Saturday, December 7, 2013, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Meet the Author

Maria Semple was born in Santa Monica in 1964. Her father was a screenwriter and wrote the pilot for the Batman television series. Her family lived in Spain, Los Angeles, and Aspen. She attended boarding schoole at Choate Rosemary Hall and received a BA from Barnard College. After graduation, she became a screenwriter for television series including Beverly Hills, 90210; Mad About You; and Arrested Development. In addition to Where'd You Go, Bernadette, she has written another novel, This One is Mine. She lives in Seattle with her partner, George Meyer, and their daughter and teaches writing. Below is a brief video clip of Semple talking about her novel.

Scenes from Seattle

Queen Anne Hill as seen from the Space Needle

The structure at the crest of the hill is the former Queen Anne High School, which has been turned into apartments, but it could just as well be "Straight Gate."

Queen Anne-style house

Possibly the model for Audrey Griffin's "white castle."

Craftsman-style house in Seattle.

Bernadette is not impressed.

Inside the Space Needle

 Seattle icon and scene of the birthday lunch for Bee's friend Kennedy.

Cliff Mass, Meteorologist

Seattle fixture and Bernadette and Bee's favorite weatherman.

Dale Chihuly chandelier in Seattle

Perhaps similar to the one Bernadette fell asleep under at the compounding pharmacy.

Antartica

Ushuaia, Argentina

The jumping-off point for tours of Antarctica.
  

An Antarctic iceberg

 One of the colorful kind that caught Bernadette's attention.

Swimming in the volcanic fumarole on Deception Island.

Notice the tourists in the red parkas. I first heard about this place when watching a Jacques Cousteau special about 30 years ago or so and has been on my bucket list ever since. I was so angry with Bee when she refused an opportunity to swim in the hot springs.

The gift shop at Port Lockroy

This is where Bee met the two English girls. Bernadette was not here.

An Adelie penguin rookery

These parents have chicks and are not fighting.

Palmer Station, Antarctica

Apparently the most coveted research post in Antarctica.

Your Humble Narrator

The story is pieced together from the viewpoint of Bernadette's daughter, Bee, short for...

Balakrishina

The blue, flute-playing baby Krishna.

Director Stanley Kubrick

This is what I imagine Bee's "Kubrick" face looked like.

Saturday, November 2, 2013, 2 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Meet the Author

This is Louise Erdrich's biography as lifted wholesale from the University of Nebraska Center for Great Plains Studies:

The eldest of seven children, Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota on July 6, 1954. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school. At an early age Erdrich was encouraged by her parents to write stories. Her father paid her a nickel a story and her mother made covers for her first books. In high school, Erdrich continued her writing by keeping a journal.

In 1972, Erdrich was among the first women admitted to Dartmouth College. She majored in English and creative writing, and took courses in the Native American Studies program headed by her future husband, Michael Dorris. She graduated in 1976.

In 1979, Erdrich earned her Master of Arts degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. For her thesis Erdrich wrote poetry that would later be published in the collection Jacklight. She also began writing her novel Tracks. After John Hopkins, Erdrich worked at The Circle, the Boston Indian Council Newspaper.

Erdrich met Michael Dorris again when she was invited to return to Dartmouth to read her work. The two exchanged addresses and began a lengthy correspondence while he was in New Zealand and she in New Hampshire. In 1981 Erdrich returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence in the Native American Studies Program. Dorris returned to Dartmouth that same year and the two were married in October of 1981.

Erdrich's marriage to Dorris began not only a domestic partnership but also a literary one. Dorris became a collaborator and agent for Erdrich. The two first wrote romantic fiction under the name Milou North to earn extra money. Milou was a combination of their first names, and north referred to their location. They also collaborated on Erdrich's other novels for which Dorris offered editorial suggestions on Erdrich's writing. Only two works, however, contain both Erdrich's and Dorris's names, The Crown of Columbus and Route Two, a collection of travel essays.

As Erdrich's agent, Dorris persuaded Henry Holt and Company to publish Jacklight and convinced Erdrich to compete for the Nelson Algren Fiction Award. Erdrich won this $5,000 award in 1982 with "The World's Greatest Fisherman." This story later became the opening chapter for Love Medicine.

Dorris had adopted three children when he was single. Erdrich also adopted them and the couple had three more children together. In 1991, their oldest child was killed in a car accident. Additional family problems put a strain on the marriage and the two separated after fifteen years of marriage. In 1997, Dorris committed suicide. Later Erdrich revealed that her husband had been depressed and suicidal during their marriage. Erdrich moved to Minneapolis, only a few hours away from her parents in North Dakota.

Erdrich's fiction is influenced both by her heritage and her life experiences. Her father's parents ran a butcher shop. Jacklight contains a section of poems entitled "The Butcher's Wife." A butcher shop is also featured in her novels The Beet Queen and Tracks. After college one of her many jobs was waitressing. Waitresses appear in several of her works.

Love Medicine is Erdrich's first and most critically acclaimed novel. It was originally published in 1984 and republished in an expanded form in 1993. Erdrich received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction for Love Medicine. It is the first of a series of novels that are interconnected with one another. The other novels are The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, and to a much lesser degree The Antelope Wife.

Erdrich has also won the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, the O. Henry Prize for short fiction, the Western Literary Association Award, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several of her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories series. Erdrich's short fiction has also appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and Paris Review. She is one of few American Indian writers who are widely read.

In the video below, Louise Erdrich talks to the PBS News Hour about her 14th novel, The Round House, which of course is our book for discussion this month.

Law and the Reservation

 In the afterword to The Round House, Erdrich mentions the Amnesty International report "Maze of Injustice," subtitled "The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA." At that point the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 had just been signed into law as a step toward a remedy. In 2011, The Violence Against Women Act, which had been signed originally in 1994 (an effort led by then-Senator Joe Biden), was due to expire, and during the reauthorization hearings, language was added which would have extended protections to native Americans as well as undocumented aliens and LGBT victims. Due to the expansion of protections, the reauthorization bill was opposed by conservative lawmakers, and only a watered-down version stripped of additional protections was able to pass in the House. In February 2013, Louise Erdrich wrote an article in the opinion pages of The New York Times about the consequences to native women of the failure to pass the Violence Against Women Act. A month later, in March 2013, the reauthorization bill finally passed and was signed into law by President Obama. At the signing ceremony, a young woman named Diane Millich of the Southern Ute tribe told of her own experience with violence at the hands of her non-Indian ex-husband and how that was made possible by the jursidictional conflicts that are now addressed by the act (see the first 2 minutes of this video).

Some followup to the book Gods Without Men

Area 51 and Roswell

Area 51 is the light rectangle in the center.

In regard to the discussion of UFO sightings in the desert, it turned out that most of us had Area 51 and Roswell, New Mexico, blended together in our minds. I was pretty sure that Area 51 was in Nevada, but not absolutely sure, so I had to look it up. It turns out that Area 51 (AKA Groom Lake) is in southern Nevada and is actually administratively part of Edwards Air Force Base, itself located in the California desert not too far from where the action of the book takes place. Groom Lake in Nevada is where many top-secret spy aircraft have been tested (including the U2 spy plane), also where captured technology from other countries was evaluated. Due to the extreme secrecy that surrounds the facility, rumors have been rife over the years that the base had something to do with either extraterrestrial exploration or captured extraterrestrial ships on earth or both. Due to a Freedom of Information Act request made in 2005, the CIA finally publicly acknowledged a few months ago that there was a test facility at that location, but didn't reveal anything more. Go to the Wiki page if you want to read more (standard Wikipedia caveats apply).

Roswell is nearly two states away from Area 51.

Roswell, New Mexico, is located in the southeast corner of that state, actually quite a way from Area 51. In July 1947, a local newspaper reported that a "flying disk" had crashed on a ranch near there and been taken to Roswell Army Air Force Base for analysis. From thence have sprung many books, television series episodes, and movies about captured alien technology and alien autopsies. The Roswell UFO Incident, of course, has its own Wiki Page.

Changelings

Twice in Gods Without Men, the idea of a changeling figures in the story. First, the child Judy disappears at the site of the UFO cult and is widely believed either to have been abducted by aliens or to have been incinerated in the explosion of the extraterrestrial travel machine that consumed the cult's founder, Schmidt. A fully grown late teen-aged "Judy" later appears to confirm the alien abduction story and become a key figure in what remains of the cult. Later, "Judy" reveals to another character that she is not actually Judy but a young girl from Salt Lake City who was picked up by one of the cult elders and groomed to impersonate the original Judy. When asked how the mother of the original Judy could have been taken in, the substitute answers, "I was the answer to her prayers." The second incident comes at the end of the book, after Raj is returned to Jaz and Lisa with his autism cured, when Jaz begins to suspect that Raj is not his son but a completely different child.

As we were discussing this, something flashed by my mind, but the conversation had moved on, and the thought was gone before it was even fully formed. Later I remembered what I had been thinking about was a movie that I saw a year or so ago, called "The Imposter," about a Texas family whose youngest son had disappeared at age 13. The family got a call three years later from Spain from someone claiming to be the lost teen. His older sister traveled to Spain and identified him as her lost brother even though he was shorter than any male in her family, had brown hair and brown eyes instead of blond hair and blue eyes, had a much heavier 5-o'clock shadow than is normal in a teen, and had a heavy French accent. As the story unraveled, people asked how the family could have been so easily and thoroughly duped, and the answer was that "He was the answer to their prayers." It was one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen and is available on Netflix (there is also a fictionalized version called "The Chameleon"). Here's the trailer of  "The Imposter".

Saturday, October 5, 2013, 2 PM, San Leandro Public Library

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

The title is taken from a short story by Honoré de Balzac, "Une passion dans le désert". The relevant excerpt is quoted at the beginning of the book and roughly translated means, "In the desert, you see, there is everything, and there is nothing ... It is God without men."

 

About the Author

Hari Kunzru was born in England in 1969 and grew up there, the child of an Indian father and a British mother. In an interview with Granta, he tells of having had fantasies as a child of being abducted by a UFO. He earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Wadham College, Oxford, and an MA in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick. Before being a published novelist he worked as a travel writer, television presenter, and music editor at a magazine. He has published three other novels, The Impressionist (2003), Transmission (2004), and My Revolutions (2007), and a collection of short stories, Noise (2005). In 2003, he was award the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, but he turned it down because one of the sponsors was the Mail on Sunday, a paper with a notorious anti-immigrant editorial position. He has been active in the cause of free speech, including reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses aloud at a literary festival in Jaipur, India, in 2012. In the YouTube clip below, he talks about his position on free speech and reads aloud a poem, "The Love that Dares Speak Its Name," which was banned in England in the 1970s on grounds of blasphemy. You may not want to watch if you are offended by homoeroticism or blasphemy.

Background for Gods Without Men

The Mojave Desert

In an interview in the Paris Review, Kunzru tells of how he first traveled to the Mojave after being trapped in Los Angeles after 9/11 and needing to get out of the city to clear his head.

Rock formation near Hole-in-the-Wall campground in the East Mojave; my husband and I camped near here in 1989.

 

The Pinnacles

The pinnacles of the book were probably based on the Trona Pinnacles, but in looking at pictures of them, I could not find a particular group that looked like three fingers.

There apparently was a real "Schmidt," though I seem to recall that his name was not Schmidt, who set up a radio transmitter near the pinnacles in order to contact extraterrestrial life, but I can't link to the article that mentions that, because I forgot to bookmark it and now I can't find it.

Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés

Francisco Garcés, as the author acknowledges, was a real person, though his presence in the novel is highly fictionalized. Here is a link to his page as a "saint of the day" at AmericanCatholic.org, and here is a picture of his historical marker in Winterhaven, Imperial County.

 

The Ashtar Galactic Command

There was, and still is, an Ashtar Galactic Command. You can visit their webpage here. I couldn't find any record album by them, but I did find out that in 1977, someone claiming to be the Ashtar Galactic Command broke into a British television broadcast to deliver a message to Earth.

The Marfa Lights

In the acknowledgements in the back of the book, Kunzru says the book was written, in part in Marfa, Texas, and in the Granta interview linked to above, he says, "I’ve never seen a UFO myself but the closest experience I’ve had is something called the Marfa Lights in Texas. It’s a paranormal phenomenon in which a fluctuating number of twinkling lights appear to be levitating over the desert night sky. Though the number varies it’s otherwise a fairly regular occurrence. No one can explain it. It’s a reliable fast-food-like UFO experience, if you’re looking to have one."

 

The Madeleine McCann Story

In the Granta interview, the interviewer references the media frenzy, as it is portrayed in the book, surrounding the disappearance of Raj as being reminiscent of the events and subsequent media circus surrounding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. This was the case of a 3-year-old from the UK who disappeared while on vacation with her family in Portugal in 2007. You can read about it in particular detail on Wikipedia, including the widespread vilification of the family by the tabloid media and the sighting of a possible abductor carrying the child in his arms.

Simulated Iraqi and Afghan Villages in the Mojave

The account of ersatz Iraqi villages in the Mojave desert is based on fact. These training villages are located at Fort Irwin.

For extra credit: Baghdad Cafe

This was one of my favorite movies from the 1980s. It is set in the Mojave, and it begins with a vision in the desert. I am embedding the theme song clip below. You can see the entire 1 hour and 28 minutes on YouTube.

NaNoWriMo?

The other day, I was reading the comments in a blog, and one of the commenters made reference to padding word count "NaNoWriMo style". I just had to go and look that up and found out it stands for "Nation Novel Writing Month," which is an annual challenge taking place in November in which participants commit to writing a 50,000-word first-draft novel during the month of November. Those of you with writing aspirations, if you are interested, click on the link above to go to the site to sign up.

Saturday, September 7, 2013, 2 PM at the San Leandro Main Library

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

The story begins and ends in the Cinque Terre region on the northwest coast of Italy, on the Ligurian Sea, the part of the Mediterranean which also borders Monaco, France, and Corsica (birthplace of Napoleon). The name means "five lands" in Italian and refers to the five villages of Monterosso al Mare, Vernaza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. These villages are not reachable by auto, but only train, footpaths, and the sea. They are part of the Cinque Terre National Park and are a UNESCO World Heritage site. When I examined the cover of the book, I couldn't decide whether it was a photo or a drawing; the colors seemed too vivid to be real. I haven't yet made up my mind about the cover, but it could well be a photo as here is a picture of the village of Manarola, which may be the village pictured on the cover of the book.

Here is a picture of the Albergo Pasquale in Monterosso al Mare, where Jess Walter says he was first inspired to begin "the Italian novel."

This is a large statue of Neptune in Monterosso al Mare, which was created in 1910 by two natives of Monterosso who had gone to Argentina and returned. The supporting terrace was damaged from bombing of the adjoining villa during World War II, and the missing limbs and trident were the result of a storm in 1966.

This is Porto Venere, to the south of the Cinque Terre, a town which also figures prominently in the book.

On YouTube, I found this interview with Jess Walter about Beautiful Ruins.



In the above video, Jess Walter mentions he became a father at 19. Does this cause you to see the book in a different light? On YouTube, there is also a 26.5-minute video in which he answers readers' questions about the book. I am including it in the event that you have a half-hour to spare.



Finally, I can't leave without a word or two about Richard Burton. The title, Beautiful Ruins, is taken from a November 2010 article in The New Yorker, "Talk Story," by Louis Menand, about late night television, in which Menand discusses Dick Cavette's 1980 interviews with Richard Burton, saying "Burton,  fifty-four at the time, and already a beautiful ruin, was mesmerizing." If you have the time, the entire interview is embedded below. I started to watch it, and Menand is right, Burton is mesmerizing. I wound up watching 25 minutes before I knew it. I'm going to watch the whole thing. Wow.

And the Nominees Are...

For the January through May 2014 Edition

The following suggestions were either put forward at the meeting on August 3 or sent to Peggy or me by email. They are listed in alphabetical order to avoid any possible interpretation of order in list as being some kind of value judgment. Please review the entire list thoroughly. If you have any additional suggestions, please let me know, and I will add them as updates to this post.

Nonfiction

Body of Work:  Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab by Christine Montross, 320 pages, available in paperback
As a medical student, Christine Montross felt nervous standing outside the anatomy lab on her first day of class. Entering a room with stainless-steel tables topped by corpses in body bags was initially unnerving. But once Montross met her cadaver, she found herself intrigued by the person the woman once was and fascinated by the strange, unsettling beauty of the human form. They called her Eve. The story of Montross and Eve is a tender and surprising examination of the mysteries of the human body, and a remarkable look at our relationship with both the living and the dead.

Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, The by Atul Gawande, 240 pages, available in paperback, a New York Times Bestseller
We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail. Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument that we can do better, using the simplest of methods: the checklist. In riveting stories, he reveals what checklists can do, what they can’t, and how they could bring about striking improvements in a variety of fields, from medicine and disaster recovery to professions and businesses of all kinds. And the insights are making a difference. Already, a simple surgical checklist from the World Health Organization designed by following the ideas described here has been adopted in more than twenty countries as a standard for care and has been heralded as “the biggest clinical invention in thirty years” (The Independent).

Night Shift, The by Dr. Brian Goldman, 288 pages, available in paperback.
Goldman shares his experiences in the witching hours at Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto. We meet the kinds of patients who walk into an ER after midnight. The Night Shift is also a frank look at many issues facing the medical profession today, and offers a highly compelling inside view into an often shrouded world.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, 368 pages, available in paperback, Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2012
How many introverts do you know? The real answer will probably surprise you. In our culture, which emphasizes group work from elementary school through the business world, everything seems geared toward extroverts. Luckily, introverts everywhere have a new spokesperson: Susan Cain, a self-proclaimed introvert who’s taken it upon herself to better understand the place of introverts in culture and society. With Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Cain explores introversion through psychological research old and new, personal experiences, and even brain chemistry, in an engaging and highly-readable fashion. By delving into introversion, Cain also seeks to find ways for introverts and extroverts to better understand one another—and for introverts to understand their own contradictions, such as the ability to act like extroverts in certain situations. Highly accessible and uplifting for any introvert—and any extrovert who knows an introvert (and over one-third of us are introverts)—Quiet has the potential to revolutionize the “extrovert ideal.” – Malissa Kent (Amazon review).

Wild:  From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, 336 pages, available in paperback
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone. Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

Fiction

Garden of Evening Mists, The by Tan Twan Eng, 352 pages, available in paperback
Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice “until the monsoon comes.” Then she can design a garden for herself.  As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?

Glass Palace, The by Amitav Ghosh, 560 pages, available in paperback
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls “a master storyteller.”

History of the Present Illness, A by Louise Aronson MD, 272 pages, paperback available January 2014
A collection of short stories written by a doctor of geriatrics at UCSF, which takes readers into the lives of doctors, patients and families in the neighborhoods, hospitals and nursing homes of San Francisco. It introduces a striking new literary voice and offers a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in America today

Home to Big Stone Gap: A Novel by Adriana Trigiani, 304 pages, available in paperback
Tucked in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia is Big Stone Gap, the bucolic backdrop for Trigiani's popular series. In this fourth entry, Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney and her husband, Jack, must come to terms with the absence of daughter Etta, newly married and living in Italy. (The country holds a special place in Ave Maria's heart: her biological father, Mario, whom she learned of and met only after her mother's death, is Italian.) Ave Maria has plenty to keep her mind off missing her only child (the MacChesney's son, Joe, died of leukemia at age four). She's a full-time pharmacist and the newly appointed director of the town's annual musical. Then comes news that her longtime friend, glamorous librarian Iva Lou, has been keeping a startling secret for nearly 20 years. Other developments, including a health scare for Jack and a Christmas visit from a colorful former resident, move the plot along briskly. With her original cast of characters, playwright and television writer Trigiani blends playfulness and pathos in this evocative portrait of a small southern town. Fans of the Big Stone Gap series can look forward to a feature film; Trigiani has written the screenplay and is slated to direct. (Allison Block Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.)

Kindred by Octavia Butler, 264 pages, available in paperback
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, 336 pages, available in paperback, Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, One of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists
Fairytale romances end with a wedding. The fairytales that don’t get more complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can’t stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It’s not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Fox’s game. And so Mr. Fox is offered a choice: Will it be a life with the girl of his dreams, or a life with an all-too-real woman who delights him more than he cares to admit?

Orphan Master’s Son, The by Adam Johnson, 480 pages, available in paperback, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
(Summary lifted from the LitLovers site). Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

Patrick Melrose Novels, The by Edward St. Aubyn, 688 pages*, available in paperback, a national bestseller, an Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle. By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation. Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy.

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead, 320 pages, available in paperback
Winn Van Meter is a WASP: He approves of discretion, shorts with little whales on them and Bloody Marys — lots and lots of "Bloodys," as they're called. Seating Arrangements takes place on a Nantucket-like island where the Van Meter family is hosting a wedding for their daughter, Daphne, who's hugely pregnant (this is the 21st century, after all). Winn, the father of the bride, shambles around in a polite funk because he's been quietly shunned by the island's exclusive golf club, and because his house has been invaded by the bridal party, who deposit makeup and bikini tops everywhere…. Author Maggie Shipstead mocks the pretensions of this tightly enclosed world even as she thoroughly — and compassionately — inhabits it. She's Edith Wharton with a millennial generation edge. And while the society of Seating Arrangements may be select, Shipstead's range as a writer is democratic: She roams from a slapstick subplot starring an escaped lobster to sublime reflections on marriage and death.

Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple, 352 pages, available in paperback
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon, 416 pages, available in paperback
For fans of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It, comes an irresistible novel of a woman losing herself . . . and finding herself again in the middle of her life.  “…when the anonymous online study called ‘Marriage in the 21st Century’ showed up in my inbox, I had no idea how profoundly it would change my life. It wasn’t long before I was assigned both a pseudonym (Wife 22) and a caseworker (Researcher 101).”

*Because of the length of this volume, Linda had suggested that we might read just the first book of the volume for the discussion meeting.