• The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter
• The Buffalo Soldier by Chris Bohjalian
• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brian
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• The Forgetting: Alzheimer's by David Shenk
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk
• Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

This National Book Award finalist was recommended by Andrea Barrett, author of Servants of the Map, which we read last year.  Its large cast of characters creates a "chronicle of love--the mad kind, the bad kind, and the kind that sustains us when everything else is gone."  New York Times: "As precise, as empathetic, as luminous as any of Baxter's past work.  It is also rich, juicy, laugh-out-loud funny and completely engrossing."  Washington Post: "A near-perfect book, as deep as it is broad in its humanness, comedy and wisdom."  Prior to this novel, Baxter was considered to be a "writer's writer" whose works received more critical acclaim than sales.

Resources for Reading and Discussion

The site of one of the most amusing scenes in the book. (It's also amusing that it is referred to here as "sacred ground.")

An excellent interview with the author with lots of insights about the book.

An excellent profile of the author in Ploughshares.

An audio interview with the author

The publisher's reading guide

New York Times review

Two years after their daughters die in a flash flood, a Vermont state trooper and his wife take in a ten-year-old African-American foster child.  This book was chosen by Writers & Books for their "If All of Rochester Read the Same Book..." program, which we traditionally read in March.  Their 2007 book was The Buffalo Soldier.

Resources for Reading and Discussion

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

A brief review in the New York Times

The novel is set in a fictional town in Vermont called Cornish. Apparently Cornish is modeled after Lincoln, where the author lives.  This introduction to Lincoln includes the story of how the 1998 flood damaged the Lincoln library, which parallels the flood of the Cornish library in The Buffalo Soldier.

Alfred (and Chris Bohjalian) would be expected to visit the local general store frequently. Here is a neat 360-degree photo of the general store in Lincoln/Cornish. Give it plenty of time to load. If everything works right, you can use your mouse to rotate the image to see the whole store. Instructions for using the mouse will be just above the picture.

I couldn't find any other interesting pictures of Lincoln/Cornish, but our book says that six miles downstream from Cornish is "the more substantial village of Durham," another fictional town which apparently is Bristol in real life. Here is a photo of Bristol.

At the very beginning of the book is a quote from Bob Marley's song "Buffalo Soldier." If you can't recall the tune, here is a 30-second snippet. Click on one of the two icons at the right of song number 5.

Historical information about the buffalo soldiers

A finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, this best-seller tells the story of the men of Alpha Company during the Vietnam War.  It is a "sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three," "a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel."  Publishers Weekly: "O'Brien's meditations--on war and memory, on darkness and light--suffuse the entire work with a kind of poetic form, making for a highly original, fully realized novel.  San Francisco Examiner: "Tim O'Brian is the best writer of his generation."  Chicago Sun-Times: "As good as any piece of literature can get."  Boston Globe: "The Things They Carried leaves third-degree burns... This prose is headed for the nerve center of what was Vietnam."

Resources for Reading and Discussion

Two New York Times reviews with interesting insights:   1   2

In this New York Times Magazine article, O'Brien describes his 1994 trip to Vietnam to revisit the area where he was stationed during the war. Unlike the book, this article is not fiction, so it provides a window into his actual experiences there (which, of course, bear strong resemblance to events in the book).

A web site devoted to the author

The title of one of the stories in the book, "The Man I Killed," could be a reference to the Thomas Hardy poem "The Man He Killed".

An unbelievably thorough index to the book that was created by a high school literature class.

O'Brien was stationed near My Lai, the scene of a brutal massacre by U.S. troops.

Didion is a writer for the New York Times and the New Yorker.  After she and her husband of 40 years returned home one day from visiting their hospitalized daughter, he abruptly died at the dinner table.  Didion soon found herself in a state of magical thinking: "We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss.  We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes."  The review on Wikipedia says: "Didion applies the iconic reportorial detachment for which she is known to her own experience of grieving; there are few expressions of raw emotion.  Through observation and analysis of changes in her own behavior and abilities, she indirectly expresses the toll her grief is taking."  The Los Angeles Times called it, "achingly beautiful."  One of the most discussed books of the year, The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2005.

Resources for Reading and Discussion

A long and interesting interview with many good photographs (if you don't time to read it, at least check out the photos).

Two video clips of Vanessa Redgrave playing Joan Didion in the Boradway version of The Year of Magical Thinking: 1   2

Public Radio interview with Joan Didion by Susan Stamberg

Interview with Didion in Guernica magazine with some insights into the book's structure

New York Times review

A collection of resources for Didion assembled by the New York Times

The author is a journalist who describes an illness that afflicts nearly half of all persons over the age of 85.  Amazon gave it a "Best of 2001."  Washington Post: "A fascinating meditation . . . Shenk has found something beautiful and soulful in a condition that forces people to live in the perpetual 'now.' . . . Deeply affecting."  Journal of the American Medical Association: "highly recommended."  Washington Monthly: "As good as the science in this book is, it takes a back seat to Shenk's eloquent reflections on the meaning of memory and aging, and their connection to our sense of self."

Resources for Reading and Discussion

A useful illustration of plaques and tangles. Click the image twice to enlarge it.

Shenk says the painter Willem de Kooning developed Alzheimer's in the 1980s. Here are several of his paintings from the Museum of Modern Art organized by date. Click on any image to enlarge it, and click on "Next Page" to see the next group of paintings. The last group includes paintings from the period when he was developing Alzheimer's.

A public radio interview with David Shenk

For more information on Alzheimer's, look for the most recent "Alzheimer's Disease Progress Report" on this list of publications from the National Institutes of Health. These reports can be quite long, but much of that is illustrations.

David Shenk's web site

The book's web site

A Turkish poet returns home from twelve years in Germany and travels to a remote town to find a woman whom he knew when they were young.  The town is torn between religious and secular forces.  A snowstorm plays a major role, as does the symbol of the symmetrical snowflake: several characters are almost mirror images of one another.  The author says some people in Turkey, "hated this book because here you have a deliberate attempt by a person who was never religious in his life to understand why someone ends up being what we or the Western world calls an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist."  Village Voice: "Part political thriller, part farce, Snow is Pamuk's most dazzling fiction yet."  The Times (London): "A novel of profound relevance to the present moment... The debate between the forces of secularism and those of religious fanaticism... is conducted with subtle, painful insight into the human weakness that can underlie both impulses."

Resources for Reading and Discussion

The publisher's web site for Pamuk

Photo of schoolgirls in Kars

Lots of photos of Kars

Traditional Islamic clothing for women can lead to awkward situations, as in this track meet (scroll down for the photo).

A long list of interviews and reviews for Pamuk. I liked the interview by Robert Cottrell, which is near the end of the list.

Review in The New Yorker by John Updike

Review in the New York Times by Margaret Atwood

Publishers Weekly: "A poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life.  Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa.  Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature--with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father."  New York Times: "Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither."

This description of the author appeared in LAVA's voting list for 2006, which was created in December 2005: "Obama, former head of the Harvard Law Review, is the senator from Illinois who gave an electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic convention and who seems destined to play a major political role in the future."   That certainly was a good guess.

Resources for Reading and Discussion

Here is Wikipedia's entry about Obama's family and personal life, which is especially relevant to this book. There is much more material above and below it if you are interested. Wikipedia also has an entry for Michelle Obama.

Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where Obama did much of his community organizing in Chicago, was built in an appalling location (see the last two paragraphs).

Here are some interesting tourist photos of Kenya. Click on any one of them to enlarge it. There is a dramatic shot of the escarpment at the edge of the Great Rift Valley, which Obama visited.

Obama is descended on his father's side from the Luo people of Kenya, a country with a complex mix of ethnic groups, languages and religions.

Obama's famous keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention is a little dated now, but it gives a good flavor of his approach.

A young man is jailed for an assault at an English estate on the testimony of a 13-year-old girl, testimony that she later comes to regret.  She serves as a nurse during World War II while he is part of the army's evacuation from Dunkirk.  John Updike in the New Yorker: "A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama."   Publishers Weekly: "This haunting novel, which just failed to win the Booker this year, is at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive."  New York Times: "His most complete and passionate book to date."  This book was short-listed for the Booker Prize. This was one of LAVA's all-time favorite discussion books.

Resources for Reading and Discussion

New York Times review

New Yorker review by John Updike

Ian McEwan's web site

Hitler's armies overran France in 1940 and came close to destroying the British army there. If the frantic evacuation from Dunkirk had failed, the Nazis might have conquered Britain also, establishing the Nazis as masters of Europe for a very long time.

In a true story strange enough to be a plot for one of his own novels, Ian McEwan discovered in 2007 that he had an older brother.

A collection of resources for Ian McEwan assembled by the New York Times.

This Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel is the story of three generations of Congregational ministers in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, written by the youngest when he was elderly. His grandfather was an abolitionist guerilla fighter during the days of "Bleeding Kansas," but his father was a pacifist. New York Times: "Gilead is a beautiful work -- demanding, grave, and lucid."  Washington Post: "So serenely beautiful and written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read it."   Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "It's a story that captures the splendors and pitfalls of being alive, viewed through the prism of how soon it all ends."

Resources for Reading and Discussion

The story of "Bleeding Kansas"

Wikipedia entry for Marilynne Robinson

Apparently the character of the elder John Ames (the grandfather) is based on an abolitionist named John Todd.

This excellent review in the Boston Globe provides context for the novel by exploring the author's religious life and also her essays on social justice.

Review in the Washington Post

Review in the New York Times

Interview with the author on public radio

"There is a Balm in Gilead" is an African-American spiritual.