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.

Happy Holidays!

Well, as you can imagine, it's been a frenetic couple of weeks at Wellesley Books but we're almost through the holiday crush. In what's become a Christmas Eve tradition, we'll have most of my family deployed on the floor tomorrow, so stop in and say hello if you are doing some last minute shopping.


As a reminder about our next meeting on Wednesday, January 25th I'm including this snippet from today's Writer's Almanac:

"It's the birthday of Norman Maclean, born in Clarinda, Iowa (1902). He was a fisherman, firefighter, scholar, and teacher, but it is as the author of his autobiographical novella, A River Runs Through It, that he is best known. Just as he described in his book, Maclean grew up at the junction of two great trout rivers in Missoula, Montana, in a family that didn't draw a clear line between religion and fly-fishing. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and his rowdy younger brother, Paul, like the sibling in the book, was in fact murdered under mysterious circumstances. Maclean did not publish the story of his last summer with his brother until he was in his 70s, but after it appeared in 1976, it very quickly became a classic of American literature.

"After A River Runs Through It, Maclean wrote about a Montana wildfire that had claimed the lives of 13 firemen and smokejumpers decades before. Part mystery, part investigation, and part autobiography, Young Men and Fire (1992) would be Maclean's final book, posthumously published two years after his death in 1990."


By the way, I also wanted to highlight a great write up in yesterday's Boston
Globe on Nick O'Connell and Cask Force.  You'll remember it was last January that we did an organized  tasting of some of his whisky and we've sampled others over the course our meetings. I've run into Nick a couple of times over the last few months and he's eager to come in for another round of tasting.  We'll see if we can get something set up soon!


Until then, I'm wishing you all a happy and joyous holiday!

Next BBGG Norman Maclean - Wednesday, January 25th

It's a busy time of year both in and out of the store, so this is coming out a bit late, but I wanted to thank everyone who made the effort on a cold/rainy night for our discussion of A Tale for the Time Being.  I have to admit, I was little nervous about the reception for the book before the meeting, but I think it may have been the most overwhelming supported books of any we've read.  (Of course, Parker will be the ultimate judge.)  I was most pleased with the number who said they would never have picked the book up on their own but are now recommending it to others.

I wanted to provide links to a couple of items we talked about over the course of the meeting.  Charlie Cassidy sent this article on the Hikikomori, the approximately half a million people in Japan who have dropped out of either school or work due to bullying or severe parental pressure.  And, once again, here is the link to the This American Life episode featuring the disconnected phone box where surviving relatives and friends have conversations with victims of the tsunami.



I'm very excited about our next book, Young Men and Fire, by Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It.  This non-fiction account of the Mann Gulch fire in 1949, in which an elite team of smoker jumpers parachuted into a wild fire is part detective story, part western, part tragedy.  All of it is told in Maclean's distinctive, concise prose.  Hope you can make it!



I'm in the store every Sunday and on Wednesday December 21st.  Stop in if you can.  Otherwise, I hope you all have a wonderful Holiday Season!

Man Booker for The Sellout and a Check-in on A Tale for the Time Being

Deserving Man (Booker)

I'm sure many of you saw that Paul Beatty and The Sellout won the prestigious Man Booker prize for fiction on Tuesday night.  We can all take some small satisfaction that we were on the bandwagon relatively early. Yet another example of how The Morning News Tournament of Books identifies great books.  I was interested to read that The Sellout was originally considered "too harsh, too unconventional, too unfamiliar" and was turned down by 18 publishers before it was eventually published.

Incidentally, A Tale for the Time Being was a semi-finalist in the Tournament of Books and short-listed for the Man Booker prize. We have about a month left until our next meeting so I hope some of you have started the book.  Rudy passed along a great episode from This American Life that feathers in nicely with the book.  I've attached his comments below:

"I happened to be listening to an episode of This American Life over the weekend and was amazed at how relevant it was to A Tale for the Time Being. I haven’t finished the book yet, so it might not be spot-on, but the TAL episode (from Sept. 23) started with a story about a guy in Japan who missed his dead relative and put a telephone booth in his back yard, although not hooked up to anything, so that he could “call” him to say the things he was thinking. Then, after the earthquake & tsunami, lots of people started to come to use his “kaze denwa” (wind phone) to talk to the people they lost. NHK filmed and recorded people so there’s lots of interesting footage."

The This American Life episode is online and available here.  It’s about 22 minutes long. Here's the NHK video.

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.