Angie’s Comments (group member since Jun 30, 2011)

Angie’s comments from the Topeka & Shawnee Co. Public Library group.

Welcome! This ongoing discussion is your place to share what you are reading and what you think about it!

And, now that 2011 is officially over, we'd love for you to share your favorite reads of 2011 in the 2011 favorites thread, if you haven't done so already.

My five favorite books of the past year were:

East of the West: A Country in Stories by Miroslav Penkov : These funny and moving stories depict the effects of historical and political changes on several generations of Bulgarians, from a grandfather who mourns the loss of communism by seeking to buy the corpse of Lenin on ebay to two teenagers separated when the country's borders change.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes : A man's version of his past is called into question when he discovers new truths about an old girlfriend who left him for a friend in this beautifully written novel.

I Knew You'd Be Lovely by Alethea Black : These short stories, mostly featuring young women struggling to find their place in life, are filled with memorable characters and sentences to savor.

All the Devils Are Here: the hidden history of the financial crisis by Bethany McLean and Joseph Nocera : This page-turning non-fiction account explains the origins of the financial crisis in an accessible, but not superficial, way.

Faith by Jennifer Haigh : This sensitive, character-driven novel explores the effects of a scandal on religious faith and the faith a family has in each other.

High honorable mention to the following novels: Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta, Emily Alone by Stewart O'Nan, and The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson; the short story collections Gryphon by Charles Baxter, You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon and This is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks; and the graphic novels Habibi by Craig Thompson and Special Exits by Joyce Farmer.

What were your favorite reads of the past year? This is the place to list your favorite books read in 2011 (whether published this year or before).

Melanie wrote: "Getting read to start Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilence, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. She wrote Seabiscuit. It should be good.

Marked had taken some turns that I di..."

Melanie, please report back on Unbroken. I've been meaning to read that for awhile now. I am on a nonfiction kick right now, too. After a down year of reading nonfiction, I'm in the middle of three right now: And So It Goes, a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, and I'm dipping in and out of two essay collections, The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem and Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

I also just finished The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, which won this year's Booker Prize. I loved this book, which is full of beautiful writing and interesting ruminations on memory, our perceptions of others, and whether life can measure up to literature. One of the book's main characters says, "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” This quote is a perfect encapsulation of the novel, which begins when the narrator, Tony Webster, encounters people and documents from his past, which call into question the narrative he has constructed of his brief relationship with ex-girlfriend, Veronica, who left him for his friend, Adrian. It's one of my favorite books of the year. I also really enjoyed Barnes' story collection, Pulse.

Welcome! This ongoing discussion is your place to share what you are reading and what you think about it!

I love this time of the year, when various publications put out their lists of best books and movies. I haven’t decided which of this year’s books will make my favorite lists (still reading some contenders), but my favorite novel of 2010 was Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. On the surface, Skippy Dies is a funny coming-of-age novel that takes a turn in the book’s third part into something much more complex, exploring issues of guilt and complicity, responsibility and regret.

Skippy is Daniel Juster, and he indeed dies in the book’s opening pages, in a doughnut-eating contest with his nerdy roommate, Ruprecht. It soon becomes clear that something more serious than doughnuts led to Skippy’s demise, and we circle back to the months leading up to his death, and in the book’s moving third act, the absence that Skippy leaves behind. Skippy and Ruprecht and their friends attend an all-boys boarding school in Dublin. The circle of characters includes Skippy’s would-be girlfriend, her psychopathic drug-dealing ex, an adrift teacher nicknamed Howard the Coward, and power-hungry administrators. Along the way, we are treated to digressions into string theory, World War I literature, and an unconventional and funny interpretation of Robert Frost’s poetry.

This book had the right mix of humor and seriousness, with a cast of characters and an engaging writing style that pulled me in. I highly recommend it.

Erin wrote: "Tricia, I'd be interested in hearing how Columbine is different from what I remember hearing and seeing in the media. I was in 5th grade when that happened, so I'm sure a lot of stuff would make mo..."

I thought Columbine was a thorough and interesting look at the events at the school and of the media response afterward.

An excellent fictional counterpart is Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. It gives the perspective of the mother of the killer, and is one of the most disturbing books I've read.

I spent most of October reading lots of short stories for a program I'm working on. I've read some great stuff by Charles Baxter, Alethea Black, Miroslav Penkov, Tobias Wolff and many others.

As much as I've enjoyed reading the short stories, for November I am looking forward to moving on to something longer (and lighter), so I think I'm picking up Colson Whitehead's Zone One next. It's about zombies! and by one of my favorite writers.

Welcome! This ongoing discussion is your place to share what you are reading and what you think about it!

Melanie wrote: "I'm reading Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men. It's part of the series that the libary and Kansas Humanities Council bring in the fall and the spring. I realized Monday that we are meeting today (..."

I haven't read Mules and Men, but I really like Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and her short stories. I imagine it will make for a great discussion.

Over the weekend, I read Julie Otsuka's slim, beautiful book, The Buddha in the Attic. (Otsuka's first book, When the Emperor Was Devine was a community reads pick.)

In this novella, Otsuka documents the lives of Japanese picture brides: their arrival in the United States, married to husbands and adopting lives that do not live up to the promises they had been led to believe when leaving Japan; their lives as wives and mothers and workers; and their forced removal to internment camps during World War II.

The book is told from the first person plural perspective, as in the book's opening lines:

"On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we'd been wearing for years--faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times."

The result is an evocative, lyrical portrait of the lives of the women, their husbands, and, in the moving final chapter, the townspeople left behind when all the Japanese disappeared. The story veers from the universal to the carefully chosen specifics--a sweater left behind at a friend's house, a woman dying in childbirth. In this way, it reminded me very much of Tim O'Brien's haunting story of Vietnam, The Things They Carried.

I just finished reading Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, which has been generating a lot of buzz, and I think it is mostly worthy of it. It is about a Westish college baseball player, Henry Skrimshander, who is a can’t-miss pro prospect on the verge of setting the record for consecutive games without an error set by his shortstop idol, Aparicio Rodriguez. When an errant throw strikes a teammate in the face, it begins a crisis of confidence for Henry. This one throw, and Henry’s downward spiral, also affects other people in his orbit, including his roommate, Owen; the college president, Guert Affenlight; Guert’s daughter, Pella; and Henry’s teammate and personal coach, Mike Schwartz.

This is a baseball novel with appeal for those who aren’t sports fans as well, due to its well-drawn characters and the focus on the shifting relationships between them. At times it reminded me a bit of David James Duncan’s The Brother's K, another novel with a character’s struggling baseball career at its core, although Duncan’s novel is more expansive in terms of time and setting.

I quickly became wrapped up in the characters of the novel, especially Mike Schwartz, the burly catcher whose own career suffers as he becomes increasingly devoted to mentoring Henry. Surprisingly, Henry's struggles almost take a backseat to the other characters in the book's second half. Without giving anything away, I really liked how Harbach handled the ending to Henry’s part of the story.

In other sports-related reading, I just finished the ESPN oral history Those Guys Have All the Fun. I listened to the audiobook, which may not have been the best format for this book, because I would often forget who was telling each story in the middle and couldn’t easily flip back to check. It focused more on the business side of the network’s evolution, and less on the personalities and the sporting events they covered. After reading this, I really want to read a book based solely on the experiences of the women working in such a male-dominated place and industry, which is occasionally mentioned but with frustratingly little detail.

Welcome! This ongoing discussion is your place to share what you are reading and what you think about it!

Did you read anything good over the holiday weekend?

I finished Domestic Violets, a very funny debut novel by Matthew Norman. Tom Violet has just finished the novel he's secretly been writing for the last five years--right when his father wins the Pulitzer Prize. If that weren't enough, he's also facing marriage problems and an uncertain future at his soul-crushing corporate copywriting job.

It reminded me of a cross between two of my favorite funny novels, Richard Russo's Straight Man (which Norman lists as his favorite novel in the extras), and Jess Walter's Financial Lives of Poets.

I'd recommed it to anyone who likes their fiction to be funny, or for fans of Jonathan Tropper, Nick Hornby, or Tom Perrotta.

Welcome! This ongoing discussion is your place to share what you are reading and what you think about it!

I recently finished two books that share similar themes: the nature of art and audience, and how the obsessive need to create affects familial relationships. In Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang, siblings Buster and Annie Fang endure a childhood of participation in their parents’ performance art pieces designed less for the acts themselves than for the possible audience reaction (one such piece involves the Fang parents heckling the children as they perform as buskers raising money for their dog’s operation). It is a darkly humorous take on a particularly dysfunctional family.

In Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, Nik Worth is a reclusive musician. After very minor success in two bands as a young man, he has faded into obscurity, creating music only for himself and his limited audience, mainly his sister, Denise. Instead, he creates a massive self-mythology he calls The Chronicles, consisting of volumes of recordings and fake interviews and record reviews.

I really enjoyed both novels. (If you enjoy The Family Fang, be sure to check out Wilson’s even better story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth). I found it interesting to read both of these books back-to-back, considering their very different perspectives on the same subject.

I would be interested to see what others’ recommendations are for other fictional treatments of art—whether it be visual art, music, literature, etc. What are some of your favorites?

I am currently reading Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine a non-fiction graphic novel about the role of the media in a democratic society. Gladstone hosts the excellent NPR radio show/podcast On the Media, and she uses the graphic novel format to explore the history of the media, as well as examining what the roles and responsibilities of the media should be, and how it has in varying degrees fulfilled and abdicated those roles. I’m about halfway through so far, and I’m not entirely convinced that the graphic novel format is the best way to tell this story, but it does give a more cheeky tone to a topic that could easily become strident. I am enjoying Josh Neufeld’s artwork, with his depiction of Gladstone in a little black dress and kicky boots as the recurring narrator, and featuring illustrated screencaps from TV news.

New thread for a new month! This ongoing discussion is the place to share what you're reading and what you think about it.

Kara wrote: "I've been working on The Unremembered by Peter Ourillian for a while because he's boring and cliche but not enough so that I've stopped reading his book. He's got a good idea but has so-so executio..."

Kara, I can definitely relate to your experience of books that aren't bad enough to quit but not compelling enough to keep the pages turning quickly. I just finished reading Kate Christenson's The Astral. The writing was excellent but I got a little frustrated at the lack of resolution with some of her characters. I'd still recommend it, but I would have liked to know more about one of the characters who all but disappears in the book's second half.

Right now I am reading Daniel Orozco's short story collection, Orientation. I have only read the first couple of stories, but I am really enjoying it so far. The first story, "Orientation" is told as an address to a new employee going through orientation, with generous descriptions of what you really need to know about the other people who work there alongside the details about insurance plans. I loved the humor of this story when I read it in an anthology (I think) a couple of years ago, and I was excited to pick up this collection.

Kjennings wrote: "I am currently reading Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. I love this book. Set in Ethiopia, it is a saga of two brothers. I am not even half way done and I really love it. I usually like to re..."

I read about 1/3 of Cutting for Stone when it first came out, before I had to bring it back to the library. I loved the Ethiopian setting and the opening medical scenes were harrowing. I've always intended to go back and finish it, and after your post I put it back on hold so I can see how it turns out.