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)?