Carole's Fall Book Club Picks
Monday, September 14, 2009 I think a book club book must do the following things (with or without a glass of wine … or two).
1. Stimulate interesting conversation among everyone in the club. To do this it helps if a book stirs some extremes in us (passion, pleasure, anger, sadness, empathy whatever)
2. Offer some insight into a aspect of life (or the world) most of the club may not know much about
3. Must be a fast and enduring read (one that you keeps you chatting about it as you head to your cars–or cabs, of course, if you had that second glass of wine)
4. It shouldn’t feel like homework
Read on for my choice picks for a book club this fall. Post a comment if you want to *chat* about my choices or anything worthy that you're reading.
Hot House Flower and the 9 Plants of Desire by Margot Berwin
First of all, any novel with a title as sexy as this one is worth a read, and this one lives up to the heat in its title. Plus even though the sum total of my knowledge and interest in plants could fit in a Dixie cup, I was so enthralled by this book that about halfway into it I found myself Googling the plants and flowers in the story (sooo not me). Lila, the main character, works in advertising, which everyone thinks is glamorous, but her life is not. Her journey into the world of plants and love and adventure starts with a Bird of Paradise and the nine plants of desire (they are real plants-I googled them, remember) that are hidden in a secret room in a New York Laundromat. If you know something about tropical plants and their habitats, you’ll really love this book, and if you don’t you’ll learn everything you’ll ever need to know about their myths and their magic.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
In the 1980s a hotel in Seattle was being renovated when the owners uncovered possessions belonging to Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during WWII. These possessions had gone unclaimed for decades. The author, Ford, puts this real historical event at the heart of this really lovely love story. Henry, a retired widower, spots a parasol amongst the abandoned possessions and it carries him back to his childhood and his first love, a Japanese American girl. The story shifts from Henry’s childhood and America in the 1940s to Henry in the late 1980s as he uses the possessions to discover what happened to his first love and her family. The novel will give you lots to talk about, including the nature of patriotism then and now, but after I finished it I couldn’t help thinking about what would be the one possession in my life that, like the parasol in the story, might trigger such bittersweet memories of love and loss and family. Mu husband, Kevin, is seriously considering this to use in one of his classes at Alverno.
Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness by Michael Greenberg
This is a heart-breaking and gut-wrenching memoir (so my one non-fiction pick this month). It’s about the summer the author’s fifteen year old daughter, Sally, “was struck mad." I read this in one sitting (you could too–trust me) and I had to call my college-age children immediately when I finished. The author approaches metal illness and its effects on a family without any sugar-coating, but he writes so lyrically and with such compassion I think any book club would find lots to talk about from this book.
Home Repair by Liz Rosenberg
During a garage sale Eve’s second husband, Chuck, literally chucks their marriage out the window when, during a garage sale, he walks out on her. Eve so didn’t see it coming, and now she has to deal with two teenage children and a house and heart in disrepair. This novel is full of men and women and children a lot like us, and it’s a novel full of big and little surprises. If your book club has enjoyed Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Berg or Anita Shreve's novels, I think you’ll really enjoy this book too.
Cheers,
Carole
Reader Comments (8)
Though I admit first book on my to read list was I Am What I Am, which I finished in about a day and a half (would have been sooner if I didn't have that thing called work interrupting my reading time :P) But I just wanted to say, you and John have a way of telling all those stories that makes me laugh hysterically and cry my eyes out.
I hope this book is as much of a success as the first one was.
Ladies if you're looking for a book about romance and adventure, this is the book for you, the characters are absoltuely captivating, the story moves along quickly. Just a great and fun read.
my only regret is that I didn't have a bottle of wine next to me while I was reading this book and its available via kindle.
The way the author is able to simply describe the experience of his daughter’s psychosis with little recourse to the language of psychiatric diagnoses, psychological labelling or social stigmatization is interesting. Furthermore, this is a family narrative of guilt, blame, anger, passion, betrayal and denial, with a binding theme of compassion and love, which appears to be told in amazingly matter-of-fact tones. The narrative style seems to seek to engage my imagination and not to manipulate my emotions. It seems to invite me to imagine the chaotic emotional turmoil of the experiences and to invite me to make sense of the phenomena described.
At various points in the book the author relates to his daughter’s experience as a loss; a loss of her selfhood. There are elements of both restitution narratives (yesterday there was health, today there is illness, tomorrow there will be health again) and chaos narratives (the self is lost in suffering and confusion). Beyond that the author leaves much of the work of sense-making up to the reader. An example of this would be the recurrent use of the story of James Joyce and his daughter. The author relates this parallel narrative without revealing the judgement he, as the father in his own version of the same story, makes of the road James Joyce took.
In not labouring his own interpretations the author leaves us to position ourselves within the narrative and the non-judgemental portrayal of the various family members ensures that we have fair access to the landscape of their perspectives.
If every story has a meaning then I found its meaning in the following speech
“I’m learning about my emotions…Sometimes you have to let things float by without becoming overattached. It’s a discipline. If you sit quietly you can watch your thoughts drop away like rain.”
This is how I’ve read this book; as a narrative stripped bare by its author of many of his thoughts and raw emotions until it has become this distilled account, full of compassion but refusing to dictate a meaning or manipulate a response.