Richard Ford Reverberations

Reader's Room

We've just returned from a long weekend in lovely San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico celebrating a couple of big birthdays for my parents with my siblings and their spouses.  We were in a little boutique hotel with views out over the city.  Gillian and I, fittingly, stayed in a room named "La Biblioteca."  If you ever chance to visit, check out the accompanying photo to see why I can highly recommend our accommodations if you are trying to keep up with you're Book Group reading...

While I resisted the temptation to delve into the second volume of the Frank Bascombe trilogy, I did use the opportunity of the travel to catch up on some vintage Ian McEwan (The Innocent) which only increased my enthusiasm for our next meeting.  Plenty of time to get started on Atonement if you haven't started yet.  Hope you can all join us on Wednesday, November 15th.

The Sportswriter - Wednesday October 11th at 7pm

I'm just back and settling in after a couple of weeks of travel out of the country.  In my absence, I hope you all noticed the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go).  For the record, in our short existence along with this Nobel, we have pre-selected winners for the Pulitzer Prize (Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son), the Man Booker (Paul Beatty - The Sellout), and a MacArthur Genius Grant Award (Ben Lerner - Leaving the Atocha Station.)  In addition, our reading list is littered with books and authors we've read after they've received major awards.  I hope you are all finding a way to let your reading background trickle out during various cocktail parties or when your are searching for a distraction during a Sox playoff disaster!

This email is also a reminder that our meeting for The Sportswriter is this Wednesday at 7pm where we will examine the prospects for Richard Ford on the awards circuit.  I hope you can make it.

As always, if you plan to attend, please send me a note so that I can insure we are properly provisioned.

Can I Change my vote?

So,  guess who wins the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature? 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/05/kazuo-ishiguro-wins-the-nobel-prize-in-literature


Can I go back and change my thumbs-down vote for "Never Let Me Go" ?
I must have missed something.

Dennis Noonan

Mid-meeting Check-in and NEIBA Fall Conference

 I had a really fun experience this week.  As many of you know, my wife Gillian is not only the active owner of our store but also the sitting President of the New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA). Their Fall conference took place this week in Providence. Tuesday night was the awards banquet where New England authors were recognized for recent books in several writing categories.  As president, Gillian selects a writer for lifetime achievement.  Her choice this year was a bit of a Hail Mary when she invited the notoriously reticent John Irving to attend and, to our surprise, he accepted. John lives in Toronto these days and chose to fly in and out of Boston to avoid connections.  He needed a ride to and from Providence and decided to carpool down with me.  Given the weather and the last couple of days I ended up with almost 4 hours of conversation with John who turned out to be super easy going, willing to roll with the traffic and, as you can probably imagine, a great storyteller.

I have a couple of weeks of travel ahead of me so I thought I'd do a mid-meeting check a little earlier than usual to see that everyone is on their way.  As a reminder our next meeting is on Wednesday, October 11th at 7pm.  We're reading The Sportswriter by Richard Ford.  Hope you can all make it!


 Dave Eggers (Hologram for the King) has a literary website called McSweeney's that puts out some really great stuff.  If you haven't seen it already, you'll want to checkout the link below:

If Bostonians Loved Other Local Institutions the Way They Love Their Local Sports Franchises

Lastly, I had several requests at the end of the evening for an updated list of the books we've read.  You can always find the syllabus for Bill's Book Group for Guys  under the "Events" tab on the Wellesley Books website.  That said, I've attached the list below.

 

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

Cooper's Creek by Alan Moorehead

The New Confessions by William Boyd

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

Headlong by Michael Frayn

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway

The Son by Phillipp Meyer

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre 

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

All That Is by James Salter 

Consider the Lobster  by David Foster Wallace

A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr

Lucky Jim  by Kingsley Amis

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

The Sisters Brothers  by Patrick DeWitt

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The Tsar of Love and Techno  by Anthony Marra

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

The Harder They Come by TC Boyle

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki 

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean 

The Whites by Richard Price

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson 

and now... The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

Welcome Back!

What great turnout last night (both old friends and new faces) for a rousing discussion of Tree of Smoke! Whether you liked it or hated it, I'm glad you came and showed once again, I think, that our best discussions come from books that are less than universally loved.  That said, I also recognize that 600+ pages is a big commitment, so thank you for taking the time with it to form an opinion.


As I mentioned, our next meeting will be held on Wednesday, October 11th and we'll be discussing The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford.  While I've read several of Ford's books, I haven't read this particular one but it's been on my list for a while. He's a New England based writer and I anticipate this should slot in nicely with some of our previous reads (Salter, Russo, Boyd, Eggers, etc.)


Hope to see you all there.

Never Let Me Go Recap and Summer Plans 2017

Happy Summer!  I'm still enjoying the afterglow of the great turnout and enthusiastic debate for Never Let Me Go last week. I'm convinced that our best and most memorable discussions occur around books that evoke such mixed and strongly held opinions.  It seems that as our shared reading experiences continue to grow, the depth of the conversation continues to improve. Then again, maybe I'm just remembering the quality of the whisky!

After a short Summer hiatus, our next meeting is set for Wednesday, September 6th.  We'll be reading Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson.  As in the last few years with Barbarian Days and The Son, this Summer's book is a little longer than our typical selections given the extended break.  An ambitious book, but one that flows easily, Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award in 2007. It's set primarily in the Philippines during the Vietnam War.  Think Graham Greene meets John Le Carre meets Hunter S. Thompson. Dennis Johnson died just recently.

Bookmark

When you come into the store to pick up your copy, be sure to ask for our new bookmark which features staff selections for Summer reading.  As for other suggestions, Dennis Noonan posted a great list on the blog. Got anything that you are excited about reading or you think the group my find interesting?  You can comment on Dennis's post or this one. By the way, if you would be interested in posting new content, let me know and I'll set you up as a contributor.

 I've read some very good non-fiction recently.  Some you might want to consider this summer:

• Lab Girl by Hope Jahren - I've been recommending this to everyone I know.  It's so great on so many levels - wonderful writing that's full of science explained simply, an empowering story of a woman battling through a male dominated field, quirky characters and a desperate plea for Earth.
• The Lost City of Z by David Grann - If, like my entire family, you loved Candice Millard's River of Doubt.
• The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery - Fascinating, easy to read, and highly informative. There are several new books out on octopuses (not octopi) and lots of recent research on their intelligence and neural processing.
• Theft by Finding: Diaries by David Sedaris - A great diversion from any reading rut.

As for fiction, I overwhelmingly recommend News of the World by Paulette Jiles.  The only reason I won't pick this short piece of historical fiction for our group meeting is because I don't think we'd get much debate.  In the Frontier West of the late 1800s, an old war veteran travels from town to town providing dramatic readings of recent newspaper publications to the locals who have no access. During the course of his travels, he's commissioned to return a young orphan girl who was captured and raised by the Kiowa to her distant relatives in San Antonio.  It's evocative, action packed, and beautifully told. It's the story you might imagine if Peter Heller had written The Son.





Until September then, I hope you have a safe, sunny, and enriching Summer!  Happy reading.

My Current Summer Objectives

Notes on "Never let Me Go"

Our appreciation for any piece of writing depends on our mood, expectations and level of interest in the story.  It would be foolish of me to attempt to describe all the elements of a good read, since we all come at reading from different points of view.  But I think we would generally agree that a good book must have an interesting story, the characters must be believable, and they must be interesting enough to care about.

To me the author's job is much like that of an angler.  Present a tasty lure, make it look interesting, set the hook, keep the light taut, reel em in with force.

I read "Never Let Me Go"  as a sci fi story.  The early bits were intriguing, the dialogue seemed authentic to me and, as a good reader, I was able suppress my confusion with the strange terminology to allow the story arc to develop.  However, the number of  questions that went unanswered continued to accrue.   I assert that somewhere in the writing, the answers must be implied or given.  This story waited until the final pages to ham-handedly answer some of the questions.  By that time,  after endless pages of introspection, and little action,  I had stopped caring about the characters.

I was left with a raft of unanswered questions:  What is left (in a body) after donating 3 organs? Who got the organs?  Who was the unseen  authority behind the carer/donor program? How did they receive their orders? Was there not even one clone who would try to escape their fate? What did the narrator think about her humanity?  I could go on.
So, if I may strain the fish metaphor, my take is that the author succeeded in hooking me in the beginning with promising lures that seemd to be going somewhere.  But he did not provide the tension to reel me in.  He let the line spin out until the end of the reel and eventually, the hook simply fell out.

Many of the thumbs-uppers were already fans of the author, and perhaps had a predisposition to find this work lovable.  Others were connected in some way to care-giving professions and saw authenticity in the account of the narrator.

The nattering naysayers were less forgiving.  Count me among them.

Dennis Noonan

Summer Reading

I'm not sure how many in the group read this blog, but I thought I might mention a few recent reads that might prove interesting to others.

Michael Connolly  - The Wrong Side of Goodbye

  Harry Bosch investigates two mysteries.  Micky Haller (Lincoln Lawyer) makes an appearance.  Vintage Connolly/Bosch.

Carl Hiassen - Razor Girl

 Zany premise and the usual collection of off-beat characters romp through the tale.  Protagonist tries to thwart engaged homeowners from building on next door lot. Razor girl conman has scam that strains credibility.  Fun Florida read.

 

Peter May - The Lewis Man

Second in the Finn trilogy about mysteries on the Isle of Lewis in Outer Hebrides (Scotland)

A bog body is found and a mystery is opened. Peter May – The Chessmen

Third in the Lewis trilogy.  A body is found in a drained Loch. Finn Macleod is back home and investigates

Peter May -- The Critic and Black Light Blue

Enzo series.  Set in France.  Good reads With rich local details and good writing.. 

Fredrik Backman, --A Man Called Ove  A novel, also a movie (Swedish) with English subtitles.  Enjoyed the book and then saw the movie.  Both very worthwhile reading,

Especially if you know any Swedes.

Erik Larson – In the Garden of Beasts

Nonfiction.  A new American Ambassador to Germany and his family find adventure in Berlin.  Set in 1933, the same year Hitler is named Chancellor.

We know how it all turns out but the story of how they saw it is gripping.

Phillip Kerr – A Man without Breath

Berlin, March, 1943.  Bernie Gunther (A Quiet Flame) is dispatched (reluctantly) to Smolensk Russia,  Looking for evidence of War crimes.  There is evidence of a massacre of Polish Officers who were prisoners. 

Peter Heller – Celine. Celine --a  most unexpected PI grandmother. searches for the father of a man who was reportedly killed in a bear attack.   Heller authored Dog stars and The Painter   

I am currently into the intriguing Never Let Me Go and plan to be at Wednesday's meeting,  See you then.

Dennis Noonan

Ishiguro Check-in

As a topical warmup to get you in the mood for our discussion of Never Let Me Go, I'm attaching this link (courtesy of Larry Rosen) to Dave Eggers' McSweeney's Literary site.  See if you can distinguish  the writing between Ishiguro's masterpiece Remains of the Day and, perhaps another modern classic, the Opening Statement from James Comey to the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Many of you will remember we read Eggers' A Hologram for the King for one of our early meetings.  So it's all coming together :)

Big Papi and David Mitchell follow-up

Celebrating yet another clutch performance!

 Still coming down off the high of our two key events last week - the in store visit from David Ortiz and the great turn out for Black Swan Green! Big Papi was outstanding - signing almost 500 books in just under 2 hours with plenty of time out for photos, smiles, and fist bumps with his fans. Equally impressive was the enthusiasm brought to the BSG discussion for our Book Group night. Two more examples of the community coming together at your locally-owned independent bookstore!

As we discussed on Wednesday night, I'm passing along an article from the Economist magazine sent by Andrew Lowenstein, addressing collusion in bullying in Japanese schools. While it has some relevance to Black Swan Green, it brings a whole new level of realism to A Tale for the Time Being.  If you thought that novel's depiction was too far fetched, you should read the article.





Lastly, we've set our book and date for the last BBGG meeting before our Summer break.  We'll be meeting on Wednesday, June 21st at 7pm to discuss Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.  From the Booker Prize-winning author of Remains of the Day, this beautifully written and haunting novel of a near future dystopia should make for a great discussion.

Hope to see you all there!










  

Recap - Decline and Fall

What a wide ranging yet cohesive discussion for Decline and Fall last night (even with a relatively large contingent)!  I love the varied opinions and observations but also feel that enough of you have been attending for long enough now that we've developed a common foundation and set of references that truly enrich the conversation. Not sure we would have had the same meeting about this book in our early days!  I can't thank you enough for your time, commitment, and enthusiastic support for the Book Group and consequentially, Wellesley Books, your locally owned independent bookstore. :)

Courtesy of Andrew Lowenstein I'm attaching a link to the YouTube video of Stephen Fry's autobiographical presentation at the Sydney Opera House where he references Evelyn Waugh and Decline and Fall extensively.

Andrew writes: Like most of Stephen Fry’s work, it's erudite and rambling but if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, here are some times he speaks about Waugh and Decline and Fall:

1. 11:55 “Instead of television…”
2. 13:15 “Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall”
3. 14:40 “I was sent away to a prep school"
4. 20:05 “I wanted to emulate Paul Pennyfeather”

Our next meeting has been scheduled for Wednesday, May 17th at 7pm.  We will be reading Black Swan Green by David Mitchell.  Mitchell is one of my absolute favorite authors but, contrary to popular belief, we've never actually read one of his books for the Group.  Seems like Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet comes up at nearly every meeting, but are too long to tackle for our purposes.  Black Swan Green is a better length and its structure should provide an interesting comparison to selections like A Visit from the Goon Squad or The Tsar of Love and Techno.

Lastly, as promised, here are some photos from my recent sojourn to Taipei and the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Bookstore reconnaissance mission. Orwell/1984 is a global phenomenon!

The local best-seller.

Chiang Kai-shek

Looking toward the Freedom Gate

The Whites - Recap

Great turnout and an enthusiastic group last night - even if the reception of the book was more muted :).  As I look back with the Book Group now into it's fourth year, I've realize how much I've come to appreciate these evenings and the conversations and the relationships they've engendered. Thanks for being there to help me celebrate my birthday in style!  And thank you Doug for making it such a festive occasion......

As I mentioned at the end of the evening, we'll be reading Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall at our next meeting on Wednesday, April 12th.  Waugh's singular style remains surprisingly modern and as funny as ever.  In this first novel, Paul Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford for debauchery and then unexpectedly qualifies for the position of schoolmaster at an elite Welsh boys' school.  Mayhem ensues!  Should make for a great conversation and I hope you can join us in April.

Young Men and Fire This Wednesday

After last night's great win for the Pats, it's time to turn our attention to the next big New England event, the Young Men and Fire discussion this Wednesday, from 7-9pm in the Used Book Cellar.  If you plan to attend, please send me a quick note so that I can make sure we are properly set up and provisioned.

If you'd like to come, but haven't quite caught up with your reading, I can offer a couple of crib sheet solutions.  The first, courtesy of Ralph Blair is official report from the US Forest Service, Mann Gulch Fire: A Race That Couldn't Be Won.  But perhaps more useful is this music video for Cold Missouri Water by Cry, Cry, Cry and sent along by Todd Whitten.  It's a Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald kind of thing and filled with a surprising amount of detail from the book if you listen closely.

One way or the other, I hope you will find a way to join us on Wednesday night.  Let me know.

A Virtual Field Trip to the Mann Gulch

 

Thanks to Barton for pointing out a great companion website for Young Men and Fire.  It references the book often and is more or less structured around the book's content.  It provides visual reinforcement to the progress of the fire, the terrain, and the dilemmas faced by the crew. Here’s the link: http://formontana.net/gulch.html. It also has some good updates on access to the canyon which has become more difficult in the past few years.