Saturday, December 1, 2012, 2 p.m. at the San Leandro Main Library

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Meet the Author

Here is a link to Suzanne Collins' biography from her official web page.

And here is a brief video called "Suzanne Collins Answers Questions About the Hunger Games Trilogy"



And for Something Completely Different

Here is a brief video put together from the film version of "The Hunger Games," as interpreted by the folks at "Bad Lip Reading." WARNING: Juvenile humor.

Saturday, November 3, 2012, at 2:00 p.m., San Leandro Library

Never in My Wildest Dreams by Belva Davis and Vicki Haddock

A short video clip from Belva Davis about the book and why she wrote it.



Here's another video clip upon the occasion of KTVU anchorman Dennis Richmond's retirement, in which we get to meet Belva Davis' husband, Bill Moore.

The Railroad and the Rise of the Black Middle Class

While reading Belva Davis' book for the November meeting and surfing the internet for themes about Oakland history and African American history, my attention was drawn to the story of the Pullman Porters and other railroad workers, because Ms. Davis had written about how important railroad employment was for the men in her own family to get out of the South and to earn a better, more stable level of income and set their own family on the path out of poverty.  Here is a short clip about the Pullman Porters.



Here is a longer presentation from "Democracy Now," split into two parts for YouTube, which emphasizes the importance of the Pullman Porters to the labor movement and to the civil rights movement.

Part One:



Part Two:

Saturday, October 6, 2012, 2:00 p.m., San Leandro Public Library, Main Branch

Please Look after Mom, by Kyung-Sook Shin. Be there or be square.

Kung-Sook Shin

Shin Kyung-Sook (as her name would appear in Korean, with the family name first) was born in 1963 in a small South Korean farming village. Like the parents in her novel, her parents were farmers who couldn't afford to send her to school, so like the writer-daughter in the novel, she went to live with her older brother in Seoul. She worked in an electronics plant while she attended night school. Her first novel was published in 1985, and she is widely read in Korea and parts of Europe. In 1995, her novel A Lone Room received Korea's Manhae Prize, and in 2009 it received France's Prix de l'Inaperçu (prize for the unnoticed/underappreciated) award. It has been translated into English by the American PEN Center, but  hasn't found a publisher. It tells the story of "an intellectually ambitious young girl struggling to survive as a sweatshop worker in the 1970s." Her most recent novel, the one we are reading, Please Look After Mom, is the work that has brought her broad international recognition. For this work, in 2011, she became the first woman to receive the Man Asian Literary Prize. Below is a YouTube clip of her award acceptance. She speaks in Korean, and her speech is translated to English by a translator.

Here is a 2-part interview posted in the blog of a student of Korean literature at Columbia University.

Part 1 and Part 2.

Random Korean Cultural References

 Hanbok: Traditional Korean dress worn on semiformal or formal traditional occasions.

 
Kimchi: Traditional food staple of Korea, made from fermented cabbage, garlic, ginger, and peppers.

Panchan (or banchan): Small dishes of cooked food served with rice.

Perilla (leaves and seeds): An herb of the mint family used in Korean cooking. The leaves are said to taste like "a combination of apples and mint," and the taste of the seeds is said to resemble sesame (though perilla is not related to sesame).

Chindo (or jindo) dog: This is a medium-sized dog traditionally used for hunting. Like the Australian dingo dog, it is a local feral dog that has been domesticated.

Traditional Korean country-style house: This is from a Unesco heritage site.

Rice-paper doors: It took me a while to figure out that this was what they were talking about. I kept picturing the mom pasting rice paper on a solid-wood western-type door.

High-rise apartment block in Seoul: Supposedly, this design is very innovative in that it has internal hubs that compel the occupants to interact.

Seoul Metro: Actually, the Seoul subway system has 400 stations. This image is from a photo project to shoot images from all 400 stations.

Nominees for March through June 2012

 Below are the books nominated for March through June of next year. Please read through the brief descriptions below. The descriptions without quotes are as submitted by the nominators. The descriptions in quotes were cut and pasted from Amazon.com. Select your favorite four and email your selections to psunlane@yahoo.com.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller –  “Details one man's opportunity to edit his life as if he were a character in a movie.”

Bringing Up Bébé by  Pamela Druckerman – Memoir about American in Paris raising a child, learning from the French ways of child-rearing.

In-flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson – Sounds like a fun collection of short stories by a contemporary British author.

Riding the Bus with my Sister by Rachel Simon – About having a disabled sister (and she apparently wrote a novel, too, The Story of Beautiful Girl).

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje –  “In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship crosses the Indian Ocean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another...”

The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee – “A magnificent, profoundly humane ‘biography’ of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.”

The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls – A friend of mine from another book group said that her group loved the book.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides – It is #8 on the Bay Area paperback best seller list.  It is also a staff recommendation for the SF Chronicle by Orinda Books.  “It is a coming of age novel about three Brown graduates who find and lose love and each other as they emerge from the groves of academe.”

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern – “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians…”

The Paris Wife by Paula McClain –  “A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.”

The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes – “This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present.”

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller –  “In this new twist on the Trojan War story, Patroclus and Achilles are the quintessential mismatched pair--a mortal underdog exiled in shame and a glorious demigod revered by all--but what would a novel of ancient Greece be without star-crossed love?”

Zahra’s Paradise by Amir and Khalil – Contemporary Iran in a graphic novel.

Saturday, September 8, 2012, 2 p.m. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I was at the wrap-up dinner for the adult reading program a couple of weeks ago, and we touched briefly on Tinker, Tailor..., which we all agreed could be somewhat confusing as it starts close to the end and is told in a very nonlinear fashion, so I declared, with much grandiosity, that I would undertake to write a timeline of the story told in a chronologically linear fashion. Well, I started that last week, and it started to be almost as long as the actual book, so I am starting over with a much less detailed timeline pulled from my memory. There are bound to be gaps which you can help me fill in at the discussion. There will be spoilers. In fact, the biggest spoiler shows up right at the beginning, so I am going to put the type in a light color that you have to select to read in order to not give anything away to those who haven't finished the book. You have to select it to read it.

John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Outlined Chronologically

Before World War II:  Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux are at university together. Percy Alleline is at university, and Control is a professor. Karla is in London for a while (cover unknown). Bill Haydon is recruited into a group of pro-communist spies. 

In the early post-war period: Smiley, Prideaux, Alleline, Haydon, and Control are all working for "the Circus," Smiley has also recruited Roy Bland and is soon to recruit Toby Esterhase. Karla is caught in the US and shipped back to Russia via India. Smiley goes to India to try to turn Karla and loses a key piece of information to Karla, along with his cigarette lighter.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1960's: Somewhere along the line, Bill Haydon has an affair with Smiley's wife, Ann. Percy Alleline comes up with an unbelievably fruitful source of Soviet intelligence, Source Merlin, whose product is dubbed "Witchcraft." From the beginning, Control believes that Witchcraft is a fraud and sets out to prove it. Witchcraft gains support among various ministries and is given a huge budget and its own safe-house, location unknown to even Control. Connie Sachs, who is working in the research department, partly through sources in the Netherlands and Japan, identifies a cultural attaché at the Soviet embassy, Polyakov, as "a six-cylinder Karla-trained hood if ever I saw one." This "hood" has a legman who is working under the cover name of "Lapin." Connie communications up the chain of command to Percy Alleline, and is shoved out of the Circus into enforced retirement.

Sometime in the late 60's after the Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia (1968): Control is approached by someone offering him a defector, a disillusioned Czech general, who has some important information about a high-level spy within the Circus. Control requisitions the services of Jim Prideaux to go to Brno, Czechoslovakia, to contact and retrieve the general. Control tells Prideaux about his suspicions of top officers in the Circus, The night before he leaves, Prideaux tries to reach the two men he trusts, Smiley and Haydon. According to Jerry Westerby, meanwhile, near Brno, in the woods around the farmhouse where Prideaux is to contact the Czech general, Russian and Czech troops are massing, with the Russians running everything, even before Jim arrives. As soon as he arrives in Brno, Prideaux realizes his cover is blown but tries to shake his surveillance and go through with the assignment anyway. He is shot, captured, tortured, accused of trying to assassinate a Czech general, and then swapped back to the British. Control is exposed and disgraced, forced out of the service along with anyone close to him, including Smiley. Sam Collins, the man who was on duty at the Circus the night of Prideaux's capture, calls Smiley's house when the spit hits the spam. Smiley is not there, but Bill Haydon shows up shortly, saying he got the news on the wire at his club

In 1973, at the present time of the story: Control is dead. Jim Prideaux has recovered from his wounds and is working as French instructor at a private boys school. Smiley is in retirement and at loose ends. He is commandeered by his former protegee, Peter Guillam, and taken to meet with the government overseer of intelligence matters, Oliver Lacon, and one of the Circus' former shady operatives, Ricki Tarr, who had disappeared, presumed defected, 6 months earlier in Hong Kong. Tarr tells Smiley of a potential Soviet defector who was hustled back to Russia to be tortured and shot as soon as Tarr contacted London about her. Irina had left behind a diary where she named a former lover of hers, Ivlov, as "Lapin" former dogsbody in the London Soviet embassy, names Polyakov as a General Viktorov, known graduate of Karla's spy school, and tells of a mole, "Gerald," a high-ranking official within the circus, who is being handled by Polyakov/Viktorov. From there, Smiley follows the clues to expose Bill Haydon as the mole. (You can finish the rest for me; I have to get ready for work).

The Many Faces of George Smiley

George Smiley appeared in either a major or a minor role in John Le Carré's first four novels, Call for the Dead (1961), A Murder of Quality (1962), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), and The Looking Glass War (1965). In the second novel, A Murder of Quality, Smiley had even been a much older man, retired, and called in as a consultant in the investigation of a murder at a private boys' school. When Le Carré began his "Karla Trilogy," his 7th, 8th, and 9th novels, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People, Le Carré reinvented Smiley, made him younger, and reworked the timeline of his career at "The Circus." A number of actors have played George Smiley in various screen and television adaptation of John Le Carré's novels.

1965, "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," Rupert Davies.

1966, "The Deadly Affair," James Mason (based on Call for the Dead and with the Smiley character's name changed to Charles Dobbs).

 












1979, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," and 1982, "Smiley's People," Alec Guiness.

 

 1991, "A Murder of Quality," Denholm Elliott.

2011, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," Gary Oldman.

How Reality Seeps into Fiction

Before I get started on real-life influences on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I want to repeat the link from my August 4th post to the Wikipedia about the insider spy jargon from the book. That way, you don't have to scroll down.

Early Life and Fascination with Secrets

From the official website of John Le Carré (né David Cornwell): “I never knew my mother till I was 21. I act like a gent but I am wonderfully badly born. My father was a confidence trickster and a gaol bird." One of his early influences that allowed him to "act like a gent" was his education at Sherborne School in Dorset, which by all accounts, he hated, but as you can see from the novel, the closed, secretive world of the British boys' boarding school, with its hierarchies, competitions, nicknames, and insider lingo,  finds an echo at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service.

The conflict between acting like a gent and keeping the secrets of a conman father, are at the heart of his most biographical novel, A Perfect Spy, which I looked for at the library, but it was apparently checked out (I will be renting the miniseries version from Netflix shortly). I also see some echoes of the father, real life Ronnie Cornwell, with Ricki Tarr, the fictitious conman, hustler, and intelligence operative, who reignites the hunt for "Gerald," the mole. Ricki was traveling on a passport under the name of "Poole," which also happens to be the name of the town in which David Cornwell was born.

According to (undoubtedly unimpeachable) internet sources, David Cornwell's father, Ronnie, was an associate of the Krays, the subject of another movie.


Also the subject of a BBC documentary.


As a matter of fact, in other John Le Carré novels I have read, the theme of gangsters' (or spies') kids attending exclusive private schools often crops up.

The Philby Scandal

The rough template for Tinker, Tailor was provided by the Philby Scandal which unrolled over the course of more than 10 years from 1949 to 1961, when Harold Adrian Russell Philby (AKA "Kim" Philby) finally defected from the UK to the Soviet Union. Like the fictitious "Gerald the Mole," Philby had been recruited at a leading university before the war to spy for the Soviets and had risen to the highest ranks at the SIS, and like Gerald, it was some time before the service was able to prove that Philby was a double agent. The rough outlines of the story are provided by a link to a PBS "Nova" documentary "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies." Here also is a link to Kim Philby's Wiki page (subject, of course, to the usual caveats about anything you read on Wikipedia).

Below is a documentary on "The Cambridge Spies," split up into three parts for YouTube.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

John Le Carré

John Le Carré is the pen  name of David Cornwell (it means John The Square in French). The rough biographical facts of his life are on his official website:

[He] was born in 1931 in Poole, Dorset, and was educated at Sherborne School, at the University of Berne (where he studied German literature for a year) and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in modern languages.

He taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg. He started writing novels in 1961, and since then has published twenty-one titles.

 Along with some quotes about himself by himself, my favorite being:

A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.

And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

Le Carré had his 22nd novel, published in 2010, Our Kind of Traitor, about the Russian mob in modern day Great Britain. He considers A Perfect Spy (1986) his most autobiographical novel, and in fact, to readers who want to know more about David Cornwell the man, Le Carré refers them to this novel. His most broadly acclaimed novel is his third, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  This novel was written in 1963 at the height of the "Cold War," at the height of the popularity of the James Bond franchise, and was widely considered to have taken the wind out of the whole James Bond image of foreign espionage. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was also made into a pretty darn movie starting the long-late but often great Richard Burton. In the grand tradition of YouTube, it was chopped up into 12 segments and posted to YouTube, but only segments 3-5 remain (probably due to copyright reasons). Below is segment 4. Enjoy it while you can.

Saturday, August 4, 2012, 2 p.m.

Be prepared to question your assumptions (and mine too).

"Do you remember when we thought a raccoon was getting into our garbage?"

Mary kept sewing.

"Turned out it was dogs."

Here's a link to a brief interview with Percival Everett in which he talks about Assumption and other things, including the crow that is sitting on his shoulder in the picture on the back cover of the book.

For something completely different:  A link to a Wikipedia entry which explains the jargon from  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Percival Everett

Just about all you can find out about Percival Everett—the author of Assumption, our book for August—on the internet is pretty much what you can get from reading the back of your book.  He was born in 1956, graduated from Brown University, has had more than 20 books, teaches at the University of Southern California, and is married to another writer, Danzy Senna.

Two of his novels are available at the San Leandro Library:

Wounded (2008), about an upper-middle-class black man, John Hunt, who has attended a private prep school and studied art at Berkeley, who chucked it all to become a horse trainer in Wyoming because of the sheer beauty of the country. John's life has reached a kind of equilibrium, when a young man who has worked for him occasionally as a ranch hand is murdered in an apparent homophobic hate crime.

Erasure (2002).  Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is an academic and a writer of very intellectual experimental novels. He has simultaneously been told that his novels are not marketable because they don't tap into the "black experience" and found one his novels (if I recall correctly, based on themes of ancient Persian mythology) filed in the "African American Literature" section of the local big-box book store, because if you're an African American writer, that's where your books go, no matter what they are about. Monk has had to go back home to the suburban DC area  (in the heat of summer) because of a family crisis, which unravels into a series of cascading crises. At the same time, the hottest best-seller that summer is a book called We's Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a college-educated middle-class writer like himself, a book that offends Monk on multiple levels. In response (and under the influence, if I recall correctly), Monk writes his own "blaxploitation" novel, My Pafology, even more offensive and over-the-top than the other book. He puts it on the market under a pseudonym, and it becomes a runaway best seller.

Here is a brief clip from an interview with Percival Everett:

Updates

If you look at the "Pages" menu to the left, you will note that I have added a new page, "Lit Links," which is a work in progress borrowed from the old links on Lori's original Readers Roundtable blog. I have been going through and testing all her old links,  updating them when possible, and adding new ones that you have told me about or that I have come across myself in my meanderings across the internet.

I have also updated the "Coming Up!" and "Booklists" pages to reflect the books we are going to read and the books we have already read. Please let me know if anything needs correction.

Saturday, July 14, 2012, at 2 p.m.

Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

 

From Peggy:  There will be two book groups for Farewell to Manzanar on Saturday.  RRTable will be in Conference Room B, so take note. Lori has offered to bring cookies for our group so come wanting dessert! Thank you Lori! She will also have some surveys and sign ups sheets we will need to fill out for the grant reporting.  

Meet the Author?

It isn't listed on the library calendar, but under "California Reads" it definitely says that Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston will be at the library at 2:00 today to kick off the California Reads program and talk about her book, Farewell to Manzanar. At this point, I am fully intending to be there.

California Reads 2012

Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

California Reads is sponsored by Cal Humanities (formerly the California Council for the Humanities), in partnership with the California Center for the Book, and the California State Library. California Reads is similar to The Big Read, which we participated in earlier this year, in that it promotes a list of books and encourages people to come together to discuss those books. This year at the San Leandro Library, the selected book is Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir of growing up in a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston will be at the San Leandro Library next week, Saturday, June 30, 2012, at 2 p.m. to talk about the book. Below is a video excerpt from the Cal Humanities website of her talking about writing the book.



Here is another brief documentary video I found on YouTube about the internment. Many of you will recognize one of the scenes from the video.

Saturday, May 5, 2012, 2 p.m.

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

Most readers will be aware that The Pursuit of Love (along with its sequels, Love in a Cold Climate, and Don't Tell Alfred) uses as a starting point, Nancy Mitford's own life and uses her eccentric, aristocratic family (seen at left) as fictionalized characters.

From the official Nancy Mitford website:

'If one can't be happy one must be amused don't you agree? ' Nancy wrote to a friend. It could stand as the motto for her life. She hid her deepest feelings behind a sparkling flow of jokes and witty turns of phrase, and was the star of any gathering.

The one Mitford sibling still alive is the youngest, Deborah (Victoria in the novels), who is now the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (what a great title), now in her 90s and still making headlines. From January 2011:
"90-Year-Old Duchess Gets Restraining Order Against Suitor." The following is a brief interview on YouTube, in which the Dowager Duchess is plugging a book of her memoirs, Wait for Me.

Also on YouTube, you can find the entire 2001 television series based on The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which was entitled "Love in a Cold Climate," and which I believe I saw the very end of. As is customary on YouTube, it is split up into small chunks, seven for episode 1 and eight for episode 2. Embedding is disabled for this video, but you can start part 1 of episode one by clicking on this link.

I still prefer Monty Python's version.

Saturday, April 7, 2012, at 2:00 p.m.

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

Well, I was going to post all kinds of preparatory and supplementary information about Parrot and Olivier, especially about Alexis de Tocqueville, the real-life French political philosopher and historian on whom the character of "Lord Migraine" is (apparently very, very loosely) based. However, my own computer melted down early this week, so I have only very limited access to a borrowed computer. For those of you with some curiosity about Alexis de Tocqueville, here is a link to a site about all things de Tocqueville, which includes further links to excerpts from Democracy in America (de Tocqueville's great work on the subject), also a link to his journal of the trip. I think that, there, we might find some of the famous passages that Carey said he borrowed and buried in Parrot and Olivier.

I scanned a few reviews, and the question that at least one of them thought was central to the book was, "Are art and democracy compatible?" which is a good question and one that we might raise at the meeting. Another question that occurred to me is: Among the few European languages that I have tried to learn, English is unique in that it has only one level of the second person. Every other that I know of (granted that my knowledge is not that broad), has a formal "you" (vous, usted) and an informal "thou" (tu). Throughout the the book, you'll notice that Olivier is perpetually irritated with Parrot for "tutoyer-ing" him. So when the English speaking world decided to simplify things by using only one form, "you," why did they choose the formal "you," instead of the brotherly "thee" (as the Quakers would have had it)?

The Big Read

"The Big Read," according to the National Endowment for the Arts' mission statement, is a program, "designed to restore reading to the center of American culture." The San Leandro Library is a NEA grant recipient again this year, and the book they have selected is Sun, Stone and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories, edited by Jorge Hernandez. If you were at last month's Readers Roundtable meeting, you had the opportunity to sign up for "The Big Read" and get your free copy of the book. If not, you can attend the Library's kickoff event tomorrow, Saturday, March 3, 2012, at 2:00 in the Karp/Estudillo rooms and hear readings from the story, "The Cooking Lesson," by Rosario Castellanos (both in English and in Spanish), see a cooking demonstration, enjoy some light refreshments, sign up for the program, and receive your free book.

We will be discussing Sun, Stone and Shadows at next week's Readers Roundtable. Be there or be cuadrado.

Saturday, February 11, 2012, at 2 p.m.

For starters, the two permanent pages, "Booklists 1997–2012" and "Coming Up!," have been updated and can be linked to by clicking the links in the left-hand sidebar. If you have not noticed them before, check them out. Also, I am trying to put together a page of links to search in order to come up with book selections. Any suggestions for sites will be appreciated.

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

First of all, a couple of months back, I posted a link that Linda had forwarded, which will take you to an article in Grantland about the decline of horse racing in America. If you missed that at the time, check it out now.

Second of all, I needed to find a definition for "claiming race" as I have always wondered what that meant since I was a child and they used to have horse racing on TV all the time. The quotation in the front of the book from Ainslie's did not clear that up entirely for me either. Here is a definition from the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association:

Claiming races constitute the majority of Thoroughbred races. Each horse entered in such a race is subject to sale, or claim, at the value stated in the conditions of the race. However, all purse money earned is the property of the person in whose name the horse started.

The primary advantage to claiming is that it offers immediate racing action. Likened to purchasing a used car, the buyer may be obtaining a horse which, with a change in training routine, may develop and excel or may turn out to be nothing more than a lemon. Unlike purchasing a horse at public auction or privately, the buyer is not entitled to perform a veterinary examination prior to the purchase.

If you elect to pursue this option, you should employ a trainer who excels in this aspect of the business. With your trainer, devise a strategy for selecting potential claims.

As the quote in the front of the books clarifies, this is to keep the owners honest, to keep them from only running their horses against horses of lesser quality.

Jaimy Gordon talks about Lord of Misrule

Saturday, January 7, 2012, at 2 p.m.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen, discussion led by Jean.

If you are looking for the book proposals for June–August, scroll down to the post immediately below this one. Please pick your favorite three (if you can) and either email them to Peggy or be prepared to vote at Saturday's meeting.

Meet Rhoda Janzen (virtually)

Below is Rhoda Janzen's book promo video from YouTube. It contains some actual pictures of her family.

Book Nominees for June–August 2012

Please choose three and either email your selections to Peggy or be prepared to vote for your three choices at the meeting on Saturday, January 7, 2012.




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.

Assumption: A Novel by Percival Everett (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman’s murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution. In Assumption, his follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other.

Great House: A Novel by Nicole Krauss (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944. Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared. Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change?

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin (fiction)
Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2011: There is a simple, yet remarkable, scene in Kyung-sook Shin’s novel, Please Look After Mom, where the book’s title character visits her adult son in Seoul. He lives in a duty office in the building where he works, because he can't afford an apartment. At night, they sleep on the floor and she offers to lie next to the wall to shield him from a draft. “I can fall asleep better if I’m next to the wall,” she says. And with this gesture, we catch a glimpse of the depth of love she has for her first-born and the duty-bound sacrifices she’s made on behalf her family. Please Look After Mom is the story of a mother, and her family’s search for her after she goes missing in a crowded train station, told through four richly imagined voices: her daughter’s, her oldest son’s, her husband’s, and finally her own. Each chapter adds a layer to the story’s depth and complexity, until we are left with an indelible portrait of a woman whose entire identity, despite her secret desires, is tied up in her children and the heartbreaking loss that is felt when family bonds loosen over time. Kyung-sook Shin’s elegantly spare prose is a joy to read, but it is the quiet interstitial space between her words, where our own remembrances and regrets are allowed to seep in, that convicts each one of us to our core. —Shane Hansanuwat. (Not available in paperback until April 2012)

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness. As Ava sets out on a mission through the magical swamps to save them all, we are drawn into a lush and bravely imagined debut that takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.

The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel by Garth Stein (fiction)
Synopsis from Garth Stein’s website: Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television extensively, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver. Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing, isn't simply about going fast. Using the techniques needed on the race track, one can successfully navigate all of life's ordeals. On the eve of his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through: the sacrifices Denny has made to succeed professionally; the unexpected loss of Eve, Denny's wife; the three-year battle over their daughter, Zoë, whose maternal grandparents pulled every string to gain custody. In the end, despite what he sees as his own limitations, Enzo comes through heroically to preserve the Swift family, holding in his heart the dream that Denny will become a racing champion with Zoë at his side.

The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: Fortunes have changed for the King family, descendants of Hawaiian royalty and one of the state’s largest landowners. Matthew King’s daughters—Scottie, a feisty ten-year-old, and Alex, a seventeen-year-old recovering drug addict—are out of control, and their charismatic, thrill-seeking mother, Joanie, lies in a coma after a boat-racing accident. She will soon be taken off life support. As Matt gathers his wife’s friends and family to say their final goodbyes, a difficult situation is made worse by the sudden discovery that there’s one person who hasn’t been told: the man with whom Joanie had been having an affair. Forced to examine what they owe not only to the living but to the dead, Matt, Scottie, and Alex take to the road to find Joanie’s lover, on a memorable journey that leads to unforeseen humor, growth, and profound revelations.

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: Rosa Achmetowna is the outrageously nasty and wily narrator of this rollicking family saga from the author of Broken Glass Park When she discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, “stupid Sulfia,” is pregnant by an unknown man she does everything to thwart the pregnancy, employing a variety of folkloric home remedies. But despite her best efforts the baby, Aminat, is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. Much to Rosa’s surprise and delight, dark eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother’s eye. While her good for nothing husband Kalganow spends his days feeding pigeons and contemplating death at the city park, Rosa wages an epic struggle to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, whom she considers a woefully inept mother. When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray. Told with sly humor and an anthropologist’s eye for detail, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is the story of three unforgettable women whose destinies are tangled up in a family dynamic that is at turns hilarious and tragic. In her new novel, Russian-born Alina Bronsky gives readers a moving portrait of the devious limits of the will to survive.

The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: A 2011 National Book Award Finalist in Fiction, The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a family tragedy and returns with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When World War One comes, Jozef joins his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser’s army, surviving a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy. A stirring tale of brotherhood, coming-of-age, and survival, that was inspired by the author’s own family history, this novel evokes a time when Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, and Germans fought on the same side while divided by language, ethnicity, and social class in the most brutal war to date. It is also a poignant tale of fathers and sons, addressing the great immigration to America and the desire to live the American dream amidst the unfolding tragedy in Europe.

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: National Book Award finalist, New York Times bestseller. In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story by Susan Hill (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: Arthur Kipps is an up-and-coming London solicitor who is sent to Crythin Gifford—a faraway town in the windswept salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway—to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of a client, Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. Mrs. Drablow’s house stands at the end of the causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, but Kipps is unaware of the tragic secrets that lie hidden behind its sheltered windows. The routine business trip he anticipated quickly takes a horrifying turn when he finds himself haunted by a series of mysterious sounds and images—a rocking chair in a deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child’s scream in the fog, and, most terrifying of all, a ghostly woman dressed all in black. Psychologically terrifying and deliciously eerie, The Woman in Black is a remarkable thriller of the first rate.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre (fiction)
Amazon.com synopsis: The first novel in John le Carré's celebrated Karla trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a heart-stopping tale of international intrigue. The man he knew as "Control" is dead, and the young Turks who forced him out now run the Circus. But George Smiley isn't quite ready for retirement—especially when a pretty, would-be defector surfaces with a shocking accusation: a Soviet mole has penetrated the highest level of British Intelligence. Relying only on his wits and a small, loyal cadre, Smiley recognizes the hand of Karla—his Moscow Centre nemesis—and sets a trap to catch the traitor.

Better Late than Never

It appears that I didn't post a single solitary thing in December of 2011. During that time, Linda sent me several links which I have been delinquent in sharing with you.

First, a link forwarded along (via Lori) in which librarians post their secret Ryan Gosling fantasies with captions, kind of like lolcats but with 99.9% more Ryan Gosling.

Second, an article in the Guardian about World Book Night, in which book lovers select books from a reading list and hand them out to new readers in order to spread the love of reading. The first world book night started in the UK last year and was such a big hit it is going global this year on April 23, 2012. The list of books for the US. is in the Guardian article. You will notice that a few past selections from the Readers Roundtable are on the list. In her email forwarding the links, Linda asked if San Leandro was going to participate in this, and it appears that the answer is: If you want to step up. There is a link in the Guardian article to the US World Book Night site, where you will find out how to be a giver.

Third, a link to YouTube clip that tells the entire history of the English language into less than 12 minutes. Watch and enjoy.