Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan grew up near Detroit and now splits his time between San Francisco and the internet. He graduated from Michigan State with a degree in economics and, from 2002 to 2012, worked at Poynter, Current TV, and Twitter. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is his first novel.

In Blip Magazine, George Saunders called Penumbra "a real tour-de-force, a beautiful fable that is given legs by the author’s bravado use of the real (Google is in there, for instance, the actual campus) to sell us on a shadow world of the unreal and the speculative."

Great Website:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/10/robin_sloan_s_novel_mr_penumbra_s_24_hour_bookstore_reviewed_.html

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (sampled from LitLovers online resource).  I added quotes from the book, along with comments from our discussion.

1. What were your initial theories about the bookstore’s mysterious patrons and their project? What did you predict Manutius’s message would be?

We loved the idea of OK and TK – Old/Scientific knowledge and Traditional/Legend/Word of Mouth Knowledge are both important.

We had no idea the puzzle would end with a picture and found the characters who were already “questing” when Clay got his job interesting.  It was actual helpful, and an interesting literary device, to have Clay record how everyone looked.  We got a great visual!

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

“He asked <...> Rosemary, why do you love books so much?
And I said, Well, I don't know <...> I suppose I love them because they're quiet, and I can take them to the park.”

“I've never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say it's a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely takes place in your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes”

2. Discuss Clay’s pursuit of love. What makes Kat attractive to him? What does it take to win her over?

Of all the characters, Kat seemed the least developed to us.  We liked that she wore the same t-shirt each day, though, and maybe that said something about her one-dimensional character, too.

“Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.”

“This girl has the spark of life. This is my primary filter for new friends (girl- and otherwise) and the highest compliment I can pay. I've tried many times to figure out exactly what ignites it -- what cocktail of characteristics come together in the cold, dark cosmos to form a star. I know it's mostly in the face -- not just the eyes, but the brow, the cheeks, the mouth, and the micromuscles that connect them all.

3. The characters remind us that fifteenth-century technologies of the book—from punch-cutting to typesetting—were met with fear and resistance, as well as with entrepreneurial competition and the need to teach new skills. How does this compare to the launch of e-books? If you try to picture what literacy will look like five hundred years from now, what do you see?

The way books are “read” may change, but they haven’t been replaced by television or movies yet.  If you read a lot of Science Fiction, then you have seen “futures” where books are burned, gone, etc.  However, in almost all SciFi, there is a magic about the person who can read and write, the keeper of the written word.  It will always be an important skill.

“After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:
A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”

4. If you were to file a codex vitae, capturing all you’ve learned throughout your life, what would it contain?

“Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.”

“If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.”

5. As Clay and the team of Google decoders take on the same challenge, what do they discover about the relative strengths of the human brain and technology?

“You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.”

6. Neel’s financial backing makes it possible for Clay to outwit Corvina and the Festina Lente Company, despite its many lucrative enterprises. In this novel, what can money buy, and what are the limitations of wealth?

“Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.”

7. Clay’s literary idol, Clark Moffat, was forced to make a choice between the Unbroken Spine project and his commercially successful fiction. If you had been Moffat, which path would you have chosen?

We did not come to a uniform conclusion on this topic, but we did talk about how difficult it might be to choose.  Money/Fame vs. Secret Society/living forever?

8. Are Penumbra and his colleagues motivated only by a quest for immortality? If not, what are the other rewards of their labor-intensive work? Can books give their authors immortality?

“Some of them are working very hard indeed. “What are they doing?” “My boy!” he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious. “They are reading!”

9. How did you react to Gerritszoon’s “message to eternity,” revealed in the closing passages? How can his wisdom apply to your life?

“There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It's not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we're still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.”

 “All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain site.”

10.  What did you think about the “quest” and “Dungeons and Dragon” themes?

The wizard (Google user), rogue (rich guy), and a warrior (bookstore clerk) on a quest was a great way to bring role-play games into the modern world.  A warrior with words?

“...this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard.”

“Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who's going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?”

“So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula. (p.34)”

FINAL THOUGHTS
Charlotte came across a novella by the author.  She thinks it was written before Mr. Penumbra's Bookstore, but does not think it was published prior to it.   Title: Ajax Penumbra, 1969.   About Mr. Penumbra finding the bookstore. Available as ebook for $2.99 ... about 65 pages

The Art Forger by B. A. Shapiro

Summary

On March 18, 1990, thirteen works of art worth today over $500 million were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It remains the largest unsolved art heist in history, and Claire Roth, a struggling young artist, is about to discover that there’s more to this crime than meets the eye.

Claire makes her living reproducing famous works of art for a popular online retailer. Desperate to improve her situation, she lets herself be lured into a Faustian bargain with Aiden Markel, a powerful gallery owner. She agrees to forge a painting—one of the Degas masterpieces stolen from the Gardner Museum—in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But when the long-missing Degas painting—the one that had been hanging for one hundred years at the Gardner—is delivered to Claire’s studio, she begins to suspect that it may itself be a forgery.

Here’s a quote that inspires:

“Our capacity for intimacy is built on deep respect, a presence that allows what is true to express itself, to be discovered. Intimacy can arise in any moment; it is an act of surrender, a gift that excludes nothing.”  (Jack Kornfield)

It’s really cool that this story takes place in Boston and anchors with a real event – the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, which included works by Manet, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Degas. But what if Rembrandt didn't paint Storm of Galilee? What if an unknown artist did instead? Would the painting be any less beautiful? Would it no longer be admired? Would it suddenly be worthless? What is it that gives an object value?
- After reading this book, and knowing how complicated and how much energy goes into making an excellent forgery, why should we even think that ocean painting IS by Rembrandt?  It could easily have been by someone else. 

- In either way, we kept coming back to art being art.  It’s beauty remains no matter who the artist is.

It is estimated that 40 percent of all artworks put up for sale in any given year are forgeries. Theodore Rousseau, an expert from the Metropolitan Museum, said, "We can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected. The good ones are still hanging on museum walls." Does knowing this affect the way you view great art? How can we tell the difference between what is inauthentic and what is real?  The novel explores the idea that we often only see what we want to see. If an expert is told a painting is a masterpiece, she sees one. If an artist desires recognition, she convinces herself that her deal with the devil is for good. How are people complicit in missing the truth?
- 40% is an astounding number.  It’s hard to imagine that collectors keep them in their private homes/collections and look at them a few times a year.

- Again, if art moves you, it is still art, forgery or not.  Beauty is beauty. 

- We want to see a painting whether or not it is the “truth.”

- We talked a bit about how “Made in America” should be “Assembled in America.”  We are all living in a world where we already can’t be sure of what is what.  (he he he… What is the What by Dave Eggers also came up next in our discussions).
- We appreciated when What is the What stated something like, “these things happened to someone, somewhere, even if they didn’t all happen to me in particular.”  That is sort of like our last book, The Invention of Wings – the experiences of enslaved people happened to someone, even if they didn’t happen to the same someone.  

- We would like fiction identified as fiction, and if it’s a fact, then attributed as such.  A historian might write a novel, but then say something like, “Research says” or “This is where the story is unknown so I have made up…”   

- We discussed Memoir vs. Fiction, as when Betty Smith was told to market A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as fiction because it would sell more copies.

What do the meetings between Edgar Degas and Isabella Stewart Gardner show about the relationship between a collector and an artist?
- This relationship isn’t real.  Some of us couldn't get by the “letters” that were used as a technique to tell the story.  They didn’t seem believable.  The language was too modern.  History says that they never existed, so this relationship between artist and collector was hard to buy as well.

UPDATE:
In October, 2014, I saw B.A. Shapiro speak at Middlesex Community College.  Here are some notes about what she said.

• She is 60 years old.
• A novel, above all else, is a story.
• The Art Forger is not more than 20 pages of anything that fits into a genre category.  It is not a historical novel, a mystery, or an art book.
• Her agent couldn't pitch it. 
• Her favorite rejection, "I love the book.  It breaks my heart not to buy it, but it will get lost without a genre."
• Large publishers publish 500 books per month and only their "big writers" get the support.  466 books get no support, like her own first 5 books.
• Algonquin Press only accepts 12 books per year and promotes all of them.  
• She now has a 2 more book contract.
• After 25 years, she is an overnight sucess.
• Her next book will be about a mural painter at the WPA working to help Jews in WWII.
• B.A. Shapiro didn't have a past history, but Barbara did, so she the publisher asked her to change to initials.
• She used index cards to keep track of her notes.  Different colors for different topics: letters, art duplication/repair process, and Isabella Stewart Gardner's life.  When she had enough cards, she shuffled them and sorted them into a book.
• She wrote 15 fictional letters to a fictional niece, but only used 8 in the book.  
• As a writer, you can't go off on a tangent that is too long.
• Sometimes, her writing group would tell her, "Your research is showing."
• Each page was rewritten 20 times and it took about 3 years.
• It has been almost 25 years since the Gardener Museum heist.  And, no, no one knows anything about it.

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

Is about the Grimke Sisters
 

Excerpt below from Oprah’s Talk http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Oprah-Talks-with-Sue-Monk-Kidd-About-The-Invention-of-Wings

The novel tells the story of four women from Charleston, South Carolina—two sisters from the prosperous white Grimké family and an African American mother and daughter who are the Grimkés' house slaves. All four share an ardent desire to break free: Sarah and Angelina Grimké from the constraints of being female in the early 19th century, and Hetty (Handful) and her mother, Charlotte, from the bonds of slavery.  Though the tale is fictional, the Grimké sisters were real-life abolitionists whose stories captivated Kidd. Also drawn from real life is Hetty, though her real life story is unknown after Sarah’s infamous birthday gift.

Some Quotes The Resonated:

“My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”

“To leave or die trying.”

“Only women hearing each other can create a counter-world to the prevailing reality.”

“Mauma had sewed where she came from, who she was, what she loved, the things she’d suffered and the things she hoped. She’d found a way to tell it.”

“All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.”

“People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn’t know for sure whether Miss Sarah’s feelings came from love or guilt.  I didn’t know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing.”

Our Conversation:

We had a rich and complex discussion. While we retold the story to one book group member who hadn’t finished the book, we added editorial comments from interviews with the author (see excerpts from interview below) and what we saw as overarching themes.  Kidd drew the story from facts about the Grimke sisters and slavery at that time.  We loved this book.  It was like Kidd had brainstormed a list of stereotypes of African Americans from that time period (lazy, forgetful, losing things, etc.) and set out to debunk/explain reality.  It gave a perspective of resistance that is often absent in other slave narratives.  It also brought in heroes for the African American people (i.e.:  Denmark Vessey) and abolitionists (i.e.: Quakers).

Themes:

•  Restriction/Lack of Control over one’s own life:  So much of Sarah’s life is about exile and seeking her place of belonging in the world.  Obviously, slavery takes away all control.

•  Siblings:  The relationship between Sarah and her sister and then between Handful and her sister.

•  Mothers:  The relationship between Sarah and her mother and Handful and her mother.

•  Forgiveness:  Father apologizes to Sarah, Sarah apologizes to Handful, etc.

•  People are Complex/No one is “all good” or “all bad”:  Denmark had affairs, Father knows slavery is wrong but cannot acknowledge it publically, Sarah’s potential husband cannot let her work, the Quakers focus on abolition and cannot see its connection to feminism (equal rights for women).

•  Finding Your Own Path:  Charlotte went to town and made her own money by sewing for others, Handful used the bathtub without permission, etc.

•  The Power Of Reading:  Handful wrote Charlotte a pass to go to town, Sarah lost access to the library once it was discovered that she had taught Handful to read, etc.

•  Men Have the Power:  Sarah’s father took away the dream of becoming a lawyer, the man Sarah might have married expected her to give up the idea of becoming a minister, etc.

Original Discussion Questions:

1. What were the qualities in Handful that you most admired? As you read the novel, could you imagine yourself in her situation?

2. After laying aside her aspirations to become a lawyer, Sarah remarks that the Graveyard of Failed Hopes is “an all-female establishment.” What was your experience of reading Kidd’s portrayal of women’s lives in the nineteenth century?

3. In what ways does Sarah struggle against the dictates of her family, society and religion? What sort of risk and courage does this call for?

4. The story of The Invention of Wings includes a number of physical objects that have a special significance for the characters: Sarah’s fleur de lis button, Charlotte’s story quilt, the rabbit-head cane that Handful receives from Goodis, and the spirit tree. Choose one or more of these objects and discuss their significance in the novel.

5. Were you aware of the role that Sarah and Angelina Grimke played in abolition and women’s rights? Have women’s achievements in history been lost or overlooked? What do you think it takes to be a reformer today?

6. How would you describe Sarah and Angelina’s unusual bond? Do you think either one of them could have accomplished what they did on their own? Have you known women who experienced this sort of relationship as sisters?

7. Contrast Handful’s relationship with her mother with the relationship between Sarah and the elder Mary Grimké. How are the two younger women formed—and malformed—by their mothers?

8. Kidd portrays an array of male characters in the novel: Sarah’s father; Sarah’s brother Thomas; Theodore Weld; Denmark Vesey; Goodis Grimke, Israel Morris, Burke Williams. Some of them are men of their time, some are ahead of their time. Which of these male characters did you find most compelling?

9. How has your understanding of slavery been changed by reading The Invention of Wings? What did you learn about it that you didn’t know before? Were you aware of the extent that slaves resisted? Why do you think the myth of the happy, compliant slave endured? What were some of the more inventive or cunning ways that Charlotte, Handful and other characters rebelled and subverted the system?

10. Sarah believed she could not have a vocation and a marriage, both. Do you think she made the right decision in turning down Israel’s proposal? How does her situation compare to Angelina’s marriage to Theodore? In what way are women today still asking the question of whether they can have it all?

Interview with Sue Monk Kidd (I just pasted a paragraph or two below from the complete answer)

Read more at:  http://suemonkkidd.com/books/the-invention-of-wings/reading-groups-2/

2. The Invention of Wings is voiced by two verbally powerful narrators: Sarah Grimké, who is inspired by the real-life abolitionist and feminist of the same name, and Hetty Handful, who is the child of your imagination. How does creating a character from the ground up differ from adapting a real person into a fictional persona, and which do you find more challenging?

One of the more unexpected things I experienced in writing the novel was that Handful’s character and voice came to me with more ease than Sarah’s. Handful would talk, talk, talk. Often I couldn’t keep up with her. When I first began writing in her voice, the only parameters I gave myself were that I didn’t want her voice to be weighed down with dialect and it must have traces of humor. I’d read a great many first person slave narratives from the nineteenth century, as well as the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s, and I had the voices of African-American women from my own childhood still resonating in me, along with the those of the quilting women of Gee’s Bend, but I think what made Handful so accessible to me was her free, unrestricted reign in my imagination. She did not come with the fetters of a previous history. She could speak and do as she wished.

Sarah, on the other hand, came with a big historical script, and that turned out to be one of my biggest challenges. I revered Sarah’s history to the point I initially became boxed-in by it. In the beginning, I had a hard time letting her venture outside factual borders. The longer she was cooped up by the facts, the quieter she got. I’d read the Grimke sisters’ diaries and essays, and while they gave me an extraordinary glimpse into their lives, their writing was rendered in nineteenth century language, wrapped in rhetoric, piety and stilted phrases.

3. What was the process of writing the novel like for you? How did you go about your research? You’ve commented that you went further out on the writing limb with this novel than you’ve been before.  What did you mean?

It took four years to write The Invention of Wings— three and a half years of writing, following six months of research. I’m not the fastest writer on the block. I spent a lot of protracted time sitting at the computer screen just contemplating the story, letting my imagination browse, trying to connect little dots, allowing ideas and revelations to come to me. Plus, I was constantly stopping to look up something in a book—what sort of mourning dress did women wear in 1819? What book titles would be on a library shelf in 1804? What were the emancipation laws in South Carolina? When I wasn’t ruminating or scouring books, I was writing, and then rewriting as I went, rarely moving to the next chapter until I felt I’d rendered the last one as close as possible to the final draft. I would easily spend an entire day tinkering with the prose on a single page.

4. For us, one of the pivotal moments in the story comes when Handful reads the ledger on which she and her mother are listed and appraised as part of the Grimké family’s property.  What does that moment in the novel mean to you?

During my research, I came upon a thesis about the Grimké’s Charleston house that included a transcript of a legally executed inventory and appraisal of all the “goods and chattels” in the house at the time of Sarah’s father’s death in 1819. As I read through this long and detailed list, I was shocked to come upon the names of seventeen slaves. They were inserted between a Brussels staircase carpet and eleven yards of cotton and flax.

5. The Invention of Wings is about several simultaneous struggles for freedom. How did you develop the movements toward freedom in Handful’s and Sarah’s characters?

Handful and Sarah are both imprisoned in their own particular way. As a white woman in South Carolina in the early 1800s, even a privileged one, Sarah’s life was vastly limited. Women had few rights, not to property or even to their own children. Essentially, they were the property of their husbands, and their purpose in life was to marry, have children, and live their lives within the domestic sphere. And yet, their lack of freedom could not compare to the horrific subjugation of enslaved women, whose entire lives were determined by their owners and whose suffering was infinitely worse. I felt like the primary thing I had to do was never lose sight of that.

6.  Sarah shared a close friendship with Lucretia Mott. What motivated you to include this relationship in the story?

It was a surprise for me when Lucretia Mott turned up as a character. I knew from my research that Mott, a famous abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer herself, had attended the same meetinghouse in Philadelphia as Sarah, at least for a time, but I didn’t know she would step into the pages of my story until the very moment she did so. It was a relief to me when she turned up. At this juncture, Sarah is alone in the North, and the only female presence in her life is Israel’s sister, who is hardly a friend to her. Inevitably, a community of women will show up in my fiction, even if it’s a community of two.

7.  One of the more unique and striking aspects of the novel is Charlotte’s story quilt. What drew you to include it in the story? What meaning did you want it to carry?

I was inspired by the quilts of Harriet Powers, who was born into slavery in 1837 in Georgia. She used West African applique technique and designs to tell stories, mostly about Biblical events, legends, and astronomical occurrences. Each of the squares on her two surviving quilts is a masterpiece of art and narration. After viewing her quilt in the archives of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., it seemed more than plausible to me that many enslaved women, who were forbidden to read and write, would have devised subversive ways to voice themselves, to keep their memories alive, and to preserve their African heritage.

8. How did you go about writing the complicated relationship between Handful and Sarah?

Their relationship is disfigured by so many things: guilt, shame, pity, resentment, defiance, estrangement. I tried to create a relationship between them that allows for all of that, yet also has room for surprise, redemption, and even love. Someone who read an early copy of the novel commented that the two women create a sisterhood against all odds. I think they do—an uneasy, but saving sisterhood.

9. Sarah Grimké was both attracted by and repelled by organized religion. What role does it play in Sarah’s life? How, if at all, does religion influence Handful? How would you describe Handful’s spirituality?

Both Sarahs, the one in history and the one in my story, carry on an intricate relationship with church and faith that was as conflicted as it was compatible. In the novel, it begins as twelve-year-old Sarah sits in church listening to the minister defend slavery. I felt it was important to acknowledge that slavery was supported not just by the government, but largely by the Church. The scene in St. Philip’s precipitates Sarah’s first crisis of faith. Did I make up my God, she asks, or did the reverend make up his?  Quakers gave her a way out of the South, just as the Presbyterians had given her a way out of society.

As a child, Handful compared God to master Grimké and wondered if there was a black God, too. Like many slaves in Charleston, she participated in house devotions, which helped to Christianize the slaves, but it was also a means of controlling them. Accentuating Bible verses on obedience, submission, and long-suffering was common. On this score, though, Handful learned how to give almost as good as she got. She learned the “Jesus-act” from her mother, which she used to her advantage. It got her permission to attend the African church, where she hoped to obtain information about her mother, but surprisingly enough to her, she found herself drawn into the church’s message of hope and deliverance.  She found strength in the solidarity of the congregation. But I think, at heart, Handful was an animist, finding her connection with the divine through natural objects like the water she watched with such devotion from the alcove, making up songs to it. Her belief that God animated nature seems present, too, in her devotion to the spirit tree.

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather

Some of our conversation and thoughts:
Is it Tom Outland who is responsible for so many broken relationships within the St. Peter family, or is it the money that flowed from his discovery?  And if he represents “good” and the money represents “bad,” then isn’t he flawed since the money came from his discovery?  Also, since he had the intellectual relationship with St. Peter, didn’t he cause that marriage to fail since it took away Lillian’s role?  Then again, everyone should have more than one person that is their “everything,” so Lillian should not have expected to be an intellectual equal in the marriage.  But what if she did, and that was how she saw herself and their relationship?  Then he did break up the marriage.  But marriages do change over time!

Cather is known for romanticizing nature, art and intellectualism, and seeing them as more important (inherently superior) than science, technology, money and materialism.  In some ways, she is a female version of Henry David Thoreau.  Art, religion, and history are treated as part of nature and science and technology master nature.  There is a need to be authentic and “go with it,” which is more spiritual, than continuing an education.

“Cather’s take on nature in the novel is that nature definitely has the power to uplift the human spirit, but that it needs the artistic hand of man to reach its full potential. St. Peter demonstrates this when he observes an artistic display of autumn flora in his drawing room; the plants are beautiful, but they reach their full glory when picked from nature and displayed in contrast to the deeply-colored furniture in the room; it is man that has given nature full scope to inspire awe. Also, Cather makes clear that the cliff-dwellers, who lived in harmony with their natural surroundings, namely the caves and shelves of rock in the Blue Mesa, reached a high level of cultural achievement, and that their accommodation and appreciation of nature made this achievement possible.”

We talked about how the novel seems to focus on the ritual and tradition of religion and not the belief system – that traditional societies are organized through spiritual beliefs which teach how to treat one another and explain the “unexplainable.” One on line commenter says, “Professor St. Peter’s take on religion, which is widely assumed to be Cather’s as well, posits that religion is one of the higher preoccupations of modern human society. Religion has the capacity to encourage people to focus on the great, unsolvable mysteries of life rather than mundane details like money or creature comfort. Religion’s power to elevate human intellectual activity is why it should be revered in modern civilization. Closely related to this point of view is Cather’s embrace of Episcopalianism and Catholicism; though she was not religious in terms of belief, she respected the “pomp and circumstance” that filled Catholic and Episcopal services as a natural outgrowth of other positive societal influences, namely art and history.”

Original Discussion Questions:

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1.  Cather, and Cather scholars, have described The Professor’s House as a tale of the ravages the onward march of science and technology make on the delicate forms of art and history. Where does true cultural achievement lie?
2.  Cather makes much of the affinity of minds between the Professor and Tom Outland. Is this affinity based mainly on their academic interests, namely their shared love of the Southwest and its history and culture, on their similar cast of mind, that is, their simultaneous single-minded devotion to their work and unwillingness to interrupt that devotion for the sake of their families, or on their ultimate rejection of the material rewards of their intellectual labor?
3.  Does desire truly foretell achievement, as Cather says? Could one foretell Outland’s achievement by his desires? Could one foretell the Professor’s?
4.  Is it Tom Outland who is responsible for so many broken relationships within the St. Peter family, or is it the money that flowed from his discovery?
5.  Is the Professor’s relationship with Lillian salvageable at the end of the novel?
6.  Outland’s offhand remark in Chapter 4 of his story to the effect that an archaeologist would have been able to tell a lot from the remains he found but that the remains never reached an archaeologist brings up a question: why does Outland think he is entitled to excavate these ruins? He, after all, doesn’t even have a high school education.
7. Cather is known for romanticizing nature, art and intellectualism. Is she perhaps a bit too scornful of how most people live: keeping up appearances, getting ahead at work, climbing the social ladder? Or is her critique, through Outland’s eyes, fair, given Outland’s background, temperament and inclinations? Using the example of the Bixbys, answer this question.

The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman

We talked about how the novel is framed by fires and how fire destroys, and then creates space for rebirth and renewal.

Women who were disfigured had very few options. Coralie keeps Maureen, her maid/mother, in the dark about her night swims and her father’s sexual exploitation. Maureen would probably not have been able to protect Coralie if she had known.

Hoffman’s portrait of New York City is of a rapidly evolving, volatile place. The historical details of the Shirt Waist Coat fire stand out most vividly.

Original Discussion Questions:

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1. The novel is framed by two spectacular fires. Why do you think the author chose to structure the novel this way? What effect does each fire have on the major characters and on the people of Manhattan and Brooklyn?
2. How does Raymond Morris, known as the Wolfman, change Coralie’s perception of her father and their circumscribed world? What parallels does Coralie find between her own life and those of the characters in Jane Eyre?
3. Why does Coralie keep Maureen in the dark about her night swims and her father’s sexual exploitation? Would Maureen have been able to protect Coralie if she had known?
4. Why does Eddie feel compelled to solve the mystery of Hannah Weiss’s disappearance? What makes him a good “finder”?
5. What did you make of the living wonders at The Museum of Extraordinary Things? How did their treatment differ at Dreamland? What enables some of the wonders, such as the Butterfly Girl, to achieve a semblance of a normal life?
6. Consider the role that animals play in the novel. Why does Coralie save the tortoise? What is the symbolism of the trout that Eddie cannot kill? In what other instances do animals reveal something about a character?
7. In thinking of her father, Coralie says “perhaps there is evil in certain people, a streak of meanness that cannot be erased by circumstance or fashioned into something brand new by love” (246). Do you think a person can be innately evil? Are the morally ambiguous actions of other characters, such as Eddie or the liveryman, redeemed?
8. Hoffman’s portrait of New York City is of a rapidly evolving, volatile place. Which historical details stood out most vividly to you? If you’ve spent time in New York, was it hard to imagine the city as it was in the early-twentieth-century? What places are currently undergoing similar transformations or experiencing similar tensions?

Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The author asks a simple question, “What do we eat for dinner tonight?” and its follow up, “Where are we going to get the food?”  He then traces three food chains from the natural environment to the family meal explaining evolution (natural selection as it relates to plant and animals), growth (or food, as well as industry), and government involvement (how rules help some and strap others):  1) the industrialized, corn-fed, hormone and antibiotic treated meal; 2) the farmer, organic, unnecessary government-ruled, meal; and 3) the hunted and gathered meal from the wild.  The story is fascinating in how much we don’t know about government subsidies and how those affect the market and treatment of plants and animals.  He also explains how our food has changed to have less nutrients and its impact on obesity. In the end, Pollan doesn’t say one meal is better or worse, but he does say once in a while we can eat the McDonald’s meal, but we should also, once in a while, eat the hunted and gathered meal (the “perfect meal”) as well.

Dirty Love by Andre Dubus

--> Dirty Love by Andre Dubus PreReading Questions

What insights does Dubus show us about human relationships with others and impressions of ourselves? How does sexuality play its part?

- FYI his website says he will be at Brookline Booksmith on June 4 in Boston, MA.

Quick Summary from Goodreads

In this heartbreakingly beautiful book of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love.

Thoughts from Our Book Group

- Not so “dirty” as “messy.”

- Some critics say the characters weren’t “real,” but we thought the stories rang true.

- Dubus doesn't feel he has to solve everyone’s personal problems, endings are left hanging, just like life.

- He has insight into damaged relationships and real people begging for love.

- Beautiful writer with wonderful sentences.

Narratives (summaries from http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_24460781/review-andre-dubus-examines-damaged-relationships-dirty-love, http://andredubus.com/dirtylove.html, and http://andredubus.com/dirtylove.html)

1.  “Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed," the opening story, explores an unhappy marriage and two cheating spouses. On the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, a controlling manager, Mark Welch discovers his wife’s infidelity after twenty-five years of marriage.  His wife, Laura, is having an affair with a banker. Although occasionally picking up and hefting a piece of lead pipe, Mark ultimately finds himself powerless to change the circumstances of his life.

- Reflecting back, we noticed that this first story sets the stage with names and relationships that are picked up throughout the novel.

- This felt more like a writing technique, than a planned integration.  He probably had separate stories and reused characters from one story to the next so there would be more cohesion between them.

2.  In “Marla,” an overweight young woman, Marla, gains a romantic partner but loses her innocence. She is a bank teller who feels her life slipping away from her. She begins an affair with a 37-year-old engineer whose passions tend toward video games and keeping his house pathologically clean.  She complains about her live-in boyfriend's playing video games: "Marla felt the same bruised emptiness that she did after an action movie, and she'd kiss Dennis on the forehead and leave the room while he kept playing."

- We talked about feeling so bad about oneself that one “settles” into an unhappy situation.

- Fear keeps us from changing our circumstances; nothing better will come along.

3. A philandering bartender/aspiring poet, Robert Doucette is married to Althea, a sweet but reticent upholsterer. In the final months of Althea's pregnancy, Robert has hot sex with Jackie, a waitress at the restaurant, and Althea finds this out and simultaneously goes into labor.

- We talked about how the waitress knew exactly what kind of man Robert was, even though she knew him for many years less than his wife.

4.  In the last story, "Dirty Love," a teenage girl tries to escape the notoriety of appearing in a sex video that goes viral. Devon is an 18-year-old waitress at the tavern where Robert works. To get away from an abusive father, she lives with a considerate, widowed great-uncle Francis, but she has to deal with the unintended consequences of an untoward sexual act that was disseminated through social media. Her parents can't get past their anger about the sex tape.  When she finds love with an Iraq PTSD vet she’s met by surfing the web: "Francis has seen it over and over again, the girl in the corner whose new radiance shines not from the boy who has found her but from the chance to direct all the love that's been pooling inside her and now it's a warm flowing stream."

- We had the most empathy for Devon.  She got trapped by lack of privacy (which got us thinking about the “Google” books).

At Fault by Kate Chopin

Themes:
• A story of morality.
• The pressure to conform to society's rules.

• Is giving up your desires (i.e.: for love) the "right" choice?

• Regrets that come with life choices

Could we live during that time period, given who we are now?  How would we been seen through the eyes of the time?

• We'd probably be considered a witch

• We might initiate and be confident for a little while, but then fall in line with social norms

• We would certainly have limited access to resources, which made this book so interesting, since she owned her own plantation

About the author
• This was the author's first book, and yet the writing style and prose was complex with rich vocabulary. 
• We wondered about the vocabulary and thought that it might have been the language of the time, more formal, more thought about the words used in conversation.
• We also noted that it could just have been the author's writing style.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman

Here are the questions we used to whet our appetite.

1. What preconceived notions of good and evil do we know?
2. Do you think "God" has a divine plan?
3. Do you think Adam/Warlock would have been different if they were nurtured by different folks?
4. How does the humor work with the subject matter?
5. What do you think is the main idea behind the novel? Do you think it works?
6. Do you think that Aziraphale and Crowley are distinctly either good or evil? For that matter, do you think any character is either good or evil? Why or why not?
7. Do you think Adam would have ended up differently had he not been lost? How?

Most of us liked this book (one of us did not)

Got going for it…

British humor

Monte Python style

Funny

Interesting idea

Pushes the nature vs. nurture question

Dog the dog was interesting and funny

The witch, Agnes Nutter, was a cool character

Some great quotes, like “The men in the room suddenly realized that they did not want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close. And as she held her sword, she smiled like a knife.”

Made it difficult…

British humor

Monte Python style

Many characters and names

Each character, even the devil’s nuns, had its own separate story line, and they also crossed over to the main plot

It was hard to keep track of present and past activities in the timeline of events

Other people found this book quite funny: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12067.Good_Omens

Study Guide and Plot Summary is here: http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-good-omens/
"Good Omens is the story of an angel and a demon who are both trying to do their jobs that are part of the Great Plan. Although Aziraphale and Crowley are adversaries by nature and profession, their relationship develops into a friendship merely because of the time spent together over thousands of years. In this unlikely pairing, compromises are made between the two of them so that they can both appear to be accomplishing their missions without overcoming the other too much. When the birth of the Antichrist occurs, they agree to work together and try to see if their influences on the child have any effect. By the time they locate the correct child, it is almost too late as Armageddon is about to begin. Events unfold and the world is saved. At the end, Aziraphale and Crowley wonder if their involvement had any effect."

A good blog review here:  http://theblogwasbetter.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/january-2013-discussion-good-omens/

Some quotes below and more here http://fish.cx/quotes/good_omens.txt and here: http://www.lspace.org/books/pqf/good-omens.html

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."

"Anyway, why're we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that." 2

"I told you. On his eleventh birthday. At three o'clock in the afternoon. It'll sort of home in on him. He's supposed to name it himself...

"Well, Hell was worse, of course, by definition. But Crowley remembered what heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn't get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell."

"Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole." 

"In fact, very few people on the face of the planet know that the very shape of the M25 forms the sigil *odegra* in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, and means 'Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds'." 

"If Adam had been in full possesion of his powers in those days, the Young's Christmas would have been spoiled by the discovery of a dead fat man upside down in their central-heating duct." 

"... the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. (This is not actually true. The Road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen. On weekends many of the younger demons go ice-skating down it.)" 

"I mean, if it takes a red sky at night to delight a sailor, what does it take to amuse the man who operates the computers on a supertanker? Or is it shepherds who are delighted at night? I can never remember." 

"So computers are the tools of the Devil? thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of *somebody*, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him." 

"Death straightened up. He appeared to be listening intently. It was anyone's guess what he listened with." 

"'We seem to have survived,' he said. 'Just imagine how terrible it might have been if we'd been at all competent.'" 

"Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide." 

"Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A." 

"Jaime had never realised that trees made a sound when they grew, and no-one else had realised it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves of twenty-four hours from peak to peak. Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is /vrooom/."

So Far from Story Street: A Novel by Jeanne LaVallee

This piece of historical fiction, based on a true story, tells the tale of a young American soldier during WWI:  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storystreet/so-far-from-story-street-a-novel

My great uncle, Joseph Arthur, was born in Salem, Massachusetts during the Industrial Revolution.  When Arthur was twenty years old, he was drafted into the campaign against Pancho Villa on the Mexican border.  And although he returned from the desert unscathed--but forever changed, he was then called back into service to join the Yankee Division of the American Expeditionary Forces lead by General ‘Black Jack’ Pershing in France in 1917.  From this campaign, he was not among the returning veterans. 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Here’s a headline summary of the book we discussed for March, “Through it is often categorized as a coming-of-age novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is much more than that. Its richly-plotted narrative of three generations in a poor but proud American family offers a detailed and unsentimental portrait of urban life at the beginning of the century.” 

Here’s a little more of the plot, “The story begins in 1912, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where eleven-year-old Francie Nolan and her younger brother, Neeley, are spending a blissful Saturday collecting rags, paper, metal, rubber, and other scrap to sell to the junk man for a few pennies. Half of any money they get goes into the tin can bank that is nailed to the floor in the back corner of a closet in their tenement flat. This bank, a shared resource among everyone in the family, is returned to time and again throughout the novel, and becomes a recurring symbol of the Nolan's self-reliance, struggles, and dreams.  Their mother Katie scrubs floors and works as a janitor to provide the family with free lodging. She is the primary breadwinner because her husband Johnny, a singing waiter, is often drunk and out of work. Yet there is no dissension in the Nolan household. Katie married a charming dreamer and she accepts her fate, but she vows that things will be better for her children. Her dream is that they will go to college and that Neeley will become a doctor. Intelligent and bookish, Francie seems destined to fulfill this ambition—Neeley less so.” (From the publisher.)

“The author, Betty Smith, the daughter of German immigrants, grew up poor in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. After stints writing features for newspapers, reading plays for the Federal Theater Project, and acting in summer stock, Smith moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina under the auspices of the W.P.A. While there in 1943, she published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, her first novel. Smith's other novels include Tomorrow Will be Better (1947), Maggie-Now, (1958) and Joy in the Morning (1963). She also had a long career as a dramatist, writing one-act and full-length plays for which she received both the Rockefeller Fellowship and the Dramatist Guild Fellowship. She died in 1972.” (From the publisher.)

We talked about how Francie’s story was originally the memoir of Betty Smith, but her publishers asked her to fictionalize her account.  We agreed that the book does read as “real” and here is an excerpt that shows how real it is, “Having married early George H. E. Smith, a fellow Brooklynite, she moved with him to Ann Arbor, Michigan, while he pursued his law degree at the University of Michigan. At this time, she gave birth to two girls and waited until they were in school so she could complete her higher education. Although Smith had not finished high school, the university allowed her to enroll in classes anyway. There she honed her skills in journalism, literature, writing, and drama, winning a prestigious Hopwood Award. She was a student in the classes of Professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe.”  Both Francie and Betty Smith did not finish high school.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book Discussion Questions and Quotes

1. In a particularly revealing chapter of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie's teacher dismisses her essays about everyday life among the poor as "sordid," and, indeed, many of the novel's characters seem to harbor a sense of shame about their poverty. But they also display a remarkable self-reliance (Katie, for example, says she would kill herself and her children before accepting charity). How and why have our society's perceptions of poverty changed - for better or worse - during the last one hundred years?

*  The Nolans cannot afford to throw anything at all away, and yet, Katie allows one exception – to throw away the coffee.  “I think it's good that people like us can waste something once in a while and get the feeling of how it would be have lots of money and not have to worry about scrounging.”

*  This pride is passed on to Francie.  She writes about the poverty, is told to stop by her teachers, and perseveres anyway, not giving up on reading and writing.

*  “There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.”
*  “The difference between rich and poor", said Francie, "is that the poor do everything with thier own hands and the rich hire hands to do things.”

2. Some critics have argued that many of the characters in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn can be dismissed as stereotypes, exhibiting quaint characteristics or representing pat qualities of either nobility or degeneracy. Is this a fair criticism?

*  “Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.”

* Our conversation revolved around other stories and experiences we knew about poverty and how this book was spot on and not stereotypical.

4. The women in the Nolan/Rommely clan exhibit most of the strength and, whenever humanly possible, control the family's destiny. In what ways does Francie continue this legacy?

*  Without Johnny, Francie would have nothing beautiful. In a way, he always delivers the song to her, instead of to the sea.  Like his songs, Johnny’s dreams have no grounding in reality.

*  Katie sends her kids alone to get vaccinated, knowing that they must learn the ways of a cruel world. Johnny just wants to show Francie as much beauty as he can.

*  “A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the boot-strap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion in his heart for those has left behind him in the cruel up climb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way.”  (These lines come right after the doctor administering Francie's vaccination makes his cruel comments about the filth of poor people. Francie sees the nurse as a mother-figure, and keeps thinking she will defend her.)

5. What might Francie's obsession with order - from systematically reading the books in the library from A through Z, to trying every flavor ice cream soda - in turn say about her circumstances and her dreams?

*  “Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.”

*  “She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more...It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.”

6. Although it is written in the third person, there can be little argument that the narrative is largely from Francie's point of view. How would the book differ if it was told from Neeley's perspective?

*  Katie chooses to love Nolan instead of Francie, and Francie learns to live with it.

*  “But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.”

*  “She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.”

*  “From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again. ”

*  “All my life I've been lonely. I've been lonely at crowded parties. I've been lonely in the middle of kissing a girl and I've been lonely at camp with hundreds of fellows around. But now I'm not lonely any more.”
*  “Francie is smart, she thought. She must go to high school and maybe beyond that. She's a learner and she'll be somebody someday. But when she's educated, she will grow away from me. Why, she's growing away from me now. She does not love me the way the boy loves me. I feel her turn away from me. She does not understand me. All she understands is that I don't understand her. Maybe when she gets education, she will be ashamed of me - the way I talk. But she will have too much character to show it. Instead she will try to make me different. She will come to see me and try to make me live in a better way and I will be mean to her because I'll know she's above me. She will figure out too much about things as she grows older; she'll get to know too much for her own happiness.”

One theme we discussed is how there are “firsts and lasts.”

*  “I know that's what people say-- you'll get over it. I'd say it, too. But I know it's not true. Oh, you’ll be happy again, never fear. But you won't forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.”
*  “To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”

Another was making your own happiness

*  “People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.”

And another was the symbolism of the tree.

* “The one tree in Francie's yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenement districts.”

* “But this tree in the yard-this tree that men chopped down...this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up it's stump-this tree lived!  It lived! And nothing could destroy it.”