TC Boyle Post Mortem

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  I had to chuckle this morning when, the day after the first Red Sox playoff game, the top trending article on the Boston Globe website is the story of an 81-year-old grandmother in Amherst who had her carefully concealed and well tended recreational marijuana plant seized from her garden after being spotted and radioed in from a National Guard helicopter.  Her response: "I had been nursing this baby through a drought, and I was pretty pissed to tell the truth.  This is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, I am a citizen of the United States of America. You have overstepped and I am not going to step aside."  I found myself wondering if I'd stumbled upon a missing dialogue from TC Boyle's book or if the Sara character had recently relocated from Mendocino, Nevada, or where ever she settled at the end of the book.

 Thanks, once again, for the overwhelming turnout and enthusiastic debate for The Harder They Come.  Despite my protestations and cajoling to the contrary, I truly believe the discussions are more interesting when the views are mixed.  I thought Wednesday night was a good balance of opinions.  If you enjoyed the book and are looking to try another by Boyle, I would recommend Drop City, A Friend of  the Earth, or The Tortilla Curtain. 

 As much as I appreciated the big turnout the other night, I believe we have reached a limit in terms of the number of participants we can accommodate under our current format.  I like everyone to have an opportunity to speak and the back and forth discussion makes for a better evening.  We lose that capability once we get much above 20 people.  I will think about possible changes to the structure, but until then I'm going to cap the sign up sheet to 25 names (under the assumption that we will have our usual few no-shows.)  That shouldn't lock anyone out, but to be safe please sign up early if you are planning on attending.

 As I mentioned at the end of the evening, our next book will be A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki on Wednesday, November 30th, at 7pm.  On the surface it has a lot in common with The Harder They Come.  Ozeki is also a great storyteller, much of the plot is set in the Pacific Northwest, there are multiple narrative voices, and it centers around family relationships (father-daughter-grandmother in this case.)  However, this book is much more finely observed and constructed, with interesting diversions into global environmental issues, zen buddhism, quantum physics, and Japanese war history.  It should be a great discussion

Lastly, I had several requests at the end of the evening for an updated list of the books we've read since we started in 2014.  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

TC Boyle - The Harder They Come - Wednesday, October 5th

I'm traveling next week and will be somewhat out of touch, so I wanted to check in and remind you that our next meeting is coming up in a little less than two weeks.  The Harder They Come is rather short and plot driven, so there's still plenty of time to finish. Hope to see you there!

 

 Also, I wanted to make sure you saw that Paul Beatty's The Sellout made the shortlist for the Man Booker prize for fiction.  You can find his short, irreverent interview here. 

My Finnegan Moment and the Dangers of Reading

The Line Up

I was in Rhode Island over the weekend, still glowing in the aftermath of a great Barbarian Days discussion when I woke up on Sunday morning to brilliant skies, an offshore breeze and some very well formed waves (insert your favorite Finnegan description) driven in from Hermine.  Inspired by his writing, surmising he was probably in the water off Montauk in the same storm system and hey, I'm 8 years younger, I never hesitated to grab my paddle board and head out. It had been 3 years since I was out surfing and I quickly realized I was, literally, in over my head.  After 45 minutes and a couple of cautious attempts at the waves, I took a big fall and my leash snapped and my board took off for the rocks.  Suddenly my mind was full of rip currents, double wave hold downs,  and barefoot dashes across sharp slippery rocks to avoid annihilation.  In the end, I emerged from the water unscathed, but with a much more vivid appreciation for some of those passages and a new appreciation for the pleasures of living some experiences vicariously through reading.

Our next Book Group meeting is set for Wednesday, October 5th at 7pm.  We are reading TC Boyle's The Harder They Come. Boyle is a prolific writer, a gifted story teller and one of my favorite authors.  I've gone back and forth about which book we should read.  I had a chance to meet him a couple of years ago in Asheville at the ABA's Winter Institute when this book debuted.  We spent a lot of time talking about our Group's reading selections.  He convinced me this would be a great fit and I've been waiting for it to come out in paperback.

Barbarian Days Upon Us

Hope you are all well and truly stoked about our upcoming meeting this Wednesday at 7pm. Looking forward to seeing you all there. To get you in the right frame of mind, Arthur suggests you check out the point breaks in  Psychic Migrations. If you plan on attending, please shoot me a note so I can make sure we are properly provisioned.

Shaka brahs!

Presidential Endorsement

I'm thinking of inviting the President in for our next meeting given that he's doing the homework.  

On Friday, the White House released President Obama's summer reading list, the titles he will likely read while vacationing with his family on Martha's Vineyard, as reported by Politico. The titles are:

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson



For those of you thinking of coming, there's  obviously still time to get started.  Hope to see you all in a few weeks.

Intermission

We are about halfway through our Summer hiatus and as I'll be out of commission for a bit for my oldest son's wedding next weekend I'm attaching this piece by William Finnegan from the Delancey Place website to remind you that our next meeting is on Wednesday, August 31.  

Today's selection from -- Barbarian Days by William Finnegan. How waves are formed.

"Here is how waves form. A storm out at sea churns the surface, creating chop -- smaller and then larger disorganized wavelets, which amalgamate, with enough wind, into heavy seas. What we are wait­ing for on distant coasts is the energy that escapes from the storm, radiat­ing outward into calmer waters in the form of wave trains -- groups of waves, increasingly organized, that travel together. Each wave is a column of orbiting energy, most of it below the surface. All the wave trains pro­duced by a storm constitute what surfers call a swell. The swell can travel thousands of miles. The more powerful the storm, the farther the swell may travel. As it travels, it becomes more organized -- the distance be­tween each wave in a train, known as the interval, increases. In a long­ interval train, the orbiting energy in each wave may extend more than a thousand feet beneath the ocean surface. Such a train can pass easily through surface resistance like chop or other smaller, shallower swells that it crosses or overtakes."

A couple of other fun notes related to previous meetings.  I don't know where you come down on the election campaigns, but George Saunders has been attending Donald Trump events around the country and has written a highly entertaining account of his experience for The New Yorker.  By the way, Saunders' first novel is scheduled for publication in February.  If you looked closely at the photo of my proposed Summer reading stack last time, you may have noticed the arc for Lincoln in the Bardo. But I'm saving that one for now. Incidentally, I'm still soliciting Summer reading updates, so if you've read anything good, post it as a comment to the blog for everyone to see (thanks Bart!)


Lastly, I was so happy to see that The Sellout was just selected to the long list for the Man Booker Prize, one the most high profile literary prizes out there. My admiration for this novel continues to grow and I've been recommending it to everyone I know. So best of luck to Paul Beatty!

Summer Reading 2016

Thanks for a great conversation around Nobody's Fool last week and apologies, again, for the last minute change of date.  We have about two months before our next meeting on Wednesday, August 31st when we will discuss Barbarian Days: A Surfer's Life by William Finnegan.  This memoir won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. "Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting." Finnegan is a staff writer for The New Yorker, about my age, and grew up near my home town in Southern California and the same generation covered in The Sellout. In the NY Times Book Review's By the Book section Geoff Dyer described Barbarian Days as the last great book he'd read because "it made me realize my whole life has been pretty much a waste. I suspected this anyway; he explained why: because I’d not surfed."

My summer ambition

 Apart from our next read, several of you have asked for some summer reading suggestions. Wellesley Books publishes a Summer Reading pamphlet, available in the store, which features recommendations from our entire staff if you are interested in something beyond my narrow scope.  Otherwise, here's what I'm thinking:

•  The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan - Replace Texas with Kentucky and this is an epic on the scale of The Son. I'm just getting started but already enthralled.
• The One from the Other by Philip Kerr - After The Quiet Flame I read the Berlin Noir trilogy which contains the first 3 Bernie Gunther novels and I have to admit I'm hooked.
• Before the Fall by Noah Hawley - "The thriller of the year." When a private plane plunges into the ocean off Martha's Vineyard, the media and the government want answers.
• The Ginger Man by James Patrick Dunleavy - Never read it, just recently heard of it, but a classic contemporary of Lucky Jim.
• Be Frank with Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson -  An editor's assistant is sent to act as caregiver to a reclusive novelist's quirky 9-year old son while she tries to finish her next novel. A whimsical page-turner in the spirit of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Where'd You Go, Bernadette.
•  The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin - For those of you who haven't had enough dystopian drama.  This is the third book of a trilogy.  The first, The Passage, was a thrilling literary phenomenon.  I felt the second was a bit of a plod, but this last has apparently returned to the level of the debut.

As always, I reserve the right to change my mind or head in a different direction. Are you reading something good?  Have other ideas or suggestions you think the group might like? Please respond or comment via the blog about books you plan to read or have enjoyed over the Summer.