Roosevelt Library Book Club

I have been appointed to the board of the Friends of the Roosevelt Library. There has not been an election of board members because we are the first one. The group just got started this spring, in time to host the Grand Re-opening on June 1st. We just held our first Book Sale last Saturday and made $550 with a five hour sale, which is not too bad for just starting out. Our next project is to get some book clubs going. We may have Teen Book Clubs later on, but we're starting out with two Adult Book Clubs. Mine is just called Adult Book Club and it is being kicked off as a follow-up to the One Minneapolis, One Read event, which is October 3rd. Everyone in Minneapolis who wants to take part reads the same book - A Choice of Weapons, by Gordon Parks. Then your local library or your school if you're a student will be holding a discussion session. At Roosevelt we will announce that one month hence will be the first Adult Book Club meeting. The first book is The March by E. L. Doctorow (reviewed way down below) and the meeting will be November 7 at 6 pm. The second book will be Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and that one will meet the first Thursday in December, also at 6 pm.  The other book club starting out in November at Roosevelt will be the Mystery Book Club. It will meet the first Saturday of the month, and you can find out more details in the library.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier

Now a major motion picture, as they say. This was a very cinematic book, as other reviewers of the film have pointed out, and did really cry out to be made into a lovely movie. I haven't seen the movie, just read the book. It had a really authentic-seeming feel, in that as one read it, one felt immersed in this 17th century Dutch town culture, but do we really know what that was like? No, but it was convincing. A little less convincing were the motivations of the main character, Griet. What Chevalier has done with this book is to imagine a persona for the mysterious girl in the painting, of whom no one knows a thing - her age, name, relationship to the painter Vermeer if any. Of especial mystery is her clothing in the painting, which is not typical of any known style at the time. It is vaguely exotic-looking, yet the girl herself is anything but exotic, and is in fact most remarkable for her simplicity and quintessential pretty-young-Dutch-girl appearance. So Chevalier has imagined her as a teenaged maid, from a nice "middle-class" artisan family, forced into service because of her father's industrial accident, and thrust into a slightly alien Catholic household headed by a non-communicative painter and his troubled wife and dominating mother-in-law. All in all I had mixed feelings about the book. It was like a great painting of which you don't know enough; it seemed to promise more than it delivered somehow. And yet I have to give it points for realism, for that very reason: life is often mysterious and vaguely unsatifying, and this book is a hyper-realistic slice of life.

Two Crackers from Once Upon A Crime

Blog editor note: Nowadays, Lia Matera is a friend on Facebook. Although I still have not met her in person, and we can't go out for coffee together because we live a couple of thousand miles apart, we actually are as good friends as two can be on Facebook, chatting, cross-commenting, and liking a lot of the same things. I was really honored to have her accept me as a friend, given that I am "just a fan". But it's true, her books are some of my favorites amongst contemporary crime drama.  


In a previous post, I bemoaned the lack of good, independent bookstores in most of Britain. Once Upon A Crime, in Minneapolis, is one of the type of bookstores I was thinking about. On my recent trip there for the birth of grand-daughter Savannah, I visited OUAC and purchased five books, reviews of which follow.

Bad Boy Brawly Brown, by Walter Mosley, is a book you will expect to be good if you are already familiar with Mosley's Easy Rawlins series. And it doesn't disappoint. The Easy Rawlins books are all in chronological order, so the story develops, society in multi-racial Los Angeles changes through the decades, and characters grow, change and in some cases die. This is the first novel after the death of Mouse, Easy's criminally violent but strangely endearing oldest friend. The ghost of Mouse haunts the story, plaguing Easy and giving him strength at the same time. This story takes place in the early 1970s, and concerns Easy's attempts to save a young boy from falling into a life of criminality through the strange politics of black power in that era. It is full of all the things you want in an Easy Rawlins story: tender family dramas and piercing sociological insights alternating with anatomically described fight scenes and thrilling car chases.

Star Witness, a Willa Jansson Mystery, by Lia Matera, is one in a series that is a personal favourite of mine. Willa Jansson is a lawyer with a colourful past. She is what we used to call a "red diaper baby"; her parents are 1960s radicals, her values are unashamedly leftist, and her heroes are secular and intellectual and revolutionary, like her parents. The early books in the series featured Willa working for a leading leftist lawyer and then, when he died in an early book, an idealistic legal cooperative. Now she works for a corporate firm, and so gets into those typical nineties-naughties conflicts of belief vs. livelihood. In this story, a bit of a departure, she gets roped into the world of alien abductees and conspiracy theorists, and gets herself tied up in some Gordian knots of legal ethics and personal responsibility. The thing that really shines about Lia Matera's books is the dialogue, both internal and external. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Persia Cafe, by Melany Nielson

This is the fifth book that I bought at Once Upon A Crime in Minneapolis.
This is a mystery of sorts, but it features neither a cop nor a PI nor even an amateur investigator. But a crime occurs, what we would now call a hate crime, although in the time and place of the story - Mississippi in the 1960s - such a term did not exist. The principal character is a young white woman, Fannie Leary, who runs the Persia Cafe. At the start of the story, the Persia Cafe is the only place in town to eat out or even have coffee and it is patronised by whites only. The cook, of course, is black, and in the way of white families in the South, because she has worked for Fannie's family all her life, she is in the sort of relationship with them that I will not even try to describe, because you cannot understand it unless you experience it. This is the relationship that my ex-father-in-law and others of his ilk referred to when they said "We care for our nigras," in a tone and context that made it clear that "yankees" and outsiders cared not for their own nigras and were exposing them to harm. But if a black person did something to put himself outside their "protection", well, that is a relationship that it is also hard to understand, except in terms of pure evil, the natural predatory nature of the human beast coming out.
The main arc of this story is what used to happen when a white woman did something to put herself outside the protection of the Southern white men. Fannie does not quite declare herself a race traitor (as I did myself in the 1960s in suburban Atlanta, and if I had done the same in Mississippi, I may not have grown up to tell about it.) But her crime of omission is enough to get the Persia Cafe boycotted by the white community, so in a moment of supreme courage, she invites the black community to dinner at the cafe.
What we get at this point is a great picture of a small southern community on the cusp of change. Having lived through this era and this place, I can attest that the picture is accurate and believable. Oh, and Fannie solves the crime, too, the original crime, which does turn out to be murder. This is a great story, a cut above the genre.

Books I read in 2003 as part of Nottingham Public Library virtual book club

Editor's Note: This post is a collection of separate posts from the very beginning of my now defunct book blog, Deborama's Books. I wrote these posts in England, and while I resided in England, I spelled things in the English manner. I have decided to leave the spelling as it is. It's not pretentiousness, just consistency.

War Crimes for the Home, by Liz Jensen
Gloria is very old, and everyone assumes that it is senility that makes her so cantankerous, and possibly forgetful.
But during the war, Gloria was young and pretty and in love. After the war she has a beloved son, who is the spitting image of the handsome groom in her wartime wedding picture. So what happened to that dashing young American who left her with a child? And why can't she remember? Or does she remember and just refuse to face it?
Now her son is middle-aged, and he has found a slightly older, middle-aged woman who believes she is his sister. As the two of them visit Gloria in the old-age pensioners' home and try to ferret out the truth, a strange story keeps coming up: a story about Gloria and her American beau and a hypnotist and his pretty, but ruthless, assistant. . .
War Crimes for the Home is unique, engaging, and oddly uplifting, with its coarse humour, its unflinching story, its flawed but lovable heroine and its wonderfully twisting exposition. I recommend it heartily.



The Death of Vishnu, by Manil Suri
Vishnu is dying on the staircase of a crowded apartment building in Bombay. He has been living on the staircase, a coveted location, and paying for the privilege by running errands for the more favoured residents. As he lies in a fevered condition, two worlds swirl around him, the real world and the dream world of his memories and fantasies.
The real world is the tiny but populous world of the apartment block, where a man mourns his dead wife, two housewives fight over their shared kitchen, a Muslim householder dreams of founding a new religion to unite Hindus and Muslims, and his son schemes with the daughter of Hindu neighbours to elope in a style befitting the Bollywood movies she loves.
Vishnu's dream world is also full of wishes and longings, and memories of his love for the beautiful but (almost always) unavailable Padmini. Vishnu's mother comes back to him in memory, reminding him he is a god, and he begins to believe that he is. As the apartment residents step past Vishnu's semi-conscious body, only sure he is not dead because of his occasional stirrings or faint cries, he becomes a touchstone for their own compassion, beliefs and self-images. This is a strange and beautiful story, beautifully told.



The Rotters' Club, by Jonathan Coe
I imagine that anyone who grew up in Britain in the late 1970s would really identify with this book. There were parts that I really identified with myself, even though I grew up in the US, in the south, and about 10 years earlier. But then there are the cultural milestones, as opposed to personal ones, and in the milieu of this book, the five protagonists are beset by the demise of the industrial base in the Midlands and the IRA terror campaign, among other things. Whereas my high school years were stamped (upon!) by the virulent white opposition to racial desegregation and the Vietnam War. So, not so different, really.
The protagonists are a gang of four schoolmates and the older sister of one of them. (The Rotter's Club of the title is Ben Trotter and his beloved big sister, Lois, whose names are of course mutated by classmates into Bent Rotter and Lowest Rotter.) The other three boys are Anderton, the class-conscious one whose father is a shop steward, Harding, the edgy rebel, and Chase, the aspiring journalist.
The four boys are trying to form a band for most of the book, and it self-destructs as soon as it is formed. One boy goes to London and gets sexually initiated by a posh young woman several years his senior. The shop steward is in the throes of an affair that can only end badly, and he is trying hard to keep his family in the dark. Another boy's mother has an abortive affair with a teacher. Industrial tension simmers, somebody gets blown up in a pub, somebody else spends several years mute because of the loss of a loved one. There is a lot happening in the book and you get swept up in it, but it is sort of hard to keep track, the cast of characters is so large and lifelike.



Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters
This book is all about suspense . . . and lesbian sub-text, of course. Therefore, I must stop myself from saying too much, as I do not want to create even a hint of a spoiler.
The story concerns two girls. Sue Trinder is brought up as an orphan in Lant Street, London, amongst petty thieves and fences and con artists, sheltered somewhat by her unofficial guardian, Mrs. Sucksby. Maud Lilly's earliest memories are coming to consciousness in a madhouse, and then after the death of her inmate mother, being given to her creepy uncle who lives in a grand but isolated house. Maud's uncle uses her as a clerical assistant in his shadowy literary enterprise. Sue is persuaded by a con-man she knows as "Gentleman" to pose as a lady's maid to Maud in order to swindle her out of her inheritance. But nothing is as it seems . . .
If you love a good mystery, or a Victorian romance, or if you have lesbian tendencies and can take a really long tease if the culmination is worth it, then this is a book for you.



Buddha Da, by Anne Donovan
This is the first novel, but the second book, by Anne Donovan, and is something I read as part of a Nottingham Public Library programme called Book Chains. (Donovan's first book was a highly regarded short story collection.)
The most noticeable thing about this book, which presented quite a challenge to me as an American, is that it is written in a Glaswegian Scots dialect, except when the few non-Glaswegians are speaking. It is told from three points of view, Jim, his wife and his 12 year old daughter Anne Marie.
Jim, for reasons not clear even to him, decides to take up meditation with some Tibetan lamas in the Buddhist Centre in Glasgow. As he progresses on his baffling spiritual journey, he gives up meat, alcohol, and sex with his beloved wife, Liz. Liz is caring for her ailing mother, wishing she could have another child before she is too old, and just trying to get on with life, and understandably sees Jim's behaviour as self-centred in the extreme. Anne Marie has the most adult attitude of the three of them, and is carrying on with growing up, ditching old friends, picking up new ones, and producing an award winning CD combining Latin chant with Tibetan Buddhist chanting and Indian house music. In the end, it is the body rather than the spirit that resolves all these conundrums, leading the little family to a whole new spiritual plane. This is a lovely and engaging book, highly recommended.



Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
This book is one everyone is talking about, possibly because it won a prestigious award (the Man Booker). It is very absorbing, and the main character is one of the most likeable in all the fiction I have ever read (and that's a lot.) I don't know if the last two chapters are supposed to be a surprise, so I won't say anything specific about them, except to say that there was something of a let-down for me in the unresolvedness of the ending. It didn't seem right to me that a book so drenched with humanity and wisdom should have this little escape clause in it (if that's what it was.) Still, I strongly recommend this book.



River of Darkness, by Rennie Airth
Editor's Note: I did read The Blood-Dimmed Tide.
River of Darkness, published in 2000 to an enthusiastic critical reception, is noted for "blend[ing] the traditions of the golden age mystery with elements of the contemporary psychological suspense novel." The story is set in 1921 and concerns a psychopathic serial killer and a Scotland Yard detective inspector. Both are survivors of the Great War. The detective inspector went into the war as an idealist and came out the other end fighting against cynicism and deeply scarred, with no expectation of ever being happy again. The killer went into the war already a psychopath and found a hellish paradise in war and a vocation that, with a few grisly props and a reliance on his training, will last him for life. From this chilling premise, Aird builds an absorbing tale of a cat-and-mouse game with enough twists to keep anyone guessing. The story is lightened up with a young novice constable's awkward coming of age in the force, and his hero worship of the main character, DI Madden, as well as a redeeming love interest and a few brilliant comic touches. There is a sequel, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, set 11 years later, which I plan to read soon.