• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
• Jim the Boy by Tony Earley
• Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston
• Waiting by Ha Jin
• The Sea by John Banville
• The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
• The Moral Instinct by Steven Pinker
• Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Like The Kite Runner, Hosseini's earlier best-seller, this story takes place in contemporary Afghanistan, but it is told from a woman's point of view. From the book description: "With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival."

The story takes place in three different locations:

• Mariam was born in the lovely city of Herat in the western part of Afghanistan near the border with Iran. It is shown here as part of a government communique that can be ignored.
• Mariam's new husband took her to Kabul, Laila's and Tariq's home town.   More photos of Kabul.   And still more.
• Laila, Tariq, Aziza and Zalmai enjoyed a brief but peaceful interlude in Murree in Pakistan. Three photos of Mall Road, Murree's main street:  1   2   3  

Here is an enormous collection of photos of Afghanistan.

RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which works for women's rights based on democratic and secular principles) provides these photos of the destruction in Kabul and also this shocking photo of the first woman executed in Kabul stadium. Possibly the author had this photo in mind when he imagined one of the key scenes in the book.

Afghanistan has several major ethnic groups, the largest being the Pashtun, from which the Taliban draws most of its support. The Pashtun code of conduct, called Pashtunwali, explains much about the recent history of Afghanistan. This link is a must-read.

When Laila and Tariq were children, Bibi took them to the top of one of the giant Buddhas in Bamiyan that were later destroyed by the Taliban. A much more difficult task than the Taliban had imagined, the destruction began with weeks of intense cannon fire that did only superficial damage, and was completed only after men rappelled down the cliff and planted dynamite behind the statues. Here are before-and-after photos of one of the statues, a photo of the hillside behind it and a ground-level view of a statue's remaining cavity.

For perspective, history reminds us that the destruction of the giant Buddhas is only one in a long series of atrocities by religious fanatics of all types:

• During the wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the 1500s, Protestant extremists destroyed 'papist" imagery in many churches, especially in Britain and the Netherlands. Here is an example that has been preserved in a church in Utrecht.
• In Mexico, Catholic church authorities accompanying the Spanish invaders burned every Aztec document they could locate, a sort of cultural genocide that destroyed vast amounts of knowledge about Aztec culture and history.

Here are several reviews of A Thousand Splendid Suns, including an excellent review in the Washington Post and a review in The New York Times that includes a video interview with the author.

Every March we open our discussion to the general public and discuss the book chosen for the "If All of Rochester Read the Same Book..." program by Writers & Books: "Selected by Granta as one of America's best young writers and featured in The New Yorker's best young fiction issue, Tony Earley [in Jim the Boy] now gives us a luminous portrait of a ten-year-old boy growing up in the Depression-era town of Aliceville, North Carolina."

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

This review in the New York Times is accompanied by interesting information about the author, including a profile, an audio interview and a transcript of the interview.

In an interview in Bookpage, Earley said that with Jim the Boy, "I wanted to write two stories simultaneously, a simple surface story and a more complicated shadow story." LAVA concluded that the surface story is told from the viewpoint of a ten-year-old boy, while the shadow story is the additional understanding the reader brings to what Jim sees and experiences. (Both Whitey and Jake yearn for Jim's widowed mother? There must be something about her that is very attractive. Whitey gave Jim the minie ball that had been dug from his grandfather's shattered leg bone during the Civil War? Perhaps he was heartbroken not only at being rejected by Jim's mother but also at not being Jim's surrogate father. On days when Jim's mother wears her mother's long black skirt, Jim is careful not to let the screen door slam? Depression can be like that.)

Paul Burch, a Nashville musician and a friend of Earley's, made an album based on Jim the Boy. For a truly delightful review of the main scenes in the book, listen to these clips from the album.

The sequel to Jim the Boy is called Blue Star. The last three stories in Here We Are in Paradise, a collection of Earley's short stories, are also about Jim and his family.

On his tenth birthday, Jim learned how to hoe corn in a field that seemed to go on forever.

On their way to the ocean, Uncle Al and Jim drove past the massive and alarmingly noisy cotton mill in Gastonia. Jim said he didn't ever want to go in that building and Uncle Zeno heartily agreed. The author was probably remembering the bitter strike that occurred there when Jim would have been about five years old. Strikers were evicted from company houses and threatened when they moved into tent colonies.

The author hinted in an interview that Aliceville, the fictional town where Jim lives, is not dissimilar to the real town of Ellenboro, NC. I can't find any old photos of Ellenboro or any nearby small town, but perhaps it looked something like Belmont, located about 40 miles to the east. One of Earley's short stories about Jim says the population of Alicedale is about 200, which seems about right for the town in this photo. Unfortunately it depicts a scene 15 or 20 years earlier than the time period of the book.

Jim's great-granddaddy McBride built the train depot in Aliceville. Here is the abandoned train depot in Ellenboro.

Abraham rescued Jim and Penn from a gang of boys in the fictional town of New Carpenter. It probably looked something like Forest City, a few miles west of Ellenboro.

Johnston, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a reporter for the New York Times, and who lives in Rochester, was our guest at this discussion. John C. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard family of mutual funds and a frequent critic of Wall Street practices, said, 'If you're concerned about congressional earmarks, stock options (especially backdated options), hedge fund tax breaks, abuse of eminent domain, subsidies to sports teams, K Street lobbyists, the state of our health-care system, to say nothing of the cavernous gap between rich and poor, you'll read this fine book--as I did--with a growing sense of outrage."

A political attack in a review in the New York Times by Jonathan Chait, senior editor at The New Republic, led to this sharp exchange between Chait and Johnston.

Oddly, the review in Business Week was less unfriendly than the one in the New York Times.

Johnston quotes Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, to challenge those who mistakenly think they are following Smith by promoting unrestrained capitalism. On the contrary, Smith warned that restraint is necessary because capitalists themselves can be all too eager to supress free competition and, as Free Lunch reports, corrupt the workings of government in order to funnel tax dollars to themselves. Similarly, an essay by Amartya Sen, Nobel-Prize-winning economist at Harvard, says that those who call for a "new capitalism" need to recognize that many of the ideas being suggested actually stem from Adam Smith himself.  Sen says, "the huge limitations of relying entirely on the market economy and the profit motive were also clear enough even to Adam Smith," who would have been "shocked" at the way business deregulation has been handled in recent years. He says that Smith also taught that government regulations aren't enough and that society as a whole must impose ethical and moral restaints on businesses. If you are short on time, focus on the first four sections of this essay.

The author's web site includes several video interviews with Johnston.

This 50-minute talk by Johnston entitled "How the Rich get Richer" overlaps the material in the book.

Wikipedia's entry for Johnston

On the first page of the book, Johnston cites the gorgeous and exclusive golf course at Bandon Dunes in Oregon, which was indirectly subsidized by tax dollars. It must be great for those who can afford it:   1   2  

A young Chinese doctor agrees to an arranged marriage that he soon regrets. He falls in love with another woman and asks his wife for a divorce, but she refuses. According to the rules he must wait 18 years before he can force the divorce and consummate his love. What personal price does an individual (and by implication, an entire society) pay for adhering too unquestioningly to the rules? Boston Globe: 'A subtle beauty... a sad, poignantly funny tale." New York Times: 'A suspenseful and bracing tough-minded love story... We're immediately engaged by its narrative structure by its wry humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of the characters and their situation."   This novel won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

An interview with Ha Jin

Two helpful reviews from the New York Times:   1   2

A critical essay (Finish the book before you read it!)

The house in Goose Village where Shuyu and Hua lived, and to which Lin returned every year, had a brick bed, a kang, that was a wide as the room. Unfortunately the best photos I found of kangs were in cave dwellings, which are certainly picturesque but not at all representative of village homes in China. If you can ignore that aspect of the photos in the next two links, you will see kangs that would resemble the one in the house in Goose Village.   1   2 (scroll down several times)

Muji, the fictional city where Lin and Manna waited for 18 years, is said to be 80 miles east of Hegang, a real city in the extreme northeast of China near the border with Russia. Scroll down once on this page to see Hegang's location on a map. A typical neighborhood in Muji probably would have resembled this one in Hegang.

Hua worked at the Splendor Match Plant, where the evening news was broadcast over loudspeakers after 'The East is Red" was played. Here are the lyrics to 'The East is Red" (scroll down).

Ha Jin wrote an amusing article called "Arrival" for the Washington Post to describe how the U.S. appeared to him when he first arrived. You can also listen to Ha Jin tell this story here.

Max Mordent is, 'a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel."

Reactions to the book varied enormously. It was awarded the Booker Prize, the most coveted of all, and most book reviewers praised it. The Independent said, '[Banville] is prodigiously gifted. He cannot write an unpolished phrase." This insightful review in the Washington Post was also positive. On the other hand, the reviewer for the Times (London) disliked it, and Michiko Kakutani, the highly opinionated literary critic for the New York Times, was absolutely venomous ("a stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale", "a chilly, dessicated and pompously written book").

Perhaps we are seeing a "reviewer war" here. Banville himself is a prominent book reviewer who has made enemies with his blunt opinions. In his review of Ian McEwan's Saturday in The New York Review of Books not long before his own The Sea was published, Banville wrote: "Saturday is a dismayingly bad book.... Another source of dismay, one for which, admittedly, Ian McEwan cannot wholly be held accountable, is the ecstatic reception Saturday has received from reviewers and book buyers alike. Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us [in the post 9/11 world], that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this?"   What ecstatic reviewer might have caused Banville's dismay? Only a few weeks earlier, Michiko Kakutani had described McEwan's book as a "dazzling new novel...", "one of the most powerful pieces of post-9/11 fiction yet published."

If you would like to compare reviews of The Sea, here are two overlapping collections:   1   2

This short interview with Banville in The Village Voice provides some interesting insights.

An overview of Banville's life and work

Read this discussion guide only after you have finished the book; it refers to details of the climax.

This lengthy critical essay in the Irish University Review provides some good insights, and it identifies many of the paintings and literary references in The Sea.   As above, you should finish the book before reading this essay.

Echoes, Allusions and Connections:

• Max Mordent: "Mordant" refers to a biting or caustic manner of speaking. In German, "morden" means "murder."
• Mr. Todd (the cancer specialist): "Tod" means "death" in German.
• Myles and Chloe: To me, their names echo "Miles and Flora," the mysterious children who also had an unhealthy and contentious relationship with their governess in Henry James' classic The Turn of the Screw.
• When Mordent has finished writing his account of that tragic summer, he refers to "Ariel set free and at a loss" and then asks, "Was't well done?" (page 182).   In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Ariel, a spirit, is required to serve the magician Prospero, who promises to free Ariel eventually if he serves him well.   After a particularly daunting task at the end of the play, Ariel asks "Was't well done?"   Prospero says yes and gives him his freedom.
• In the dream that drew him to the Cedars (page 19), Mordent moves his injured left leg in an awkward half-circle as he walks. On page 140 we learn that his father, who abandoned his family when Max was young, walked the same way.

Mordent is an art historian who is writing a book on Pierre Bonnard. Just before noting that "everything for me is something else" (page 103, Vintage paperback edition), he discusses Bonnard's Table in Front of the Window, a painting of a room with a window that itself looks like a painting on an easel. Visible in the upper right is the ghostly outline of a face that reminds him of Chloe, "with her handsome, high-domed, oddly convex forehead." Her ghostly hand is farther down.

Mordent tells us (page 113) that Bonnard continued to paint pictures of his youthful wife at her bath long after she grew old and even after she died.   He describes in detail a painting called Nude in the Bath, with Dog with its distorted bathtub and floor tiles that seem to flow.

Mordent says (page 96) that what his own reflection in the mirror most reminds him of is an early Van Gogh self-portrait "in which he is bare-headed in a high collar and Provence-blue necktie".

Banville has recently begun writing noir novels under the pen name of Benjamin Black. Here is a YouTube video of Banville discussing the Benjamin Black phenomenom, and an interview with Benjamin Black by none other than John Banville himself.

As omnivores, humans are able to eat a huge variety of foods, but that means we must learn how to avoid things that are bad for us.  Pollan follows the major food chains -- industrial, organic, and foraged -- from source to meal, discussing health and environmental issues along the way.  The New York Times named it as one of the top ten books of the year.

This mountain of corn is piled beside grain elevators that ran out of storage space.  The accompanying New York Times article explains how government subsidies produce this result, a point that Pollan emphasizes.

POKY Feeders, described in chapter 4, feeds truckloads of corn to as many as 57,000 cows at a time.  Their installation is large enough to be visible on Google maps.  Each of those black dots is a cow.  Scroll up, down, right and left to see all of them.

Petaluma Poultry's definiton of free range chicken is technically correct according to government standards because their chickens have some access to the outside.  But Petaluma leaves out key parts of the story.  Pollan points out in chapter 9, section 4, that these chickens are given access to the outside only a couple of weeks before they are slaughtered, and most of them never venture out of the shed anyway.  Shouldn't the definition of "free range" include the idea that chickens actually do range freely?  If someone develops a breed of chicken with a genetic fear of the outside, will those be "free range" chickens by the government's definition as long as someone occasionally (and pointlessly) opens the door to their shed?

An alternative to industrial farming is Joel Salatin's Polyface farm, described in chapter 10.  A visitor took these photos of the farm.  This "pastured chicken" farm in California is modeled after Salatin's farm. 

Pollan recommends Eat Well Guide and EatWild as sources of information about farms near your home that supply organic food and pastured meat and dairy.  He recommends The Organic Center for reliable information about organic food in general.

This review in the UU World includes links to several related books.

Pollan's web site has links to many reviews and articles.

Pollan discusses his book in an audio interview on National Public Radio.

This review in Tikkun, a progressive Jewish magazine, discusses the book's implications for kosher food.

The book's critique of "industrial organic food" led to a debate at Berkley between Michael Pollan and John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, a natural foods grocery chain.

As a counter-balance, this article in The Economist argues that doing the right thing about food unfortunately isn't as simple as it is often made out to be.

A mute boy on a Wisconsin dog-breeding farm is visited by his father's ghost who says that he was murdered by his own brother. This gripping novel, loosely based on the Hamlet story, quickly became the number one best-seller. New York Times: 'The reader who has no interest in dogs, boys or Oedipal conflicts of the north woods of Wisconsin will nonetheless find these things irresistible. Pick up this book and expect to feel very, very reluctant to put it down." This is the second book in a projected trilogy, although it was the first to be published.

This map shows the general location of the story in northern Wisconsin. Note Ashland on the shore of Lake Superior at the upper right of the map and north of the fictional Sawtelle farm. On the road south of Ashland is the smaller community of Mellen, where Edgar went to school. Note also the Chequamegon National Forest, which appears on the map as a patchwork of green spaces.

Essay fought a water spout near some sea caves that probably looked a lot like these. NPR has a recording of what things sound like inside one of these caves.

Excerpts from several reviews

A collection of reviews

A review in the Boston Globe by Chris Bojalian, author of Midwives and Buffalo Soldier, admires many aspects of the book but thinks it should be about a third shorter.

Wroblewski is more forthcoming than most authors about his intentions with the novel in this interview and in this Question & Answer session. Both are highly recommended.

An extraordinary Japanese dog named Hachiko plays a role in the story.

A book named Working Dogs by Elliot Humphrey & Lucien Warner, also plays an important role in the story, and is real also. Wroblewski, however, took the liberty of adding a fictional third author, Alvin Brooks, who corresponds with Edgar's grandfather about breeding and training dogs.

Does morality come from God? Is it just a trick of the brain? If neither of those, then just what is it? If we say that morality is a product of evolution, does that belittle it? Why do moral judgments involve so much more emotion than other kinds of opinions about how people ought to behave? Steven Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard and the author of several books on how the mind works. Our discussion for December focused on an essay that Pinker wrote on this topic for the New York Times called The Moral Instinct.

Wikipedia's entry for Steven Pinker

This article on Jonathan Haidt is highly recommended.  He developed the concept of the five fundamental moral themes that Pinker discusses in The Moral Instinct.  The article appears in Miller-McCune, a new magazine devoted to "turning research into solutions."

Haidt co-sponsors a web site called yourmorals.org, which has several quizzes that let you "learn about your own morality while contributing to scientific research on moral psychology."  Its "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," which measures where you fit on a liberal-conservative scale, is especially relevent to Pinker's essay.  The Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard has a similar test.

Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote a critical review of Pinker's essay.

Steven Pinker's personal web page at Harvard

Pinker discussed The Moral Instinct in 30-minute interview on public radio.

Pinker points out that the list of "human universals" (characteristics shared by every human culture) developed by Donald E. Brown, an anthropologist, contains several moral concepts.

Wikipedia's entry for the Trolley Problem.

A 67-year-old man retires to a remote cottage in search of peace and solitude, but a chance meeting with his only neighbor brings back memories of his father, a boyhood friend, a youthful prank, and the Nazi occupation of Norway.   Sunday Telegraph: "By the end, when all the pieces fall into place, we can see how elegantly Petterson has constructed matters, letting us live in a mystery we don't know needs solving until the solution is presented."  This book won the 2007 International Dublin Literary Award and was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times.   It generated an especially good discussion in our group.

Wikipedia entry for Petterson

This excellent interview with the author covers several aspects of his life, including a tragic ferry accident.

Another informative interview

Helpful reviews from The New York Times, The Independent and The Boston Globe

This Wikipedia entry contains a chronology of events for the book.

The publisher's discussion guide has some good questions.

The story of Norway's occupation by the Nazis during World War II

In Petterson's previous novel, In the Wake, written in 2007, the protagonist begins writing his new book. The first paragraph of that imaginary book is the first paragraph of Out Stealing Horses, which Petterson wrote in 2008. (Page down.)

Much of the story takes place on a river that originates in Sweden and then flows into Norway and back again into Sweden.   The nearest town of any significant size is Innbygda.   Both the river and the town actually exist.   Innbygda is the adminstrative center for an area in eastern Norwegian called Trysil.   The river that flows through this area is known locally as the Trysilelva, and it does indeed flow from Sweden to Norway to Sweden.   Here is a photo of the Trysilelva River near Innbygda; the landscape here would probably be similar to that near Trond's father's cabin several miles downriver.   Known as the Klaralven in Sweden, the river terminates at Karlstad, where Trond's mother bought him a suit.

At the end of Part I (page 122), Trond says that what he was most afraid of was to be the man in the Magritte painting who sees the back of his own head in the mirror. (Page down)

Trond was first attracted to Jon's mother on the day the neighbors helped Barkald put up his hay.   Their hay racks probably looked something like these, except longer.   When they were cutting trees several days later, Trond was impressed that she worked as hard as a man yet rowed home and back at midday to check on her young son while the men napped.   Perhaps this painting captures her spirit.   Click to enlarge.

Twice Trond mentions hearing the neighboring milkmaid singing the cows home with "a voice the sound of a silver flute."  You've probably never heard anything quite like that ancient Scandanavian song form.   Near the bottom of this Wikipedia article, beneath "External Links," is a recording of a woman singing the cows home.   Click on "Listen to kaukning."

Discussion question: In the final words of the book, Trond tells us, "we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt," a lesson that he learned from his father when pulling nettles.   Did Trond truly succeed in deciding when the unpleasant things that happened to him in his childhood would be allowed to hurt?