Flight Behavior

Book club today was a treat on many levels.  Carolyn had flown in to visit her sister Connie and to celebrate, Peggy brought carrot cake cupcakes.  She said if we didn't get to have a going away party, at least we could celebrate with a coming back party.  And after reading this book, she brought silverware forks to be washed later.

The book had a lot of issues and it was long so not everyone was able to finish in time, but in the context, it didn't seem to matter. We never got to the publishers questions and the discussion never flagged. We pretty much agreed that the first couple of chapters were hard to get into and perhaps it's because we trusted the author, we continued.  Peggy said she didn't really start to enjoy it until half way.

She had taught school in a poor Appalachian town for three years and told us that it's pronounced, Apaha-lach-ee.  Her principal had corrected her and when she said, I was always taught to say, Apah-lay-chee, he said - yeah, we get stuff wrong down here.  She said it let her know where she stood.

Several of the ladies had lived in poor communities in the south and we spent some time talking about the grinding hopelessness of their lives.  Kingsolver wrote a dialogue between Ovid and Dellarobia, talking about her abysmal science and math scores on the college entrance test.  She explained that it was because the teachers didn't like those subjects and substituted PE instead.  Peggy said that the weakest teachers she had taught with were at that school.

We also talked about the role of the church in a community.  They all said that it was huge, about as huge as football.  Hester's was heavily involved in their church.  I thought it was because it gave her legitimate contact with Bobby, but they said no - a church is core to a community.  I thought when Bear said that weather was the Lord's business, he was using that as an excuse.  The ladies said no - remember that he was willing to turn to their pastor for advice and mediation.  Did Bear know that Bobby was his own son?  I didn't think to wonder until I was driving home.

We talked about Dellarobia and Hester's parallel stories and how circumstances provided different outcomes.  Hester always felt that Dellarobia would leave one day.  Maureen reminded us that is why she remained distant to her grandchildren, knowing she would lose them.  Dellarobia's flight fantasies were always with other men, until she began to awaken to her own potential.  We all said that we had hoped that she and Cub would make things work, but what Hester had anticipated was right.  We liked Cub and after batting it around, agreed that he would be happier not feeling like he had to apologize and maybe get some praise.

Mary asked what we thought about the ending.  I was struck by the house with all their living and all their experiences just lifted up and floated away, like it erased their marriage.  Everyone was taken by Dellarobia's bold step, a result of a slow blooming over the course of tracking the butterflies and what a change this also meant for her children.  It was hard to end a book with the end of a marriage as a means to a future - we had hope for some kind of bridge between their two world. At that point there was no going back, and as Maureen said, she had no choice.  We had a couple of flights - the Monarchs and Dellarobia. She wasn't the same woman anymore.  Brilliant book!  This is on college reading lists and I think we did a good job parsing out points in our limited time.

Americanah

This book was my recommendation and if you didn't care for it, I apologize.  I knew nothing about the book, only that it was on just about every list.  The book title refers to someone who has lived in America and returned to Nigeria.  I had read her first book and liked her writing. If your eyes glazed over at 400 pages (or less), I'm sorry but - I really loved it.  There I said it.

I think we had an outstanding discussion on a book that will most likely show up college recommended reading lists for years to come, and those classes will give the book more then 90 minutes of their time.

The book at its basest level was about racism.  We felt that Adiche clearly had race in her mind when she started to write.  The characters, and there were many - almost too many - brought faces and feelings to the experience.  She wrote that race is not about biology, it's about sociology.  We saw racial prejudice in Nigeria, the UK and the US and we grew to care about the characters. Maureen said that she recently read a piece saying that fiction is what you read to feel the experience. Snobbish readers who say they only read nonfiction miss out.

We liked Obinze and felt he was a kind man.  None of us understood why Ifem (saving vowels and misspellings) broke all ties with him over the event with the tennis coach.  Someone said that she was self-sabotaging. Mary reminded us that she was depressed, whether she wanted to call it that or not.  She had run out of money and simply could not get a job.  It's easy to be critical but her circumstances were extraordinary.  I had a hard time liking her after she broke up with both Blaine and Curt, but then later wanted to keep them on the string.  Angela said she felt the same.

We were fortunate that both Peggy and Mary have experiences in Africa and helped us see the circumstances more clearly.  Mary talked about how important education was and how families would invest everything to make sure their children had good schooling.  Peggy said it's caste system, much like India.  The landlord didn't want to rent to Ifem because she was Igbo and her hair wrapper's boyfriend wouldn't marry her because she was Igbo.  Adiche wrote that lighter skinned Nigerians had better opportunities.

Angela both said they learned a lot from the book.  She admitted that she hadn't necessarily liked it but was glad she had read it, though she found Ifem spoiled.  Kareen said she hadn't finished it - wasn't sure she would.  Joanne appreciated seeing a different side of Nigerian culture other than the home of the "scam."  Peggy said that she felt that the tone was one of loneliness and discontent.

We talked a lot about Ifem's blog. Mary said that if you flipped through it you'd get a nice synthesis of the book and it's intended message, that of a non-American Black on race.  It's impossible to cover all the points of this nearly 600-page book here, but Adiche touched on many:  the self-satisfied smug rich white Americans and their favorite African charities, what it's like to have a President who looks like you, the issues Black women have with hair styles, Whites who pretend to not notice skin color, the difficultly of a minority teen to fit in, and well - you know.

The conclusion was wide open.  Diana said - you just don't know. And we don't.  Will Ifem sabotage the relationship like others in her past, destroying a family in the process, or is this the thing that she's been missing and trying to get back all along?  We'll never know.

Our March meeting was the last before Carolyn moved away so I took pictures.  I'd like to periodically do this so can have a record of our group.  We've been together for a long time.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

It's been quite a while since we've been so divided on a book.  It was about two to one, dislikes to likes.  Mary really helped us all think again about what the book was and what the author wanted to say. I appreciated seeing it through her eyes.

I emailed a quote from Kelly Corrigan in my meeting reminder and we talked about it again today.  For posterity:

I remember a lecture from one of my lit classes about a theory called “Reader Response,” which basically says: More often than not, it’s the readers—not the writers—who determine what a book means.  The idea is that readers don’t come blank to books.  Consciously and not, we bring all the biases that come with our nationality, gender, race, class, age.  Then you layer onto that the status of our health, employment, relationships, not to mention our particular relationship to each book—who gave it to us, were we read it, what books we’ve already read—and, as my professor put it, “That massive array of spices has as much to do with the flavor of the soup as whatever the cook intended.”

Hamid's narrator added to this:  "It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm."

Kathy felt this book demonstrated the Reader Response perfectly.  We all interpreted the nameless country as different geographic locations and had equally different responses to the events in the book. We did agree that the format, in the second person, without names or place, allowed the telling of a universal story, which laid bare a broken and corrupt society somewhere in Asia. Throughout this, he (the nameless you) maintained a certain level of morality, refusing to lower his standards to provide safe water or to provide a comfortable life for his wife and son.

The narrator provided a note of  humor periodically as in the above quote on books.  Carolyn laughed at his advice to be the third child, which gives one a much better economic advantage.  He could also be pithy re/his son:  "You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one."

 Mary liked the spoof of it being a self-help book and thought it playful.  She especially liked how he had come from nothing and become rich, lost most of his money, but died having loved and been loved. We thought that he was content with the last days of his life with the Pretty Woman, playing cards and enjoying the camaraderie.  We agreed that the only successful relationship they could have had was the one they did have.

The discussion was brief.  I mentioned that this book was short-listed for the Man Booker which made Joanne laugh and say to Kathy - we seem to have problems with Bookers, don't we?  I know that's true, but we did love the long-listed Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.  At least more people liked this than Midnight's Children.   So many books, so little time.

And the Mountains Echoed

Our session today was well attended and also one of the shortest book discussions we've ever had.  We all liked the book, but the two who enjoyed it the most are Mary and Carolyn who had read it last year, then reread it for today.  The rest of us were floundering a bit with all the side stories.

I started the comments by reading those that Kareen emailed me:

I was disappointed in that he didn't develop more of his characters and some he didn't even need to include (Idris & Timur, perhaps Marcos and Thalia and others in that chapter). The latter two could have a book of their own. The book was really about Pari (the sister) more than anyone else it seems. She actually ended up better off for leaving her old village even though it broke Saboor and left Abdullah missing his best friend (only to forget her in the end because of Alzeimer's). Saboor had to support the family he had left, to prevent other children from dying in the winter, the stove for him was a necessary evil. The apple tree was cut down to supply the town with heating wood but also to signify the end of a family as he had known it...to destroy all those memories, both good and bad (depending on whose memory was part of the tree). Oh, then we have the tale of Parwana and Massoma....just a lot of hit and miss all over. It seems like there needed to be more focus for a story. The book just went all over the place just like my comments seem to be doing.

I said that it seemed like Hosseini almost wanted to write a short story collection but didn't follow through.  Maureen said she found some comments online, one saying that it indeed was a collection with nine separate stories.

We thought this was the most autobiographical of Hosseini's three books, for example:  a physician figured prominently, the locale shifted several times to include places he had lived, and his father had worked hard to get his family off welfare after settling in California, as had Abdullah.

Because there were so many threads, a couple of us missed cues here and there.  I for one didn't realize that Parwana had pushed Masooma from the tree.  We wondered why Hosseini had weighted some stories, like Pari's marriage and children, and slighted others like Iqbal and Gholam's return from Pakistan.  Claudia was surprised that they could come back and expect to find their property waiting for them, like maybe there would be a statue of limitations, but Jenny said there's no such thing.  Look at the Jews trying to recover items stolen during WWII.

Diana read the passage from some comments she found online -"A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later."  And truly this story was just that, with lots of storylines in between getting on and getting to the end.  And speaking of end, we were all disappointed by the facile wrap-up, just a little too convenient and quick to be consistent with the earlier tone of the book.

We talked about the role of warlords in contemporary Afghanistan and Carolyn said that's why the government is having such a hard time getting power and respect.  They can't provide for the people like the warlords do, which she called the price of submission.  Maureen said she didn't get the sense of place being specifically Afghanistan, and Barbara said she could see it  being India or Iran.

The meeting concluded abruptly when someone mentioned the X-Ray feature in Kindle.  We spontaneously broke into small groups and explored it's function on our different devices.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

I went to the meeting today with mixed feelings because I certainly didn't know why the book had been awarded five stars from so many people.  And this is the reason I love us because I came home with a completely different appreciation and a resolve to reread it.  Both Maureen and Mary read it twice and swore than the second time was a breeze and a hoot.  In my defense, I had just finished Goldfinch where two young men have their lives turned upside down because they don't have an adult advocate.  I was feeling very defensive for Bee.

Jennifer and I both started the book, liking Bernadette and sympathizing with her but lost a little empathy about half way. This is where the discussion made a huge difference for me.  Kareen had said that this is a book of Seattle and she thought the author nailed it.  Many in the group were in agreement, plus as Barbara said, if you're a depressive person - Seattle is not the place for you.

We were sympathetic to Bernadette, getting lost in depression after so many miscarriages and a grievously ill daughter, coming after having a career high followed by a geographic relocation.  We talked about Bernadette and Elgie's two careers, both genius but on different trajectories, how both isolated themselves and how that left Bee to become a parent.

The one thing that stuck in Joanne's craw was the house.  She'd been in real estate in equally rainy Portland and was appalled that the house was ignored.  She couldn't believe that no one could smell the mold and mildew. She said that the smell of a house in that condition should have repulsed the occupants.  That was a hard buy-in for me, as my parents left the region because of my asthma.  Bee had asthma and a lung condition that caused her to spit up spume.  I wonder if this is more funny for Seattle-ites.

Joanne said she thought that Bernadette's wake-up moment was when she realized she had nearly given everything away to her Indian "assistant."  We did think that as strange as the arranged intervention seemed to be, that was the moment that Bernadette got it that she had messed up her life and had to change.  None of us were fond of the reinvented Audrey - too dramatic, too weird.  That was a little out there, as was her whacked-out son who was dropped on the survival desert, and the ever absent Mr. Audrey.  And wasn't it just a little odd that it was Audrey who abetted her escape from the bathroom down the ladder?

I asked if anyone thought Soo-Lin was a bit racist, the gratuitous Asian computer geek.  They said no - she was genuine Microsoft geek.  Jennifer wondered about why the author inserted Soo-Lin's pregnancy at the end of the book since it was dangling without development.  The ending was a source of much discussion.  Joanne and Maureen both pandered the idea that Bernadette could have just inserted herself uninvited into the scientific community in the South Pole.  Oh and Diana got a kick out of us reading this at the same time that the Russian ship full of scientists was trapped in ice at the North Pole.

 We loved the principal who was a steady-eddy in all the hysteria and the part-time school program developer, Ollie. At the end of the discussion, I realized that I had missed the fun of the spoof and I have first book of my summer reading already in place.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

We loved this book!  I don't think it was the first time for any of us yet we were still enthusiastic readers.  Diana thought it was sad that it had taken her so many years to write this because surely she would have written others.  Frankly, we all longed for a sequel.  Oh my, how modern media has changed the way we think of a stand-alone book.

With so many delightful characters, it was hard to single out a favorite.  We especially liked Isola Pribbey's observation, "reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad one."  Apparently she was not too delicate as Juliet noted she "doesn't approve of small talk and believes in breaking the ice by stomping on it."  Juliet's humor was always a relief.  It's through her encouragement that Isola decided to become the new Miss Marple.

You would think it awkward to read a story told through letters but the author did it flawlessly.  We did like seeing how the writers and readers related to one another - tender bits were revealed, having been told in the confidence.  Kathy liked it that Elizabeth had pinned Eli with her father's wings for bravery during his relocation and then later those wings showed up in Kit's box of special memories - somehow revealed through various letters.

I thought it was nice that the author was able to keep the book light while revealing some of the horrors of the occupation.  Mary agreed, noting the letter Juliet received from someone protesting the cruel treatment of the pets left behind.  We laughed at the sanctimonious Adelaide Addison, but really didn't give the book the time and discussion it deserved.  Still, it was a delightful December book selection.

Maureen said that she has friends who never read fiction, thinking that fiction is less than nonfiction.  She asked if we had friends like that, and several of us responded yes.  I asked how many of us would have known about the German occupation of the Channel Islands, were it not for reading this book.  Only Jenny raised her hand.  We laughed.  I remembered that in a Political Geography college class, our professor had defined a people as sharing a common language, religion and literature, and that literature was subject to confiscation as a method of control.  We disagreed that you don't learn through reading fiction as we all felt we learned a lot through this book and we will remember it.

The Christmas potluck was fabulous, possibly the best and most copious ever.  Following desert we played the pirate exchange game with books.  I think it's also called the white elephant game.  It's certainly the longest meeting in our history, though you wouldn't know it from the short blog post.

Here we are, the Tuesday Book Club celebrating Christmas 2013:  Mary, Claudia, Sharon, Jennifer, Darlene, Kathy, Diana, Kareen (behind), Barbara, Jenny, Connie, Carolyn and Maureen.  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

The Bells

In spite of receiving several emails from members who were unable to attend yesterday, we still had a nice representation for a rousing discussion.  We were pretty much in agreement that while it wasn't exactly our favorite read, it's a book that we'll never forget.

Joann was frustrated because she found a couple of plausibility issues she couldn't get past, namely that the baby was an heir and given the fame that Moses achieved, there is no way that he would have been able to keep the boy hidden and anonymous.  She felt that the grandmother would have moved heaven and earth to get him back.  Kareen reminded us that Moses had locked her in a trunk and thrown away the key.  We don't know her outcome, but we do know her son was weak, without self motivation or any affection for the baby.

I struggled with some of the coincidences that were necessary to propel the story forward, like Moses finding Nicolai and Rumus after they left the monastery and Kathy tossed in, the finding of the wet nurse who turned out to create a home for them. And here is where we also agreed that after all the details up to this point, the end seemed hastily contrived. We also felt the first half of the book was much different than the second half.

The history of castratos was new to all of us, and the practice was driven by Italy and Italian opera.  They sang the role of female voices until women were finally allowed to sing them for themselves.   Harvell's description of the physiology of a eunuch was certainly an eye opener.  Denise reminded us that even their fingers were elongated.  The argument was that a live castrato was better off than a dead street urchin.  At least that's what Ulrich told himself and wanted to believe.

We talked at length about how Harvell crafted this tale to provide a retelling of the Myth of Orpheus.  I had read a lot of reviews online and found that the raves came from fans of opera, and there were many readers who found the book absolutely compelling - one said she gobbled up the first 100 pages.  In Harvell's retelling of Orpheus, he embroidered where necessary and often had us on the cusp of believable and unbelievable, some parts were almost to the point of fairy tale.

We all thought Harvell's beautifully descriptive language was what made the book readable, but the cruelty of the characters, particularly the doctor and music master, made for difficult reading at the same time.  The doctor was the most loathed character and Nicholai was our favorite.  Darlene reminded us that this was a hard time in history.  Indeed!