Saturday, December 3, 2011, at 2 p.m. at the San Leandro Main Library

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

The discussion will be led by Teresa. Check the schedule on the TV monitor at the library entrance for room location.

A brief interview with the author.

The Rest of the Story of the Edinburgh Paper Sculptures

If you recall, back in September, Linda sent us a link about paper sculptures (made from books) that were being mysteriously left at various libraries around Edinburgh, Scotland. This week, Linda sent us the link to the entire story plus the final chapter. Read and enjoy.

New Directions for Public Libraries

Linda sent a link via boingboing to an article about the Fayetteville Free Library (FFL) in Fayetteville, NY, installing a "hackerspace," which pretty much quoted an article in KQED's online magazine about the same thing, which pointed to an article in Make magazine about the future of the public library.

This was the video embedded in the boingboing article, in which the FFL librarian explains what the project is about.



Which led me also to this video about the FFL itself, about how the library is more than just a book repository.

Getting Ready for Lord of Misrule

A link from Linda to an article about the decline of horse racing in America, with the pull-quote:

"Putting slot machines in a racetrack is very much like opening a wine bar and advertising that you have an All U Can Smoke crack buffet in the lobby."

I Capture the Castle

Apparently, I Capture the Castle was made into a movie in 2003.



It is available for streaming on Netflix, or if you are not a Netflix subscriber, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube, broken up into 8 segments of approximately 15 minutes each.

More Great Finds from Linda

This is Where Superbrain Changes Clothes

Villagers in Somerset bought the local disused phone booth for £1 & filled it with books. It's now their library.

[Now, if it was a blue police call box, it might be larger on the inside than it is on the outside.]

























Vampire Etiquette Advice and a Book Recommendation




This is why I love this book (A Discovery of Witches): the grownup's Harry Potter — Linda

Saturday, October 1, 2011, 2 p.m.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Here is a segment of "CBS Sunday Morning" about the book.



I was going to write a much longer post about this book because it raises so many questions that I find interesting, questions about scientific ethics and laws regarding scientific research. In the back of the book, there is a discussion about various legal and ethical issues of human tissue research. The issue that interests me the most is the idea that a genetic sequence is patentable. I went looking for information on this and found this great link to a Nova episode called "Cracking the Genetic Code," which was originally a 2-hour program which has been broken up into 8 to 10-minute segments for easy viewing on your computer. I fully intend to watch it now that baseball season is over.

Abraham Verghese: A Doctor's Touch

Another great find from Linda. (sorry it is so low on the page)

One-Star Reviews from Amazon.com

Link from Linda:

"Lone Star Statements"


I have to agree with the reviewer's comment about Slaughterhouse-Five vs. Gravity's Rainbow, the one Linda highlighted in her email, but other than that, the reviews in the article seem to be written by Spock from "Star Trek." They remind me of Three Panel Book Review, a cartoon that appears in The San Francisco Chronicle's book section.

Women Suffrage Centennial 1911-2011/ Women’s Equality Day August 26th

From Milli-Ann:

Dear Friends,

As I alluded to at the end of our book club meeting yesterday, on October 10, 2011 we will be celebrating the 100th Anniversary of women voting in California.

In 1911, California became only the 6th state in the United States where women could vote – nine years before passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

The women in the rest of the country (most of them) had to wait almost 10 more years for voting rights.

I hope you enjoy HerStory’s YouTube production honoring the women behind the nineteenth amendment. The ninety-first anniversary of its passage was August 26th, Equality Day. Please pass this LEGACY on to friends and family.

Best regards,

Milli-Ann (Iuso-Cox)

To view our YouTube Winning A Voice video click here.

To understand more about Women’s Equality Day click here.

To view our HerStory website click here: HerStory For Futures Unlimited.

In order that Equality Day, August 26th, becomes a tradition, it must not only be proclaimed but observed with appropriate celebrations. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns’s film and book about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, emphasizes that we are doing this NOT FOR OURSELVES ALONE but for our posterity.

So first, educate yourself by clicking on these three important links. Then, send the WAV YouTube link onto your friends and family encouraging them to do the same. By spreading the word in this manner we will keep this legacy alive.

P.S. If our clip about the long 140-year struggle for Women to have a voice in their government wets your appetite, enjoy some of the other YouTube clips. (I especially like the ones about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton sung by SpiderAdams01 (Steve Adams) and the one about Alice Strokes Paul.

***********************
For those of you who did not get the email with the flyer, about the event at the library on Saturday, August 24, 2011, here is a link to the page at the library website.

Book Art

Thanks to Linda for another great link. This is a blog post about paper sculptures made from books mysteriously appearing at libraries around Edinburgh, Scotland.

Saturday, September 10, 2011, at 2:00 p.m.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Nominees for February through May 2012

Please pick your 4 favorites and send them to Peggy via email before September 1, 2011.

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: Nancy Mitford’s most enduringly popular novel, The Pursuit of Love is a classic comedy about growing up and falling in love among the privileged and eccentric. Mitford modeled her characters on her own famously unconventional family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, who stays with them at Alconleigh, their Gloucestershire estate. Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce; Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother; and the seven Radlett children, despite the delights of their unusual childhood, are recklessly eager to grow up. The first of three novels featuring these characters, The Pursuit of Love follows the travails of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward Radlett daughter, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent Communist, and finally a French duke named Fabrice.

One Day by David Nicholls (fiction)
From Publishers Weekly: ...The episodic story takes place during a single day each year for two decades in the lives of Dex and Em. Dexter, the louche public school boy, and Emma, the brainy Yorkshire lass, meet the day they graduate from university in 1988 and run circles around one another for the next 20 years. Dex becomes a TV presenter whose life of sex, booze, and drugs spins out of control, while Em dully slogs her way through awful jobs before becoming the author of young adult books. They each take other lovers and spouses, but they cannot really live without each other... Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (nonfiction)
Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2010: From Laura Hillenbrand, the bestselling author of Seabiscuit, comes Unbroken, the inspiring true story of a man who lived through a series of catastrophes almost too incredible to be believed. In evocative, immediate descriptions, Hillenbrand unfurls the story of Louie Zamperini--a juvenile delinquent-turned-Olympic runner-turned-Army hero. During a routine search mission over the Pacific, Louie’s plane crashed into the ocean, and what happened to him over the next three years of his life is a story that will keep you glued to the pages, eagerly awaiting the next turn in the story and fearing it at the same time. You’ll cheer for the man who somehow maintained his selfhood and humanity despite the monumental degradations he suffered, and you’ll want to share this book with everyone you know. —Juliet Disparte

Room by Emma Donoghue (fiction)
Amazon.com Review. Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010: In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time. —Lynette Mong

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (fiction)
Amazon Best of the Month, June 2009: Colum McCann has worked some exquisite magic with Let the Great World Spin, conjuring a novel of electromagnetic force that defies gravity. It's August of 1974, a summer "hot and serious and full of death and betrayal," and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious. A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers. This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives--a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young artists, a Park Avenue judge. All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging. And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later. You might find yourself paused, considering the universe of lives one city contains in any slice of time, each of us a singular world, sometimes passing close enough to touch or collide, to birth a new generation or kill it, sending out ripples, leaving residue, an imprint, marking each other, our city, the very air—compassionately or callously, unable to see all the damage we do or heal. And most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip, or step in something awful. But then someone does something extraordinary, like dancing on a cable strung 110 stories in the air, or imagining a magnificent novel that lifts us up for a sky-scraping, dizzy glimpse of something greater: the sordid grandeur of this whirling world, "bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants."—Mari Malcolm

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (fiction)
From Bookmarks Magazine: Critics loved Egan's newest novel, describing it as "audacious" and "extraordinary" (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the hands of a less-gifted writer, Egans's time-hopping narrative, unorthodox format, and motley cast of characters might have failed spectacularly. But it works here, primarily because each person shines within his or her individual chapter that offers a distinct voice and a fascinating backstory. A few reviewers mentioned the uneven nature of the chapters and the different stylistic experiments within them. Yet, hailed as "a frequently dazzling piece of layer-cake metafiction" (Entertainment Weekly), A Visit from the Goon Squad is a gutsy novel that succeeds on all levels.

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (fiction)
Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2010: It is nearly impossible not to be drawn into horseracing cliches when describing Jaimy Gordon's novel Lord of Misrule, especially since it came out of the pack as a dark horse (there you go) to win the 2010 National Book Award for fiction the same week it was published. It's a novel of the track, and Gordon embraces racing's lingo and lore and even some of its romance of longshot redemption, though she knows those bets never really come in, at least the way you think they will. Her story is set at a backwater half-mile track in West Virginia in the early '70s, the sort of place where people wash up or get stuck or, if they're particularly cruel, carve out a provincial fiefdom. The horses there are washed up too but still somehow glorious, and they're as vividly and individually defined as the people who build their lives around them. Between horse and handler there's a sort of cross-species alchemy that, along with Gordon's gorgeous language and wise storytelling, provides the central beauty of her mud-caked but mythic tale, which Maggie, one of her most compelling characters, comes the closest to describing: "On the last little spit of being human, staring through rags of fog into the not human, where you weren't supposed to be able to see let alone cross, she could make a kind of home." —Tom Nissley

Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones (fiction)
From Bookmarks Magazine: Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Overall Prize for Best Book and short-listed for the Booker Prize, Mister Pip delighted critics with its beautiful prose, compelling characters, and humane exploration of literature's power. They especially lauded Matilda, who learns to identify with Pip and, in the process, heals the rift with her mother. Not every scene is heartrending; however, this story is framed by rape, murder, and civil war. Some reviewers noted a few whiffs of paternalism from the author, some awkward dialogue, too much foreshadowing, and an odd ending. But in its exploration of how literature can bring joy amid great suffering, Mister Pip is a heartwarming and worthwhile coming-of-age novel. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (fiction)
Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2010: In this vivid and visceral work of historical fiction, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey imagines the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political philosopher and author of Democracy in America. Carey brings de Tocqueville to life through the fictionalized character of Olivier de Garmont, a coddled and conceited French aristocrat. Olivier can only begin to grasp how the other half lives when forced to travel to the New World with John "Parrot" Larrit, a jaded survivor of lifelong hardship who can’t stand his young master who he is expected to spy on for the overprotective Maman Garmont back in Paris. Parrot and Olivier are a mid-nineteenth-century Oscar and Felix who represent the highest and lowest social registers of the Old World, yet find themselves unexpectedly pushed together in the New World. This odd couple’s stark differences in class and background, outlook and attitude—which are explored in alternating chapters narrated by each—are an ingenious conceit for presenting to contemporary readers the unique social experiment that was democracy in the early years of America. —Lauren Nemroff

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (fictionalized nonfiction)
From Publishers Weekly: For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith, the narrator of this true-life novel by her granddaughter, Walls, lived in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose megaselling memoir, The Glass Castle, recalled her own upbringing, writes in what she recalls as Lily's plainspoken voice, whose recital provides plenty of drama and suspense as she ricochets from one challenge to another. Having been educated in fits and starts because of her parents' penury, Lily becomes a teacher at age 15 in a remote frontier town she reaches after a solo 28-day ride. Marriage to a bigamist almost saps her spirit, but later she weds a rancher with whom she shares two children and a strain of plucky resilience. (They sell bootleg liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a baby's crib.) Lily is a spirited heroine, fiercely outspoken against hypocrisy and prejudice, a rodeo rider and fearless breaker of horses, and a ruthless poker player. Assailed by flash floods, tornados and droughts, Lily never gets far from hardscrabble drudgery in several states—New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois—but hers is one of those heartwarming stories about indomitable women that will always find an audience. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Just Kids by Patti Smith (nonfiction)
Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2010: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren't always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late '60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices—or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe discovered he was gay, they divided their dimes between art supplies and Coney Island hot dogs. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his metier, with a Polaroid and then a Hasselblad, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her friend's delight, from a poet into a rock star. (Mapplethorpe soon became famous too—and notorious—before his death from AIDS in 1989.) Smith's memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and artful, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous, with the oracular style familiar from her anthems like "Because the Night," "Gloria," and "Dancing Barefoot" balanced by her powers of observation and memory for everyday details like the price of automat sandwiches and the shabby, welcoming fellow bohemians of the Chelsea Hotel, among whose ranks these baby Rimbauds found their way. — Tom Nissley

Just to Get Everyone in the Spirit

The Radetzky March

He was only called Pfiffikus because you give that name to someone who likes to whistle, which Pfiffikus most definitely did. He was constantly whistling a tune called the "Radetzky March," and all the kids in the town would call out to him and duplicate that tune. (Page 52)

The "Radetzky March" was written by Johan Strauss Sr. in 1848 (Op. 228) and dedicated to the Austrian Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky von Radetz. It is traditionally played as the final number at New Year's concerts in Vienna. The audience claps in time to the music. The video below shows the "Radetzky March" being played at the 1987 New Year's concert in Vienna with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and the audience.

August Meeting Wrap-Up

For those of you who came here looking for the post with the nominees that weren't chosen during the last selection, since I have a feeling that post is about to be knocked off the bottom of the page by this post, here is a permalink to that post. You will find synopses both for the books that weren't chosen and the books which were chosen, so out of those, the ones we are being asked to consider now for voting by e-mail are:

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Wells
Mr. Pip by Lloyd James

I just realized that Let the Great World Spin is not in the original post because it was nominated at the meeting and not before, so here is a link to a synopsis of that. Also, we have a nomination by Nancy for consideration of Room by Emma Donoghue, so here is a link for that. Peggy would like to have us pick our 4 favorites and reply no later than Sunday, August, 21, 2011, by email or by phone. I don't want to post her email and phone here on the internet (for anti-spam reasons), but if you don't have them, add a comment to this post stating so, and I will send them to you.

Followup to City of Thieves: A Russian Movie Recommendation, "Ballad of a Soldier"














For those of you who don't mind subtitled movies, a Russian movie from 1959 that you might enjoy is "Ballad of a Soldier." It is available on Netflix and is not as "heavy" as a lot of Russian movies, also the hero of that story physically looks what I imagine the character "Kolya" to look like. In the movie, the hero's name is "Alyosha," (diminutive of Alexei). He is out on recon one day at the front, and he and his partner stumble across German tanks. Impulsively and in a panic, Alyosha picks up an anti-tank gun and scores a direct hit on two tanks, incapacitating them. For his "bravery," his commanding officer proposes him for a medal. Alyosha asks instead for leave for a couple of days to visit his mother on the collective farm because her roof has been leaking and he wants to repair the roof. The officer agrees, but since he knows travel in wartime will be difficult, he grants Alyosha 6 days: 2 days to get there, 2 days to fix the roof, and 2 days to get back. The film then follows Alyosha on his journey where: 1) transportation is even more messed up than his commanding officer imagined, and 2) Alyosha is such a friendly and helpful guy he can't help getting involved in the lives of the people he meets along the way. That is all I can say about the plot in case any of you want to watch it.

Saturday, August 6, 2011, at 2 p.m.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

The siege of Leningrad

















The encirclement of Leningrad by the German army was completed on September 8, 1941, and was not completely lifted until January 27, 1944. By the time it was over, of the original 3 million residents of the city, anywhere from 600,000 to 800,000 had died of cold, starvation, or bombardment by the Germans (not to mention being shot by the authorities for looting, desertion, etc). The picture and the facts are lifted from the St. Petersburg tourism web page Another good site I found was part of an "Eyewitness to History" site and contains several survivor accounts in their own words.

Cultural References from City of Thieves (I look them up so you don't have to.)

War and Peace. On page 90, Kolya expresses his opinion about Natasha Rostov, the main female character from Tolstoy's War and Peace, causing Lev to marvel that anyone would care that much about a fictitious character. What I found out by watching the David Benioff video that I have embedded below is that, during the siege, copies of War and Peace were printed up and handed out to the people of Leningrad to read as a morale booster.

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). (I can't find the exact page for reference). A Russian poet of Polish Jewish extraction, Mandelstam grew up in imperial St. Petersburg, and like most poets of the time, was initially a supporter of the revolution. Like the father of the main character, Lev, he was seized by the police and died in custody. Benioff references Mandelstam's "Stalin Epigram."

The Stalin Epigram
by Osip Mandelstam
translated by W. S. Merwin

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). A Russian poet of upper-class Russian extraction and a great friend of Osip Mandelstam. (Some, including Mandelstam's wife, claimed that the two were more than friends, but Akmatova always denied it.) Akhmatova also initially supported the revolution but eventually became disillusioned. She was often criticized by the Soviet establishment for writing bourgeois, sentimental love poetry. Because of her personal associations, her poetry was officially banned between 1925 and 1940. On page 68, Kolya lashes out at Akhmatova, not only for her "narcissistic" verse, but also for having left Leningrad and for urging the women of Leningrad to fight via radio broadcast from the safety of Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975). The composer remained initially remained in Leningrad where he volunteered for the fire brigade and posed for the posters mentioned by Lev on page 67. He wrote the first three movements of his 7th Symphony while in Leningrad, but was evacuated to Kuybishev where he finished the work (it turns out Kolya was right about that). The 7th Symphony is often called the "Leningrad Symphony," and was premiered in Moscow, but the most famous performance was in wartime Leningrad itself as detailed in the video clip below.



Interview with David Benioff about City of Thieves

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

Another Great Link from Linda

10 Unconventional Bookstores For Your Browsing Pleasure

Saturday, July 9, 2011, at 2 p.m.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Get yer anglophile on! Helen Simonson talks about her book.

Saturday, June 4, 2011, at 2 p.m.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese. There is some brief biography at the front of the book, but also I found his website, where you can find out more about the man himself and his books and articles. From the website:

Born of Indian parents who were teachers in Ethiopia, he grew up near Addis Ababa and began his medical training there. When Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed, he briefly joined his parents who had moved to the United States, and worked as an orderly before returning to complete his medical education at Madras Medical College. he later retured to the U.S. for his residency as one of many foreign medical graduates. Like many other foreign medical graduates, he found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him, an experience he described in one of his early New Yorker articles, The Cowpath to America.

From Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was a resident from 1980 to 1983, he did his fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine, working at Boston City Hospital for two years. It was here that he first saw the early signs of the HIV epidemic and later, when he returned to Johnson City as an assistant professor of medicine, he saw the second epidemic, rural AIDS, and his life took the turn for which he is most well known -- his caring for numerous AIDS patients in an era when little could be done and helping them through their early and painful deaths was often the most a physician could do.

What does "cutting for stone" mean? I had to look up the origin of the phrase "cutting for stone," because it was obvious in the novel and from the various contexts in which it was used, that it had some cultural reference outside of the novel itself. It turns out that it is from the Hippocratic Oath, "I will not cut for stone, even in patients in whom the disease is manifest..." which is widely interpreted as drawing a distinction between being a physician and being a surgeon and a proscription against a physician performing procedures for which he is not qualified, even if it seems like easy money.


Ethiopia and Eritrea

Those of us at the meeting last month, who had already started Cutting for Stone remarked about what a fascinating place Ethiopia sounded like, so I rounded up some pictures from the internet.

Addis Ababa: The modern capital of Ethiopia, the setting of much of the novel, and the city of Marion Stone's (and Dr. Verghese's) youth.






























Axum: The ancient capital of Ethopia and the location of the treasury which houses what is claimed to be the original Ark of the Covenant. The first picture is the old St. Mary's church. The subsequent pictures are from in or near the new St. Mary's church (built by Haile Selassie). The last picture is of the treasury.





























Lalibela: This is the site of ancient churches carved from the surrounding rock hills. The last picture is the largest church in the world carved out of a single piece of stone.



































Eritrea: Now a sovereign nation, in the novel it was part of Ethiopia, the homeland of Rosina and Genet, and the country of rebels.

































Tizita (see pages 227 and 228): This is the song that Almaz sang as young Marion held her breast. It is the song that is synonymous with Ethiopia to the older Marion as he is living in the United States. As it says in the book, there are many versions. This is my favorite of the versions I found on YouTube.

You Know, I Don't Remember the 80's at All

For those of you who came looking for the book suggestions we're going to vote on Saturday, they're in the post down below.

Otherwise, it's time the get your 80’s groove on (via Sag Harbor).

First, pull on your Cosby sweater...

People we knew started wearing sweaters with mind-melting patterns, in tribute to the Coz Himself, and the barber shops buzzed up versions of Theo’s latest haircut, whatever he and his friends sported on set, in their brief careers, those handsome boys who went nowhere. The young men marched out of barbershops to all coordinates with flattops, fades, hi-tops of Pisan ambition: Theo’s army. “They’re a real Cosby Family,” people said, when acquaintances broke the atmosphere to better orbit. A term of affection and admiration. Page 193

...I walked in just in time to hear the newscaster say, “A surprising announcement about an American classic.” Somehow I knew. I stayed through the commercial break and watched as Roberto Goizueta, the CEO of Coca-Cola, cheered the end of the world. It was inconceivable, like tampering with the laws of nature. Hey, let’s try Gravity-Free Tuesdays, buckle up, motherfuckers. From this day on, water is incredibly flammable, see how that goes... Page 127

You Cha-Ka lookin’...

You could also preface things with a throat-clearing “You fuckin’,” as in “You fuckin’ Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost–lookin’ motherfucker,” directed at Bobby, for example, who had light brown skin, light brown hair, and indeed, shared these characteristics with the hominid sidekick on the Saturday morning adventure show Land of the Lost. Page 52


Here We Go...

Bobby turned on his MC voice, “One Two Three, in the place to be,” and Reggie said, “Alright!” They started their routine and I rolled my eyes in the darkness. Bobby and my brother had memorized the lyrics to Run-D.M.C.’s “Here We Go” and had to perform it at least ten times a day. Page 169



The highlight of the summer was the U.T.F.O.– Lisa Lisa concert...

Lisa Lisa was shorter in person, but her chest was bigger. I signed off on that. Page 253



U.T.F.O. (Un Touchable Force Organization) represented teen striving, youthful perseverance against the odds, and goofball personas that made our own stabs at reinvention look like genius. Page 235



Everybody Hated WLNG...

...All I could do was succumb to the LNG Effect. It proceeded thusly: out of the speakers emerged a song you’d heard only once before in your life, one that left such a faint record in your brain that it was a memory of a memory. Paralyzed by confusion, you wondered, “Where have I heard that before?” The answer was, Nowhere important. Page 269.

Time to Pick Books for October–January

New Nominees

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (fiction)
From Bookmarks Magazine: Critics loved Egan's newest novel, describing it as "audacious" and "extraordinary" (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the hands of a less-gifted writer, Egans's time-hopping narrative, unorthodox format, and motley cast of characters might have failed spectacularly. But it works here, primarily because each person shines within his or her individual chapter that offers a distinct voice and a fascinating backstory. A few reviewers mentioned the uneven nature of the chapters and the different stylistic experiments within them. Yet, hailed as "a frequently dazzling piece of layer-cake metafiction" (Entertainment Weekly), A Visit from the Goon Squad is a gutsy novel that succeeds on all levels.

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (fiction)
Amazon.com Review, Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2010: It is nearly impossible not to be drawn into horseracing cliches when describing Jaimy Gordon's novel Lord of Misrule, especially since it came out of the pack as a dark horse (there you go) to win the 2010 National Book Award for fiction the same week it was published. It's a novel of the track, and Gordon embraces racing's lingo and lore and even some of its romance of longshot redemption, though she knows those bets never really come in, at least the way you think they will. Her story is set at a backwater half-mile track in West Virginia in the early '70s, the sort of place where people wash up or get stuck or, if they're particularly cruel, carve out a provincial fiefdom. The horses there are washed up too but still somehow glorious, and they're as vividly and individually defined as the people who build their lives around them. Between horse and handler there's a sort of cross-species alchemy that, along with Gordon's gorgeous language and wise storytelling, provides the central beauty of her mud-caked but mythic tale, which Maggie, one of her most compelling characters, comes the closest to describing: "On the last little spit of being human, staring through rags of fog into the not human, where you weren't supposed to be able to see let alone cross, she could make a kind of home." — Tom Nissley

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen (nonfiction)
From Publishers Weekly. Starred Review: At first, the worst week of Janzen's life—she gets into a debilitating car wreck right after her husband leaves her for a guy he met on the Internet and saddles her with a mortgage she can't afford—seems to come out of nowhere, but the disaster's long buildup becomes clearer as she opens herself up. Her 15-year relationship with Nick had always been punctuated by manic outbursts and verbally abusive behavior, so recognizing her co-dependent role in their marriage becomes an important part of Janzen's recovery (even as she tweaks the 12 steps just a bit). The healing is further assisted by her decision to move back in with her Mennonite parents, prompting her to look at her childhood religion with fresh, twinkling eyes. (She provides an appendix for those unfamiliar with Mennonite culture, as well as a list of shame-based foods from hot potato salad to borscht.) Janzen is always ready to gently turn the humor back on herself, though, and women will immediately warm to the self-deprecating honesty with which she describes the efforts of friends and family to help her re-establish her emotional well-being. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones (fiction)
From Bookmarks Magazine: Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Overall Prize for Best Book and short-listed for the Booker Prize, Mister Pip delighted critics with its beautiful prose, compelling characters, and humane exploration of literature's power. They especially lauded Matilda, who learns to identify with Pip and, in the process, heals the rift with her mother. Not every scene is heartrending, however: this story is framed by rape, murder, and civil war. Some reviewers noted a few whiffs of paternalism from the author, some awkward dialogue, too much foreshadowing, and an odd ending. But in its exploration of how literature can bring joy amid great suffering, Mister Pip is a heartwarming and worthwhile coming-of-age novel. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (fiction)
Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2010: In this vivid and visceral work of historical fiction, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey imagines the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political philosopher and author of Democracy in America. Carey brings de Tocqueville to life through the fictionalized character of Olivier de Garmont, a coddled and conceited French aristocrat. Olivier can only begin to grasp how the other half lives when forced to travel to the New World with John "Parrot" Larrit, a jaded survivor of lifelong hardship who can’t stand his young master who he is expected to spy on for the overprotective Maman Garmont back in Paris. Parrot and Olivier are a mid-nineteenth-century Oscar and Felix who represent the highest and lowest social registers of the Old World, yet find themselves unexpectedly pushed together in the New World. This odd couple’s stark differences in class and background, outlook and attitude—which are explored in alternating chapters narrated by each—are an ingenious conceit for presenting to contemporary readers the unique social experiment that was democracy in the early years of America. — Lauren Nemroff

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (fiction)
From Publishers Weekly, Starred Review: Shteyngart (Absurdistan) presents another profane and dizzying satire, a dystopic vision of the future as convincing—and, in its way, as frightening—as Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's also a pointedly old-fashioned May-December love story, complete with references to Chekhov and Tolstoy. Mired in protracted adolescence, middle-aged Lenny Abramov is obsessed with living forever (he works for an Indefinite Life Extension company), his books (an anachronism of this indeterminate future), and Eunice Park, a 20-something Korean-American. Eunice, though reluctant and often cruel, finds in Lenny a loving but needy fellow soul and a refuge from her overbearing immigrant parents. Narrating in alternate chapters—Lenny through old-fashioned diary entries, Eunice through her online correspondence—the pair reveal a funhouse-mirror version of contemporary America: terminally indebted to China, controlled by the singular Bipartisan Party (Big Brother as played by a cartoon otter in a cowboy hat), and consumed by the superficial. Shteyngart's earnestly struggling characters—along with a flurry of running gags—keep the nightmare tour of tomorrow grounded. A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart's best yet. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Held Over Due to Popularity

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (fictionalized nonfiction)
From Publishers Weekly: For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith, the narrator of this true-life novel by her granddaughter, Walls, lived in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose megaselling memoir, The Glass Castle, recalled her own upbringing, writes in what she recalls as Lily's plainspoken voice, whose recital provides plenty of drama and suspense as she ricochets from one challenge to another. Having been educated in fits and starts because of her parents' penury, Lily becomes a teacher at age 15 in a remote frontier town she reaches after a solo 28-day ride. Marriage to a bigamist almost saps her spirit, but later she weds a rancher with whom she shares two children and a strain of plucky resilience. (They sell bootleg liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a baby's crib.) Lily is a spirited heroine, fiercely outspoken against hypocrisy and prejudice, a rodeo rider and fearless breaker of horses, and a ruthless poker player. Assailed by flash floods, tornados and droughts, Lily never gets far from hardscrabble drudgery in several states—New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois—but hers is one of those heartwarming stories about indomitable women that will always find an audience. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Just Kids by Patti Smith (nonfiction)
Amazon.com Review, Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2010: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren't always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late '60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices--or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe discovered he was gay, they divided their dimes between art supplies and Coney Island hot dogs. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his metier, with a Polaroid and then a Hasselblad, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her friend's delight, from a poet into a rock star. (Mapplethorpe soon became famous too--and notorious--before his death from AIDS in 1989.) Smith's memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and artful, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous, with the oracular style familiar from her anthems like "Because the Night," "Gloria," and "Dancing Barefoot" balanced by her powers of observation and memory for everyday details like the price of automat sandwiches and the shabby, welcoming fellow bohemians of the Chelsea Hotel, among whose ranks these baby Rimbauds found their way. — Tom Nissley

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (nonfiction)
Amazon.com Review, Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? — Tom Nissley

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister (fiction)
Product Description from Amazon.com: A "heartbreakingly delicious" national bestseller about a chef, her students, and the evocative lessons that food teaches about life. Once a month, eight students gather in Lillian's restaurant for a cooking class. Among them is Claire, a young woman coming to terms with her new identity as a mother; Tom, a lawyer whose life has been overturned by loss; Antonia, an Italian kitchen designer adapting to life in America; and Carl and Helen, a long-married couple whose union contains surprises the rest of the class would never suspect... The students have come to learn the art behind Lillian's soulful dishes, but it soon becomes clear that each seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen. And soon they are transformed by the aromas, flavors, and textures of what they create.

Colson Whitehead on Sag Harbor

Miscellaneous Somewhat Relevant Lit News

I'm sure many of you have heard about the critical "60 Minutes" segment last Sunday and the controversy that is swirling around Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea (our book selection in November 2008). If not, here is a link to a San Francisco Chronicle article about the controversy. The article also has links to Greg Mortenson's response to the accusations.

Also related to one of our earlier selections (1906: A Novel by James Dalessandro from January of this year), on last Sunday, in honor of the 105th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake, the Chronicle printed the first of two articles containing excerpts from the diary of Leonie von Zesch, a resident of San Francisco, at the time of the quake. 23 years old, and a practicing dentist. The story of the woman herself and how her diaries were almost lost is almost as interesting as her observations of the quake. Check it out.

Related to yet another of our past selections (Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro from January 2007), they made a movie out of it. Silly me, I did not know that. Here's a comment from Mick LaSalle's column:

Dear Mick LaSalle: I was amazed that "Never Let Me Go" was not one of the 10 best nominees of 2010. Why didn't it get any nominations?

-- Bob Zimmerman, Lafayette, Calif.

Dear Bob Zimmerman: It can't have helped that it's about the most depressing movie imaginable. Academy voters get DVDs of the Oscar contenders, and a movie's chances go down if viewers feel like killing themselves after an hour.

Here's the official trailer.



In news about a book we didn't read but which was nominated at one time to be one of our selections, Water for Elephants has just been released as a movie. Here's the trailer for that.

News from Farm City

Linda spotted this article in the San Francisco Chronicle: Oakland gardener questions need for permit to sell produce.

I remember when Novella Carpenter spoke here at the library, she said she never paid much attention to permits and zoning regulations. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I hope the law gets changed.

NOLA Links

The following is an excerpt from "When the Levees Broke," a documentary series that Spike Lee produced for HBO. I just got disc 1 from Netflix and am hoping to be able to watch it tonight


This second video is the trailer from "Treme," a series that debuted last year, also from HBO. It was produced by the same people who produced "The Wire," which may be my all-time favorite TV series ever. I have "Treme" in my Netflix queue and look forward to watching it as soon as it is available.


Finally, a link to the web page of The Zeitoun Foundation, to which a portion of the profits of the book will be donate.

Another Reason to Hate Jonathan Franzen

(Thanks to Linda)

From the Chron:

In August 2010, the cover of Time hailed Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, and called him a "Great American Novelist." The book is about a birder who declares war on "feline death squads" and calls cats the "sociopaths of the pet world," responsible for killing millions of American songbirds. The author told a Daily Beast interviewer this month: "With songbird populations falling all across North America, I think it's time for a movement to keep cats indoors."

Books for May and June Available at the Booktique

For May: Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (fiction)

From the book jacket: From the award-winning author of John Henry Days and The Intuitionist: a tender, hilarious, and supremely original novel about coming-of-age in the ’80s. Benji Cooper is one of the few black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. The summer of 1985 won't be without its usual trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to to fumble through and state-of-the-art profanity to master. Benji will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut(which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, just maybe, this summer might be one for the ages. A New York Times notable book. One of the best books of the year: The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor. A PEN/Faulkner Award finalist.

For June: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (fiction)

From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review: Lauded for his sensitive memoir (My Own Country) about his time as a doctor in eastern Tennessee at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s, Verghese turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys: Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brothers long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become doctors as well and Vergheses weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Ford Madox Ford on Literary Criticism

(From Linda)

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”

The Writer, Sheila Schwartz

Here is a link to a tribute Dan Chaon wrote to his late wife, Sheila Schwartz.

Meeting Wrap-Up, March 5, 2011

This afternoon, the Readers Roundtable met in the Trustees room at the San Leandro Main Library. Geri having unexpectedly called out of town, Peggy very ably facilitated the discussion. The book for this month was Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon (per Peggy, pronounced "Shawn" not "Chay-on" or "Chah-on"). The book comprises 3, seemingly disparate but related stories: A young man being rushed to the hospital by his father, a young woman leaving town with her high school science teacher immediate after graduation, and a man approaching middle age putting his life on hold and rushing to the edge of the Arctic Circle to answer a frantic SOS from his twin brother whom he hasn't seen in 10 years. Much of the discussion centered around the structure of the book, the switching back and forth between the 3 stories. I thought that the switching back and forth was very effective and helped to draw me into the story and made it very difficult to put down the book. Several others present, though, felt that the switching around was manipulative and annoying and felt that the payoff wasn't worth all the suspense built by the book's structure.

Other major topics of discussion were the theme of shifting identities and the theme of internet swindles and stolen identities. Many also felt that no individual character was particularly well drawn or sympathetic, so it was hard to care about the book's eventual payoff. Some the book because it was dark and not all sweetness and light, and others disliked it because it was dark, and there is already enough darkness in real life. Of those present and voting, 3 liked the book, 4 disliked the book, and 3 were indifferent.

When I got home, I realized that we hadn't talked about the father of the twins and his influence on their personalities and the directions their lives took. I actually found him one of the more interesting characters in the book, although we only really know him through the memory of his son. Did anyone else like Mr. Cheshire? What about the name "Cheshire," like the cat who disappeared all but his smile? Discuss amongst yourselves.

Book Report

Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2006, Pantheon Books, 768 pages, available at the San Leandro Library.

I didn’t know how long this book was when I proposed it as a book group selection. It probably never would have worked out. On the other hand, I was able to read it in two weeks, so I know it is doable. The book takes place in a fictitious African country, the Free Republic of Aburĩria. The second Ruler of Aburĩria has just announced the launch of a grandiose new project, “Marching to Heaven,” to begin just as soon as he can get funding from the “Global Bank.” Kamĩtĩ, a poor but highly educated job seeker, meets Nyawĩra, a privileged and highly educated political activist, in the office where she works as the administrative assistant of the man chosen to head up “Marching to Heaven.” From there, events snowball to transform Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra together into the Wizard of the Crow, a wizard and healer, and just in time too. Right after the appearance of the Wizard of the Crow, as it turns out that the Ruler himself is in need of some magical help.

This book has all the things I like in a book, rebellion, adventure, political intrigue, magic, and satire. I particularly enjoyed the dynamics between the Ruler and his ministers, how he plays them off against each other, and the lengths to which they are willing to go to abase and mutilate themselves to win the approval of the Ruler and gain advantage over each other. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the author, was imprisoned and then banished from Kenya, his native country, due to the political content of his writing, and it is easy to see how he offended the mighty. You can read more about his life and his writings at his website. As harsh as he is in his portrayal of the mighty, the author is sympathetic and affectionate toward the ordinary people caught up by the regime’s cruelty and greed, especially one character who turns out to be (in my opinion) the hero of the book.

Like I say, there are magical happenings in the book, and I know that will steer many people away from the book. A lot of people do not like “magical realism,” and who am I to argue with them? In defense of the magic in this book, it seemed to me like it was aided and abetted significantly by people’s need to believe in magic. The powerless believe in magic because it is the only hope they have, and the powerful believe in magic because they believe they deserve it.