The Dixie Association: Avid Readers’ Special Event
August 19, 2008 at 5:49 pm | In Avid Readers, Uncategorized | Leave a CommentI hope to see everyone this Thursday at 6PM for a special reading by Arkansas author Donald “Skip” Hays. He’ll be reading from his novel The Dixie Association and answering questions about the novel and the writer’s craft. The Dixie Association is not only my favorite sports book, it’s one of my favorite books, period. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending the book to a person who cares little if anything for baseball. The Dixie Association is a hilarious, often raucous look at life in the American South, and Arkansas, in particular. The plot centers around Hog Durham, an ex cattle rustler and small time thief, and his triumphant season playing first base for the Arkansas Reds. The Reds are a motley crew of characters, including Cuban refugees, a Native American spitballer, a washed-up drunk knuckleballer, and even a beautiful young woman who substitutes for Hog at first base. During their season, the Reds encounter religious fundamentalists, the good old boy justice system, and political pressure from the media and aspiring politicians alike. These encounters make for a wild read.
The reading promises to be an entertaining one. As always, newcomers are welcome to join us.
Changes for Avid Readers
August 19, 2008 at 5:23 pm | In Avid Readers, Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: Add new tag
First and foremost, I’d like to apologize for becoming a little lax in my blogging duties. The summer reading program was extremely successful for us this year, which means that we were very busy, and the blog got a little lost in the shuffle. So, some news:
The Avid Readers Book Club is undergoing a few changes. Beginning in September, the club will expand to two different meeting times. The original Avid Readers club will continue to read award-winning titles and authors, but will now meet in the Shiloh Room noon-1PM the third Tuesday of each month. Cindy McCauley will be taking my spot as the group facilitator.
Details of the first Genre Book Club meeting are on the Genre Book Club Page!
The March: Avid Readers’ discussion (cancelled)
July 3, 2008 at 7:44 pm | In Avid Readers, Books! Books! Books! | Leave a CommentI should have known better when I decided to forge ahead with the Avid Readers’ discussion scheduled for the eve of a major national holiday. July 3rd is just not the time to get together with your book club. Odds are that even if you don’t go in for the fireworks, picnics, and John Wayne movie marathons, you still travel or take part in some family gathering. In a bit of rash thinking last month, I made the call to keep our regular meeting time intact. Alas, it was not meant to be.
However, we did read a good book: E. L. Doctorow’s The March. Since we didn’t actually convene to discuss the novel, the following critique is all mine. Rest assured, I will get the opinions of the other members and update this post accordingly. Unless, of course, they all completely agree with everything I say, and let’s face it, the odds of that are slim.
As with Doctorow’s Ragtime, the author’s most celebrated work, The March is made up of a group of entertwining stories that sometimes intersect and/or diverge. It’s a structural device that is good for conveying the historical sweep and import of the events described, but it’s also one that destroys the possibility of any quick, easy plot summary. Perhaps the best way to describe the plot of The March is to simply describe some of the characthers found therein.
There is General Sherman himself, the Union general who is leading a prolonged march into the American south. Sherman is a brilliant military strategist, but is also mentally unstable, and has a hard time reconciling his romantic ideals about war with the reality of the desctruction that his troops cause.
Pearl is a freed slave who leaves her Georgia plantation to follow the troops. She finds herself disguised as a drummer boy, and eventually ends up assisting the battlefield surgeon Colonel Wrede Sartorious. The surgeon is a German immigrant who is so deeply invested in his surgical operations that he is detached from the violence around him.
Will and Arly are Confederate soldiers who find themselves defecting from side to side in order to survive. Arly is a particularly clownish character who provides much of the comic relief in the novel. His philosophical discourses seem to be at odds with both sides of the conflict. Strangely, Arly sees himself as protected by a divine power to carry out great deeds.
General Kilpatrick is a Union general under Sherman’s command. Kilpatrick is a crude tactician who has a reputation for behaving recklessly and getting soldiers killed. He is presented as a psychological foil for Sherman. Unlike his commander, Kilpatrick has no illusions about the glory of war, and sees each conquered city, town, or plantation as a means to achieve personal gain.
These characters make up the bulk of the narrative, but there are numerous others who litter the landscape of the novel. Even those characters that are given limited space in the narrative are memorable. Doctorow offers no one-dimensional stock characters during the course of The March. And it is this aspect of the novel that sets it apart from many historical fiction novels. Doctorow presents history as the accumulation of many stories. Even Sherman himself is presented as only one piece of the historical backdrop, and the lives of even the lowliest social stature have a part to play in the drama.
Doctorow’s style is immensely readable, and although the cast of characters seems unweildy or overwhelming in describing the novel, it never seems so in the reading.
Next month, we’ll be meeting at a special time. We’ll get together Thursday, August 21, to discuss Donald Hays’ The Dixie Association. The author himself will be on hand to read from his novel and take part in our discussion. This will be a great opportunity to get to know an Arkansas author and his work. As always, and especially for this event, we welcome visitors and newcomers to take part in the discussion. Copies of The Dixie Association are available at the Information Desk for checkout.
The Meaning of Night: Avid Readers’ discussion 06/05/08
June 7, 2008 at 2:44 pm | In Avid Readers, Books! Books! Books!, Uncategorized | Leave a CommentThe Avid Readers book club convened on a very warm and windy Thursday evening to discuss Michael Cox’s debut novel The Meaning of Night. The novel is complex and lengthy, mixing mystery, suspense, and historical fiction into a potent literary cocktail. The book is subtitled A Confession and is a work of meta-fiction purporting to be the edited and footnoted compilation of a papers recently discovered in a university library. These papers are the first-person account of Edward Glyver, who reveals through twists and turns his meticulously plotted revenge against the one person he blames for his downfall: the rakish literary figure Phoebus Daunt.
The Meaning of Night is set in Victorian-era England, and Cox presents the reader with a thoroughly realized setting. Often the reader is shown the contradictory extremes of life in this era: the grand country estates with lavish sitting rooms, and the filthy gaslight-illuminated streets where thieves and prostitutes populate the night. Glyver is a man of both worlds. He is both highly intelligent and ruthless. He is capable of acts of charity, as well as acts of cruelty and violence. He has the ability to move inconspicuously in high society circles, but he also is a frequent visitor to opium dens and brothels. Ultimately, he is a man driven by a singular purpose: revenge. This complexity makes Glyver a three-dimensional character as well as a fascinating, though unreliable, narrator. Glyver spares the reader none of the sordid details, welcoming us to his narrative by casually describing his murder of random person before gorging himself on an oyster supper. Literally, this takes place in the opening sentences of Glyver’s confession, signalling to the reader that the road ahead will travel through some dark places.
Michael Cox populates his novel with a rich supporting cast of characters. There’s Le Grice, the taciturn soldier and athlete who is Glyver’s friend in London. There’s Glyver’s employer and benefactor, Mr. Tredgold, a lawyer whose firm provides the best defense money can buy, legal or otherwise. There’s Bella, the prostitute who harbors great affection for Glyver. And of course, there’s Phoebus Daunt, the criminal poet, who is the focus of Glyver’s hatred and the target of his vengeance.
The Meaning of Night is a historical fiction that not only captures the feel of the time in its setting, but also adheres to many of the forms and traditions of Victorian fiction. The plot structure and dialogue often echoes Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Indeed, these authors even figure into some of Glyver’s literary digressions. And the novel is full of digressions. Those who like a streamlined narrative that hurtles towards a quick resolution would do well to keep this novel at arm’s length. Glyver is a man of letters, a confirmed bibliophile with a love of obscure texts. Many of these literary allusions are illuminated by the footnotes included by the “editor.”
To say much more of the plot would be to spoil a great mystery. And The Meaning of Night is just that: a mystery. In much the same way that our earlier reading of The Stolen Child revealed other facets of the fantasy genre, our reading of The Meaning of Night showed us another side to the mystery genre. The Meaning of Night is a mystery hammered into the framework of historical literature. It is comparable in many ways to Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost and Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, two other great historical mysteries.
The Avid Readers will meet again on July 3 at 6:30 to discuss E. L. Doctorow’s The March, another work of historical fiction, set this time in the American Civil War. As always, newcomers are welcome. Copies of The March are available for extended checkout at the Information desk in the library. Drop in and pick up a copy, and we’ll see you at the next discussion.
The Stolen Child: Avid Readers’ Discussion 05/01/08
May 3, 2008 at 4:41 pm | In Avid Readers, Books! Books! Books!, Uncategorized | Leave a CommentFor the first time in three months, our book club meeting wasn’t assailed or even threatened by inclement weather. Discounting the near fog-like haze of pollen in the air that was wreaking havoc with the sinuses of a couple members (your faithful blogger included), it was a pleasant Thursday evening to relax, enjoy some snacks, and discuss Keith Donohue’s debut novel The Stolen Child. I’d been looking forward to reading and discussing this book for months. It is the first instance of real genre fiction that we’ve approached, and I was both nervous and excited about the reactions. I’m a great reader of genre fiction. I devour large chunks of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and noir mysteries for my pleasure reading, but I knew from prior discussions that the other Avid Readers were not great fans of the stuff. So it was with some eagerness and some trepidation that I opened the discussion of The Stolen Child.
Donohue’s novel, named for a William Butler Yeats poem in which a child is tempted away from the world of humans by a persuasive faery, is the story of a group of hobgoblins living in the forest somewhere in the northeaster United States. These faeries of the woods are eternally young and live a hardscrabble life in the forest, each waiting for his or her turn to switch places with a young human child and return to the human world. The story begins in the late 1940s with the abduction of Henry Day. Young Henry runs away from home one day and hides himself in a hollow tree, where he is seized by the hobgoblins, transformed through magic rites into one of their kind, and replaced by a changeling who is able to adapt himself physically to take the place of Henry Day. And so the young Henry Day becomes Aniday the hobgoblin/faery, and the changeling takes over Henry’s former life. The novel details the dovetailing development of both characters: Aniday’s search for his lost childhood and coming of age as a complex individual trapped in a child’s body, and Henry’s quest to find his place in the human world and discover the secrets of his long-lost past prior to his life as a changeling.
If all this sounds very outlandish and far-flung, it’s really not. Donohue uses his fantastic premise as a springboard to tell a story about the difference between an idealized childhood and the reality of life in modern America. Likewise, the hobgoblins of his novel are not the characters of Disney fairy tales: rather than living carefree in the forest, they brave the brutal elements and struggle to preserve the secret of their existence from the encroaching modern world. Above all, the strength of the novel is its ability to depict honest human emotion and ground the fantastic plot devices in a realistic setting. While hobgoblins and magic are most certainly the stuff of fantasy, the ephimeral nature of identity and the basic human desire for acceptance and belonging are not. At one point, a character in the novel mentions that many myths and legends are simply different modes of expressions for the human condition. It could be inferred by the reader that this is exactly what Donohue is attempting with The Stolen Child.
For a debut novel, The Stolen Child is a surprisingly polished and cohesive read. All the members of the group mentioned that they would read another of the author’s books. Even those members who were initially reluctant about reading a book categorized as fantasy reacted positively to The Stolen Child. In the end, I think those members walked away with a different impression of what fantasy literature could entail. I suggested also the works of Neil Gaiman and Christopher Moore as other works of fantasy that ground many of the genre’s tropes in the real world and use them to speak about the human condition.
I was very happy indeed that everyone approached this book and its genre with an open mind. I was even happier that their open-mindedness paid off and they enjoyed the book. We all agreed that one of the purposes of our club was to read things we normally wouldn’t read.
Next month, we’ll discuss another debut novel: Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night. Subtitled A Confession, this novel is set in Victorian England and contains the first-person account of a man plotting the death of his sworn enemy. Despite weighing in at a hefty 700 pages, it promises to be an enthralling read if the numerous glowing reviews are to be believed. We’ll meet on Thursday June 5 at 6:30 for light refreshments and discussion. As always, we welcome and encourage all newcomers. Book club copies of The Meaning of Night are available for extended checkout at the information desk. Drop in and pick up a copy, and we’ll look forward to seeing you at our next meeting.
Suite Francaise: Avid Readers’ Discussion 4/3/08
April 9, 2008 at 10:45 pm | In Avid Readers, Books! Books! Books! | Leave a CommentThe Avid Readers book club convened on yet another evening that carried with it the threat of horrible weather. The last two meetings have taken place under the shadow of forecasted snowfall, and this latest meeting was nearly derailed by a predicted deluge of rain and possible hail. Thankfully, the weather rain dried up and the clouds even parted for a few hours to allow for our discussion of Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, a novel about the German occupation of France written during the German occupation of France by a Jewish writer living in France. The novel is actually a combination of two novellas of a proposed five that were written immediately preceding the author’s imprisonment and death at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
The story behind the novel’s publication is just as interesting as the plot of the novel. Nemirovsky wrote the first two novellas were handwritten in tiny script in a leatherbound journal. When Nemirovsky’s husband was later taken to Auschwitz, the couple’s daughters fled, taking with them a suitcase of family documents, including that leatherbound notebook. For years, neither daughter examined the contents of the notebook, fearing that it contained a journal or diary, the contents of which would prove to painful to read. Then, in 2004, the daughters donated their mother’s papers to a museum, and the contents of the notebook were finally discovered, translated, and published.
Suite Francaise is, of course, an unfinished novel, and as such, there is no satisfying conclusion. Although the author did leave behind copious notes about the events of the next part of the novel (and even some notes about the final two parts), so much of what was not written was due to the fact that history had yet to unfold the background against which Nemirovsky’s characters interact. In fact, in the author’s notes (published here as an appendix to the novel), she admits that the final parts of the novel are in “limbo,” as the world events surrounding their plots was still very much in flux.
What we found most enjoyable about Suite Francaise is what sets it apart from most World War II novels: that it focuses on the day to day lives of common people. Nemirovsky wrote that she wanted to portray the comedy of day to day life, and there are moments of quiet comedy in the novel that seem almost incongruous with the calamitous events taking place on the world stage. The events of Suite Francaise, especially the second part, concern mostly common people who are trying to retain some sense of normalcy in the midst of war.
The first novella, Storm in June, uses multiple viewpoints to depict the mass exodus of people from Paris at the threat of the German advance. We see the chaos through the eyes of a middle-aged couple, an aristocratic family (and in one instance, their cat), a famous writer, and a priest travelling with a group of juvenile delinquents. In the second novella, Dolce, Nemirovsky uses a tighter focus, mostly depicting an occupied provincial town through the eyes of a young woman who has trouble reconciling her personal feelings for a German officer with her national identity.
We were evenly split over our opinions for Suite Francaise: some of us liked it wholeheartedly, others didn’t care for it, and still others preferred the first novella to the second. Nevertheless, the novel is an interesting historical artifact and one of the few pieces of historical fiction about the German occupation that is actually contemporary to the period.
We’ll be shifting gears next month to read a bit of modern fantasy. We’ll meet again May 1 to discuss Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child. This novel is the story of a young man who is captured by a group of mysterious forest creatures and raised by them. In his place, the creatures leave a changeling, who is in turn raised by “normal” parents. The novel chronicles the lives of both young men, and highlights their searches for identity.
The Franklin Affair: Avid Readers’ Discussion 3/6/08
March 7, 2008 at 3:59 pm | In Avid Readers, Uncategorized | Leave a CommentA small (or shall we say “very exclusive”) contingent of the Avid Readers group met on a Thursday night to discuss Jim Lehrer’s novel The Franklin Affair. Despite our numbers being thinned by the threat of impending snowfall (none of which actually materialized in our immediate vicinity), we had a short discussion about the novel, which blends historical fiction with a mystery of sorts.
The Franklin Affair is the story of R. Taylor, a writer and historian specializing in early American history, in particular the historical figures of the American Revolution. Most importantly, R. (as he is referred to throughout the novel) is a Ben Franklin fan. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel, aside from the myriad tidbits of historical information about Franklin and his contemporaries, is the portrayal of historians as fanatical followers of particular historical figures. R. self-identifies himself as part of the “Ben crowd,” whereas his girlfriend is a follower of John Hancock (whom R. constantly refers to as a bit player in the grand scheme of American history). When R. comes to Philadelphia for the funeral of his mentor, who is a prize-winning Franklin biographer, R. becomes embroiled in a plagiarism controversy concerning a bestselling Ronald Reagan biography. As if all this upheaval isn’t enough, R’s mentor entrusts him with a secret that may implicate Ben Franklin in a murder and other founding fathers in the cover up thereof. R must balance his loyalties to Franklin’s legacy with his responsibilities as a historian, as well as his love for his deceased mentor, who may also be guilty of plagiarism.
Now, if you think this sounds like a convoluted plot, consider also that it is all crammed into a mere 207 pages. And therein lies the major problem that we had with the novel. The plot, while interesting, seems hurried along, with some characters and storylines simply disappearing without much resolution. Add to this that some of the characters are very thinly drawn and their relationships halfhearted, and you end up with a novel, that while interesting and very readable, ends up not quite satisfying. Lehrer clearly has a deep love for history and he transfers that enthusiasm to his characters to the point of humorous exaggeration. We wondered if the historians of the real world are anything like the fanatics portrayed in the novel, who seem more suited to a Star Trek convention than academia.
Perhaps all this criticism makes The Franklin Affair seem like a terrible book. It’s not. We did feel that it was an interesting concept, albeit one that seemed to cry out for more three-dimensional characters and better resolution. While so much historical fiction feels overwritten and long, The Franklin Affair seemed almost like the first half of a really good book that simply stopped at an arbitrary number of pages. Lehrer is clearly a talented writer, who has a command of clear prose and sense of setting. On those two merits alone, we feel that he is writer worth reading.
Be sure to join us again on April 3 to discuss Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise. This novel was somewhat of a publishing sensation in 2006 upon its translation from the French. The author was a Jewish writer living in France who died in Auschitz. This novel went unpublished until its discovery decades later.
Remember that all newcomers are welcome to jump right in and join the discussion.
The Book Thief: Avid Readers’ Discussion 02/07/08
February 8, 2008 at 8:36 pm | In Avid Readers, Uncategorized | Leave a CommentThe Avid Readers group convened on a cold Thursday night to enjoy some good refreshments and even better discussion about Markus Zusak’s astounding novel The Book Thief.
The novel is set in a small German town during the early years of World War II, and features a unique literary framing device: the narrator of the book is Death himself. Zusak’s narrator, who is neither grim nor a reaper, as he makes clear in one of his many asides, tells the tale of Leisel Meminger and her experiences with her foster parents in the small town of Molching, and more specifically to the poor neighborhood of Himmel Street. Leisel is a precocious, willful child who comes to her new home illiterate and clutching her first stolen book, a professional guide for beginning gravediggers. From this auspicious beginning, Death narrates the story of a few years in the life of a girl who becomes a book thief and a word shaker.
Set against a backdrop that features many harrowing aspects (the Holocaust, the Nazi book burnings, the air raid sirens, and comulsory Hitler Youth rallies), The Book Thief is primarily a coming of age story, and one that includes moments the streak across the emotional spectrum: from heart-rendingly tragic to heart-warmingly funny, often within the same chapter. The reader sees Leisel and her foster parents, the Hubermanns, bear up courageously in circumstances that would drive others to cowardice.
Leisel’s journey from illiterate foster child to intelligent, compassionate, and integral member of a family is accompanied by a colorful cast of characters. There is Rudy Steiner, Leisel’s best friend, who paints himself with charcoal to emulate his hero Jesse Owens. There is Ilsa Hermann, the mayor’s wife, who allows Leisel to “steal” books from the Hermann’s library. There is Max Vandenburg, the Jewish fist-fighter hidden in the Hubermann’s basement. Each character is rendered vividly, and sticks with the reader long after the novel’s profound conclusion.
Our group found The Book Thief to be a compelling and unforgettable novel. One of our group even ventured that the book would be one that would wind up in her 50 Favorite Books list. We all agreed that we’d recommend the book without reservation. Zusak’s writing is clean and clear, sometimes even simple, but his novel is tightly and inventively structured. Better still, it is a book that concerns an era about which much is written that still manages to provide a fresh perspective and a compelling plot.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to read The Book Thief, we all recommend that you pick up a copy and spend some time with Leisel and the other inhabitants of Himmel Street. We promise that it is not a novel that you will soon forget.
The Avid Readers group will meet again on Thursday March 6 at 6:30PM to discuss Jim Lehrer’s novel The Franklin Affair, an historically-based mystery that promises to be a lively read.
A Woman in Jerusalem: Avid Readers discussion 1/03/08
January 8, 2008 at 3:48 pm | In Avid Readers, Uncategorized | Leave a CommentThe Avid Readers group convened on a cold Thursday night to enjoy some light refreshments and discuss A. B. Yehoshua’s novel A Woman in Jerusalem.
The novel is the story of a Russian born woman who dies in a bombing in Jerusalem. The only means of identifying her body after the blast is a pay stub from a bakery where the woman was briefly employed. A muckraking newspaper reporter prints a scathing article about the bakery’s supposed inhumanity to its employees for allowing the woman’s body to lay unclaimed and unidentified in a morgue for so long. Wracked both by guilty feelings and the bad publicity generated by the article, the bakery’s owner charges the human resources manager with the task of locating and notifying the dead woman’s family of the tragedy.
Slowly, this somewhat unusual assignment develops into a mission that finds the human resources manager travelling to a remote village in a former Soviet republic. Along the way, the novel becomes a meditation on some very heavy topics, among which are questions about humanity, compassion, and responsibility to our fellow citizens. A Woman in Jerusalem is somewhat enigmatic and doesn’t offer any easy answers. Like the characters in the novel, the readers are forced to draw their own conclusions about the validity of the human resources manager’s mission and the degree to which he is successful.
Our opinions about A. B. Yehoshua’s novel ran lukewarm. On one hand, we felt that the novel was inventive and brought up some important ideas, but we also felt that it was somewhat flawed in its execution. One group member felt that the novel suffered from repetitiveness and was slightly annoyed that the characters were referred to by their titles or roles in the plot rather than with proper names. As a group we felt that some of the intricacies were probably lost in the cultural translation.
The Avid Readers will meet again on Thursday February 7 to discuss Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, a novel set in World War II and narrated by Death himself. Join us for what promises to be a lively discussion about an interesting book.
What is the What: Avid Readers Discussion 12/06/07
December 10, 2007 at 9:33 pm | In Avid Readers, Uncategorized | Leave a CommentThe Avid Readers group convened on a cold Thursday night to enjoy some cheesecake and discuss Dave Eggers’ heartwrenching novel What is the What. The novel, which is based on the actual life story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, takes the reader on a journey from a remote village in southern Sudan to refugee camps in Ehtiopia and Kenya, and finally to Atlanta, Georgia. Along the way, Valentino faces innummerable hardships. Not only does he face starvation, predation by wild beasts, and the horrors of a violent civil war, but he is also faced with the emotional trauma of separation from his family.
As a group, we found the novel to be so good that we were nearly at a loss for words when discussing it. Although the novel is filled with heartbreak, it is also a powerful portrait of strength and courage. Valentino’s survival through hardships that none of us could even fathom gives the novel a hopeful dimension. Of course, the reader feels accutely the frustration that Valentino experiences during his many years in a refugee camp and during his difficult time in Atlanta, but Valentino’s ability to face and surmount these obstacles with dignity is nothing short of amazing.
We also felt that the novel was important in a sociopolitical context as well as a literary one. As a work of fiction (albeit one that is firmly rooted in true events), What is the What has the unique ability to inform an audience about the plight of Sudanese refugees in a way that a nonfiction book could not.
If you missed this discussion, we’d love to see you at our next meeting on Thursday January 3. We’ll be discussing A. B. Yehoshua’s A Woman in Jerusalem.
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