Riverview Book Club News & Notes

Vote for your top 10 choices, in order. Email to Michele at timmj @ comcast.net or drop it off at her home at 636 Cherokee (across from the tennis courts). Please submit your vote by Sept. 1.

Please note the length and availability of each book. SPPL is St. Paul Public Library, Dakota (DCPL) is also noted, and Ramsey County (RCPL) if necessary, are as well as whether there’s an audio book available, and if it’s Non Fiction.

A Marriage Bureau for Rich People by Farahad Zama 304 p.
SPPL: 5 DCPL: 4 RCPL: 1 Audio: RCPL
The customers who visit Mr. Ali’s arranged-marriage bureau in contemporary India are mostly pragmatists: they look for mates based on height, complexion, caste, economic status and religion. As business picks up, Mr. Ali, a Muslim, takes on a young assistant, Aruna, a poor Hindu girl, who helps him formulate happy unions. While the bureau prospers, Mr. Ali and his wife contend with their headstrong son, a human rights advocate who worries them constantly, and Aruna faces her dismal home life and a handsome young client who may want more from her than lists of potential matches.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 336 p.
SPPL: 30+ DCPL: 74! Audio: DCPL
The classic novel—a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man’s struggle for justice—but the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun A Personal History of Violence in America by Geoffrey Canada (Non-F) 192 p.
SPPL: 2 DCPL: 0 RCPL: 1 no Audio
Canada knows the world of inner-city children intimately, for he grew up in some of the most dangerous areas of the Bronx. As a young child, he learned that only those who can fight will survive. When he reached adolescence, the knife was the weapon of choice, but for today’s youth, which he calls “the handgun generation,” it is the pistol. He explains exactly what growing up in this war zone does to the psyche: fear, doubt and anger crowd the mind, driving out love, friendship and laughter. There is no post-traumatic stress syndrome, because there is no “post.” Greedy drug dealers and gun manufacturers, he says, by flooding the inner cities with their products, have made urban violence, which always existed, more deadly. He has a series of recommendations, rooted in his own experience as a child and as an adult, that are thoroughly convincing.

The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being by Derek Bok (Non-F) 272 p.
SPPL: 1 DCPL: 0 RCPL: 1 no Audio
Delving into the burgeoning field of happiness research, former president of Harvard University Bok (The State of the Nation) sifts through scientific studies on how societal well-being indications can and should be used to shape social and political policy. . . . Bok’s arguments on how good government, access to education, and adequate child care make for a pleasanter society are incontrovertible, and he initiates an important, jargon-free discussion of American public policy, especially when its aims contradict or diminish the public weal.

Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver 576 p.
SPPL: 6 DCPL: 19 Audio: DCPL
Missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and 4 daughters are off to the Belgian Congo in 1959. Nathan has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: “We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle,” says one of Nathan’s daughters. But of course it isn’t long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they’ve arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan’s fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air.

Power of One by Bryce Courtenay Non-F 544 p.
SPPL: 6 DCPL: 3 RCPL: 3 no Audio
Episodic and bursting with incident, this sprawling memoir of an English boy’s lonely childhood in South Africa during WWII pays moderate attention to questions of race but concerns itself primarily with epic melodrama.

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs (Non-F) 352 p.
SPPL: 10 DCPL: 18 Audio: SPPL, DCPL
“Bookman gave me attention. We would go for long walks and talk about all sorts of things. Like how awful the nuns were in his Catholic school when he was a kid and how you have to roll your lips over your teeth when you give a blowjob,” writes Burroughs about his affair, at 13, with the 33-year-old son of his mother’s psychiatrist. That his mother sent him to live with her shrink shows that this is not just another 1980s coming-of-age story. The son of a poet with a “wild mental imbalance” and a professor with a “pitch-black dark side,” Burroughs is sent to live with Dr. Finch when his parents separate and his mother comes out as a lesbian. While life in the Finch household is often overwhelming, Burroughs learns “your life [is] your own and no adult should be allowed to shape it for you.” There are wonderful moments of paradoxical humor as well as some horrifying moments, as when one of Finch’s daughters has a semi-breakdown and thinks that her cat has come back from the dead.

Haunted Ground by Erin Hart 352 p.
SPPL: 10 DCPL: 32 Audio: SPPL
Cutting turf in the peat bogs of his Ireland farm, Brendan McGann finds the perfectly preserved head of a woman. So begins Hart’s thriller, which follows archeologist Cormac Maguire, maverick local detective Garret Devaney, and Nora Gavin, an American anatomist lecturing at Trinity College Medical School, as they investigate the farmer’s grisly finding, which could date back quite far, given that peat bogs can preserve bodies for centuries. Cormac and Nora stay in the house of Hugh Osborne, the owner of a decaying manor who also happens to be the prime suspect in the unsolved disappearance of his wife and infant son two years ago. Osborne’s dour cousin, Lucy Osborne, is the housekeeper, and her son, 17-year-old Jeremy, who drinks too much, also lurks around the estate. Nora finds a filthy, dead crow on her bed, as well as broken glass littering her bathroom floor. What’s going on in this malevolent household?

Half The Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn (Non-F) 320 p.
SPPL: 10 DCPL: 10 RCPL: 3 Audio: SPPL , RCPL
New York Times columnist Kristof and his wife, WuDunn, a former Times reporter, make a brilliantly argued case for investing in the health and autonomy of women worldwide. More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century, they write, detailing the rampant gendercide in the developing world, particularly in India and Pakistan. Far from merely making moral appeals, the authors posit that it is impossible for countries to climb out of poverty if only a fraction of women (9% in Pakistan, for example) participate in the labor force. China’s meteoric rise was due to women’s economic empowerment: 80% of the factory workers in the Guangdong province are female; six of the 10 richest self-made women in the world are Chinese. The authors reveal local women to be the most effective change agents.

A Walk in The Woods by Bill Bryson (Non-F) 397 p.
SPPL: 9 DCPL: 22 Audio: SPPL , DCPL
Returning to the U.S. after 20 years in England, Iowa native Bryson
decided to reconnect with his mother country by hiking the length of the 2100-mile Appalachian Trail. Awed by merely the camping section of his local sporting goods store, he nevertheless plunges into the wilderness and emerges with a consistently comical account of a neophyte woodsman learning hard lessons about self-reliance. Bryson carries himself in an irresistibly bewildered manner, accepting each new calamity with wonder and hilarity. He reviews the characters of the AT (as the trail is called), from a pack of incompetent Boy Scouts to a perpetually lost geezer named Chicken John. Most amusing is his cranky, crude and inestimable companion, Katz, a reformed substance abuser who once had single-handedly “become, in effect, Iowa’s drug culture.” The uneasy but always entertaining relationship between Bryson and Katz keeps their walk interesting, even during the flat stretches.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold 368 p.
SPPL: 10+ DCPL: 41! Audio: SPPL, DCPL
The novel begins swiftly. Susie Salmon announces, “I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” Susie is taking a shortcut through a cornfield when a neighbor lures her to his hideaway. The description of the crime is chilling, but never vulgar, and Sebold maintains this delicate balance between homely and horrid as she depicts the progress of grief for Susie’s family and friends. She captures the odd alliances forged and the relationships ruined: the shattered father who buries his sadness trying to gather evidence, the mother who escapes “her ruined heart, in merciful adultery.” At the same time, Sebold brings to life an entire suburban community, from the mortician’s son to the handsome biker dropout who quietly helps investigate Susie’s murder. Much as this novel is about “the lovely bones” growing around Susie’s absence,
it is also full of suspense and written in lithe, resilient prose that
by itself delights.

The Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman 238 p
SPPL: 10 DCPL: 12 RCPL: 8 no Audio
12 lush and lilting interconnected stories, all taking place in the same Cape Cod farmhouse over the course of generations. Built during British colonial days by a man who dies tragically on a final fishing trip, Blackbird House is home, in the following generation, to a man who lost his leg to a giant halibut. In the late 19th century, Blackbird inhabitant Violet Cross has a brief affair with a Harvard scholar who inevitably betrays her; in the story that follows, she pushes her son, Lion West, to Harvard in 1908, which in turn launches him to life—and early death—in England. Lion’s orphaned son, Lion West Jr., serves in World War II and meets a German-Jewish woman spirited enough to stand up to his possessive grandmother Violet.

Lives of the Circus Animals by Christopher Bram 352 p
SPPL: 2 DCPL: 1 RCPL: 0 no Audio:
Endearing, aging gay actor Henry Lewse thinks he wants sex and not love, yet he is drawn to Toby, a very good aspiring young actor, who still nurses a breakup with Jessica Doyle’s successful playwright brother, Caleb. Fag hag Jessica, meanwhile, can’t seem to let herself fall for failed actor Frank, the one man who completely adores her. Ascerbic Times second-string theater critic Kenneth hates his life and, so his therapist suggests, takes it out in his reviews, most recently on Caleb’s most recent play. Which brings us to the pistol and Caleb’s mother. From Henry to Jessica to her lovable, slightly off-kilter mother, who has (fortunately) very bad aim, Bram gives us characters to love for their humanity and vulnerability from the outset of a sweetly funny and engaging novel that makes the contemporary New York theater scene spring to life in an imaginative unfolding of the interrelationships of fascinating, often eccentric, people being themselves.

The Wild Blue The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 by Stephen Ambrose (Non-F) 299 p
SPPL: 8 DCPL: 11 RCPL: 10 Audio: SPPL, DCPL
George McGovern and the young crew of his B-24 bomber, volunteers all, are the focus of this vivid study of the air war in Europe. The B-24 bomber, dubbed the Liberator, was designed to drop high explosives on enemy positions well behind the front lines–and especially on the German capital, Berlin. Unheated, drafty, and only lightly armored, the planes were dangerous places to be, and indeed, only 50 percent of their crews survived to the war’s end. Dangerous or not, they did their job, delivering thousand- pound bombs to targets deep within Germany and Austria. In his fast-paced narrative, Ambrose follows many other flyers (including the Tuskegee Airmen, the African American pilots who gave the B-24s essential fighter support on some of their most dangerous missions) as they brave the long odds against them, facing moments of glory and terror alike.

The Wednesdays Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton 306 pages
SPPL: 1 DCPL: 9 RCPL: 6 no Audio
A group of mothers convene in a Palo Alto park and share their changing lives as the late 1960s counterculture blossoms around them. Linda is a runner who tracks women’s progress at the Olympics. Brett has one eye on the moon, where men are living out her astronaut dreams. Southern belle Kath isn’t convinced she has dreams outside the confines of her marriage (but she’s open to persuasion), while quiet Ally only hopes for what the other women already have: a child. Frankie, a Chicago transplant who has followed her computer genius husband to a nascent Silicon Valley, is the story’s narrator and the ladies’ ringleader, inspiring them all to follow her dream of becoming a writer. They write in moments snatched from their household chores and share their stories in the park.

Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle 355 p.
SPPL: 2 DCPL: 7 RCPL: 6 Audio: DCPL, RCPL Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. From the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these 4 and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay 294 p.
SPPL: 8 DCPL: 37! Audio: DCPL
American Julia Jarmond, moved to Paris at 20, married the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, and had a daughter. Julia now writes for an American magazine that assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundups. Julia learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by his family when its Jewish occupants were deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel.

Dune by Frank Herbert. 535 p.
SPPL: 13 DCPL: 12 Audio: SPPL, DCPL
Set on the desert planet Arrakis, this is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family, and bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls (Non-F) 288 p.
SPPL: 13 DCPL: 23 Audio: DCPL
The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family’s nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. 270p
SPPL 10+ DCPL: 19 Audio: DCPL
At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. 153 p. (Non-F) SPPL: 17 DCPL: 9 RCPL: Audio: SPPL
The great-granddaughter of Iran’s last emperor and the daughter of ardent Marxists describes growing up in Tehran in a country plagued by political upheaval and vast contradictions between public and private life.

Snow Flower And The Secret Fan by Lisa See. 258 p.
SPPL: 13 DCPL: 19 Audio: DCPL
In seventeenth‐century China, three women become emotionally involved with “The Peony Pavilion,” a famed opera rumored to cause lovesickness and even death.

The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer. 370 p. (Non-F)
SPPL: 6 DCPL: 6 RCPL: Audio: SPPL, DCPL
In a memoir of growing up with a single mother, the author describes how he received valuable life lessons and friendship from an assortment of characters at the neighborhood bar, which provided him with a kind of fatherhood by committee.

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum. 482 p.
SPPL: 13 DCPL: 0 RCPL: 4 Audio: SPPL
A professor of German history begins a long journey back into a past she has pushed aside, returning to Germany to reopen the wounds of her own life‐‐as well as that of her mother‐‐as a child living in Nazi Germany.

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. 518 p.
SPPL: 1 DCPL: 48! Audio: SPPL, DCPL
Passionately in love, Clare and Henry vow to hold onto each other and their marriage as they struggle with the effects of Chrono‐Displacement Disorder, a condition that casts Henry involuntarily into the world of time travel.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. 350p.
SPPL: 10+ DCPL: 40 Audio: SPPL, DCPL
Ninetysomething‐year‐old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. 560 p.
SPPL: 1 DCPL: 20 RCPL: 15 Audio: SPPL, DCPL
Set in an Oz where a morose Wizard battles suicidal thoughts, the story of the green‐skinned Elphaba, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West, profiles her as an animal rights activist striving to avenge her dear sister’s death.

Saving Ceecee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffmann 306 p.
SPPL: 5 DCPL: 10 RCPL: 7 Audio: RCPL
Laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching, Beth Hoffman’s sparkling debut is, as Kristin Hannah says, “packed full of Southern charm, strong women, wacky humor, and good old-fashioned heart.” It is a novel that explores the indomitable strengths of female friendship and gives us the story of a young girl who loses one mother and finds many others.

Every Last One by Anna Quindlen
SPPL: 16 DCPL: 47! Audio: DCPL
Ultimately, in the hands of Anna Quindlen’s mesmerizing prose, Every Last One is a novel about facing every last one of the the things we fear most, about finding ways to navigate a road we never intended to travel, to live a life we never dreamed we’d have to live but must be brave enough to try.

30 Jul