LAVA Discussion Book Candidates for 2012
These candidate books come from several sources, including suggestions from LAVA members, lists of award-winning books, favorites of other book clubs, the Harvard Bookstore’s best-seller list (my personal favorite), literary blogs, etc. Several were carried over from the previous voting list. There are 20 books on this list, but we will choose only 8 of them in this balloting, which unfortunately means that many worthwhile books will be excluded from next year’s reading schedule. As before, the most popular runners-up will be included in the next list of candidates.
Why do we need to choose only 8 books to cover 12 meetings? We don’t read a book for January because that month is occupied with choosing the next list of books. In March we read the book chosen by Writers and Books for the "If all of Rochester Read the Same Book" program. In July and September we see a film at The Little Theater instead of discussing a book. Therefore we need to choose only 8 books to cover a full year.
LAVA members are encouraged to research these book candidates in bookstores, libraries, on the web, etc. Bring this list and your thoughts to the special January meeting at my house on Saturday, January 7, which will be devoted to sharing information and opinions on these books (and sharing good food).
After the January meeting and prior to the voting deadline of Sunday January 29, please "mark your ballots" and return them to me. First review the guidelines for choosing LAVA discussion books, which reflect some of the things we have learned about choosing books over the years. Then, using a system similar to the one used in the Olympics, rate each book individually on a scale of 1 to 10, using 10 to indicate books that you think would generate the best Lava discussions. If you wish, you can write your rating for each book in the margins of this document. Last year, several members rated each book as we discussed it during the January meeting and then handed their marked list to me as they left, but you can use any method you prefer as long as you get your ratings to me by the voting deadline.
The candidates are divided into three groups: shorter fiction, shorter nonfiction, and longer works. This division doesn’t affect how you cast your vote, but it does affect how the final schedule is created. If no nonfiction book is among the top vote-getters, the most popular nonfiction book will go on the list anyway to assure that we get a little variety in our reading. Any of the longer books among the top vote-getters will be assigned to the August and October meetings because that will give us two months to read them.
Candidates for Regular Meetings (fiction)
Aloft by Chang-rae Lee, 2004, 364 pages. A tragicomic novel of suburban American life by an author of Korean ancestry who was brought to this country at the age of three. Boston Globe: "An affecting portrait of a man trying to define his place as a father, son, and lover in America today." San Jose Mercury: "Filled with passages of revelation about who we are and what we are becoming." Atlanta Constitution: "Nearly every page of Aloft is full of surprises, of emotional land mines." This is the author's third novel. His first, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and his fourth was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/aloft/ Suggested by Joan S. 16 books plus one CD in the library system.
Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout. 304 pages, 1998. Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, which LAVA read in 2010. A single mother "temporarily" moves with her infant daughter to a small New England mill town in an attempt to give her life new direction. Socially isolated, she focuses her energy on her daughter, but their relationship becomes distant as the daughter becomes a teenager. When the daughter falls in love with her math teacher, who is caught taking advantage of her, the mother reacts with fury and even jealousy. They try to rebuild their relationship against the background of a gossip-ridden town with its own secrets. San Francisco Chronicle: "Every once in a while, a novel comes along that plunges deep into your psyche, leaving you breathless....This year that novel is Amy and Isabelle." New York Times: "One of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place." Review in the New York Times. 32 copies in the library system.
The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton. 1988, 328 pages. This is the story of a woman growing up in a small Illinois town in difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances. It won the Pen/Ernest Hemingway award for best first novel. Boston Globe: "A sly and wistful, if harrowing, human comedy." Los Angeles Times: "Jane Hamilton’s novel is authentically Dickensian…. The real achievement of this first novel is not so much the blackness as the suggestion of resilience. At the end, Ruth begins to put together her shattered body, spirit and life." Glamour: "Hamilton's story builds to a shocking crescendo. Her small-town characters are as appealingly offbeat and brushed with grace as any found in Anne Tyler's novels." Amazon: "Hamilton has perfect pitch. So perfect that you wince with pain for confused but fundamentally good Ruth as she walks a dead-end path. The book ends with the prospect of redemption, thank goodness." Suggested by Joyce H. 42 copies in the library system.
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. 252 pages, 2006. Amazon describes it as a "hauntingly beautiful novel about two characters whose lives are woven together in such complex ways that even after the last page is turned, the reader is left to wonder what really happened." One of the characters is an elderly man who escaped from the Nazis long ago, and the other is a fourteen-year-old girl. (Another "character" in this book is a book called The History of Love.) The Times (UK): "For all the complexity of this book, it has the simplicity of pure emotion, and is a delight because of it." The New York Times says it "keeps its reader off balance until a stunning finale" and spoke of the "deep, surprising wisdom that gives this novel its ultimate heft." Nicole Krauss was recently named to the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of young writers with promising futures. This book has been translated into 27 languages. Suggested by Bill. Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/history_of_love/. 28 copies in the library system.
A Mercy by Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, which LAVA read in 1996. 196 pages, 2008. "In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love—first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith." USA Today: "[It] examines slavery through the prism of power, not race. Morrison achieves this by setting A Mercy in 1680s America, when slavery was a color-blind, equal-opportunity state of misery, not yet the rigid, peculiar institution it would become." Christian Science Monitor: "The chances for mercy to thrive in a new land are weighed on a small farm in New York. Four women who were acquired by farmer-turned-trader Jacob Vaark in various ways have forged an unlikely family... [Vaark’s] farm is a small collective of every type of servitude possible years before the country turned exclusively and implacably to the enslavement of black Africans." Times (London): "A stark story of the evils of possessiveness and the perils of dispossession emerges slantwise. Hints, suspicions, secrets, ambivalences, scarcely acknowledged motives and barely noticeable nuances serve as signposts to enormities and desperations." Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/mercy/ 47 copies in the library system.
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey. 381 pages, 2009. This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2010; two of the author's previous novels won the Booker Prize. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political philosopher, toured the United States in 1831 and from his experiences wrote the hugely influential Democracy in America. Carey's imagines that journey through the eyes of two fictional traveling companions, Olivier, the child of French aristocrats, and Parrot, the motherless son of an English printer who is expected to spy on Olivier for his over-protective parents. New York Magazine: "Cranks its energy, like Don Quixote, out of the friction between two antipodal characters... Hums with comic adventure." The Christian Science Monitor: "An energetically intelligent novel... It bristles like a hedgehog with all of Carey’s spiky ideas." Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/parrot_and_olivier_in_america/ 23 copies in the library system.
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry. 300 pages, 2008. This novel won the Costa (Whitbread) Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. An earlier novel by this author was also shortlisted for the Booker. Roseanne Clear, a 100-year-old inmate of an Irish mental institution who was committed during Ireland’s civil war because she had a child out of wedlock, secretly writes her story. Because the institution is closing, the chief psychiatrist must also piece her story together to determine what will happen to her next. Publishers Weekly: "Written in captivating, lyrical prose, Barry's novel is both a sparkling literary puzzle and a stark cautionary tale of corrupted power." The Guardian: "[Barry] makes enthrallingly beautiful prose out of the wreckage of these lives by allowing them to have the complication of actual history in all its messy elusiveness." The Times [London]: "There is something spiritual in Roseanne's brave reverence for life, in her willingness to find angels in the midst of cruelty, prejudice and ignorance." Margaret, Andi and Bill have all read this book and recommend it. Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/secret_scripture/. 17 copies in the library system plus one CD.
The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer, author of the best-selling The Confessions of Max Tivoli. 195 pages, 2008. Colm Toibin, author of The Master, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, says "It is written in prose that makes you want to slow the book down and read passages over again, but it also has a plot which makes you want to race ahead and stay up all night until you know what happens in the end." Los Angeles Times: "A book whose linguistic prowess and raw storytelling power is almost disruptive to the reader. It's too good to put down and yet each passage is also too good to leave behind....Every twenty pages or so, the plot implodes and the characters reveal themselves." New York Times: "Mr. Greer's considerable gifts as a storyteller ascend to the heights of masters like Marilynne Robinson and William Trevor." A Washington Post Book of the Year. Suggested by Andi. Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/story_of_a_marriage/ 19 copies in the library system, plus a CD.
The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessian Boyle. 355 pages, 1995. A Mexican couple slips across the border and lives precariously in a camp in an outlying area near Los Angeles. In a nearby gated community lives a liberal couple who moved there to be close to nature but who find that nature is sometimes a bit too much for them, especially the coyotes who threaten their pets. They also develop a strong fear of the nearby camp of homeless Mexicans. The lives of the two couples intertwine in unhappy ways. Boston Globe: "Succeeds in stealing the front page news and bringing it home to the great American tradition of the social novel." Review in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/08/home/boyle-tortilla.html. A collection of reviews (page down to see them all): http://www.englisch.schule.de/boyle/boylerev.htm. Suggested by Vicki. 17 copies in the library system plus a CD.
Candidates for Regular Meetings (non-fiction)
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning science reporter for the New York Times. 304 pages, 2007. The American Scientist: "In wry, witty and occasionally florid prose, Angier introduces readers to the scientific method and basic probability and then presents guided tours of the basics of physics, chemistry, evolutionary and molecular biology, geology and astronomy. She illuminates each discipline by drawing on interviews with its top practitioners, and she displays everywhere a unique flair for finding familiar examples and vivid analogies." Boston Globe: "Everything you ever learned and forgot, or never learned, in high school science is here: what an atom looks like, how a cell survives, why Earth's tectonic plates move.... She writes in folksy, sometimes cutesy prose, making even the most abstruse theories accessible." Nature: "An astonishingly literary science book... Angier’s gift for metaphor lights up the dustiest corner. Suggested by Tess. 24 copies in the library system in Nov 2010.
How To Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas Foster, a professor of English. 296 pages, 2003. Each chapter discusses a symbol or other literary device and illustrates it with loads of examples. One chapter, for example, is titled "It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow," and another "It’s Never Just Heart Disease." The book ends with a short story by Katherine Mansfield followed by two detailed and very different analyses of it, each of which uncovers hidden layers of meaning. The author also discusses in detail James Joyce’s three-page story "Araby," which is freely available on the web and could be a discussion point for us. Written to engage young college students, this book’s style may seem a bit breezy for some, but James Shapiro, a prominent professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, says: "I know of no other book that so vividly conveys what it’s like to study with a great literature professor." Suggested by Bill. 14 copies in the library system, and Bill has an extra copy.
The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr. 283 pages, 2005. The true story of the search for and the rediscovery of a painting of Caravaggio that had been lost for almost two centuries. It provides insights into art history, the techniques of art restoration and the petty jealousies of art scholarship. The Boston Globe: "His book is about the pursuit of lost art and also the life of the pursuit. He writes with a novelist's gift for character and a dramatist's for character in action." The New York Times: "the book reads better than a thriller." Baltimore Sun: "reads like a whodunit, romantic thriller and scholarly monograph all rolled into one." Economist: "As perfect a work of narrative nonfiction as you could ever hope to read." Designated one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by the New York Times. Washington Post review: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/22/AR2005122201579.html 27 copies in the library system.
Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison by Piper Kerman. 298 pages, 2010. Soon after graduating from Smith College, Kerman was enticed into helping a friend who was involved with drug smuggling. Years later, an executive at a non-profit organization, she was appalled to find that her brief fling with the romance of crime had caught up with her, and she was sent to prison. Her story of acclimating to the culture of prison has been described as revealing, moving, enraging and often hilarious. Los Angeles Times: "This book is impossible to put down because [Kerman] could be you. Or your best friend. Or your daughter." Smith magazine: "But it’s her rendering of her fellow prisoners—their surprise birthday parties with homemade cards and microwave cheesecake, the ways they bring hope and humor to the inside, and the makeshift families they create—that allows Orange to transcend the prison genre and become a story about the remarkable capacity for strength and resilience, that of Kerman and the women she met in prison." Review in the Los Angeles Times. 22 copies in the library system.
Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. 334 pages, 2006. Publishers Weekly: "In this companion volume to his bestseller, Emotional Intelligence [which LAVA read in 2001], Goleman persuasively argues for a new social model of intelligence drawn from the emerging field of social neuroscience. Describing what happens to our brains when we connect with others, Goleman demonstrates how relationships have the power to mold not only human experience but also human biology. In lucid prose he describes from a neurobiological perspective sexual attraction, marriage, parenting, psychopathic behaviors and the group dynamics of teachers and workers." Scientific American: "The author’s introductory tour through this emerging research landscape helps readers grasp core concepts of social neuroscience, illustrating abstractions with poignant anecdotes, without excessive jargon. Goleman also explains how such research may influence our lives." The author’s web site: http://www.danielgoleman.info/social_intelligence/index.html 24 books and 3 CDs in the library system.
This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpen Faust. 346 pages, 2008. The Civil War introduced America to death on an unprecedented scale. This book, a finalist for the National Book Award, discusses how the country dealt with the aftermath. Kirkus Review: "A moving work of social history, detailing how the Civil War changed perceptions and behaviors about death." Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: "The beauty and originality of Faust’s book is that it shows how thoroughly the work of mourning became the business of capitalism, merchandised throughout a society." New York Observer: "Eloquent and imaginative, Ms. Faust’s book takes a grim topic–how America coped with the massive death toll from the Civil War–and makes it fresh and exciting." Suggested by Rachel S. Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/republic_of_suffering/ 21 copies in the library system plus one audio CD.
Longer Books (suitable for August and October)
We read no more than two books in this category per year, and we reserve them for our August and October discussions, which gives us two months to read them. This does not imply that our August and October books must come from this section. If all of the top choices are shorter books, that is what we read all year.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. 509 pages, 2004. This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize, as was the author's previous novel. Publishers Weekly: "Mitchell's third novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives... Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book." New York Observer: "The elaborate structure enacts a theory of history that’s part of the novel’s core meaning; the stop-and-go narrative reveals itself as a continuous cycle; the separate stories achieve a weird unity; and what seemed at first mere cleverness begins to look like wisdom." Washington Post: "Cloud Atlas is a work of fiction, ultimately, about the myriad misuses of fiction: the seductive lies told by grifters, CEOs, politicians and others in the service of expanding empires and maintaining power." Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/cloud_atlas/ 12 copies in the library system.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution-And How It Can Renew America by Tom Friedman, who has won the Pulitzer Prize three times. 412 pages, 2008 edition; 528 pages, 2009 edition. This was one of five books on President Obama’s vacation reading list for 2009. (The other four, by the way, included Plainsong by Kent Haruf and John Adams by David McCullough, both of which LAVA has already read.) Friedman urges the U.S. to embrace green technology to alleviate global warming and restore our economic and political stature. New York Times: "If Friedman's profile and verve take his message where it needs to be heard, into the boardrooms of America and beyond, that can only be good--for all our sakes." Financial Times: "Tom Friedman has done it again…. He has lit upon what he might describe as another Big Idea, and, given his track record as a zeitgeist thermometer, we should all pay attention…. He has a gift for weaving anecdotes and examples from around the world into his broader tapestry." Suggested by Vicki and Rod. Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/hot_flat_and_crowded/ The library system has 78 books.
Mayflower: a Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. 358 pages, 2007. Library Journal: "Mayflower is a jaw-dropping epic of heroes and villains, bravery and bigotry, folly and forgiveness. Philbrick delivers a masterly told story that will appeal to lay readers and history buffs alike. Clearly one of the year's best books; highly recommended." New York Times: "Mayflower is a surprise-filled account of what are supposed to be some of the best-known events in the American past but are instead an occasion for collective amnesia." Philbrick won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2000 for another book. Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/mayflower/ The library system has 50 books and 16 CDs.
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky 448 pages, written in 1942, published in 2007. This best-seller is a book club favorite. Washington Post: "This extraordinary work of fiction about the German occupation of France is embedded in a real story as gripping and complex as the invented one. Composed in 1941-42 by an accomplished writer who had published several well-received novels, Suite Française, her last work, was written under the tremendous pressure of a constant danger that was to catch up with her and kill her before she had finished. Irene Nemirovsky was a Jewish, Russian immigrant from a wealthy family who had fled the Bolsheviks as a teenager. She spent her adult life in France, wrote in French but preserved the detachment and cool distance of the outsider. She and her husband were deported to Auschwitz in 1942." This book contains two of what was intended to be a suite of five novellas. The first follows families from different social classes during the chaotic flight from Paris during World War II, and the second observes life in a French village occupied by the Germans. Puzzlingly, there is little mention of the plight of Jews. The Telegraph: "outstanding, full of beauty, pain and truth." The Times (London): "a marvellous tragic-comedy of manners... No other work of fiction as forcefully conveys the fate of France under the Nazis." Independent (Britain): "this is no gloomy elegy but a scintillating panorama of a people in crisis -- witty, satirical, romantic, waspish and gorgeously lyrical by turns." Suggested by Ginny. Reviews: http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/suite_francaise/ and more reviews: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/nemirovi/suitef.htm 46 copies in the library system plus 3 CDs.
When Everything Changed: the Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins. 475 pages, 2009. Collins, the first woman to be Editorial Page Editor for the New York Times, is currently a columnist for the Time's Op-Ed page. The New York Times called it a "smart, thorough, often droll and extremely readable account of women’s recent history in America." Washington Post: "Gail Collins's rich, readable account of the last 50 years of the women's movement…reminds us of the triumphs, mortifications and hilarity of the early decades, as well as the personalities." Dallas Morning News: "Millions lived through the material Collins covers in her new book. To those who did not, it might read a little like science fiction." Review in the New York Times. 19 copies in the library system.