Atocha Station - Novel or memoir?

Writing a novel or memoir?

 I really enjoyed the discussion last night and was pleased with the generally favorable Lucky Jim.  For those of you who were interested in some additional contextual reading, here is the link to the WSJ Book Club featuring Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust.  We also talked about The Patrick Melrose Novels.

The next Book Group meeting (and last before the Summer) is set for Wednesday, June 10th at 7pm.  We will be reading Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner.  The protagonist, a brilliant if unreliable American Poet visiting Madrid on a prestigious fellowship, has a background that strongly resembles that of the author.  Is this a memoir or a novel?  "Fresh, unpredictable, intellectually stimulating, and often quite funny," the book is one of several recent releases that challenge the structure of traditional narrative fiction.

 I promised to attach a link to the James Woods review of Leaving the Atocha Station.  Try to stay open minded!

Still testing with Bill! This is a newly initiated post as opposed to a response to another post. I found the link for "New Post" difficult to pick out against its background even after I knew to look for it. Maybe a different color font?

Summer Reading - 2015

As the reality of a 3 month Summer hiatus for the Book Group hits home and you are looking for a way to stay connected, here are some suggestions for Summer reading:

• Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr - The collection contains the first 3 books of the Bernie Gunther series. We would have read this instead of The Quiet Flame except for the length.
• Light Years or A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter - He passed away last week at the age of 90 and these are his master works. I am so glad we read All That Is earlier this year. He once referred to himself as a “frotteur,” saying he liked to rub words between his fingers. 
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt or All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr - These modern epics continue to be enthusiastically recommended by many in our group but are just too long for our regular meetings.
• A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra -  If you loved The Orphan Master's Son, this book is set in a small village in Chechnya and spans two wars.  Curiously both Marra and Adam Johnson teach creative writing at Stanford.
• The Palace of Treason by Red Sparrow author Jason Matthews - This spy/thriller series set in post-Soviet Russia and written by a 33-year CIA veteran has great characters and depictions of spy craft.
• True Grit by Charles Portis (with fantastic intro by Donna Tartt) or The Sisters Brothers (winner of the 2012 Tournament of Books) by Patrick DeWitt - As a companion to The Son but with a Butch Cassidy flair.
• The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St Aubyn - These four short novels in one collection are an interesting modern follow up to our Lucky Jim discussion on the deterioration of the English class system. Highly autobiographical, St Aubyn is considered the greatest living prose stylist and once you are familiar with these you will see references to them constantly.
• And of course, Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel - Our selection for the September meeting of the Book Group and Winner of the 2015 Tournament of Books.

For what it's worth, here is my reading plan for the summer:

•  Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
• The Dog  by Joseph O'Neill
• 2666 by Roberto Bolano
• Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
• The Bird Skinner by Alice Greenway

As always, I reserve the right to change my mind and head a different direction. Please respond via comments about books you plan to read or have enjoyed over the course of the Summer.

Bill

James Salter - All That Is

Hi all -  Looking forward to seeing everyone next Wednesday at the store.  I hope you are enjoying the book, although I would guess it has potential to be one of our more incendiary choices.  To help frame the conversation, I'm attaching a few articles on the author and book.  There's lots more out there if you look.
I sincerely hope you can make the meeting.  I've got a nice single malt I brought back from London and a private bottling of rye from Whistle Pig of Vermont.

James Salter could be the greatest writer you've never heard of although he's written many Hollywood screenplays and even resorted to writing profiles for People magazine. There has been a big push recently to get recognition for his work.


Is James Salter sexist?  Is he a writer for men only? Enjoy this debate between Roxanna Robinson and Katie Roiphe.

Sunday Afternoon Update

Le Carre Fan

Musical Philosopher

Between the weather and the anticipation of the Patriots' game, it's been a somewhat quiet afternoon in the store today.  While you may be gearing up for Tom versus Peyon XVI, as well, I wanted to make sure you didn't miss a couple of interesting tidbits in the Sunday papers.  First, the Boston Globe Bibliophiles column  interviewed John Cleese about his new memoir, "So Anyway..."  Turns out he's a big John le Carre fan.  Must be his understated English sensibility.  Secondly, Bruce Springsteen is the author of a new picture book called "Outlaw Pete" and is interviewed in the "By the Book" column in the NY Times Book Review where he lays out a most impressive reading syllabus.  He's just finished reading "Moby Dick" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" in parallel.  He riffs on all the major Russian writers as well as Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Richard Ford.  I was thinking he would be a great addition to the Book Group when he mentioned Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy" as the book that you might be most surprised to find on his nightstand.  So given the connection, I was thinking maybe Mark could approach him and let him know the next date for the Book Group.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - October 30, 2014

Greatest Living Writer?

John le Carre is 82 years old and still remarkably productive.  He wrote the screenplay adaptation of his book, A Most Wanted Man in Philip Seymour Hoffman's last film.  His most recent book,  A Delicate Truth was one of Wellesley Books' Summer Picks and has sold very well at the store.
  
While these recent articles in The Guardian and the Boston Globe  make the case for le Carre as the greatest writer of his generation, he seems the easy pick for the best spy writer ever.  The only debate seems to be which book is his best.  My favorite, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, is a popular choice.  However, this article in The New Yorker makes the case for A Perfect Spy which I considered for the group but, at 800 pages, deemed impractical.

Thinking of You

Packing priorities

Heading home from a week's worth of rambling on the Pembrokeshire Coast of Wales with a couple of days in London at the end of the trip, I had a chance to swing by a favorite spot,  Cadenhead's Whisky Shop, Scotland's oldest independent bottler.  If you are a fan of single malt, you won't find a more appealing shopfront, with unique single cask bottlings from all your favorite distilleries listed in chalk on big blackboard along with pertinent details.  Though I had to sacrifice some travel clothes and check my bag, I've managed to squirrel away couple of fun bottles for the flight home.  Reason enough to make the next Book Group meeting even if you don't particularly enjoy Tinker, Tailor!

 By the way, while in London, we had the good luck to pick up a couple of returned tickets for the sold out production of Shakespeare's Richard III starring Martin Freeman of Sherlock fame.  The play is set and staged in 1979 Britain (The Winter of Discontent) in a version of Churchill's War Rooms.  Interestingly, the program notes cite the dictatorship of Kim Jong-Il and Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in the same paragraph as inspirations for the production format.  The relevancy of the Book Group discussions is a gift that never stops giving!