charlie, floated away while she looked at him and loved him. And as she looked she saw the deep light falling on him and he seemed mingled with the whole mysterious goldenness of the evening, to be part of it; and she felt herself lost with him in a sudden dark poignant intimacy and merging,–a lifting flood, all come and gone in a timeless moment.

Judith idealizes the Fyfes, and it is this dance of knowing they do not reciprocate (until they do) and that she must hide it from them that makes and unmakes her. Judith is not a terribly likeable young woman at times, but Lehmann takes you into her mind and into her inexhaustible well of feelings and impressions and you cannot help but understand and empathize with her. When Judith goes to college and falls in with the magnetic Jennifer and is carried away into a friendship/affair with her, she almost escapes the mysterious, brooding Fyfes. But even Jennifer, who eventually leaves Judith for a more open lesbian affair (the lesbian themes are quite tame and veiled for today’s readers), cannot curb Judith’s love for the elusive Roddy.

Virago Press has been reprinting many of Rosamond Lehmann’s books, as well as other books by women writers that might otherwise be forgotten. I own the Virago edition of The Echoing Grove, but my copy of Dusty Answer was an on Harvest/Harcourt copy whose glue was so brittle the entire book cracked apart as I read it. I taped the spine so I could keep reading it on the bus.

I can’t say I loved this book, but I appreciated aspects of it. But what I find fascinating in today’s world, where reading blogs and social networking sites abound, is that now you can read an out of print or semi-obscure book and find others in far flung places who are reading the very same things. I was delighted to find this blog, where I found my reading itinerary was taking some similar twists and turns.

It says something about this generation of readers that we can take Christopher Morley’s mantra, “Read, every day, something no one else is reading,” and then find other readers who are doing the same. Does this defeat the purpose, or take away the mystery of wondering who else out there might be discovering a book or author? Perhaps. But it also means that book discussions can happen in new and fascinating ways. Call it book groups without boundaries.

The good doctors at New York Presbyterian Hospital have realized the healing power of talking about books.

In an effort to improve the bedside manners of residents, Dr. Richard S. Panush encourages the discussion of short stories, poetry and essays among his fellow physicians and their patients.

Using literature as a jumping off point for conversations before seguing into the medical issues has resulted in more compassionate patient care and better evaluations for the residents. Participants are calling it “narrative medicine.”

Looks like modern medicine is catching up. Reading can make you better at your job. And now you have another question to ask prospective medical professionals, “What are you reading?”

Last week, I wrote about ideas for book groups during the holiday season. No matter how you spend that meeting, it’s important, it’s mindful, it’s wise as another year of reading comes to an end, to celebrate and acknowledge your efforts.

I’ve been thinking about why people choose to give their time to the rather unusual pursuit of gathering together to discuss the solitary activity of reading. Sometimes it is joked that book groups are just a veiled excuse for a social outlet, that no one reads the book, or that the least interesting part of the meeting is when we feel required to talk about the novel. Certainly we’ve all had busy months where we couldn’t finish a book and nervously made such jokes about ourselves. But deep down it isn’t true. We read!

Some people–whether because of a failure in education, a short-sighted set of values, or a life experience that sadly never led them to the epiphany that comes when we read something that changes us–cannot see that reading is more than a diversion, a way for idle people to pass time. Feel sorry for these critics and the empty spot they carry inside; take their harsh comments, smile, and ply them with another great book; but never for a moment believe them.

Membership in a book group is a chance to join together with others in celebration of a cherished activity, an activity that gives its practitioners a broader understanding of the world; that nourishes our sense of empathy; that quietly fills our minds with a wealth of practical knowledge in fields we will never directly experience; that builds the strength of heart that can only come when we know we are not alone in feeling our greatest frailties, our starkest fears, but also in our capacity to find inner strength in the face of adversity.  These are just a few of the gains we reap from the wonderful vicarious experience of reading books.

So as you travel on a cold winter evening to the last book group of your year, make sure you take a few moments to celebrate with your friends, your combatants, your fellow travelers of the page. You are sharing one of the great triumphs of the human spirit. You are supporting each other in one of the best ways you can spend your precious time. Reading is important work.

I want to discuss the book’s merits as literature. I want to discuss character motivation, and foreshadowing, and plot surprises. I want to discuss an author’s skill in tying together his threads at the end. As for the actual content of the book – its historical setting, its social setting, the issues at stake – well, those are secondary at best, in most cases simply a pretext for storytelling. What we discuss in our book group is how we responded to the emotional situation of the novel – how we felt about the hero’s choice at the end of the story, for instance. The actual situation – the cathedral-building or fly-fishing of the piece – is generally frosting.

  Daniel L. Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes is making me re-think this prejudice, particularly in terms of what makes a book good for discussion. As I approach the halfway point, he’s already had two superb set-pieces of narrative – the desperate race upriver to save the lives of his wife and daughter who are dying of malaria, and the terrifying night a boat trader gets the men of the village drunk and convinces them they should kill Daniel and his family. Still, beyond the survival of his family, this book is about more. It’s about a man encountering a people who think entirely differently than he does, and trying to understand their values from their language. And as Everett is challenged in his beliefs, so is the reader. Suddenly what you thought of as simply reality and common sense is thrown into question.

Should people help each other? I don’t think of that as Christian, I think of it as human. If a woman who’s giving birth all alone happens to develop complications and screams for help, should her sister help her? A no-brainer, right? That seems beyond a cultural value to me, yet the Piraha people hear her screams and let the woman die. Her sister does not go to help her. Emotionally I flipped out, and this was not a plot point.

Child-rearing is another one. Should children be protected from dangers they don’t understand? If a toddler wanders too close to the fire, should a mother jerk the child away or let the little guy get burned? An infant is playing with a huge machete, twisting it and flipping it and bringing it very close to removing body parts, and then he accidentally drops the knife. His mother kindly picks it up – and hands it back to him.

I had to slam on the mental brakes for these. They were violations of my cultural values that actually made me mad. This wasn’t anthropological. This was about basic human compassion. Wasn’t it?

The sexual openness wasn’t so hard for me to accept, although its almost comical to watch poor Daniel the Christian believer get pushed to the wall: he comes home to find his eight-year-old daughter watching wide-eyed as two naked men wrestle laughing on the floor together, grabbing each other’s genitals. When he scolds them, they look at him in complete bafflement. Didn’t the guy have a sense of humor?

My liability here is I’ve always found anthropology fascinating, ever since my first college course. To me this is utterly compelling stuff, but I need to be fair. I don’t want to inflict this on unwilling minds. I don’t want to have my literature-hungry reading group suddenly find themselves dumped unceremoniously into the heart of the Amazonian rain forest with a linguist.

Have I lost my mind? Is this really the right book for December – the story of a good Christian family who go native?

Who knows, but I’ve still got time to read another chapter before catching the bus to work.

Goodbye, Wisconsin by Glenway Wescott.  Borderland Books Edition, 2008. 

For many years, in the back of my mind, there lurked a book with a title that intrigued me and angered me at the same time: Glenway Wescott’s Goodbye, Wisconsin.  What is wrong with us and why is everyone always trying to leave, I wondered but never bothered to read this book to find out. 

Wescott found success early with a book called The Grandmothers and then the collection reviewed here.  Expatriated in Paris, his companions included Ernest Hemingway (who modeled a character after him), Gertrude Stein and Isadora Duncan.  While living abroad, he continued to write about his home state, never kindly.  After success in the forties, he then went into a long drought, fell from fame and never really achieved the kind of status that other writers of his period, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, did. 

The opening essay that gives this book its title is a challenge to read today.  Why is it that past generations always seem better educated than I am?  Don’t answer that one. 

Imbued with a sense of superiority, the essay tackles issues at a level that requires a classical education to understand.  There is no doubt that the essay is a bitter attack on the Middle West, including the people who live there.  Typical is this slap at a Wisconsin denominational college wherein Wescott believed that “the better part of genius, if any turned up here, would be discretion.” 

He states that the Middle West is “a state of mind of people born where they do not like to live.”  As to why he would have fled, Wescott makes it clear “how much sweeter to come and go than to stay, that by way of judgment upon Wisconsin.”

Ouch.

Undaunted, I was still determined to read the short stories in this collection for more clues as to what was (is) wrong with my home state.

In this collection, published at the height of his popularity and critical acclaim, are some challenging short stories.  Each has well crafted characters, a strength that seems to be a Wescott hallmark.  However, what becomes evident in each story is that Wescott was interested in the failings of our residents, not in their achievements.

Clues to Wescott’s own restlessness can be found in stories like “Adolescence” in which a young farm boy feels even more isolated when his friend talks him into dressing as a woman for a masquerade party.  The message comes when the boy hopes for a day when there would “be no more disguises, nor need to be taken care of, nor harm in being neglected.”  This story is the one most overtly dealing with Wescott’s sexual orientation and the challenges it caused. 

In “The Runaways,” a man and wife try to escape Wisconsin only to recreate their despair in a new setting, learning “that romance is for those who see, never for those who do, and underpaid as a profession.”  Other escapees do not fair much better.  In “The Sailor,” using a character from a previously published short story called “Prohibition” wherein the boy Terrie is denied his right to escape by joining the Navy, Terrie returns from his naval service on the coast of France, none the better for the effort.  His failure to find true love in the French woman he befriends is recounted to his Wisconsin farm brothers to no avail and now he is cast adrift with “no desire to stay there on the farm with a brother who did not know enough about life to understand what he was talking about.”

Part of that misunderstanding may extend both to Wescott as a human being and to his contemporary readers.  That is fine because it is that controversy that would make this a great book for a book discussion.  A reader group would be challenged to find the meaning in the predestination story “Like a Lover” or in the nature of the threat in the story “In a Thicket?” 

The pathos shown in the ultimate fate of a composer forced to return from Paris in “The Whistling Swan” closes the collection.  Here, the character resigns himself to a life in Wisconsin, symbolized by the death of a swan, and it is made to feel like the sealing of his fate. 

Certainly, the nearer you are to Wisconsin or the Middle West, the more the meaning to this book.  But I believe the trauma suffered by these characters is universal and this collection, newly published by Borderland Books, would be a challenge to any discussion group. 

How often have you come across a book that offers too much to discuss in an hour or an hour and a half (whatever the length of your discussion session)?  A book that completely overflows with interesting characters, incidents, and plot twists, as well as brilliant philosophical observations, thought-provoking insights, and just plain great writing?  Such a book is Saturday, by Ian McEwan, the acclaimed author of Atonement, and it is the book that my group discussed last week (or at least we discussed part of it!).

I’m not complaining.  Saturday is a wonderful novel, and it provided the basis for a very stimulating discussion.  The difficulty lay in the fact that we couldn’t cover all of it, and as the leader, I had to decide what we wouldn’t focus on, simply because of the time constraints.

If you’ve read any of McEwan’s books, you know that he is a superb writer.  People always comment on how well he handles language, how beautifully he puts words together.  Beyond that, he tells a compelling story, and a story with a purpose — to make the reader think about life and how it is lived, and often to think about the act of writing and its value to civilization.

For instance, in Saturday, he is telling us about one day in a man’s life — but the account seems to stand for his entire life, and our lives, as well.  McEwan is talking about how we live now, in the wake of 9/11, how seriously we have been changed and what this means.  His protagonist is a neurosurgeon living in London, a man with a profession he embraces passionately, with a wife and family he adores, with good friends and other interests, and a comfortable home.  How quickly everything can change, based on a careless accident and an encounter with a disturbed ruffian.  But this is just what occurs on the surface.  McEwan also explores the shadows of war and global unrest, fear of ageing and the approach of death, and the power of poetry to affect men’s emotions, and in some ways, to alter lives.

Once you start talking about Saturday, you won’t want to stop.  In fact, I’ve had book group members come up to me days later and start out, “About that book, I’ve been thinking…”

Yes, too much to talk about in just one session.  But perhaps that’s the best kind of book for a really great discussion.

 It’s the time of year for bests, and Amazon has released its Best Books of 2008, consisting of the Top 100 Editors’ Picks and the Top 100 Customer Favorites.  The only title to show up among the first 10 picks on both lists is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, no doubt because of the Oprah connection. Here are the top 10 editor picks:

1. The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (This title was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.)

2. Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg

3. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

4. The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

5. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

6. The Likeness by Tana French

7. Serena by Ron Rash

8. So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger

9. The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

10. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu

I had an English professor in college who told us there were four reasons for reading. Reading for information is self-explanatory, from history to how-to. Reading for the joys of literature – the art of character, plot, language. Distinct from that was reading to escape reality, from romantic time-filler to genre fantasy. The fourth reason was inspiration.

  All four reasons kick in reading Daniel L. Everett’s Amazonian memoir, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. Everett goes back thirty years to tell you what happened when he was twenty-six and a gung-ho Christian missionary and linguist who decided to take his brave young family into the Amazon jungle to study a tribe who spoke a language like no other living tongue, to translate a gospel into their language and save their souls.

The happy Piraha people had other ideas. The soul that ended up getting saved was the author’s own.

This compelling, addicting memoir is not only a family survival saga and a study in linguistics, it’s also filled with anthropology, philosophy and pure jungle adventure all rolled into one, the story of one man’s personal conversion from orthodox Western religion to a spiritual celebration of life.

I’ve read the first fifty pages, I’m completely spellbound, and I’m only pausing long enough to write this blog. Right now Daniel’s wife and daughter are both deathly sick with malaria, the poor man is freaking out as they slowly make their way toward medical help in an Amazonian ferryboat moving at six-knots an hour up river, the captain has refused to hurry, they’ve just come to a mysterious stop, and the entire crew has just abandoned the boat all dressed in identical soccer uniforms.

The easy pleasures of a droll, straightforward narrative style and a genuinely likeable husband and father are enhanced even further by a banquet of facts. I had no idea that the Amazonian rain forest is nearly the same size as the continental United States. More than one third of all known species on earth live in the Amazon. This brave family has just stepped into a world “without Western entertainment, without electricity, without doctors, dentists, or telephones,” a world where you shake out your gym shorts in the morning to make sure they don’t contain scorpions or tarantulas.

As for the book’s title, it’s not really a danger warning at all, it’s the idiomatic way the tribe says good-night, the equivalent of “Sweet dreams!”

That’s the single thing I’m most fascinated by – the tribe. They have no words for “I’m sorry” or “thank you.” That in itself intrigues me. The concepts don’t apply to the Piraha people. And so even though the first three reasons for reading are certainly active as I hungrily follow the story, it’s the fourth reason for reading that’s luring me on – I want to know about the ways and beliefs of this tribe that converted a missionary without even trying.

All right, this blog is long enough. Back to my book, where poor Daniel, stranded in an Amazonian ferryboat without a crew, is frantically waiting for a soccer game to end, watching over his delirious wife and daughter…

Fa la la.

What’s a book group to do in December? Half your members won’t have time to read a book, and if you add to their task loads, many will ditch the group altogether, taking one of the other, less-demanding, holiday invitations they’ve received.

You can just pack up the group for a month and come back in January, but there’s something sad about that. If your book group members are also friends like mine are, it’s an important part of the season to spend an evening with them. Here are ten ideas for how to handle that awkward holiday meeting. Pick one or mix and match them for memorable, seasonal fun.

1. FOOD ‘N PRESENTS

It’s not original, but everyone has extra goodies around during the holiday season. Bring them to the group along with small bookish presents. Bookmarks are cheap and welcomed by readers. Or exchange books, either serious gifts from your overpacked shelves or silly white elephant titles.

2. HOLIDAY READINGS

As we librarians discover when we put together the Obligatory Holiday Display, many longer books devoted to the season are author cash-ins and other less-than-inspiring fare, but there are lots of wonderful short works. Whether your taste runs to Jean Sheperd stories, The Christmas Carol or David Sedaris’s acerbic Santaland Diaries, there are dozens of good choices to pass around a book group circle. If you aren’t a Christmas mood, try poetry or reading a play aloud.

3. DECORATE A TREE IN THE STYLE OF A BOOK

Pick a well-known novel or a literary genre and decorate a Christmas tree with ornaments inspired by it. Whether the result is a Seussian squiggle or a dark Russian masterpiece, a spicy romantic blush inducer or a futuristic dystopian nightmare, you’ll have a lot of fun. Consider donating the result to a charity tree festival, a local library, or bookstore. Or blame it on the mulled wine and hide it in the basement.

4. RECAP YOUR YEARLY READING

Instead of reading something new, ask members to briefly talk about their favorite book of the year or their favorite book-related moment.

5. GAMES AND PUZZLES

Get one of your clever members to design book-related games or puzzles. One possibility is a bookish version of Balderdash, in which each player invents a one-paragraph plot synopsis for a lesser-known book title. Mix the creations with the real plot synopsis, having one player read them all aloud, then have players guess which synopsis is real. Players score points by guessing the correct synopsis or when others guess that their fake synopsis is real. Hilarity will ensue! For a simpler version, reverse the game, requiring players only to invent titles for a synopsis.

6. HONOR FALLEN AUTHORS

This is less cheerful, but consider taking a few minutes to remember great authors who have passed away in the last year. Remembrances can take the form of short passages from their work read aloud or short personal tributes by members about the impact these writers had on them or others.

7. INVITE FAMILY & FRIENDS

Bring loved ones and friends who are readers to a holiday meeting. It’s a good way for the book group members to get to know each other better. Make sure you have good food and a few fun distractions if you choose this option: It might result in the recruitment of some new readers. 

8. COMPILE A LIST OF FAVORITES

Ask each member to bring a list of their favorite authors or books. Read them aloud and briefly discuss. Make sure that someone compiles the result into a list that can be distributed later to each other and future members. A variation is to list the books that inspired you to become readers.

9. NOMINATE YOUR BOOK CHOICES FOR THE UPCOMING YEAR

Instead of reading something new, use the last meeting of the year to develop your forthcoming schedule. If that task is too heavy, put together a joke schedule: a year of terrible books, silly books, or books for an imaginary audience–member spouses, the Nobel Prize committee, ill-behaved people, or Martian anthropologists trying to understand Earth culture–for instance.

10. READ CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Assign your members to introduce an excellent children’s book at the meeting. Children’s books are short and not much trouble in a busy month, and you may help your members find gift ideas for children on their shopping lists. Consider collecting everyone’s selections and giving them as a donation to a worthy school library, family, pediatrician’s office, or charity.

Those are a few of my ideas for the holiday meeting, but I’d like to hear about what your groups do in December. Please share comments so that other book group organizers can benefit from your creativity and experience!

Here’s an idea for a book group. Keir just sent me news about an original Web series to air on CBS.com called Novel Adventures. It’s centered around a group of friends who belong to a book club; but in each episode, instead of meeting to talk about the book, they go off (in Saturn cars, apparently) and have adventures instead. According to the press release, “each of the eight episodes will focus on a different novel or series and the subsequent adventures that the books inspire in the four women.” The novels the women won’t be reading, or at least won’t be discussing, are

• The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
• Girls Like Us (Sheila Weller)
• The Bourne Trilogy (Robert Ludlum)
• Monster of Florence (Douglas Preston)
• The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry (Kathleen Flinn)
• Gone With the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
• Life So Far (Betty Friedan)
• The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society (Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows)
• Knit Two (Kate Jacobs)

We hadn’t discussed a nonfiction book in a while, and because the first Tuesday of the month fell on Voting Day this year, I was a little nervous about what the turnout might be. It turns out, the book group was a welcome distraction; the room was packed and discussion was as lively as ever.

We met to discuss Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between. Stewart, a Scot and historian, decided to walk across Afghanistan in 2002, in the winter after the United States and its allies had arrived in search of Bin Laden and to oust the Taliban. Stewart admits that his walk was a stubborn and even crazy thing to do, but he did it anyway. Stewart followed the route taken by the 15th-century emperor Babur, he takes us deeper into the mountain tribes of Afghanistan, their complex histories, shifting allegiances and isolated lives.

Because there were no discussion questions available, I made some for the group. Here is what I came up with:

• Why do you think that this book was selected for incoming students in the Fall of 2008 at Brown and Brandeis Universities?

• Why does Stewart embark on this journey? What does he hope/expect to find?

• Why is Stewart so fascinated with Babur and his journey? What did you learn from the passages from Babur’s journal?

• What was Stewart’s experience with the Afghans he meets along his journey? What about his traveling companions (including Babur, the dog)? What did you think of his letters of introduction?

• How does Stewart view Afghanistan? Does his book give you a better understanding of the country?

• How does Stewart write about theTurquoise Mountain? Why is this area significant? How does he feel about the Afghans digging up historical artifacts from the area? Why do you think Stewart named his renewal organization Turquoise Mountain?

• What did you think about Stewart’s view of the postcolonials of the past and the supposed ‘neocolonials’ of today? (pg. 247) Where does Stewart fit in?

• In Stewart’s TIME article, “How to Save Afghanistan,” he writes, “Creating a narrative of national identity is not a technical engineering problem but more a question of mythmaking.” In America, we have seen the mythos of the American dream and character invoked countless times in our present election cycle. Given what you have learned in Stewart’s book, do you think a national identity is possible for Afghanistan?

We touched one some of these questions, but kept coming back to Rory Stewart’s writing (a little dry, removed), his journey (amazing but at times read as improbable), and his views of the country and what we should and shouldn’t be doing there. The group was more intrigued and interested in Stewart’s story after his walk, and wished a new forward or afterward had been provided.

Stewart now runs a nonprofit organization, Turquoise Mountain, aimed at renewing and restoring the city of Kabul and supporting its local businesses and traditional crafts.

Reading articles by and about Stewart truly enlarged the group’s appreciation and understanding of The Places In Between. But I must admit that as I was reading it myself, I had concerns about its discussability. Sometimes the books I worry about the most turn out to have the most dynamic discussions, all the more so for proving me wrong.

The hardest book-of-the-month to choose for our book club and our bookstore always comes at the end of the year.

It can’t just be the best book. It needs to be short enough to read during the most socially-crowded month. It needs to be upbeat enough that it works with the holidays, not against them. It needs to be the kind of book that can also be a gift. Sometimes I’m lucky and stumble on a book like Orhan Pamuk’s wonderful Istanbul or Dominika Dery’s charming The Twelve Little Cakes, and everyone’s happy. The book sells well in the bookstore, the club members thoroughly enjoy it. One year we read W. Somerset Maugham’s very, very short The Painted Veil and went to see the excellent film together as a holiday outing. It was one of our most delightful times.

Unfortunately, the books I’m reading this month just aren’t right for December.

  Take Max Blecher’s Scarred Hearts, the new translation of a Romanian novel from 1937, written by a young Jewish man with spinal tuberculosis who died at the age of twenty-nine. The novel takes place in a sanatorium in France, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before, though it has echoes of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. But it’s much grimmer, and debilitating disease does not make good holiday reading. The inmates wear body casts they call corsets, and the best that secret lovers can do is rub their casts against each other. I bailed when two lovers got a little carried away and the man’s open fistules drained, creating a disgusting, green wet mess and causing the permanent removal of my bookmark.

I toyed briefly with the well-written memoir by Christopher Lukas, Blue Genes, told by the brother of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who committed suicide. But discovering a family secret of suicidal tendencies isn’t holiday reading, either. For any other month but December.

  There’s Asne Seierstad’s brave, troubling The Angel of Grozny. I adore Asne Seierstad – she’s one brave, committed Norwegian journalist whose book, The Bookseller of Kabul, was a shout in the silence when it first came out – and her new book, about Chechnya, does have a cute kid on the cover – true, he’s a war orphan with a machine gun in his hands and appears to be imitating a warrior’s leap, but still, a kid. It could pass for a holiday book – it does have “angel” in the title – though it’s probably more heartbreaking than heartwarming.

  Aiiieeeee, I’m running out of books – and then this afternoon I was handed an advance by Karen Pennington, our Random House rep, at a presentation to the University Book Store staff of holiday titles. Coming out next Tuesday is Daniel L. Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, a memoir of a Christian missionary and his family in the Amazonian jungle who encounter a tribe who convert the author away from fundamentalism. Now there’s one I’ve never heard of before! It doesn’t look like an easy read, and the author’s interest in linguistics may go beyond mine, but the beliefs of the tribe look absolutely fascinating. Hmmm, maybe I’m not out of books yet…

I’m standing in line to vote at 5:30 am so I can be reasonably assured that I’ll get to work on time when it happens. It always happens when I have to wait for a while.

No one wants to talk any more about the issues. But they don’t want to stare into their quickly cooling cups of coffee, either. It’s too dark and quiet and everyone is waiting for someone to say something that isn’t election-related and might annoy some of us, because we’re gonna be here awhile.

I pull out my favorite ‘uncomfortable cocktail party silence’ question. I turn to the man behind me and ask, “So, what are you reading?” He widens his eyes a moment, then smiles and says, “I just finished The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck. I’m from Wichita, just like the main character and it was a spooky story about life during wartime. What’s really disturbing is you never find out where the soldiers are, what war they’re fighting, or why.”

The man in front of me turns around to both of us to say, “I read that. It reminded me of The Road by that guy who wrote that movie with that creepy dude with the bad haircut.” I grinned. “You mean Cormac McCarthy.” “Yeah, him. What’s that book that the movie was based on?” “No Country for Old Men.” “That’s the one. Creepy. Bloody. But way cool, you know? I didn’t mind the violence.”

The two men took off comparing recent movies and readings when I felt a tug on my sleeve. It was the first man’s daughter. She’d gotten up early just to watch her parents vote. “I’m reading Junie B. Jones number 9, the one where she’s a crook.” Her mother grinned down at her and told me, “It’s Junie B. Jones is not a Crook. And I’m the one doing the reading, at bedtime. My book group picked up Luncheon of the Boating Party. It was recommended by some other woman in another book group.”

Before I could visibly blanche, one of the poll workers called out, “P through Z! Last name, P through Z! This way, please!” I darted out of the long line and hustled into the polling place. I don’t think I could handle talking about that book one more time this year.

It’s definitely time for a change.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

My library was recently awarded the We the People Created Equal Bookshelf under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association.  Amongst the 21 books that came to our library was both an English language and Spanish language version of the classic speculative fiction novel, Flower for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. 

Back on September 7th, Ted Balcom asked “Do We Neglect Authors Once They’re Dead and Gone?” and I tried to address that issue with Mary Roberts Rinehart only to discover a major lack of racial sensitivity in The Circular Staircase.

Tangentially, Keyes’ novel about Charlie Gordon does not use our contemporary sensitive words for people who are challenged.  Instead, Charlie is a mentally retarded thirty-two year old man who is driven to learn.  While he attends Alice Kinnian’s classes at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults, he is recommended by her for a radical experiment to raise his low IQ.  Hopefully, this novel can still be appreciated despite the language that is now viewed as not sensitive.   

This novel uses the language of its time and it has a rather interesting history on its own.  The original idea for this novel came in a short story written by Keyes for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, published in 1959, while Keyes was a high school English teacher.  The short story went on to win a Hugo Award at the World Science Fiction Convention. 

It was first filmed in 1961 when “The United States Steel Hour” produced “The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon,” with Cliff Robertson as Charlie, from a screenplay written by the author and James Yaffe.  Robertson so liked the role he retained the rights with the hope to turn it into a major motion picture. 

Keyes went on to expand the short story into the novel we are all most familiar with and managed to win a Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1966. 

The film, with a screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, was made in 1968 and again starred Cliff Robertson as Charlie with Claire Bloom as Alice.  Cliff Robertson won the Oscar for best actor for his portrayal. 

Is this novel still popular enough to host a book discussion?  Our library can answer yes for when we received the grant we decided to kick off the celebration with two book discussions:  one for young adults and one for everyone. 

This was the first young adult book discussion our library has ever had.  We got nine to sign up and six to show up.  Our discussion was led by Dr. Edwin Block, professor of English at Marquette University, who is our twice-annual Greendale Reads discussion leader.  Dr. Block wrote specific questions for middle school aged attendees and had a very successful discussion.  The reason why seems to lie in the universal feeling we all have that something in us is wrong and a magic silver bullet can cure it. 

In the case of Charlie, it is his intelligence.  He says, “I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.”  What person, especially a middle school aged reader, cannot relate to being viewed as different? 

What stayed with me the most while reading this novel again was the incredible loneliness a person can experience if they view themselves as an outsider.  Flowers for Algernon is not a happy book to read and its message is a warning not a solution to problems that still plague us as humans today. 

Two days after the young adult discussion, we had twelve sign up and eleven attendees at the all-purpose discussion on the book.  While that night Dr. Block had slightly different questions, we found ourselves drifting back to the issue of what did the kids say. 

The adults were able to discuss issue with less restraint that the young adults including the issues of Charlie’s blossoming interest in sex.  Ultimately, I would judge that both groups got something out of the discussions and came away favorably impressed with this classic. 

While I hate to see this novel confined to either the world of science fiction or limited by being tagged a young adult novel, I think it fits in both categories.  However, I also believe this is a novel that has universal appeal and should work with any book discussion that wants to tackle its tough issues that still resonant in our world today. 

I’d never heard of him. Have you? Suddenly, out of nowhere, someone with the unlikely name of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio is the Nobel Prize-winner for Literature, top dog in the literary world of 2008, and nobody I know had ever heard that name before or read a single sentence by him.

  When the University Book Store was lucky enough to get in a small shipment of his most recent novel, The Prospector, still in hardback, I snatched one. I’ve been reading it ever since. I’m approaching the halfway point, and I’m frankly baffled.

The Prospector has all the elements of a novel by Joseph Conrad – tropical sun, remote islands, the sea, colonials and natives – but it’s as though the story has been written by Proust, so it’s all memory images and living out childhood dreams and moving in slow motion. There are very few characters – Alexis, the young narrator, and his sister, Laure, their mother, and now Captain Bradmer. So it’s not about character interaction, that’s for sure. Le Clezio doesn’t seem very interested in people.

Not only that, but there have been no plot twists or surprises.

  You see why I’m a little confused. Though written in first person, our narrator Alexis L’Etang hardly takes you into his confidence. He’d much rather tell you about the rocks and beaches. What is this novel trying to do, then, with all this slow, dense writing? I’d have to call it an evocation, with elaborate, almost ecstatic descriptions coming at the reader in rivers of detail, the words all conjured up by memory. The initial sequence, upon which the whole book will repeatedly reflect, is the young narrator growing up on the island of Mauritius, before the summer of the cyclone. The cyclone sequence itself, which comes at the conclusion of the childhood opening, is unforgettable, truly a Steven Spielberg moment – water forcing its way under the doors, creeping across a living room carpet, a frantic mother clutching her two children as their house is gouged, smashed, shattered, and ripped apart all around them.

Alexis is at sea now, on board the Zeta heading for the island of Agalega, and I’m definitely ready for some plot twist or character surprise. We’ve been at sea a long time. For what? A lot of sea description. Hardly a flicker of interest in the other men on board. Another ten pages, and I’m frustrated. I’m trapped in the mind of a young man who is oblivious to other people. I’m not as fascinated by the sea as Alexis is. I suspect, if Le Clezio hadn’t won the Nobel Prize, I might consider bailing here. But I’m going to stick it out a bit longer…

  As it turns out, a hundred pages longer. Though the story moves forward at glacial speed, the language builds a kind of trance. Midway through my Saturday I look up and realize it’s getting dark outside and I’ve been at it all day, hunkered down in my armchair, with or without my cat, sailing for the island of Rodrigues and meeting the fascinating Maraf girl with her harpoon, Ouma. The whole thing has an utterly classic feel, gorgeous language, thoughtful sentences, an industrious hero straight out of Robinson Crusoe in a plot veering more toward Green Mansions.

Alexis has searched for his father’s treasure, he’s fallen in love with an island girl, and now he’s enlisted and survived the horrors of the First World War. How all this hangs together is beyond me, but unless I get a really tempting phone call I’m going to be anchored to my armchair tonight until I reach the end of this voyage. Which is only another sixty pages…

I didn’t finish until this morning. I was tired and didn’t want to rush the ending. Now I’m done with the novel, and I’m no clearer about the experience. I don’t feel rewarded, I don’t have that exhilaration that comes from a book that’s enriched me. Spending over three hundred pages in the mind of a man who finds rocks, trees and sea birds far more interesting than human beings has been a bit of a burden. Alexis is so off in his own world there’s not really much to like about him. He’s constantly walking off without explanation and leaving his beloved behind – like volunteering to fight in the world war without telling her. Ouma, regrettably, is little more than a male fantasy without one original characteristic or trait. Okay, she uses a harpoon. These characters don’t have depth. Treacherous cousin Ferdinand barely steps on stage. There’s no writer’s joy in bringing these characters to life. Their actions are often reported bluntly, from afar.

That said, let’s try to figure out why Le Clezio could have been singled out for the Nobel Prize. What does he have more of than anyone else? The novel is definitely anti-colonial. There’s a nightmarish revolt at a sugar refinery early in the novel where an oppressive overseer is thrown alive into the oven. In the background of the story we hear about revolts. And there’s one key scene where Alexis goes to work in the field beside the men he’s supposed to be watching over, and loses his job because of it.

I had hoped to use the Nobel Prize-winner’s The Prospector, coming out in paperback later this month, as my December selection for the book club. I’ve got six pages of notes on it. Unfortunately, judging by the way I feel now after having spent the weekend reading it, the search for my December book still goes on.

This week I learned that the bookshop where I got my first job after college is closing. The Jeffery Amherst Bookshop will be closing its doors this year after its owners, Howard and Joy Gersten, approaching their 80s, finally retire.

The Jeffery Amherst Bookshop and College Store, situated on Pleasant Street, across from the lovely greenspace in Amherst, Massachusetts, was a plum of the independent bookselling world. It was cozy, and its wooden shelves gave it the feel of a cabin stocked to the gills with treasures. The Gerstens hired people who loved to talk about books and that made the bookstore beloved in the community.

I worked in the College Store as an Assistant Textbook Buyer and academic books buyer. For the two years I was there, in Fall and Winter semester, I trained the “rushies,” the temporary workers hired to receive the textbooks and help the floods of students find their assigned course texts for Amherst College, UMASS and Hampshire College. It was fun, exciting and stressful work. I still remember trudging into the snow to lug heavy Ingram boxes into the shop. I remember fondly the wine and cheese readings for the Amherst and UMASS professors. But most of all I remember the thrill of working with books and readers, of working with others who shared my passion for the written word.

Amherst also happened to be a place where literature was in the air, and not just because of the ghost of Emily Dickinson. I saw poets like James Tate and Dara Wier walking the streets. Everyone had stories of run-ins with literary greats. My friend Drew told me about the time Norton Juster, author of the children’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth, came in to the bookshop. Drew said to him, “When I was a kid The Phantom Tollbooth was my favorite book.” Juster replied, “Why isn’t it your favorite book now?” Drew also used to steal the poetry (and money) left on Emily Dickinson’s grave by admirers, and I think Drew has moved back to the area, so fans beware!

But The Jeffery Amherst Bookshop will also have a place in my heart for a much more personal reason: it’s where I met my husband. And strangely enough, when we moved to Seattle and started working in a bookstore together (again), we met another Jeffery Amherst alum. It is a small world, indeed.

Where would book groups be without independent bookstores? I cannot imagine a world without them. They change our lives one book at a time. Here’s a toast to a happy retirement for the Gerstens and to a bookshop that will be missed by many customers in Amherst and beyond.

I know I’ve blogged numerous times about Luncheon of the Boating Party and the book discussions I’ve attended for it, but it occurred to me last night how very differently readers will approach a book.

This is nothing surprising for any of us who facilitate book groups, but how often do we get to see this postulate in action? For the fourth time this year, I lead discussion on Susan Vreeland’s wildly popular fictional account of the summer Renoir spent painting his masterpiece.

The local AAUW book group was completely fascinated with the characters assembled for the painting. They loved the act of flipping back and forth from the pages of the book to the reproduction of the painting provided. While doing this, one of the attendees piped up that she thought the painting was also a character in the novel.

She pointed out that the many emotions and actions of the models, on and off the canvas, were qualities that contributed to the development of the painting. She had us all convinced when she pointed out the dramatic change in the painting once Circe was removed from the scene. Both the painting and the other models’ lives were impacted with the absence of this pivotal woman.

I was hooked. I hadn’t heard this theory before, but it worked for me and the rest of the group. I have so much discussable material on this book that came from all the groups, that I don’t know if I’ll ever use the publisher provided reading guide again.