On the Rails

We had book club today, talking about The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead.  It's the first book I've ever read by Whitehead, and it was really an incredible book--painful and exhilarating and pretty explicitly a work of genius.

Unfortunately, I don't even feel remotely qualified to do a reader's guide for this one. It's just too...big? raw? intimate? It's a lot of these things, but most of all I'd say it's brilliantly structured.

Cora is a slave on a plantation in the South, which is pretty horrifying, as you might imagine.  Her mother escaped when Cora was young, leaving her on her own in a horrible situation and now, many  years later, Cora takes thee opportunity to run. She travels with another escaped slave, Caesar, on the Underground Railroad. In her travels, she sees different parts of the country and the different situations of black people.

It's kind of a Pilgrim's Progress of horrors. Magical realism isn't quite the right term, but there is the feel of a fairy tale or a parable about this. The first clue is the actual railroad that runs underground, on which Cora makes her escape.  It's not really dreamlike, not the way I expect magical realism to be.  It's actually much more realistic--different stations in different states of repair, and the characters wonder over who built it and how it works.

But it's also both ends of a metaphor--the railroad and the mysterious connection going to no one knows where. And at every point in the journey, each stop takes you on a tour through a lot of the horrifying things that have been done to black Americans through history. It's not literally an antebellum landscape--we get a glimpse of the Tuskegee experiments, of Jim Crow sundown laws (only worse, so much worse), of all kinds of horrors in all kinds of guises. 

Cora is an interesting protagonist--she's prickly and not terribly personable, and she's not an adventurous person.  Although she does several heroic things, she's not a hero.  I'm reminded of Sansa Stark--when you read a story about great injustice, you expect your protagonist to rise up and vanquish it.  But really, if the world was full of heroes there'd be a lot less injustice, and the most a person can often hope for is to survive and not be to horribly damaged by the journey.

Okay, I do have a couple of talking points, in case you have a book group of your own.  Here are my questions.

1. What did you think of the interstitial chapters, where you get glimpses of other characters' back stories?  Did you feel like they fit together with each other?  They seemed to serve many different purposes; did they have anything in common?

2. What did you think of Ridgeway? Did he feel like a real person, or like an archetype of a slave hunter?  He stood for the institution--indifferent and implacable.  How did he work as a human being.  And, corollary, how did the character of Homer work for you, as an archetype/stereotype and as a person?

3. This is the worst question, but which state was the most horrifying to you?  Which atrocity struck you hardest.  I was surprised at the different answers in our group.

4. What did you think of the ending, both as a symbolic ending to the journey and as a place to stop the narrative?  What do you think would come next--or maybe I mean what would be the logical next place for this story to go?

Discussing in book club, we kept saying "so depressing, horrifying."  But the fact is that it was a beautiful book to read.  It was horrifying, but it also gave you enough space among the horrors to catch your breath and appreciate the storytelling that was going on here, and the craftsmanship that takes on the enormity of an historic experience and shapes it for a modern audience in a most accessible way.

The Buried Giant

Oof.  Guys.  Oof.  Not good.

I always feel bad when book club all hates a book, because I voted for it.  But I will admit that it makes a good meeting (does anyone remember the fabulous sangria festival of rage that was The Children's Hospital?), and sometimes, when it's unclear what's actually happening on the page, it's helpful to have a group of like-minded interpreters around to sort out who went where and what that part meant.

So this month, Work Book Club discussed The Buried Giant.  The one thing I'll say that makes me feel better is that we were all interested in reading it; I can't be blamed alone for pushing it on the group.  Though, god help me, I would have if it had come to that; I generally really like Kazuo Ishiguro, and this one has been on my to-read for ages. Never Let Me Go is a great book.  The Remains of the Day is hypnotic and sad.  I even liked A Pale View of Hills, though it was a little confusing. 

And yes, there was a lot of confusion about what actually happened, and even more about what it meant, but I think the really big theme here was Really Cool Ideas That Went Nowhere.  Or maybe Themes the Book Presents but Fails to Explore.  Either way, I don't really have discussion questions about the book so much as discussions that I wish the book had fostered.  So let's talk about those.

1. Ground-up worldbuilding is tricky with unreliable narrators.  It takes delicate work, which is decently done here, I think.  When you're trying to establish whether this is a world where there really are dragons, giants, and ogres, or if it's just a world where people vehemently believe in those things, you're going to be hampered by the fact that the main plot point is vague memory problems in most characters.  I'll give him props for this; I was never really confused about what kind of world I was in (though I was confused about some (many) of the details).

2. What does it mean to have an intimate romantic relationship with someone if neither of you have any long-term memories?  You have your day to day life, and your emotions, but without memories of core experiences, where does the deep bond come from?  Is it about clinging more tightly to what's right in front of you?  Is it about falling in love with this person every day?  Are you even the same person they fell in love with when you don't have your memory?  I mean, we find out later that Axl was a great warrior. That's who Beatrice married;  how does that relationship compare to these two people with no memories of these characters?

3. I think we can globally get behind the notion that stealing someone's memories is bad guy behavior.  How deluded is it to think you're doing it for a good reason?  Like, is this the road to hell that's paved with good intentions? Or is it just flat out selfish, a way to keep your boot on the neck of someone you've beaten?

4. The argument between the warrior and the monk about the value of penance is fascinating to me.  If the monks' penance can bring forgiveness to the entire kingdom, then wrongs will continue to be done and cancelled out in a neverending cycle.  But if you switch over to Wistan's punishment/vengeance model, where even old wrongs have to be paid for as a debt, do you inevitably end up in a cycle of hatred and revenge?  What keeps a man from doing evil if he can buy his way out of punishment with a novena?  But what actual good does revenge do?

4b. WTH, Arthur?  Did he really do that?  Because that's a real jerk move.

5. Why, god, why does everyone say the name of the person they're talking to in EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE???

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  I have so many questions that I can't phrase in any way except "what's with that?"  What's with the woman in the boat on the river, and the pixies?  What's with the evil birds?  What's with the giant's mound at the beginning of the story?  What's with that last paragraph?  What's with Edwin in general?  What's with any of this book?

If someone can explain it to me--explain what it reveals, instead of what it obscures--I would be grateful, but I don't think that's a thing this book does.  I think this is a book that's more like When We Were Orphans, which was the Ishiguro book that I struggled with the most.  Because that was a book that was full of things that just didn't make sense, even knowing that the narrator is unreliable and in deep denial and spinning everything and maybe even a little crazy.  This one is a thousand times more bewildering. 

I strongly recommend that you go out and read Never Let Me Go.  And that's all I have to say about that.

Socrates vs. Plato: Smackdown

I need to take some time to come back from this rough stretch in the real world; apologies, and no promises.

But there have been some fabulous books to discuss in this period, and I'm going to start with The Just City, which we'll be talking about at my work book club next week.  I posted from the halfway point, but now I'm done and I think this is a good place to gather discussion questions before the meeting.

Some quick review points, though: the sequel/companion books, The Philosopher Kings, comes out in May, and if you haven't read the first one yet, you might want to wait for a few weeks, because I suspect that it's a read-one-after-the-other situation.  It's not so much a cliffhanger--well, maybe it's a cliffhanger.  It could be a very abstract, nonspecific ending, but I suspect this was one long story in Jo Walton's mighty, magnificent head.

Okay, without further ado, questions for discussion of The Just City, which you must read, preferably with your book club.

1) To what extent is this novel a feminist novel.  But wait, let's back that up a bit and ask: 1a) what is a feminist novel?  Which is a broad question, but this is a book for long discussions of meaning.  And after you answer that, then you can answer the main part of question 1.  I have no idea of the answer to 1a.  But if you rephrase it: to what extent are the positions and depictions of women in this society the main or driving force of this novel?

I felt like the idea of what a woman's position is or could be in this imagined society was really the most compelling, driving force here, and I think it highlighted the whole point of this book, which was where philosophy meets practicality.  Who's going to do the manual labor, and how are we going to deal with childbirth?

Which leads to SO MANY OTHER questions, like 1f) given that none of the masters has ever had a baby (male or female), how is it that men can't help with the child rearing stuff, or 1m) to what extent are the Just City's limitations around women caused by the fact that the majority of people come from ancient history, especially the men?  Or 1s) rape and its many aspects: did it freak you out that Maia had to face Ikarus over and over again?  Or that Socrates was his friend?  What does it mean to be friends with a rapist?  With one who doesn't realize what he did was rape?  Even after being told?

I could go on forever.  Maybe these should be separate questions, but then you get back to 1) to what extent are these questions the main problem of the novel?  Or maybe, is this--the situation of women here--a lens for looking at all kinds of privilege and entrenched prejudices?

I'm not sure about this; the masters are almost all white, for clearly explained reasons, but of course the children are all treated as equal, apparently.  It seems oversimplifying to say that this is about women and how they are treated, but really way too broad to say that it's about oppression in general.

I can already see that my question numbering system is shot to hell.  Anyway.

2) The main theme of the book is very much about the transformation of the general to the specific.  Theories are turned into principles, which become plans and then actions.  Where along this chain do most things fall apart?  Is this something you see in the rest of the world, too?  How does this relate to the trouble people have in seeing why someone different from them might need the world to be constructed in another way?

3) What do you think about the depiction of gods as characters here?  How do gods' motivations and considerations compare to mortals', and how are they scaled down appropriately.  Compare it to other books in which gods are characters (I'm thinking of NK Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy, but if you have others in mind, please mention them in the comments, because this in particular fascinates me).  How do gods understand mortals?  How do/can they care about them, and how do they manage their relationships with them?

4) Philos, eros, agape.  How useful is this construction of love?  What's so wrong with eros?  What did Plato have against eros?  I might need some actual Plato reading to catch me up here.

5) Tangentially related, how do you think the author managed the fact that all these people are basically living and arguing about Plato's ideals without actually managing to answer many of the questions that come up?  It seems only natural to me that answers would never be satisfactory, but it feels like Plato lays out all these answers that just lead to more questions, but no one in the story tries to lock down further answers, as though Plato was the only one who had the authority to declare things firmly True and Right. Does that seem natural?  Don't you wish someone had answered some of these questions?

6) Also, don't you now want to have a Socratic dialogue?  Have one with me!  I'm available for arguments and discussions.

There's so much more--slavery, Kebes, robot sentience, Athene's temper, cliffhanging, babies!  Damn this is the most readably meaty book--or meatily readable--that I've encountered in a while.  I preordered the sequel, which I NEVER do.  Can't wait for book club!

Station Eleven: Better Than The Stand

I put that up front, because the basic outline of the end of the world in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is very close to Stephen King's The Stand: a supercharged flu virus sweeps the world and kills 99.9% of the population in a few weeks.  There's almost nothing else in common between the books, except possibly a fascinating attention to the detail of what it's like to be a survivor; still, it was enough for me to think that Station Eleven reads very much like Mandel read The Stand and asked, "why would you mess up this lovely story about humanity with some trumped up notions of good and evil?"

In fact, the notion that there is a Greater Purpose is exactly the opposite of what this book is about.  It's about how connections, explanations, and causation is not the same as meaning, purpose, or reason.  "Everything happens for a reason," says one character, coming across as vaguely New Agey.  When another character says the same thing 20 years later in a different world, it's ominous, and the heavier implications of that statement are much more clear.

It's a hard story to summarize, because it follows several characters in several time periods.  The lynchpin is Arthur Leander, a famous movie star with a preteen son, three ex-wives, and the role of King Lear in a new production. He dies in the first scene, not a victim of the flu, but of a standard heart attack.  It's tempting to map out how all the characters are related to him, but the truth is that it's both complicatedly interconnected and not particularly neatly tied up: Jeevan, a member of the audience who tries to save Arthur's life, used to be a paparazzo in LA and once took a picture of Arthur's first wife, Miranda.  Miranda was an artist who wrote a series of comic books that Arthur gave to a little girl in the play, Kristen.  Kristen survives the plague and, many years later, is an actress with a traveling symphony.  Clark was one of Arthur's oldest friends, but they drifted apart when they became famous.  Their stories intertwine, and the threads cross between the world before and the world after. 

The two stories that thread through this are Arthur's life, in the past, and an encounter between the Symphony and a town controlled by a dangerous religious zealot.  They are very different stories--the life of a man from a small town who becomes a movie star and a tense post-apocalyptic piece.  They are tied by the characters, but also by the notion that all stories are tied together somehow, that the threads that hold the world together are not big, important cords, but rather fine, delicate weaving, so interconnected that the tiny threads make strong cloth.  At least, that's what I think.

The other thing that I think this book is about is the question of whether to go forward or backward.  I'm going to get to this in my last discussion question below (really just a bulleted list of points; so much easier than having to segue between them!) but I think it's one of the core themes of the story and I want to bring it up.  This book is very much about the past versus the future, in some very complicated ways.

Okay, let's get to this.

1) Let's get this out of the way: the epidemiology here is sketchy, right?  If you look at the speed of infection and the speed of death, even with a 100% infection rate and a 100% mortality rate, it kills too fast to spread like this, right?  I mean, maybe that first plane could take out all of Toronto, but nobody sick makes it to the little backwater towns where no one's even passed through this month who's been on a plane.  So that's a little sketchy.  Which brings us to:

2) The loss of the infrastructure is what really brings us down.  How off-the-grid can you REALLY live?  Especially unexpectedly in the winter?  It definitely seems like things would stabilize eventually, but it makes you think about the supply chain for every single little thing around us.

3) There is a difference between a scarce-resource apocalypse and a resource-rich apocalypse.  Essentially, in some stories, most people die but the world remains--survivors have the leftovers and the same natural resources that were available 1,000 years ago.  In the other, the world has been ravaged, or civilization breaks down without killing most of the population, and suddenly supply and demand are off.  Very different end of the world books.

4) This makes for a fairly peaceful end of the world here, which I find kind of beautiful.  Life is not easy--there's little medicine, people die very easily--but starvation isn't the big killer.  By the time the canned food runs out, most people have figured out that they need a garden and to hunt.  People can be cautious instead of afraid.  I love this opportunity to glimpse this best side of humanity.

5) There is some discussion in the book of the right way to raise children in such a world; do you teach them about the past, and all the wonders they can't even comprehend?  Or do you let that die, teaching them only about the world around them?  The answer to this one seems obvious to me, but I think the emotional baggage of the past would play a bigger role when facing the question in reality.

6) Moments in the book that broke my heart or moved me or that I want to talk about: the house Kristen and August go into, where the parents are dead in their bed and the child dead in its own; the moment when Kristen realizes that she's about to die and everything becomes okay; Clark and Arthur going out to dinner; the museum.  No spoilers; just discuss.

7) What do you make of Miranda?  Kris didn't like her at all; I found her intriguing.  She was not someone I related to, but someone I recognized; wholly turned inward, with only the most tenuous connections outside herself.  Because it's what the world dictates, she follows those, and so she ends up in her relationship, in her job, married.  But her art, her story, is the only thing that's real to her.  She's unlike all the other viewpoint characters, though, and she breaks the pattern of who's included.  What do you think is the reason?  Does it have to do with her comics?

8) Don't you want to read her comics?  It sounds amazing, and beautiful, and complicated.  Maybe too heavyhanded a metaphor, but this ties back to the question of weather connection implies meaning: it's a similar story, but not a similar ending.

9) The big question in the story-within-the-story is about whether to go forward, into a dangerous and precarious unknown, or to try to go back to something that is ruined, and to make a life in those ruins.  I think this ties directly into all the different tensions in the story--the zealots, the question of how to raise the children.  Do you want to move forward, or do you want to move back?  Moving back isn't literally possible, of course, but clinging to the memories, living on them or against them, allows them to dictate your future. 

This post is ridiculously long, and I want to go on and on about that point--about how I think that concealing the past from the children is, counterintuitively, about clinging to he past.  Holding the past as history lets you move forward with hope and intent; hiding it as a secret makes it present and dangerous, keeps you living with it.  About how Arthur's life is all about moving forward--from his small hometown, out of college into acting, through three marriages.  About Miranda's forward motion in life, and how she brings what matters with her.  Clark and the Museum; the symphony and Shakespeare.  The zealots and the belief that the old world had to die for the new one to be born. 

It's silly to apologize; this post is no more a jumble than most of my posts.  But this book was amazing--I would never have believed it would work, and here it is, lovely and perfect, full of people doing the best they can--even the villains.  The more I think about it, the more I love it.  You should absolutely read it.

Love to Hate? Or Hate to Love?

The book club meeting this month did not come together as one might hope.  People are hard to corral, it turns out.  But my Mariah meeting was delightful, and my gchat with Kris was cathartic, and I'm here to give you some talking points about the book Fourth of July Creek, by Smith Henderson.

The summary is easy, because it's literary fiction: an alcoholic social worker in rural Montana in 1980 becomes deeply involved with a father and son who are living in the woods.  He's enthralled by them.  At the same time, his estranged daughter goes missing.  There's your summary.

Questions are both easy for this one, because there's a lot to say, and hard, because I feel like I have answers I want to RANT about all of these things.  So if my questions are phrased in a, shall we say, leading fashion, take it as my trying to be all things to all people.  Well, all things to me.

1) Aren't you tired of reading books that hate women?  (See what I meant by leading questions?)  Do you sometimes start reading a book and have hopes that the fact that all the female characters are messed up and vacuous and have no internal lives and exist only to serve the male characters is going to be addressed in the text, and that the author is consciously commenting on things, but then you realize that no, it's not the character who's treating women as non-people, it's the author?

There are no females who are anything but a mess.  Most of them are defined entirely in their relationships with Pete.  True, most characters in this book are a mess, but you have Cloninger, and the judge, and even Spoils, who are all very flawed but also have strong streaks of good, of trying.  But Pete wonders if all women are Beth, and of Beth, he thinks that her beauty "makes a body want to screw her heart out."

There were so many places to put this non-messed-up woman, too.  Give one of the other social workers a little depth.  Give Mrs. Cloninger some lines.  Have Mary say something about compartmentalization at the beginning of their relationship.  Give Mary some damned depth.  Make one of the FBI agents female.

Nope.  This book really hated women, and that's my biggest (but far from only) problem with it.

2) How many times did you go back and forth between liking Pete--thinking of him as a normal, though deeply flawed, person--and hating him for not even trying at any of the things he's supposed to be doing?  Did you find yourself able to have sympathy for his alcoholism, or did you feel like he didn't really struggle with it so much as just drink a lot?  Am I being too judgemental?

3) What does Pete want?  What is he chasing?  He and Beth ask each other why they do the things they do--why do they?  Is that question the point of the book?

4) What is the point of the book?  I've talked before about how a book doesn't have to make a Grand Statement, but that to understand a book, I need to know why the author chose to tell this story specifically.  Sometimes it's because it's a romp, and sometimes it's so we understand a real situation, but most often I feel like I can see the Point the author was trying to make--even The Dinner was about how evil can look banal, and even The Red House was about how suffering takes so many forms and happens to everyone.

For this one, every possible point I can come up with feels like I'm tacking it on.  Is it about how we could all be treating each other more gently?  Is it about how people do things that don't make sense, so we never really know how we got to where we are?  Both of those are real possibilities, but I feel like Pete is so damned un-self aware that he doesn't really embody any of them.

5) What does Jeremiah Pearl mean to Pete?  Why is he drawn to Benjamin and his father?  What pleasure does he take in their company?  Is it how they live outside of civilization?  Because Pete's living on the fringes of it himself?  Is it about nature?  Because he doesn't seem to notice the nature?  Is it because he's won the cautious approval of a guy who hates everyone, and that makes him feel full of himself?  That feels truest, but I don't think it's supported by the text.

6) Is it a little heavy-handed to have your main character named Snow (with a daughter who calls herself Rose), and his mirror character named Pearl?  I'm not sure what the metaphor is, but doesn't it seem ponderous anyway?  And what's up with a lawman in the American West named Pinkerton?  Again, too much?

7) What about the ending?  Too pat?  Too happily-ever-after?  Do you think (you can guess what I think) that maybe the explicitly racist crazy guy living in the woods was maybe let off the hook a little bit there?

8) What is up with Cecil?  What is even his role in this story?  Is it just to make Pete seem like less of an ass because hey, he learned his lesson there, right?  Social workers out there, how do you feel about Pete as a social worker?  Given that he's operating in the '80s in the middle of nowhere and likely has no access to services, is he doing the best one might expect (when he isn't taking a week off here and there and over here again)?

I thought I hated this book till about 3/4 of the way through it, but at that point I realized that I may hate all the characters, and (see item 1) possibly the author, but I was actually kind of enjoying reading it.  I would call this a thumbs up, even if my only desire is to rant about it vociferously.

Which, look, I just did!  Book clubbers who read this I'd love to hear your thoughts; I'm sure Kris has a rant of her own that she'd like to post.  I'm sorry the meeting didn't work out; I even finished the book BEFORE Tuesday this time!

Oh, well. Another month, another chance.  See you all in October!

Verity Revisited

This month, book club read Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein.  I read and loved this quite a while ago, and I was excited to get a chance to talk about it.  My fellow clubbers were not as excited about it as I was, though they mostly liked it.  It definitely ended up on that list of books that weren't bad, but didn't give us a lot of conversational fodder.

Which also means this reader's guide will be pretty short.  They're some of the things that I was thinking about on this read-through, along with points that were made at book club.  It's funny how I am never surprised or thrown off when someone else doesn't have the same feelings or opinion about a book as I do, but I am surprised when they have different perceptions or expectations. 


1) This book has been much reviewed and discussed in the blogosphere, and it's generally known to have a "twist" in the middle.  Did you see the twist coming?  Do you even think it was a twist, or was it more of a reveal?  What's the difference?

2) What expectations did you have going into the book? The cover blurb tells you that two women crash in occupied France--this small amount of information removes some tension that would exist if you were reading blind (which I did the first time; I had an ebook with no cover blurb).  Between cover information and other background knowledge, how was your perception of the book affected by what you knew before going in?

3) Related, what do you think of this cover?  This was the cover when I first read it, though I don't think it's current now.  The cover led some of my fellow clubbers to expect the story to take a romantic turn, possibly even a sexual one. 

4) Springing from that, what do you think about Julie and Maddie's friendship?  "It's like falling in love, finding your best friend."  Julie says they would never have been friends if not for the war; even if they had, do you think this type and intensity of friendship is ever replicated outside of wartime? 

5) Do you think Maddie and Jamie end up together?  (There's info on that in Wein's companion book, Rose Under Fire, so I know the answer, but it was a discussion at book club.)

6) This is one I've thought about a lot, and it applies to a lot of books.  When you have a book where the narrator's reason for telling the story is part of the narrative--basically a story that is being written by one of the characters, as opposed to just "told"--there's a certain stylistic bar that needs to be cleared.  This is true in epistolary novels, books that are structured as diaries, and book like this, where the narrator sitting down and writing the account is part of the account.  The fact of voice is a huge deal in a book like that, because real letters and diary entries don't sound like novels, and very few people actually writing their life story are going to sound like they're writing a novel.

The way I see it, there are two problems faced by a writer working like this.  First, providing information to the reader of the novel in a way that is narratively pleasing while remaining authentic to the in-story writer's intent.  Like, when I sit down to write in my diary about the day Something Big happened, I probably don't start with all the details of how it was an ordinary day and I ate breakfast, etc.  Honestly, in my diary I start with the BIG point and then maybe backtrack to details, but there's no tension in a diary entry, because I'm writing for someone (me) who already knows the end of the story.  Similarly, if I write a friend to tell them Something Big happened, I make an announcement.  I'm not likely to draw it out with a detailed account that leads up to it.  Maybe some people do, but I don't.  So it's on the author to come with a voice that seems to be someone who would authentically write like that.

The second problem is related--backstory.  Someone writing in their diary is not going to describe the fight they had with X today while giving details of the history of their friendship with X, and info about X's parents and history and all the info that the reader needs.  Some of that info might come up peripherally (I mean, I know her mom is critical, but that doesn't mean blah blah blah), but you're not going to find a way to get an incident from years ago that informs this one into the document.

Verity solves that by making Julie a) a very literary writer, who b) is purposefully rambling.  There are in-story explanations for why she wants to give so much detail and history and go over every bit--self-comfort, stretching the time out, and other, below-the-surface reasons.  Maddie, on the other hand, is a blunter, more practical person, and while her writing because she has literally nothing else to do makes some sense, I think the image slips more here.  Wein does a good job using a different voice, but she does get into narrative parts and it starts to sound like a novel, and not like what Maddie would write. 

And heaven help us, one of my pet peeve lines in literature is "I have to write this down or I'll go crazy" or forget, or it won't seem real.  If you have to tell me that, it's because you know I'm not quite buying it.

So to summarize the question: how does the semi-epistolary nature of the novel work for you?

It's really my one critique--I don't mean to sound like I hold it against the book.  I love the book, and I love how Maddie's cold hard facts reveal so much about the truths behind Julie's narrative.  Really, though, I just love Maddie and Julie, and that they have each other and love each other.  I've read a million World War II books, and I think this one might have touched me the most.

Not Very Bohemian

I went on vacation right after book club this month, which means I didn't get a post up about it right away, when things were fresh.  Which is too bad, because it was a great meeting--the book, Bellweather Rhapsody, by Kate Racculia, was a good read.  It wasn't the deepest book ever, but it had a lot going on and was fun.

The story is easily summarized: a high school Statewide music conference takes place in a battered old hotel in the Catskills.  The musicians, their teachers, the hotel staff, and other guests are snowed in, and there are shenanigans as well as danger afoot.

Let's see if I can remember any of my good questions about it. Caution: I don't remember most of the characters' names, but I should still be able to explain what I'm talking about.

1) Which of the various and interesting plot twists did you see coming? I don't want to give things away, but there are a number of revelations, some of which I suspected (the end of Jill's story) and some of which I didn't (the concierge's story).

2) What did you think of the tone of the book?  Did you find that starting out with Alice and Rabbit set the tone as kind of a coming of age story?  How did the aspects of real physical danger--the death and murder and physical threats--fit with the more getting-along-in-high-school elements of the story?

3) Related: the tension over the possibility of this being a ghost story was interesting.  Was it misleading, or just the right amount to keep you on your toes?

4) None of the teachers/chaperones who were featured seemed particularly attached to teaching; they were all musicians who had defaulted to teaching after giving up professional music for one reason or another.  On one hand, this seems like the kind of thing that is particularly likely to be true in music (more than it would be for, say, science teachers).  On the other, it removes the idea of sharing and teaching music from the book--only one character has any real sense that it's worth something to pass this on to the kids.  Are the connections between the kids and adults and their music realistic? Sad? Is there a cautionary tale there?

5) What do you think about the bad guy being a flat out sociopath?  Does this seem like an oversimplification?  Do you think the internal monologue of that person (the short access you get to it) seems like what that kind of person's head really sounds like?

6) Seriously, how sad is that hotel?  Don't you kind of just want to go on vacation there to throw them a little business?

7) Were the Shining references too heavy handed?  Or were they inevitable, since the reader couldn't avoid making them so the characters might as well?  (Hint: I vote the latter.)  And was the bigger, more dramatic homage at the end a bridge too far?

8) What did  you think of the chaperone's relatively unresolved plotline?  Appropriate?  How do you think things are going to end up there?

That's all for now!  Next month for book club: Code Name Verity, which I've already read but am thrilled to read again and talk about!

Book Club for the Time Being

I still don't know what that means in the context of this book, "for the time being."  There's a LOT going on in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being--like, a LOT; maybe more than is good for the book--and the idea of time and time beings is just one of many, many things.

Well, wait, I guess it's not so much that I don't know what it means--a person, anyone who lives in the flow of time, is a time being.  It's more like I don't quite know why that observation is useful.  As I said, a lot of things going on here.  As usual, I think a question list is a good place to start, although I also think that the last question will be the most important one.

1) Time: since it's in the title, let's talk about it.  This is a multipart question, though, and some parts work better than others.
   a) Where does time come up?  What kind of references, what kind of metaphors?  Explicit references and the ones that are built into the story, like the relationships between all the threads of narrative and how they unfold.  (I am really tempted to spew out a list here--the Friends of the Pleistocene, Ruth pacing herself as she reads, Proust--but you could go on forever.)
   b) How do all of these references to time support or relate to the actual themes of the book?  Is time actually a theme, or more of a motif?  Why are these references there?

2) Okay, so we've done time.  Let's do other themes.  There are tons--alienation and the character against society; nature (the island/the temple) vs. civilization (Tokyo/New York); death (duh).  Can you think of more?  Are they related to each other, or just piled on top of each other?

3) Does this book contain too many symbols and motifs?  Like, what's up with the Jungle Crow?  And pet cats?  What about the protagonists' relationships with little old ladies? French language and literature? Did all the parallels between Nao's life and Ruth's seem meaningful or add to the story for you? How?

4) Is there a difference between magical realism, surrealism, and dream logic?  And do you hate dream sequences as much as I do?  I also hate drug trips and mad ramblings (OMG JOSS WHEDON I'M LOOKING AT YOU), but what this book had in spades was dream logic.  Is this book magical realism?  Like, what do you think was going on with the pages of the journal? And what about the scene where Nao goes to class after the attack?  Is that her telling her story the way she wants it, or is it dream logic, or magical realism?

5) What's your general opinion of books where the protagonist has the same name and many of the same characteristics of the author?  Do they make you suspicious, seem overly precious?  Do you ever wonder what it must be like to know that person and either look for or see yourself in their books?  Have you read Everything Is Illuminated?  Do you suspect that Jonathan Safran Foer is too precious to live?  Woah, wait, that had a lot of magical realism in it, too.  Do you think the books are related in other ways? 

6) Back to Time Being and eponymous characters, how did you feel about Ruth's relationship with Oliver?  Did they seem to kind of hate each other?  Was this just standard long-marriage stagnation, or was it actual disdain?  Were you rooting for her to maybe leave, move somewhere with a good internet connection and a Starbucks? And harking back to question (5), how would you feel about this book if you were the real Oliver?

7) Did you feel like the story was hitting you over the head with things, or did they creep up on you?  For example, did you figure out what was going on with Babette before Ruth explained it to Oliver? (I didn't.)  Did you figure out what was going on with the internet bidding war before Oliver explained it to Ruth? (I did.) At what point did you realize that the book was not actually going to be the remarkable life story of a Buddhist nun that you were promised in the cover copy?  Were you resentful?  Are you still?

Dude, there is a lot to say here, and I've been writing this post for days (around getting a new computer due to a major crash experience).  I don't know how much I loved the book itself, but I did like it.  And I truly did love that it had me asking so many questions.  If I knew the answers to half of them, I think I would have loved the book itself, too.  I do like questions, but I'm very, very big on answers.

Book Club, Three Weeks Gone

Book club met on Monday [n.b., I started this post a a full month ago; we met on Monday, September 30. This is my blogging shame.], and then I developed some sort of bottomless pit of an influenza or something[and went on vacation, etc.] and have been off the grid. 

But the book was so seriously good, I want to make sure I talk about it. So: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  Bloggers who speak much more intelligently than I have already talked about how wonderful this book is; what I can add is mostly just my discussion questions.

Ifemelu is moving back to Nigeria after many years of living in America.  As she contemplates the move, she also thinks about making contact with her high school

I have some discussion questions based on notes I took (I took notes!) at book club.  Because this was one of the smartest books I've read in a long time, and my book club is, overall, smarter than I am. 

(Warning: general-ish spoilers ahead)

1) Ifemelu is often passive in her relationships.  She keeps her thoughts to herself, she follows the flow of the group she's in, and her life changes significantly as she moves in different social circles.  But the voice in her blog is clear and sure, opinionated and angrier than she ever expresses in her "real" life.  Where do you think this contrast comes from?  What do you think it says about her, or about the world around her?  And do you think that seems to be changing at the end of the book?

2) Look at some of the individuals and groups of people that Ifemu meets.  Do any of them reflect people who seem familiar to you?  (The college roommates, the nanny employer, the grad student social circle, the hairdressers.)  Do they seem realistic, nuanced, representative?  Do your assessments of the realism of characters who are more familiar to you affect your feelings about the characters who feel less familiar? 

(This is one of those questions I have an answer to: I think the parts of the book that felt less familiar to me had an immediate believability because the parts that were familiar were so well-crafted.)

3) Why do you think she had so much trouble finding a job when she first came to the states?  Was it just an unlucky streak of interviews, or do you think there was more going on?

4) What do you think about that one character's suicide attempt?  What was behind it?  How do the issues you think are behind it relate to the central themes and ideas of the book?

5) Do you think this is a love story?  I've heard people say at its heart, the book is a love story.  I'm not sure I agree; I think the idea of how you're shaped by where you're from and where you are, and how being of more than one place is not something the world does a good job of encompassing right now.  How do the different stories--love story, immigration stories, personal stories--serve each other?

6) One of the most amazing things about this book is how broadly and directly it addresses race.  As a white person, I feel like I learned a lot, was given a lot to think about and a lot of new perspectives, without feeling confused or defensive.  What ideas or observations about race stuck out most to you?  Is there anything that you learned or got a new perspective on from this book?

This is probably the objectively best book that I've enjoyed in months, maybe even all year.  It's a human story, a literary story, and I think it was the juxtaposition of the unfamiliar and the very familiar that really made it so irresistible.  This is kind of a lame compliment that says more about me than about the book, but I feel smarter for having enjoyed it.

Bernadette at Book Club

Get it?  'Cause the title of the book is Where'd You Go, Bernadette?  (By Maria Semple, just to sneak that useful information in there.)

Poor Bee; her mother has disappeared.  The novel is composed of a collection of documents--mostly emails and letters from Bee's school, from Bernadette to her new personal assistant in India, from her neighbor to the blackberry abatement specialist.  The portrait that emerges is an unflattering one of a brittle and neurotic Bernadette.  The other players don't fare much better, from the overearnest parents at the school to the absolutely nutballs neighbor/parent who hates her.

The first time I picked the book up, I put it down after 30 pages.  I hated pretty much all the characters, and I was pretty sure the author hated them, too, and wanted me to laugh at them with her.  They were all just so sad, though, I stopped reading.

But when I read it for book club, my opinion changed.  I loved this book, and Maria Semple loved her characters.  She saw how they screwed up, but she also saw how much screwing up doesn't make you a bad person, even when you do it repeatedly and over a long period of time.  You could say the big message here is that it's never too late, and my word do I like hearing that sometimes.

Unfortunately, this book being so all-around enjoyable meant that our discussion at book club was not as spirited as usual.  It's also not as rich in questions for future book clubbers in need of a reader's guide.  (By the way, there was a reader's guide in the back of my copy.  I was not terribly impressed.)

Anyway,  here's what we thought was worth talking about.

1) Answer the title question.  At the point in the middle of the narrative where (is this a spoiler?) an actual disappearance takes place, what zany ideas did you come up with?  I had a whole bunch, and they're really cool, but they're very spoiley, and I'm not sure how to keep spoilers from showing up in an RSS reader, so I will put those theories in a paragraph at the very end of the review.  That's where the spoilers live.

2) Talk to me about religion.  How did religion fit in with Audrey's character arc?  With Bee's?  Were there undercurrents besides the obvious "religious" things, or did the religion thing seem tacked on?  By the characters (tacked onto their lives) or by the author (tacked onto the story)?

3) What do you see going on with gender relations in this book?  There are some really interesting subquestions and ways to look at things here--Elgie's vs. Bernadette's roles in their marriage vs. the expectations of those roles; Elgie as kind of the token man in the story overall; Bernadette's career and subsequent collapse are all very "feminine" in both cool and not-cool ways.

4) Talk about mothers.  Bernadette's relationship with Bee, Bernadette's history with trying to get pregnant, the other mothers at the school and their relations to each other, other kids' reactions to Bernadette, Audrey as a mom, Soo-Lin as a parent.  Is Bernadette a good mother?  Is she a better mother than she might appear to be?  Appear to whom?  And hey, what about Elgie--is he a good father?

5) There's a really cool conversation to be had if anyone reading this book knows anything about: Seattle; intense, participatory schools for crunchy, high-achieving families; working at big, exciting, cult-like organizations.  5b) If you read this and Mr. Penumbra, compare the latter's depictions of Google with Bernadette's depictions of Microsoft.

Okay, that's all the questions.  Now the next paragraph has my spoilers of Theories I Had In the Middle of the Book about Were Bernadette Actually Was.  Don't read it if you haven't read the book!

I thought she might be: hiding out in the desert with Audrey; trading identities with Audrey and hiding out in the desert answering Soo-Lin's emails; down in Los Angeles wreaking vengeance on the reality TV dude who ruined her house; building a new house somewhere weirdly under their noses in Seattle; building a house in Antarctica.

Was I right?  Well, read the book!

Book Club Debriefing

Once again, we had a great difference of opinion on the book this month, which was Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. I thought it was an engrossing story and also a series of engrossing stories.  Some people thought it was unnecessarily repetitive.

I don't suppose anyone could deny that it's technically repetitive; think Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.  Yes, there's a level on which the same events are playing out over and over again.  But the spots that some people (well, let's call them "Kris") found to drag were the parts that I thought were the most carefully constructed.

Wait, though, let's back up.  The premise of the book is that Ursula Todd is born, and dies at birth.  And she is born, saved, and lives on.  Later, she drowns in the ocean. But there is also a version where she is saved.  And so on, throughout her life--she dies, and, with a twist, she lives.

Now, the way this unfolds, I won't say it's perfect.  For the first third of the book, I couldn't quite get a handle on it.  Ursula was very little, and it was much more about her mother.  Really, except for the occasional do-over to save Ursula's life, it was very much  a quiet domestic story, about finding meaning in the mundanities of life in the English countryside of the early 1900s.  This is the opposite of something I would generally like to read.

But as the story moves into Ursula's adolescence and adulthood, it starts to come together.  Individual lives illustrate different points, and also fit together to look at how a life shapes itself.  A small incident can change the way you think about yourself, which might change how you react to a bigger incident, which can change the whole course of your life.  So much of what happens to us is luck--and not just luck with externalities, but also luck on how you react in a moment, what you notice, how you perceive a situation.

Anyway, as someone who has book-clubbed many a time, I thought a list of discussion questions might be the best way to approach this book in a blog post without being too spoilery.  I will leave you with the fact that I was not convinced by the first third of the book, but was quite convinced by the next two thirds, and was somewhat confused by the end.

1) What were the "rules" of Ursula's repeated lives?  Did your understanding of those rules change over the course of the book?  To what extent were the changes from one go-around to the next a result of her purposeful changes, versus simple luck? At first I thought the whole idea was a sort of quantum mechanics thing, where these are all ways things could have gone.  Then I thought it was about what it would be like to live with the idea of these other quantum realities close to you.  But by the end it seemed more intentional than that.

2) How did Ursula's character change over the course of the book?  Do you think there was more change over the large arch of the book, or within individual life stories?  Do other characters seem to change over time, or does your view of them change as Ursula grows up?  (Especially Izzie, Hugh, and Sylvie.  What did you think of Sylvie?  I had a very different opinion about  her in the beginning, when she was almost the star of the book, than at the end.)

3) Related, what kinds of things did this book have to say about motherhood?  How was Ursula's feelings about and relationship with motherhood related to her "fate?"

4) There are quite a few details that seem significant but don't come together as major plot elements, or don't carry from one story to another.  (Sylvie in London when Ursula is there in secret; the fate of Izzie's baby.)

5) Wasn't Maurice AWFUL?  Are real people ever that unadulteratedly horrible?  Do you know anyone that nasty?  (You should probably be careful discussing this one at book club, depending on whether any of the members know your extended family.)

6) What was Jimmy all about?  Why was there a Jimmy?  (Someone in book club pointed out that birth control wasn't available in the '40s, to which I reply that I know why Sylvie and Hugh had Jimmy, but I want to know why Kate Atkinson had him.)  It seems like you've already got Teddy as the baby of the family.  What role does Jimmy play in the family and in the story?

7) What happened at the end there?  Did it work?  Did one of those lives become real?  Was the last one the "getting it right" version?  There seem almost to be two endings, one where she kills You Know Who and one where she doesn't but everything turns out all right in the end anyway.  (You know, except what happened to Sylvie, but by that time it was water under the bridge, right?  You do still follow me, don't you?)

Anyway, that's my list, cleverly non-spoilery.  I really wanted to use the title of a certain episode of Dr. Who for this post, but THAT would have been a spoiler.  Although I suppose so is the prologue of the book, if you look at it that way.

Book Club: So Close!

I thought the worst kind of book club is when you have a meeting that goes very badly, but it turns out that's the second worst kind.  The worst kind is when you read a really great book that you really want to talk about and then no one is able to get together for a meeting.  I want to talk about it!

The book is The Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles. You won't find a lot in the blurbs about the plot, which is as it should be--it's not a book about action and twists, but you never really know quite what will happen, and that's a big part of the appeal.  I'll tell you a little bit more, but first I want to warn you--at the end of this post, I'm going to put some discussion questions that I was going to ask my book club.  They're very spoilery, so you should not read all the way through if you're ever going to read the book.

First the plot, though.  The story follows the narrator, Katey, for a year--1938, to be precise.  At the beginning, on New Year's Eve, she and her boardinghouse roommate, Eve, meet Tinker Gray (I keep wanting to say Tinker Bell, not because of the Peter Pan character, oddly enough, but because of Stringer Bell from The Wire).  Tinker is a well-to-do banker, and their new-acquaintance banter reveals that he's feeling stuck in a rut.  This is the beginning of a friendship between the three that will lead all kinds of places, bring all kinds of new people into Katey's life, and reveal a lot of the world to her.  It's a book that is very much about Manhattan, and about being a woman in the first half of the century.  It's about the end of the Depression, and about class and money and charm.

One of my favorite things about the book is that Katey feels like a mystery to us, even though the story is told in the first person, and even though we have plenty of information about her.  Her life before the story begins is told in bits and pieces, the way you learn about anybody's life--where she grew up, the bones of her family structure, anecdotes here and there that fill things out.  I love that you spend the book getting to know everyone as Katey does, but also getting to know Katey.

Okay, book club questions coming up in a second.  First, to fill space, I'll say that this book reminded me of watching all my favorite old movies--All About Eve, Stage Door, Laura, and The Philadelphia Story.  I wish I could read it again.

But here are the questions.  Total spoilers, I warn you.  But fellow book clubbers, if you want to answer, you totally should. 

1) Did Tinker have to leave everything behind to redeem himself?  I mean, he was a banker, right?  Was the all-or-nothing choice that he makes at the end because he, personally, psychologically had to get away, or because it was really the only thing that could be done, or because that was the right life for him all along?

2) What do you think of Eve's disappearing act? She's such a huge part of the first half of the book, but she's also so different from Katey--did her departure make her feel less like a real person, or just less like Katey's close friend?  I thought it was really significant that she came from money--what she and Katey admire and are looking for is so different, even if neither of them cares about money.

3) What do you think of Wallace, Dickey, and Tate?  I think it's interesting how Katey triangulates herself around these three men in the later parts of the book.  She's looking for herself, but why does it seem like the men in her life are where she orients herself?  There are plenty of women--Eve, Bitsy, Anne--but the men are so much more reflective of where she is.  Is that because of her self-possession?  Her career-mindedness?  Or just because she's not all about love and romance?  Not that the other women appear to be.  Can't quite get a handle on this one.

4) Did you see Tinker's revelation coming?  What did you think of it, and of Katey's reaction to it?  I actually wasn't that surprised--I thought something like that near the beginning of the book--but my feelings about it really changed once Katey reacted to it.  I mean, I wasn't that surprised but I hadn't really thought about what it said about his character, but as soon as Katey had a reaction, my response was filtered through her reaction.

If you've read the book, I hope you read the questions, and if you do, I'd love it if you responded.  I'm really dying to talk to someone about this--to the point where I asked my husband (who hasn't read it) these questions yesterday and he made a valiant effort at answering.  (Eve represents innocence, and Dickey is the serpent in the Garden of Eden, in case you were wondering.)  Really, if you have any thoughts at all, please do comment.  Thank you, virtual book clubbers!