Reading+Suggestions

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 * Nominations from the October 2010 meeting, which we will select in January or February were:**

//**Fiction:**// //Freedom// by Jonathan Franzen //Nightfall// by Michael Cunningham //Summertime// by J.M. Coetzee // Private Life // by Jane Smiley // My Sister's Keeper // by Jodi Picoult

//Man in the White Sharkskin Suit // by Lucette Lagnado A description from the book reads as follows: " Lucette Lagnado's father, Leon, is a successful Egyptian businessman and boulevardier who, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit, makes deals and trades at Shepherd's Hotel and at the dark bar of the Nile Hilton. After the fall of King Farouk and the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, Leon loses everything and his family is forced to flee, abandoning a life once marked by beauty and luxury to plunge into hardship and poverty, as they take flight for any country that would have them. A vivid, heartbreaking, and powerful inversion of the American dream, Lucette Lagnado's unforgettable memoir is a sweeping story of family, faith, tradition, tragedy and triumph set against the stunning backdrop of Cairo, Paris and New York ." (Jo)

The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer something by Mario Vargas Llosa

Underworld by Don Delillo Delillo believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith havereplaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria. Underworld is the best book that I have read since the border trilogy by Cormac McCarthy. It was absolutely fascinating, but here are some caveats: it is 877 pages and has about 100 characters. the chapters pick up the story of the novel in a rather disjointed fashion, so the book is much better read as quickly as possible. I am not a baseball fan, but the opening chapter on and historic baseball game attended by Sinatra, J Edgar Hoover, and Jackie Gleason was enough to make me decide that I'm going to start watching more baseball. If we do consider the book, I think it should be for several months in advance to give people a chance to read it. (Jack)

The Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo.

//** Non-fiction :**// Raymond Carver : A Writer's Life, by Carol Sklenicka Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild This Just In: What I Couldn't Tell You on TV by Bob Schieffer The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Fail us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons Operation Mincemeat : How a Dead Man and A Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben McIntyre The Beak of the Finch : The Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Wiener The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson The Earth: A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race, by Jon Stewart , et al.,

Nobody Move
//(contributed by Janet Shaban - she mentioned how much she enjoyed these crime novels)//

Times Topics: Denis Johnson
 Hot on the heels of his National Book Award-winning novel, “Tree of Smoke,” Denis Johnson — by far one of our best writers — has written what might seem like a side step: a short, tight crime noir, produced under deadline as a serial for Playboy magazine. Like so many contemporary crime narratives (“Pulp Fiction” comes instantly to mind), Johnson’s new novel, “Nobody Move,” keeps a narrow focus, homing in on the plight of Jimmy Luntz, a barbershop chorus singer, compulsive gambler and Steve Buscemi type who owes money to a guy named Ernest Gambol, who collects for a guy — a dealer of some sort — named Juarez. Luntz has that slightly buffoonish airhead quality that comes not so much from stupidity as from a willed ignorance that keeps him from being tagged as a creature of full-blown criminality. He’s the exact sort of character who would find himself in touch with weird happenstance, the kind of happenstance that transpires inside a crime narrative: arriving less out of fate (fate would be too structured) than out of a need, artistic and aesthetic, to fill page after page with snappy, wiseacre dialogue. In this case happenstance arrives in the form of a chance meeting, as Luntz, having shot Gambol, tears through a beautifully rendered California landscape. The person he meets is Anita Desilvera, and Anita, in the way of such things, is a damsel in distress. Her husband, a Palo County prosecutor, has set her up as the fall girl in an elaborate payoff scheme involving a corrupt judge. To give much more of the plot away would be to betray this hugely enjoyable, fast-moving novel. Suffice it to say that money is involved, locked away in a password-­protected account, and that we’re driven forward page by page as Luntz and De­silvera come together and hide out — in hotel rooms, at a biker encampment — and have sex and try to trick the tricksters and end up alive and with the loot. One senses that Johnson took great pleasure in writing on a deadline, keeping the story tight to the bone, honing his sentences down to the same kind of utilitarian purity he demonstrated in “Tree of Smoke.” His descriptive passages — and they are few and far between — show his poetic mastery. When the corrupt judge appears, Johnson writes, “Even in his wheelchair the man gave an impression of height, some of it established by his coiffure — brilliant, silver-white, layered like a toupee, which plainly it wasn’t, as Gambol had his fingers tangled in it, pulling the man’s head backward in his wheelchair to prevent him fixing the buttons of his shirt.” At rare moments, the exchanged witticisms push beyond all bounds of reality, and the female characters threaten to become mere shadows, serving — a bit too easily — the carnal needs of the men. They are, in other words, forced into the divine formula of the genre, acting as catalytic sparks meant to keep the fire burning and add to the fun, working to propel us to what we know will be a bloody end. They’re effective, though, by the one measure that counts the most: we do keep reading. Someone’s going to get out alive (maybe), and we hope it’s going to be the relatively good guys. Johnson is one of the last of the hard-core American realist writers, working — in his own way — along a line that might be charted from Melville and Stephen Crane, with a detour through Flannery O’Connor and Don DeLillo. He routinely explores the nature of crime — all his novels have it in one form or an­other — in relation to the nature of grace (yes, grace) and the wider historical and cosmic order. So how does “Nobody Move” fit into his oeuvre? As Susan Sontag might say, it seems to operate as a flight from interpretation, settling into the genre for a ride, looking away from the wider implications of the world to enjoy itself by unfolding action within a neatly closed universe. But something more is at hand, because Johnson is a great writer, and even a casual entertainment, written well, has meaning. If “Tree of Smoke” — intricately plotted, embracing the entire Vietnam era and bringing it up alongside the war in Iraq — was a huge piece of work, a “Guernica” of sorts, then “Nobody Move” is a Warhol soup can, a flinty, bright piece of pop art meant to be instantly understood and enjoyed. It opens with the line “Jimmy Luntz had never been to war,” and it closes with two characters near a river. All of its symbols — if you want to take a shot at finding deeper meaning — are in your face and seem to be saying, at least to me, that for the most part, most of us live within the status quo, one way or another, just trying to locate the next move. David Means is the author of “The Secret Goldfish” and “Assorted Fire Events.” He teaches writing at Vassar College. More Articles in Books » A version of this article appeared in print on May 10, 2009, on page BR6 of the New York edition.

//Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West// By Christopher Caldwell (Doubleday, 422 pp., $30)

Review at @http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/portents:

"**As its subtitle** makes clear, this is a book about immigration, Islam, and the West. But at the same time this is also a book about a particular moral culture, a set of attitudes, habits, and beliefs that has developed in Western Europe over the past sixty years."

//--from Jack Thompson//

Hello all, I have discovered a wonderful pod cast with interviewer Nancy Pearl from Seattle. These are long interviews by someone who is a true bibliophile. I have listened to three so far, and can definitely recommend them. Azar Nafisi, Ann Patchett , and mystery writer: Dana Stabenow. All different and each one a delight. So if you are interested: @http://www.seattlechannel.org/BookLust/ It is easy if you have an ipod or another MP3 player, but you can also just download to your computer. //Lou//

//**Child 44**// by Tom Rob Smith -- Takes place in Stalinist Russia with lots of interesting (and depressing) detail about the culture of the time.

//**Iron Lake**// by William Kent Krueger -- Takes place in Minnesota with frequent reference to the inidigenous American Indian tribes and their culture

//**Hardball**// by Sarah Paretsky -- Takes place in Chicago with many place references and depressing talk about dirty cops and politicians. A V.I. Warshawski novel. [Need a title and info on this - EHST]