November's Read: Tumbledown by Robert Boswell

Title: Tumbledown
Author: Robert Boswell
Date: November 17
Host: Faith

 From the publisher, Graywolf Press: At age thirty-three, James Candler seems to be well on the road to success. He's in line for a big promotion at Onyx Springs, the treatment facility where he's a therapist. He has a fiancee, sizable house, and a Porsche.

But...he's falling in love with another woman, he's underwater on his mortgage, and he's put his hapless best friend in charge of his signature therapeutic program. Even the GPS on his car can't seem to predict where he should turn next. And his clients are struggling in their own hilarious, heartbreaking ways to keep their lives on track. How can he help them if he can't help himself?

In Tumbledown, Robert Boswell presents a large, unforgettable cast of characters who are all failing and succeeding in various degrees to make sense of our often irrational world. In a moving narrative twist, he boldly reckons with the extent to which tragedy can be undone, the impossible accommodated.

Almost Too Much Excitement for Our Small Group

Title: On Sal Mal Lane
Author: Ru Freeman
Special Guest via Skype: Ru Freeman
Special Guest in the Flesh: Jocelyn Hale, Executive Director of The Loft Literary Center
Host: Chris

Well, where to begin in describing a wonderful night filled with luminaries, stimulating conversation, shrimp cocktail, and Open Book? At the beginning.

Joining us via Skype from Collegeville, Minnesota, where she was guest-lecturing at the College of St. Benedict, Ru Freeman -- the author of our discussion topic On Sal Mal Lane -- was generous with her one spare half-hour, and with her willingness to answer our questions.

Author Ru Freeman joined the conversation via Skype from
the College of St. Benedict.

Our one cardinal book club rule is this: No one gets to start the discussion with "I loved (or hated) this book "because it closes down nuanced conversation right from the get-go. But with the author in the room (at least on screen), we threw that rule out the window. This is an astounding work by a wise writer. It will break your heart and leave you with a first-hand understanding that war happens to real people, even those who live on a quiet street like Sal Mal Lane.

Insights and Opinions

+ The book's pace at the beginning is slow and dreamy. We need to meet each of the families on this small dead-end street in Sri Lanka. It takes some doing to master the names and remember which characters are Tamil and which are Sinhalese. There is a new history to learn, and most of us here in the U.S. know nothing about cricket. Very slowly, the story builds. Joanne started the book, and put it down. Then she picked it up again at the urging of a friend and never looked back. Lois stuck with it and "when I got to a certain point, Joe asked 'what happened to my wife?'" As Margy so aptly put it, "I don't think you could do it any other way, and still have it end so powerfully."
+ This is not a book to read episodically. Read it in just a few sittings, and allow it to build and build. Freeman uses a wide-angle lens, and then narrows it tighter and tighter until it reaches its final focus on a stunning end-point. It is tough going at the start, but stay with it. You will fall in love.
+ Chris felt like she grew up on that lane -- that it was a street like any other in the world, with children playing and knowing each other despite their parents' opinions, religions, or political leanings. And this is the author's intent. "The point of the book is to make people feel like that place is their place, and that those children could have been their children, and to make war personal to you even though you weren’t born there," Freeman said. "People’s ethnic backgrounds and skin color may be different, but that story is not particular to one place."
+ Linda loved the representation of so many groups on one small lane. "I could picture every one of those families. It is a microcosm of the world, and the situations that so many people face."
+ Unfolding the story through the eyes of the children is a brilliant device. There are hints about unhappy marriages, and child abuse, but you see it only through the children.
+ There are also lessons to be learned about grieving in this book. Each child finds a different way to grieve, and the reader sees ways to grieve healthily and give something back.
+ Ru closed her call with us by reading the unpublished epilogue, which will be included in the upcoming paperback.
+ The rest of our conversation involved plot points that would spoil the book for anyone reading this who hasn't already read the book, so we'll stop here.

Other Interesting Bits

+ Jocey Hale brought us up to speed on exciting changes at The Loft Literary Center and at Open Book, and we are so grateful to her for joining us for this session. The Loft will be 40 years old in 2015 and exciting plans are afoot. What she pointed out -- and what we all already know -- is that involvement with the Loft is transformational. We see daily evidence of this in the lives of so many that we know.
+ Faith sent a letter, asking that our next meeting be at her house, even though she says the house "looks like the Hesperus after it was wrecked." We will bring all of the snacks and wine and she is NOT to lift a finger.

Ru Freeman loves her publisher! Here, she plants a big
one on Fiona McCrae, Graywolf Press

+ Some of our number were lucky enough to be included at a Graywolf Press luncheon a few days after book club at which Ru Freeman was an honored guest. At the luncheon, Freeman offered even more insight into the writing of On Sal Mal Lane. She grew up on a multi-ethnic dead-end lane in Sri Lanka, went to a convent school but was more interested in play than study, and had two very protective older brothers who are the models for Suren and Nihil (including his ability to recite poetry and sing backwards). The book is dedicated to them: "For my brothers, Arjuna and Malinda: Loka, who provided the music of our childhood, and Puncha, who kept me as safe as he could.

October's Read: On Sal Mal Lane by Ru Freeman

Meeting date: Monday, October 20
Location: Open Book, Mahai Book Club Room
Special guest: Jocelyn Hale, Executive Director, The Loft Literary Center
Host: Chris

From the publisher, our own Graywolf Press: On the day the Herath family moves in, Sal Mal Lane is still a quiet street, disturbed only by the cries of the children whose triumphs and tragedies sustain the families that live there. As the neighbors adapt to the newcomers in different ways, the children fill their days with cricket matches, romantic crushes, and small rivalries.

But the tremors of civil war are mounting, and the conflict threatens to engulf them all. In a heart-rending novel poised between the past and the future, the innocence of the children -- a beloved sister and her over-protective siblings, a rejected son and his twin sisters, two very different brothers -- contrasts sharply with the petty prejudices of the adults charged with their care. In Ru Freeman's masterful hands, On Sal Mal Lane, a story of what was lost to a country and her people, becomes a resounding cry for reconciliation.

A big welcome to the evening's special guest

Jocelyn Hale, executive director of The Loft Literary Center, will join us for conversation and discussion. She's reading the book now!

The Human Legacy of a Failed Utopia

Title: In Times of Fading Light
Author: Eugen Ruge translated by Anthea Bell
Host: Lois

Winner of the German Book Prize, In Times of Fading Light is the multigenerational story of an East German family before and after the fall of Communism. The novel begins and ends in September 2001, first with the ailing Alexander Umnitzer visiting his once academically brilliant and now demented father before traveling to Mexico to search for answers to his family's mysteries, and ending in Mexico.

In between, we spend 1952 with ardent Communists Wilhelm and Charlotte, who are repatriating from Mexico to post-war East Berlin before construction of the wall, 1961 with a young Kurt and his Russian wife Irina, 1973 for Alexander's stint in the East German army, and then to 1989, by which time Alexander is in West Germany working in theater, having left behind his son Markus. The story's touchstone is Wilhelm's 90th birthday party celebration, which is told and retold from the perspective of several characters, to an effect that is both heart-breaking and hilarious.

Insights and Opinions

+ Having lost some of our membership to travel and one to injury, ours was a smaller but still enthusiastic group. Being in Open Book, our literary haven, primed the conversational pump. And so did the wine.

+ Ruge is a master at fully inhabiting his characters. From the ancient Russian Baba Nadya to 12-year-old Markus to Charlotte and Wilhelm who share only a fervor for Communism but nothing else, to Irina the Russian emigrant whose roast goose is three parts tradition and two parts alcoholism, these characters each have a distinct voice that is entirely believable.

Lois' incredibly indulgent peanut thingies

+ On the other hand, there is a flatness to Ruge's characters -- a profound lack of empathy. As Lois put it, "I didn't like any of these characters much when reading them through someone else's eyes, but once inside their heads, I liked them much better." Each of these characters is sensitive to the hurts and slights they suffer at each others hands, but the harm each of them wreaks on their family members is wholly invisible to them. Perhaps a society that stomps out the individual kills the soul, and one generation passes this deadness of spirit on to the next.

+ We come back to Wilhelm's 90th birthday celebration several times. Each time, a different character describes the event, noticing different details, objects and smells, interpreting what people say and do in a different way. With every telling, the party grows more fractured, absurd, sad and funny. Since every character's point of view is different and paints the facts in a different light, it's almost as if the reader becomes another character.

+ Ruge defines his characters by their obsessions -- Irina and her roast goose, Charlotte's incessant remodeling, Wilhelm's grossly inflated sense of his own importance to the Communist machine. Maybe all of us are defined by our obsessions.

+ Lurching back and forth between characters and time periods made the book hard going for some. The reader needs to be alert to stay on track. Note-taking helps, and Shirley (our academic) would have loved some footnotes, especially to deliver details about locations and historical events that may not be familiar to an American audience.

+ There is a note of underground feminism in this book. Both Irina and Charlotte have greater credentials than their husbands, but their husbands are lionized while they labor alongside, unrecognized.

+ Most of the group loved the book, but not all. Joanne felt a connection to all of the characters because they were all so absolutely human. Steve, on the other hand, wanted to see some kind of progression in the characters, not just a deeper desperation. Liz felt the writing was wonderful, but could not relate to the characters, feeling they lacked empathy and learned nothing about themselves by the end of the novel. But as Kurt's character says, "they were all eternal exiles" and then later points out "how cheerful pure despair can make you." Perhaps their essential human flaws are enough.

+ Definitely worth your time.

A Welcome Journey Back to the Driftless Region

Title: Jewelweed
Author: David Rhodes
Host: Gail

In his latest novel, David Rhodes reunites readers with some of the characters Rhodes' fans met and embraced in Driftless. After a long stint in a hellish prison for profit for a crime committed out of youthful foolishness, Blake Bookchester is paroled into the sponsorship of Winnie, the earnest local pastor. As he works to adjust, he reconnects with Danielle Workhouse, who is clawing her way up out of a hardscrabble existence by taking a job in the mansion of the Roebucks, caring for the family and their dying son. Her son Ivan and his best friend August explore the woods and the adults' mysteries, accompanied by Milton the pet bat, a hermit who lives in a melon patch, and a feral boy.

Geographical detail of the driftless region in Wisconsin

As their lives entwine, old hurts surface, secrets are uncovered, and risks taken jeopardize the tenuous hold these character have on the futures they so desperately desire.

Insights and Opinions

+ Who knows if it was because we were all excited about discussing this book, but we had a very full house with Gail, Vicky, Lois, Shirley, Blanche, Steve, Faith, Joanne, Margy and Liz. This, of course, makes for lots of loud talking all at once.

+ Rhodes is courageous in what he is trying to do with this book, and Milkweed Editions is courageous in allowing him his freedom to do so. He steps over the edge into the supernatural and then draws back into realism. He takes the reader to a new realm. Does Pastor Winnie really levitate? Or is this a state of mind? A metaphor? Ultimately, we decided that everyone has other-worldly moments, and we all call them different things. But they exist. It doesn't matter if they are "real" to anyone else. And isn't his writing a form of levitation?

+ In some places, the dialogue seems artificial and speech-y, but Rhodes is doing this by design. Brooke's initial conversation with Winnie in prison about Spinoza and books, and Brooke's later break-in into Flo's room for a long conversation about Spinoza with a woman who, earlier in the book, could barely speak, are two examples. But there is another layer here, in which you suspend judgment and just go with the magic of it all. This is perhaps not intended to be a realistic novel.

+ Rhodes delivers a superb balance between extraordinary realism and the allegorical. When he describes drought conditions and writes of "trees clenched" into "leaf fists," you feel the parched landscape in your gut. He has a deep understanding of nature to be able to write like this.

+ This is a satisfying novel, with deeply felt characters, page-turning plot points, and beautiful prose. There was some disagreement among us about the ending, and whether it was a bit too pat -- Blanche felt it tied up perhaps too neatly with a big bow. Margy thought the ending was "blue-collar Jane Austen." Vicky felt it was more similar to a Shakespearean comedy ending, where everyone gets together. But ultimately we decided we didn't care, and that we loved the book.

+ All of Jewelweed's major characters are outsiders in their own way -- Ivan being held back a grade, August too intellectual for his own good, Danielle damaged and holding so tight she can't recognize friendship when it's offered, Blake teetering on the edge of recidivism, Winnie as the fish out of water in her congregation.

+ At this point, we drifted into a rolling conversation about God, spirituality, pantheism, agnosticism, atheism, and Native American perspectives, being lovers of tangents. But Rhodes' book is conducive to tangential thinking. And some of our best discussions happen when we rove.

+ Rhodes believes in the goodness of human nature. Every character has an underside of goodness, even the villains.

+ Although this book has a few flaws (very few), it's a work of art. We loved it.

Oddments and Telling Details

+ There is a groundswell of opinion that every third or fourth book should be on the lighter side -- a bit of relief from the heavy, sad, or significant. As one participant put it: "In this great pudding of intellectuality, we need a few raisins." So, at least three times per year, we will read something that is NOT about the lost boys of Africa, NOT about the slums of anywhere, NOT about women sold into sex slavery, and does NOT have so many characters that you have to keep a notebook while reading.

Journeys Back and Forth Through Characters and Chronology

Title: Transatlantic
Author: Colum McCann
Host: Margy

National Book Award-winner Colum McCann spins a masterful web of interlaced novellas in this loosely bound novel of connection between Ireland and America. Moving gracefully between present time and three transatlantic crossings at key moments in history, Transatlantic woos the reader with beautiful prose and fully realized characters.

Alcock and Brown, the first aviators to fly nonstop
across the Atlantic Ocean.

After a brief present-day prologue, we move to a gripping account of Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown's attempt at the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Then, it's on to Dublin for Frederick Douglass' lecture tour among the sympathetic Irish. Finally, we join U.S. Senator George Mitchell on his 1998 work at mediating peace in strife-torn Northern Ireland. In each of these stories, we meet women who play a minor role, but are deeply affected by their connections to these three events. These women are the focus of the second half of the novel.

Frederick Douglass

Insights and Opinions

• All agreed that the way the stories overlap and intertwine is powerful, frustrating, rewarding, and heartfelt. The question was posed "is this a new trend?" More and more frequently, we find novels that do not follow the traditional novel arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. Rather, more of today's authors are playing with structure in fiction, knitting together short stories or novellas that share characters, or unplugging stories from their chronology, and stitching them together in a new order.

• At least one of us found the work frustrating for exactly this reason. McCann creates such engaging characters -- people who live and breathe and in whom we are completely invested -- that it's jarring to leave them and move on to somebody else. Any one of these characters could have been the book. We all wanted more time with each of them.

• The Alcock/Brown transatlantic flight chapter is astonishing. Joanne felt this chapter held more energy and commitment from the author than any other chapter in the book. On the other hand, she found the George Mitchell section less engaging.

• McCann's prose is masterful. Powerful sentence fragments. Images that transport. A rhythm to the words that is nearly music. This is beautiful writing -- the perfect gathering of words.

• Vicky pointed out (via email) McCann's ability to clothe historical events in an urgency that makes them seem as if they are happening as we read them. She characterizes him as "a smooth and generous writer."

• At least one of us was hopelessly confused about the letter and why Hannah thought it had anything to do with Frederick Douglass. But since this same person spent one sleepless night trying to reconstruct the chronology of the women and to figure out who was related to whom while flopping about sleeplessly, she should just be ignored as she should have taken notes while reading.

• Hannah is the only voice in the first person. Why is this?

• We spent some time trying to decide what was at the center of the book. Crossings? The women? Certainly not the big events or the great men. Maybe there is no center. Maybe that's fine.

• As a related follow-up, try this article provided by Margy, which seems to confirm our observations about the emergence of a hybrid form of literature, and traces its literary history:

The Rise of the Fragmented Novel

Oddments and Telling Details

• He-man Steve gets a major award for riding his bike to book club in the stifling humidity. Most likely his enthusiasm was due to meeting his August 1 book deadline for Mastering the Craft of Writing: How to Write with Clarity, Emphasis, and Style to be published next spring. Buy it, please.

• We are out of books to read for future meetings, so please come prepared to our next meeting with your suggestions, or feel free to send them ahead of time. The current list of possibles is listed in Under Consideration.

• Mmmm. Cucumber sandwiches.

Call for Book Club Selections

Desperate Times

Due to low attendance, humidity, a bum hearing aid battery, and inability to remember the name of "oh, you know, that book," our July meeting did not generate the usual long list of possible future reads. This is where you come in.

We are so confused

Please submit your suggestions for what we should be reading from September until we run out of ideas. You can submit your ideas as a comment here, or send them by email, or bring them with you to our next session on August 19, 2013.

Thank you for your kind and studious attention.

August's Read: Jewelweed by David Rhodes

From the publisher, Milkweed Editions: "When David Rhodes burst onto the American literary scene in the '70s, he was hailed as a brilliant visionary. In Driftless, his "most accomplished work yet (Joseph Kanon), Rhodes made Words, Wisconsin, resonate with readers across the country. Now with Jewelweed, this beloved author returns to the same out-of-the-way community and introduces a cast of characters who must overcome the burdens left by the past.

After serving time for a dubious conviction, Blake Bookchester is paroled. As Blake attempts to adjust, he reconnects with Danielle Workhouse, a single mother whose son Ivan explores the woods with his precocious friend August. While Danielle goes to work for Buck and Amy Roebuck in their mansion, Ivan and August befriend Lester Mortal, a recluse who lives in a melon field; a wild boy; and a bat, Milton. These characters -- each flawed, deeply human, and ultimately universal -- approach the future with a combination of hope and trepidation. Jewelweed offers a vision in which the ordinary becomes mythical, the seemingly mundane transformed into revelatory beauty.





David Rhodes on life and writing.

July's Read: Transatlantic by Colum McCann

From the publisher's book description:

"Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators -- Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown -- set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean...

"Dublin, 1845 and '46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause...

"New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Ireland's notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion.

These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history...The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller..."

Join us July 22 at Margy's house for the next in a series of rousing discussions.

McCann to Read at Hennepin County Library June 24 at 7

This event, at the Minneapolis Central branch of the Hennepin County Library, is free and open to the public.

Woke Up Scratching Our Heads

Title: Woke Up Lonely
Author: Fiona Maazel
Host: Liz

Ours is a tough group, so it's not surprising that reactions were mixed to our June read -- Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel. When the first to speak admitted to not having finished the book, three others owned up, too. Now, we are serious finishers as a rule. So, getting to the bottom of this was a road we had to go down.

Insights and Opinions

+ Maazel has attempted something very brave and creative here. Take a cult, throw in some hostages, a charismatic leader, an ex-wife leading a double life, and U.S. intelligence organizations, and you have the stuff of a page-turning potboiler. But then combine that with well-crafted prose, multi-dimensional characters, and a literary sensibility, and you have something new that is not a tidy fit for any genre. Ultimately, it doesn't work, at least from our point of view. But Maazel is clearly a talented writer with guts.

Roses and peonies

+ Margy characterized Maazel's work as "too odd, both in plot and in language," while Joanne said she was captured right away by the prose and humor, but ultimately "I couldn't like any of the people."
+ Perhaps to avoid the "potboiler pitfall," Maazel has much of her action take place off-screen. Major plot points occur off the page. We return to a character, only to discover some critical event has already happened.

+ The key theme in this book -- and the cult's reason for being -- is loneliness. Maazel heightens this by writing right up to the point where we might learn the "why" of a particular character, and then backing off. Ultimately, we never know why these characters choose what they choose or act the way they act. As a result, there is no one to root for.

The aftermath

+ Everyone agreed that the hostages were characters introduced too late in the game to make us care about them. Some felt that the book starts to come alive when we meet the hostages, but by then it may be too late.
+ The cult itself, an L. Ron Hubbard-type organization named The Helix -- is not well-developed. We don't really know why it exists, what the attraction is, or why followers flock to its leader, Thurlow Dan. We need more about Dan so we understand the attraction and the conflict. Otherwise, he's just repellent.
+ Many of us were excited when we started reading. This book is original, clever, creative, wild and unpredictable. But ultimately, it falls apart. We all agree she is a fine writer, and we expect many more good things from her in the future.

Oddments and Telling Details

+ There were no barred owl sightings. Sorry, all.

June's Read: Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel

From the official book description:
"Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness in the 21st century. With its communes and speed-dating, mixers and confession sessions, the Helix has become a national phenomenon -- and attracted the attention of governments worldwide. But Thurlow, camped out in his Cincinnati headquarters, is lonely -- for his ex-wife Esme and their daughter, whom he hasn't seen in 10 years.

Esme, for her part, is a covert agent who has spent her life spying on Thurlow, mostly to protect him from the law. Now, with her superiors demanding results, she recruits four misfits to both a reconnaissance mission in Cincinatti. But when Thurlow takes them hostage, he ignites a siege of the Helix House that will change all lives forever."

Sound interesting? Then read it and join the group at Liz's house Monday, June 17 to discuss.

The Lyrical Landscape of the Mind in a Deeply Personal Collection of Poems

Title: Odessa
Author: Patricia Kirkpatrick
Host: Joanne

The beauty of hearing the artist read her poems in an intimate setting is that we hear the poem in the way it was intended -- the rise and fall of the voice, the pause where it should rest, the emphasis that thrills. How lucky were we to hear Patricia Kirkpatrick read from her stunning new collection in Joanne's rooftop aerie?

Example of Kirkpatrick's note-making system

From the publisher, Milkweed Editions: "A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick's Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the 'emotional core of the self,' and central to the process of memory. In poems emotionally charged but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick creates from loss a dreamlike reality. Odessa, 'roof of the underworld,' a refuge at once real and imagined, resembles simultaneously the Midwestern prairie and a mythical god-inhabited city. In lines bearing shades of Classical heroism, Kirkpatrick delivers a personal narrative of stunning dimension."

Insights and Opinions

+ The collection has a three-part structure:
• Aura -- a distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing, or place.
• Parietal -- of or relating to, attached to, or denoting the wall of the body; parietal lobe: middle part of each cerebral hemisphere.
• Cairn -- a mound of rough stones built as a memorial or landmark.
+ The theme of the collection is identity. Who am I?
+ When asked whether she wrote differently after her surgery, Kirkpatrick talked about her process, which involves generating a rich store of material from which she later chooses lines or thoughts to work with. Following surgery, she wrote several poems in a single sitting, shortcutting her usual process. Perhaps due to post-surgical drugs, her inhibitions were gone for the moment, and she wrote complete poems from beginning to end.

Pictures, phrases, definitions,
and thought fragments

+ The word "core" and core as an idea appear prominently and intentionally in these poems. Kirkpatrick uses the mythical Persephone, also called Kore, the queen of the underworld who must forever return to Hades each year before emerging again in the spring -- a "going down" before a return to life.

Oddments and Telling Detail

+ For more, read this interview, in which the poet talks about "finding one's voice through poetic form, the geography of the female body, and crafting myth from Minnesota soil."

The Overlapping Language of Geography and Anatomy

+ This was our first attendance via Skype, with Steve the willing guinea pig. Mostly, it went okay. It was a grand experiment to see if we can do this again for our snowbirds and frequent travelers. We think the answer is yes. Although a tripod would be a good investment.

May Event: Patricia Kirkpatrick Joins Us to Read from Odessa

Don't miss Book Club on May 20, when Patricia Kirkpatrick joins us to read from and discuss her 2013 Minnesota Book-award winning collection of poems, Odessa. Book club members are invited to bring poetry-loving friends.

At this event, Patricia will read some poems from the book and answer our questions about the work, her process, poetic forms, autobiographical poetry and more.

Joanne is our host.

If you don't have the book already, you can purchase it online from the publisher, Milkweed Editions.

Buy Odessa by Patricia Kirkpatrick

A Kind-hearted Respite for the Weary Reader

Title: A Week in Winter
Author: Maeve Binchy
Host: Chris, at Open Book

Published posthumously after beloved Irish author Maeve Binchy's death in 2012, this slight volume tells the story of Stoneybridge, a small town on the west coast of Ireland where everyone knows each other, and Chicky Starr, who takes on a decaying mansion overlooking the sea to transform it into a holiday destination.

Chicky harbors a secret. Further, everyone thinks her dream is insane. Throughout the course of this story, she collects a variety of characters, all with their own stories and complications.

Insights and Telling Details

We chose this book as a "light entree" after having consumed its emotional opposite for last month's conversation (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers). It did the trick.

It's important to note that this blog writer missed the conversation, but has heard through the grapevine that Binchy's book stimulated one of the more lively discussions in a long time. If you know what happened that night, please weigh in and add your comments here.

Beautifully Written, Painful to Read

Title: The Yellow Birds
Author: Kevin Powers

From the publisher's book description:
'"The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year-old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city... Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for.'

Insights and Telling Details

+ Joanne summed up the power of this novel precisely: "We've all read war stories, but none like this." The reality of modern combat is disturbing, horrifying, and not what we think. There is no down time. Just constant slaughter without purpose, taking and retaking the same city over and over again.
+ Powers' narrative style is deeply moving and his way with metaphor is powerful and strange. The military jargon is a little daunting to the civilian, but looking up the terms used solves the problem.
+ A few of our readers confessed to not fully understanding the plot. Why is he arrested? For writing the letter? Ultimately we decided the reason was contained in the text: somebody had to be held to account for the death of the soldier.
+ The story moves back and forth in time. While some felt that a chronology would help the reader, others appreciated this method for the way in which it supports the story., The narrator, as he tries to make sense of it all, is never truly in one place without being in the other. It's a sophisticated narrative style, where time is disjointed and disclosure is partial.
+ Steve was celebrating the new life of his grandchild while reading this at night. The experience, he said, was "hard, hard, hard."
+ The narrator struggles to understand, but he never judges. "Eventually, I had to learn that freedom is not the same thing as absence of accountability."
+ Two of our number say this book affected them more than anything else they're read about war. With some of the best writing we've ever experienced, The Yellow Birds is a surprising, tender, brutal book. We recommend it, with reservations because of its grim power. The reader is a participant in this war. This is no distant history. We are still living it.

A Man Whose Power Is in the Half Light

Title: Wolf Hall
Author: Hilary Mantel
Host: Steve

Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Price and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Wolf Hall is a new telling of life under King Henry VIII during that moment when he chooses to divorce his queen of 20 years and marry Anne Boleyn. Mantel chooses Thomas Cromwell as her central character and the fulcrum around which the future of England teeters.

Insights and Telling Details

Between snow-birding, head colds, and conflicts, our group was perhaps the smallest ever, with only four attendees. Wolf Hall earned rave reviews from all four.

Wine and lovely things by the fire.

+ Mantel's prose is often hard to follow, as dialogue is frequently attributed to "he" despite the presence of many "him's" in the room on the page. But there is a rhythm to it, and you figure it out after awhile. The prose is so beautiful, you don't really mind.

+ Mantel redefines Thomas Cromwell from the way he is usually portrayed in history, as she does Thomas More, the utopian thinker whose ready resort to torture hardly made him a "man for all seasons." As well, King Henry VIII comes across as surprisingly sympathetic (ruthless in pursuit of his goals, but also needy, witty, funny and fun-loving).

+ Steve found the portrayal of the cardinal particularly delightful and we all appreciated how Mantel used dialogue to develop her characters and their relationships.

+ Mantel brings history alive, animating historical figures into flesh and blood. The group marveled at the depth of the author's research and her extraordinary presentation of detail, giving the reader a glimpse into the history, society and life of the time.

+ Violence and brutal poverty in a rigid social structure highlight just how close to primitive life was in those times.

+ The gruesome details about what's actually involved with hair shirts and burning someone at the stake were a bit hard to take, like the story of the supposedly heretical grandmother whose family and friends come the day after her burning to retrieve her bone fragments and skull.

+ Everyone appreciated the portrait of Cromwell, whose competence, self-restraint, and calculating pragmatism (often generous, but always with a purpose) made him a fascinating character. We noted how he would remind himself to "adjust his face" to disguise his true thoughts and how he withheld information about his story so that his mysterious background would make him a more formidable foe. "A man's power is in the half light."

+ A good half of our group had already read well into the next volume of this series by the time of the meeting, not wanting to say goodbye to Cromwell or Henry.

Portrait of a Strange, Kind, Terrible and Heroic Man

Title: The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Author: Robert A. Caro
Hosts: Gail and Shirley at Open Book

Named by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of the year, this fourth volume in Robert A. Caro's mammoth study of Lyndon Baines Johnson is weighty by every measure. At 736 pages in the hardcover version and 21164 locations in the Kindle version, Caro's book challenges the reader to commit. From Michael Schaub's National Public Radio review: "Caro has once again shown that he might well be the greatest presidential historian we've ever had...Although the amount of research Caro has done for these books is staggering, it's his immense talent as a writer that has made his biography of Johnson one of America's most amazing literary achievements...Caro's chronicle is as absorbing as a political thriller...There's not a wasted word, not a needless anecdote..."

President Lyndon Baines Johnson

Insights and Opinions

+ Reading this book just after having seen the movie Lincoln while living through the current political gridlock in Washington made for a richer experience than would otherwise have been the case -- and a richer conversation. The more things change, we acknowledged, the more they stay the same.
+ Caro's work covers a time arc of just a few months, principally surrounding the Kennedy assassination and Lyndon Johnson's first steps in moving into the presidency with a grim determination to keep the nation and the world calm while moving critical legislation forward. But informative flashbacks and flash-forwards ground the reader both in LBJ's roots and his future challenges.
+ None of us had read any of the prior Caro works in this series, and none felt as if they had missed something. The book stands on its own.
+ Caro's writing style is elegant -- excellent, clean prose, and short sentences that carry their own power. The book is a page-turner.
+ This is a fascinating look at a complex man. At once, LBJ was strange, kind, terrible, important, and venial. Caro exposes how Johnson's early poverty and public humiliation at the hands of unkind neighbors who took more than a little pleasure in his father's downfall informed his political and personal life.
+ The hatred and disdain levied against Johnson by the Kennedy administration is hair-raising and horrifying, especially when compared to the level at which Vice President Joseph Biden has been invited in to the daily workings of the current administration.

Oddments and Telling Details

+ Every time we meet to discuss what we've read, turns out somebody has had personal experience with the topic. This night was no exception, with one of our members sharing memories of dinner at the White House, a tipped-over chair, Gregory Peck, and a kind escort from the room by President Johnson himself.
+ As supporting materials, we scanned through a November 30, 1963, issue of Life Magazine, which included a chilling pictorial of the Kennedy assassination and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald as well as a look back at the Camelot years, an inquiry into "Who is Lyndon Johnson?" and coverage of the civil rights riots also taking place at the time. Then, we had to spend some time arguing about whether things are really worse today.