• The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels
• Name All the Animals by Alison Smith
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
• The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
• Love in the Time of the Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Copies in Seconds by David Owen
• Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr

Pagels is a professor of religious history at Princeton and a leading figure in progressive and feminist religious circles.  Her earlier book, The Gnostic Gospels, won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Pagels shows that the concept of Satan has evolved over time, sometimes in ways that have promoted social evils such as anti-Semitism.  Booklist says The Origin of Satan provides, "important insights into the demonization of 'intimate enemies' that has marked the history of Christianity. . . . This is an informative, beautifully written book."

Resources for Reading and Discussion

For many people Satan is an intensely real and immediate threat:

• An article in Catholic World News about an update to the rite of exorcism
• A melodramatic web site with details about possession by Satan
• A disturbing on-line application form for requesting an exorcism

I found lots of interviews with Elaine Pagels, but unfortunately none specifically about this book. Still, the links below are useful as background material.

A 95 minute video of Elaine Pagels' Ware Lecture at the 2005 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly. Click on "View this event" to see it. Pagels is an entertaining speaker and the lecture is fascinating although, unfortunately, it doesn't deal with The Origins of Satan. If the video quality over the web is bad, you could just listen to the sound track. You can skip over the first 23 1/2 minutes, which deals with preliminaries.

An interview with Pagels by the Minnesota Women's Press about Mary Magdalene and the Da Vinci Code.

A joint news conference by Pagels and Welton Gaddy criticizing President Bush's "Irresponsible Use of Religious Language", especially the use of the term "evil" in a way that shuts down discourse.

Interview with Pagels by Bill Moyers

A New Yorker interview with Pagels about Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of Christ."

An interview with several links to the text of some of the Gnostic Gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas.

This sad and witty memoir of the author's years at Mercy High School in Rochester covers the depression that followed her brother's death, religious doubts, romantic feelings toward a female schoolmate and the nuns' secret swimming pool.  Writers & Books chose this as their "If All of Rochester Read the Same Book..." selection for 2006.

Resources for Reading and Discussion

Writers & Books always provides a good interview with the author and a great discussion guide.

The author's web site has all the resources anyone would need, including an extensive list of reviews and some nice background information, including family photos.

This best-seller has become a favorite of book clubs.  Publishers Weekly: "Hosseini's stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th century, but betrayal and redemption come to the forefront when the narrator, a writer, returns to his ravaged homeland to rescue the son of his childhood friend after the boy's parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid '90s."  Isabel Allende: "It is so powerful that for a long time everything I read after seemed bland."

Resources for Reading and Discussion

Hosseini's web site

A profile of the author

An NPR audio interview with the author

Review by the San Francisco Chronicle

Photos:

• Hazara family. Hassan and Ali were Hazaras, said to be descended from the Mongols.
• Hazara boys
• Seven photos of street life in Kabul:   1   2   3   4   5   6   7

"In his almost Jamesian evocations of the mannered upper classes in his native Tennessee. . . Taylor weaves a rich social web in telling the story of one family's stark social decline, symbolized by a move from Nashville to Memphis."  Publishers Weekly: "The circumstances are affected by the particular milieu of Memphis, just a few hundred miles away from Nashville, but having its own accents of speech, social hierarchy, customs and patterns of behavior, even a certain style of dressing. . . As the novel unfolds, what seems a simple story becomes weighted with psychological nuances, revealed as layer after layer of family secrets is stripped away. . . This is a wise book, and despite its deliberate understatement, a profoundly affecting one."  This Pulitzer Prize winner was recommended by Azar Nafisi, who wrote Teaching Lolita in Tehran.

Resources for Reading and Discussion

Photo and a brief biography of the author

More photos and another bio

Article about a professional biographer named Hubert McAlexander who wrote a biography of the author. If you scan about half way down to the heading "Writing a Writer's Life," you will see a section that is about Peter Taylor.

Review in the New York Times by Marilynne Robinson, the author of Gilead

Review in the New Republic

Review in the Washington Post

This Booker Prize winner is a favorite of book clubs.  Booklist: "Pi Patel, a young man from India, tells how he was shipwrecked and stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for 227 days.  This outlandish story is only the core of a deceptively complex three-part novel about, ultimately, memory as a narrative and about how we choose truths."  The author grew up in Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Alaska, and Canada, and as an adult has lived in Iran, Turkey, and India.

Resources for Reading and Discussion

Map of Pondicherry, Pi's home town. It is a former French colonial territory in southern India that is centered on the city of Pondicherry but also includes the areas represented on this map by the various red splotches.

Meerkats, the only inhabitants of the algae island

The author explains the origin of the name "Richard Parker."

"How I Wrote Like of Pi," by Yann Martel

BBC interview with the author

NPR audio interview with the author

Review in the New York Times

Review in the Guardian

The adventures of a lifelong dreamer named Augie March who repeatedly fails but finally succeeds.  "Augie March was Bellow's attempt to preserve forever the Chicago neighborhoods of the Depression Era -- an era he felt to be, paradoxically, one of unparalleled fullness of life."  Martin Amis in the Atlantic Monthly: "The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel.  Search no further."   One of the most honored of all U. S. writers, Bellow won the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and three National Book Awards

Resources for Reading and Discussion

"How I Wrote Augie March's Story" by Saul Bellow

"The Adventures of Augie March" has been classified both as a "picaresque" novel and as a "bildungsroman."

The Saul Bellow Society's web site provides summaries of critical studies of Augie March.

Bellow won the Nobel Prize in 1976. Here is the press release, which amounts to an overview of his work. Other resources are on this page also.

Bellow's Nobel lecture. There is an audio link here that allows you to hear the first 11 minutes of his talk.

The New York Times review that was published just after the book appeared in 1953.

The readers' guide from Penguin Press.

Designated by Penguin Press as one of the "Great Books of the 20th Century," this is the story of a man who waits more than 50 years to declare his love to a beautiful woman whom he lost to another man "much above her station."  Marquez is a master of magical realism, "the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality."  Newsweek: "Humane, richly comic, almost unbearably touching and altogether extraordinary."

Resources for Reading and Discussion

Photo of the author with his wife and one of his sons

Youthful photo of the author with Chilean poet Pable Neruda in Paris

New York Time review by novelist Thomas Pynchon

An informative biographical sketch

In addition, here are two fascinating articles from The New Yorker. The first one, which outlines the tragic history of modern Colombia, provides interesting details about the author's life, including his complex political views and his long-time personal friendship with Fidel Castro.

The second article, which was written by Garcia Marquez himself, tells the story of the tumultuous courtship of his parents. He obviously borrowed quite a few elements from his parents' story for Love in the Time of the Cholera.

One of the most quoted people in the book is Bob Gundlach, a member of First Unitarian who was with Xerox since its earliest days and who was recently inducted into the Inventors' Hall of Fame.  Bob joined us for this discussion to share some of his personal stories about the early days of an obscure little company with big ideas. He also demonstrated xerography for us with a primitive desktop device that he used for experimentation long before the first commercial Xerox copier was produced.

Resources for Reading and Discussion

Description of Bob Gundlach on the Inventors' Hall of Fame web site

A recent interview with Bob explaining how he heats and cools his house for $50 per month.

The Wikipedia entry for Bob Gundlach

The Wikipedia entry for Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography

A seven-page summary of the book in Smithsonian Magazine, written by the author himself.

Doerr received her BA at age 67 and published this book, her first, a year later.  According to 500 Great Books by Women, "This is the story of an Anglo married couple, Richard and Sara Everton, who, in a burst of idealism, move from San Francisco to an old family home and abandoned mine in Mexico. . . Their years as Ibarra's only foreigners - Richard's work, his illness, Sara's work, her care of Richard, their neighbors and friends, the constantly surprising landscape, the stones - is a story told with affectionate and patient wisdom."  Washington Post: "A novel of genuine power and intelligence, written in an arresting style, amply imbued with atmosphere and meaning."  New Yorker: "A novel of extraordinary beauty, of unusual finish, of striking originality. . . it pierces the heart."

Resources for Reading and Discussion

Stones for Ibarra is loosely based on the author's life experiences. Harriet Doerr married a mining engineer whose family owned a mine in a small Mexican town, and the two of them lived there for several years before he died of leukemia. Details can be found in the first two links below.

• An article on Doerr in Stanford Magazine
• Doerr's obituary in the Los Angeles Times

Wikipedia entry for Doerr

Stones for Ibarra was made into a TV movie for the Hallmark Hall of Fame.