Thursday, March 3, 2022

Blog Back on Track; Local Author Jess Walter

 I am going to catch up the Read Book List from out book club.  I may have missed a couple but we did have a bit of a hiatus due to Covid.  Thanks to Maura for now hosting our Zoom meetings.

For our next book we have selected Jess Walter's Cold Millions. It should be a good one!

Our last meeting went well and everyone loved The House on the Cerulean Sea. We agreed it was nice to be reading books that are lighter in nature like our last two have been.


"The Cold Millions: A Novel by Jess Walter was a sprawling historical fiction novel taking place in the early 1900s primarily in the state of Washington as there was a national movement and an uprising of the unions working for better wages and workers' safety as well as the continued movement of women's suffrage rights. At the fore of this tale are the endearing Dolan brothers, Ryan and Gregory, or Rye and Gig."




Friday, December 11, 2020

A Gentleman In Moscow

 Our next read...


Some Background On 'Three Men In A Boat' by Jerome K. Jerome

 (This was pulled from an on-line article by the Guardian)

An ancient river. The journey upstream of some impressionable young men into a mysterious, challenging interior. An inevitable reckoning at the source. Finally, the terrible return to reality. Here, surely, is pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest.

But this is not Heart of Darkness, and the river is not the Congo. Actually, it's the Thames, and the narrator is not Marlow but J, or Jerome, K Jerome. Published in 1889, 10 years before Conrad's novel, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), is one of the comic gems in the English language. An accidental one, too. "I did not intend to write a funny book, at first," said its author.

Humour in literature is often not taken as seriously as it deserves. Nevertheless, there are a few seriously funny books that remain great for all time. Three Men in a Boat is one of these. Ostensibly the tale of three city clerks on a boating trip, an account that sometimes masquerades, against its will, as a travel guide, Three Men in a Boat hovers somewhere between a shaggy-dog story and episodes of late-Victorian farce.

What's it all about? Jerome K Jerome would probably say his masterpiece was "about one hundred and fifty pages", but I would argue that Three Men in a Boat is about the cameraderie of youth, the absurdity of existence, camping holidays, playing truant, comic songs, and the sweet memories of lost time. You could also read it as an unconscious elegy for imperial Britain. Did I omit to say that it also features a dog named Montmorency? In short, like all the finest comic writing, it's about everything and nothing.

Jerome K Jerome is more or less forgotten now. He was a jobbing freelance literary journalist who had just got married and needed to provide for his wife and family. Encouraged by his new wife, Georgina, Jerome intended his account of a boating holiday to be a popular travel guide for a booming market. In late-Victorian England there was a vogue for recreational boating on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. This was the golden age of the Henley regatta. Rowing boats, steam launches, even the occasional gondola: in the Season, up to 800 vessels a day passed through Boulter's Lock near Maidenhead. Here was an audience for a new river guide. In fact, Jerome's descriptions of Hampton Court, Marlow and Medmenham are all that survive from the original plan for a travel book.

But something funny happened on the way to publication, perhaps because it was first serialised in a magazine. Jerome's discursive comic voice took over. The river journey he makes with his friends George and Harris (and Montmorency) becomes the narrative line on which he hangs a sequence of comic anecdotes loosely associated with the journey upriver.

Jerome's themes are airily inconsequential and supremely English – boats, fishing, the weather, the atrocities of English food and the vicissitudes of suburban life – perfectly pitched in a light comic prose whose influence can be detected later in the work of, among many, PG Wodehouse, James Thurber, and Nick Hornby. My favourite Jerome set piece is the episode with the tinned pineapple.

The three mariners have had a long, hard day on the river. They reach their evening mooring, dog-tired and ravenously hungry. When George unearths a tin of pineapple chunks "we felt" writes Jerome, "that life was worth living after all". They were, he says, all of them exceedingly fond of pineapple. As the anticipation begins to build, he delivers the most perfect sentence in a book already buoyant with light comedy. "We looked at the picture on the tin," writes Jerome; "we thought of the juice."

Then they discover that they have no tin-opener. What follows is a passage of comic genius spun from nothing more – or less – than the banality of everyday life. Read it. This passage ("a fearful battle") comes as the brilliant climax to chapter 12.

Three Men in a Boat is one of those rare classics that seems to come, as it were, out of nowhere, and to defy the odds. Jerome K Jerome later wrote a hit West End play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, but he never recaptured the mood of careless comic joy that aerates the pages of his immortal masterpiece.

A note on the text

Three Men in a Boat began life as a travel commission for the magazine Home Chimes.

Its author later described what went wrong: "I did not know I was a humorist," he confessed. "The book was to have been 'The Story of the Thames', its scenery and history… I never got there. It seemed to be all 'humorous relief'. By grim determination I succeeded, before the end, in writing a dozen or so slabs of history and working them in, one to each chapter, and FW Robinson, who was publishing the book serially, promptly slung them out… From the beginning he had objected to the [since lost] title , and halfway through I hit upon Three Men in a Boat, because nothing else seemed right."

Jerome sold book publication rights to the Bristol publisher, JW Arrowsmith, who had been having a big success with a three-and-sixpenny single-volume series (including work by Arthur Conan Doyle and Anthony Hope), a new phenomenon which had begun to supplant the great Victorian "three-decker" novels. The Education Act of 1870 had created a new mass readership, and Jerome was eager to reach this new audience. On publication, however, it seemed as if his cunning marketing plans had gone awry. He had not allowed for the critics.

Jerome's fascination with bank clerks and "the lower orders" was denounced up and down. "One might have imagined," he later wrote in My Life and Times, "that the British Empire was in danger. The Standard spoke of me as a menace to English letters; and the Morning Post as an example of the sad results to be expected from the over-education of the lower orders…"

To be specific, the reviews ranged from the vitriolic to the merely hostile. The use of slang was condemned as "vulgar" and the book as a whole abused as a shameless appeal to "'Arrys and 'Arriets" – sneering critical terms for working-class Londoners. The magazine Punch dubbed Jerome K Jerome "'Arry K 'Arry".

Typically, the reading public paid absolutely no attention. Three Men in a Boat went on selling in vast numbers, defying gravity. It was also promptly pirated by unscrupulous American publishers. In Britain, Arrowsmith told a friend: "I pay Jerome so much in royalties, I cannot imagine what becomes of all the copies of that book I issue. I often think the public must eat them."

The first edition appeared in August 1889, and remained in print until March 1909, when, after the sale of some 200,000 copies, a second edition appeared. In his introduction to this printing, Jerome states that he had probably sold another million (pirated) copies in America.

The book was also translated into many languages. The Russian edition was particularly successful and became a standard school textbook, possibly as a documentary account of life in the heart of the capitalist empire. Since its publication, Three Men in a Boat has never been out of print. I'm unashamedly fond of it, and chose it as my "desert island" book on BBC Radio 4 in 2000.

Three more by Jerome K Jerome

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886); Three Men on the Bummel (1900); The Passing of the Third Floor Back, stories (1907), the play (1910).


Sunday, March 10, 2019

Article About 1984

Most of us read this in High School.  There has been so much superficial as well as deep discussion of how it has affected our world view.  I thought it would be interesting to read some of these and discuss as well as the novel itself.

George Orwell's road to dystopia;

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21337504

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Alice Munro; Winner of 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

This is from Wikipedia; 

Alice Ann Munro (/ˈælɪs ˌæn mʌnˈr/née Laidlaw /ˈldlɔː/; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time.[2] Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."[3]
Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario.[4] Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.[5] Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction", or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."[6] Munro is the recipient of many literary accolades, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the contemporary short story",[7] and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. 

Sunday, October 7, 2018

November Book Selection

This should be a good one for the season; a comedy about Armegeddon by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (of Discworld Series fame).  It is also being made into a TV series to be released in 2019 on Amazon Prime video.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch is a World Fantasy Award-nominated novel, written as a collaboration between the English authors Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The book is a comedy about the birth of the son of Satan, the coming of the End Times. Wikipedia
Originally publishedMay 1, 1990
Page count288
GenresHorror fiction, Fantasy, Humorous Fiction


Here is the link to the series preview trailer; 

https://mashable.com/video/good-omens-trailer-nycc/#fMw63Pi9waqa

Friday, August 31, 2018

October 3rd Book !

We will be reading 'I Am The Messanger' by Marcus Zusak.  It was recommended by Maura.  See all of you in October.  Have a good read!

Here is the beginning of a review by N. Alysha Lewis :

For seventeen years, I forced myself not to have a favorite book. I loved reading so much, I didn’t want to decide on one in case I read something even better right after. The Phantom Tollbooth came close because it gave me my love of word play, but even still, when asked, I never gave a straight answer. Then I read I Am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak.
Many know Zusak as the man who wrote The Book Thief, a very popular selection for summer reading lists that got the movie treatment a few years ago. And I get it. The Book Thief is a great book. It deserves the accolades and attention it has received—but in my opinion, I Am the Messenger, which turned 15 this year, is the YA read you should be picking up.


Thursday, July 19, 2018

August 2018 Book

The River of Doubt; Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.


Saturday, April 28, 2018

Early June Book Club at ARBOR CREST Winery!!

We had a very nice time at The Gilded Unicorn followed by the Pie & Whiskey readings at the Washington Cracker Barrel building!  So much fun in fact that we decided to try Arbor Crest outside next time.  If the weather is bad we have a back up plan; Candace's house.  Regardless, her famous applesauce cake will be there! 




We are reading "Guns of the South" by Harry Turtledove.  This is an alternative history book about the Civil War. There is one copy in the city library system and one digital copy in county.  So.... if you can't find one in one of our local used bookstores then you will have to get a cheap copy from one of the following online source;  thriftbooks.com, amazon, betterworldbooks, bookfinder, alibris, abe books.  Candace and I already have a copy. We have a 7 week period till book club so order it
soon.





Tuesday, April 24, 2018