We've been back for a while!

After our Covid hiatus, attempts at Zooming and then getting together at various restaurants, we have recently(four times?) have been back to using our original formula of meeting at a member's house. It works the best.  Two of our members have moved away (CA and MN) so we continue try to Zoom with varied results.  Tonight we will attempt to use WhatsApp instead.  We shall see..

Tonight's discussion is about Christian Cooper's book, 'Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World'.  You may have seen him in the news a few years ago from the run in he had with a white woman in NYC's Central Park.

Looking forward to Pie (I'll bring the Whiskey)...

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."

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.

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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).

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

Alice Munro; Winner of 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

This is from Wikipedia; 

Alice Ann Munro (/ˈælɪs ˌæn mʌnˈroʊ/, née Laidlaw /ˈleɪdlɔː/; 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. 

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 published: May 1, 1990

Authors: Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett

Page count: 288

Adaptations: Good Omens (2018)

Characters: Aziraphale, Anathema Device, Crowley, Shadwell, Adam Young

Genres: Horror fiction, Fantasy, Humorous Fiction

Here is the link to the series preview trailer; 

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

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.

August 2018 Book

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

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.

Homegoing

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi Ghana, 18th century: Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the notorious Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and shipped off to America to be sold into slavery. HOMEGOING follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the slave traders of the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the Asantes’ struggle against British colonialism to the first stirrings of the American Civil War, from the jazz of 20th-century Harlem to the sparkling shores of modern Ghana. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi Publication Date: May 2, 2017 Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction Paperback: 320 pages Publisher: Vintage ISBN-10: 1101971061 ISBN-13: 9781101971062

Martin Marten in January 2018

We will be reading Martin Marten by Brian Doyle for the upcoming January Book Club. It will be at Lori's house on Tuesday January 16th. Martin Marten is a braided coming-of-age tale like no other, told in Brian Doyle's joyous, rollicking style. Dave is fourteen years old, living with his family in a cabin on Oregon's Mount Hood (or as he prefers to call it, like the Multnomah tribal peoples once did, Wy'east).

A.J. Fikry

KIRKUS REVIEW Zevin (Margarettown, 2006, etc.) chronicles the life of A. J. Fikry, a man who holds no brief for random acts, who yearns for a distinct narrative, who flounders about until his life is reordered by happenstance. Fikry owns Island Books on Alice Island, a summer destination off Massachusetts—think Nantucket. He’s not yet 40 but already widowed, his wife, Nic, dead in an auto accident. Fikry drinks. Island Books drifts toward bankruptcy. Then, within a span of days, his rare copy of Poe’s Tamerlane (worth $400,000) is stolen, and 2-year-old Maya is deposited at his bookstore. Fikry cannot bear to leave the precocious child to the system once it becomes apparent her single mother has drowned herself in the sea. He adopts Maya, spurred by her immediate attachment to him. That decision detours "his plan to drink himself to death" and reinvigorates his life and his bookstore. Add Amelia Loman, quirky traveling sales representative for Knightley Press, and a romance that takes four years to begin, and there’s a Nicholas Sparks quality to this novel about people who love books but can't find someone to love. With a wry appreciation for the travails of bookstore owners—A. J. doesn’t like e-readers—Zevin writes characters of a type, certainly, but ones who nonetheless inspire empathy. Among others, there are the bright and sweet-natured Maya, who morphs into an insecure but still precocious teenager; Lambiase, local police chief who finds in Firky the friend who expands his life; A. J’s brother-in-law, Daniel Parish, a once–best-selling author riding out a descending career arc; and Daniel’s wife, Ismay, who sees A. J. as everything Daniel should be. All fit the milieu perfectly in a plot that spins out as expected, bookended by tragedy. Zevin writes characters who grow and prosper, mainly A. J. and Lambiase, in a narrative that is sometimes sentimental, sometimes funny, sometimes true to life and always entertaining. A likable literary love story about selling books and finding love.

Maise Dobbs

Maisie Dobbs Maisie Dobbs Maisie Dobbs, Psychologist and Investigator, began her working life at the age of thirteen as a servant in a Belgravia mansion, only to be discovered reading in the library by her employer, Lady Rowan Compton. Fearing dismissal, Maisie is shocked when she discovers that her thirst for education is to be supported by Lady Rowan and a family friend, Dr. Maurice Blanche. But The Great War intervenes in Maisie's plans, and soon after commencement of her studies at Girton College, Cambridge, Maisie enlists for nursing service overseas. Years later, in 1929, having apprenticed to the renowned Maurice Blanche, a man revered for his work with Scotland Yard, Maisie sets up her own business. Her first assignment, a seemingly tedious inquiry involving a case of suspected infidelity, takes her not only on the trail of a killer, but back to the war she had tried so hard to forget.

Our Next Book is..."As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner

This is our first book by Faulkner. I have always been meaning to read something by this famous American author and here is my chance. I have had 2 copies lying around in my many stacks of books. Here is an excerpt about him: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949 William Faulkner William Faulkner - Biographical William Faulkner (1897-1962), who came from an old southern family, grew up in Oxford, Mississippi. He joined the Canadian, and later the British, Royal Air Force during the First World War, studied for a while at the University of Mississippi, and temporarily worked for a New York bookstore and a New Orleans newspaper. Except for some trips to Europe and Asia, and a few brief stays in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, he worked on his novels and short stories on a farm in Oxford. In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner has invented a host of characters typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. The human drama in Faulkner's novels is then built on the model of the actual, historical drama extending over almost a century and a half Each story and each novel contributes to the construction of a whole, which is the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants. Their theme is the decay of the old South, as represented by the Sartoris and Compson families, and the emergence of ruthless and brash newcomers, the Snopeses. Theme and technique - the distortion of time through the use of the inner monologue are fused particularly successfully in The Sound and the Fury (1929), the downfall of the Compson family seen through the minds of several characters. The novel Sanctuary (1931) is about the degeneration of Temple Drake, a young girl from a distinguished southern family. Its sequel, Requiem For A Nun (1951), written partly as a drama, centered on the courtroom trial of a Negro woman who had once been a party to Temple Drake's debauchery. In Light in August (1932), prejudice is shown to be most destructive when it is internalized, as in Joe Christmas, who believes, though there is no proof of it, that one of his parents was a Negro. The theme of racial prejudice is brought up again in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which a young man is rejected by his father and brother because of his mixed blood. Faulkner's most outspoken moral evaluation of the relationship and the problems between Negroes and whites is to be found in Intruder In the Dust (1948). In 1940, Faulkner published the first volume of the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, to be followed by two volumes, The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), all of them tracing the rise of the insidious Snopes family to positions of power and wealth in the community. The reivers, his last - and most humorous - work, with great many similarities to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, appeared in 1962, the year of Faulkner's death. From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969 The Wikipedia entry makes for interesting reading; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Faulkner

Info about Neil Gaiman

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman[2] (/ˈɡeɪmən/;[3] born Neil Richard Gaiman,[2] 10 November 1960)[4] is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book (2008).[5][6] In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards.[7]

December 2016 Book Club Meeting

The next book club meeting will be on Tuesday December 6th at Julie's house and the book is the following: The ocean at the end of the lane [LARGE PRINT] / NeilGaiman. There are several copies at in the County Library system so I suspect there are several in the city system as well. Jeff

The Nightengale Summary

FRANCE, 1939 In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When France is overrun, Vianne is forced to take an enemy into her house, and suddenly her every move is watched; her life and her child’s life is at constant risk. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates around her, she must make one terrible choice after another. Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets the compelling and mysterious Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can...completely. When he betrays her, Isabelle races headlong into danger and joins the Resistance, never looking back or giving a thought to the real--and deadly--consequences. With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah takes her talented pen to the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime. (less)