• Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen, 261 pages, 2014.
• Queen of the Fall by Sonja Livingston
• Lila by Marilynne Robinson
• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
• The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff
• Euphoria by Lily King
• Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

A middle-aged New York City resident who once was a world-famous photographer moves to a dilapidated, rural cabin so she can pay her parents' nursing home bills by renting out her expensive apartment in Manhattan. There she bonds with a local man and considers the possibility of a second chance at love and career.

This brief interview with the author provides insights into the process of writing this novel.

A review in the New York Times.

After Benjamin said Kaddish for his grandfather, Tad sang it. Here is a video that explains how to say Kaddish.

A six-minute interview with Quindlen by NPR, in which Quindlen describes this novel as a "coming of (second) age story."

A one-hour video of the author giving a talk at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC. Her part of the talk begins just before the five-minute mark.

The author's web site.

The Wikipedia article on the author.

A painting supposedly by Mary Cassatt plays a role in this story. The painting is described (page 59) as "a young woman gazing at her baby daughter, her face alight, her child's hand reaching toward her." As the Wikipedia article on Cassatt explains, the mother-child relationship is a key theme in Cassatt's work.

The publisher's discussion questions

Every March we open our meeting to the general public to discuss the book chosen for the "Rochester Reads" program organized by Writers & Books.  This year's choice, Queen of the Fall is a collection of essays that ranges from picking apples for money as a very young child to progressive priests at Corpus Christi to Susan B. Anthony's alligator purse. The author, who was raised in poverty in the Rochester area, now teaches at the University of Memphis.

Writers & Books always provides an informative interview with the author and a discussion guide.

The author's web site.

Here is an interview with the author in a journal called Compose.

In the interview above, Livingston said, "I believe that we humans are always trying to make meaning." Watch this short video, which was created in 1944, which demonstrates that it is almost impossible not to read meaning into its depiction of the movements of trangles, squares and circles.

Here is a one-hour video of a talk that Livingston gave at Finger Lakes Community College last year. She begins speaking at the 5:30 mark.

A migrant worker and former prostitute wanders into a small town in Iowa. There she marries a much older minister who, like her, is beset with loneliness. Comforting each other, they wrestle with the mysteries of existence. This novel won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for her earlier novel, Gilead, which LAVA read in 2007.

The New Yorker has an essay on Lila that is recommended reading for our discussion. Among other things, it points out that the scene on page 7, in which the stolen child, Lila, is given a badly needed bath, "lays out, right at the start, all the novel's main themes: suffering, abandonment, forgiveness, rescue, and then, in bracing counterpoise, the question of whether one actually wants to be rescued, or can be." It also provides a broader context for the story by connecting this novel with the others in the Gilead series and noting scenes in them that are presented differently in this novel because the point of view is different.

A thoughtful essay by a professor of literature in The Guardian suggests that Doll's character is a reference to Harriette Arnow's 1954 novel The Dollmaker, whose main character is an uprooted woman in the midwest who struggles with poverty. Many people, this essay also notes, will automatically recall Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph, "The Migrant Mother," when they think of Lila.

Lila noticed that the fields around her shack were "going all to tansy," which she disliked because it reminded her of the tansy tea they were given to drink at the bordello in St. Louis (page 28).

Here is a one-hour video of the author talking about Lila. Skip to the 28-minute mark, which is the beginning of the book discussion.

The discussions between Lila and Ames sometimes drift toward the theology of universalism, the belief that God would never condemn anyone to an eternity of torture in Hell (see pages 101 and 258). Here is the discussion of universalism on a web site that calls itself "an encyclopedia of Biblical Christianity." It has a couple of paragraphs about Unitarian Universalism, but it makes the common error of trying to characterize that denomination's doctrinal basis. It is difficult for many people to understand that that denomination simply isn't based on doctrine.

Here is the Wikipedia article on Marilynne Robinson.

On the Gulf coast of Mississippi, four destitute children prepare for Hurricane Katrina with no mother and a father who drinks too much. This novel won the National Book Award.

Here are several reviews of the book. The one in the Washington Post has some interesting insights.

The Wikipedia article on the author.

Esch is reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology as a school assignment for the summer break and is currently on chapter 7, "The Quest of the Golden Fleece." She thinks frequently about Medea, who in that story is inflicted with an uncontrollable love for Jason.

Jesmyn Ward's own story can be pieced together from this biographical sketch and these interviews in Austinist, The Guardian and Guernica . Her mother was a housekeeper, and her father taught Kung Fu. Her sister became pregnant at age twelve. Her brothers and their friends kept pit bulls and sometimes fought them. Her mother's wealthy employer paid for Jesmyn to attend a private school, where she was the only black child. She received a BA and master's degree at Stanford. Later she returned to the town where she was raised, DeLisle, LA, (population 1000) and taught at the University of South Alabama. She now is a professor at Tulane in New Orleans. Her most recent book, Men we Reaped: A Memoir, is about She now the lives of five young men in her community who died within a fairly small span of time. One of them was her brother. Here is an excerpt from that book.

Hurricane Katrina was the deadliest hurricane in recent U.S history, its devestation made even worse by the inept response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Its head, a political loyalist who was appointed by George W. Bush, had no previous experience in that field, having worked previously for the International Arabian Horse Association.

A three-minute BBC video of the author showing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in her home town.

Esch, like others who have experienced a hurricane, said it sounded like a train. Here is a short video of that eerie hurricane sound.

This seventy-three-page honors thesis compares Salvage the Bones to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which Ward has named as an inspiration.

Two brothers from Maine have had a difficult relationship since childhood. They now work in New York City, one at a prestigious law firm and the other in a Legal Aid office. After returning home to deal with the legal consequences of their nephew's appalling behavior (he tossed a pig's head into a mosque during prayer), they eventually come to terms with a tragic event from their own childhood. Strout also wrote Olive Kitterage, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel that LAVA read in 2010.

Wikipedia has an article named History of the Somalis in Maine. It is almost entirely about the Somali community in Lewistown, which is in many ways the model for the fictional town of Shirley Falls in The Burgess Boys.

The reviewer in the Washington Post was enthusiatic about the novel, but the reviewer in the Los Angeles Times thought that it lacked compelling characters.

This interview with the author in the Chicago Tribune has some interesting insights.

Strout was invited to do a special reading of her book for the sizeable Somali community in Minneapolis.

An examination of possible criticisms of this novel by doctrinaire literary Modernists, who might feel that the story is too tidy.

A 25-minute video of Stout discussing this novel.

The novel discusses the differences between the majority Somali community in Shirley Falls and the community of Somali Bantus.

The novel mentions Maine's Moxie soft drinks more than once.

When the Nazis occupy Paris, a master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History flees with his blind daughter to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where her life intersects with that of a young German soldier. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize. It was also one of our all-time favorites.

A travel writer's impressions of Saint-Malo today along with photos of the destruction during World War II.

The article on Saint-Malo in the English Wikipedia is fairly brief. The version in the French Wikipedia has many more images, including this appalling photo of the town engulfed by smoke while being bombed from the air.

The author's web site.

Two helpful interviews with the author, one lengthy, and one relatively short.

A half-hour video interview with Doerr about this book.

An enthusiastic review of the book in the Washington Post.

Book recommendations from the author.

Techniques for finding the source of a radio transmitter.

Saint-Malo is easily confused with Mont-Saint-Michelle, about 30 miles east.

In this work of non-fiction, the young daughters of a minister are overcome by convulsions and screaming in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. In the ensuing panic, twenty people (and two dogs) are executed for witchcraft. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for another book.

The reviewer in the Atlantic was enthusiastic, but a reviewer in the New York Times was highly critical. Each of these reviews is accompanied by an interesting graphic.

A four-minute video interview with the author about this book. It has several more interesting grapics.

The author's web site.

The Wikipedia article on the Salem witch trials

The author notes that the behavior of the "possessed" girls in Salem is similar to what is sometimes associated with a mental condition called conversion disorder. Here is information on that condition from Wikipedia and the Mayo Clinic. To see the entire Mayo Clinic article, you need to keeping clicking the right arrow toward the bottom of each section of text.

Arthur Miller wrote a famous play about the Salem witch trials called The Crucible.

Poppets, crude figures of humans used in the practice of magic, appear repeatedly in this book. The ever-helpful internet has an article that teaches you how to make poppets in four easy steps!

In 2012, several high school girls in Leroy, New York, just outside of Rochester, began to twitch uncontrollably in what was apparently a case mass hysteria.

Far more disturbing were the hysterical accusations of satanic abuse at day care centers and the bizarre case of Paul Ingram, who confessed to satanic crimes that many find difficult to believe.

This novel is about three young anthropologists in New Guinea who are caught in a love triangle that threatens their careers and their lives. It is loosely based on events in the life of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead.

The novel loosely maps to actual history something like this: Nell: Margaret Mead, Bankson: Gregory Bateson, Fen: Reo Fortune, Helen: Ruth Benedict, The Children of Kirakira: Coming of Age in Samoa

Ths Library of Congress has an extensive on-line exhibit on Margaret Mead. This section of it shows several items relevant to the book, including the Square diagram (called the Grid in the novel).

Review in the New York Times

A short video of the author talking about this book.

A lengthy interview with the author in Guernica about this book.

The author's web site.

Two poems play a role in this novel: "Sir Patrick Spens", anonymous (page 70), and "Decade" by Amy Lowell (pages 92, 192 and 247).

A short video by an art gallery about life on the Sepik River. It is clearly oriented toward tourists.

Here are the images that appear when you search Google Images for "Sepik Art".

When Clemson University in South Carolina chose this book for its incoming freshman class to read, it created an uproar, with a full-page ad in the local newspaper accusing Clemson of promoting a book of pornography. This article by Ann Patchett in the Atlantic provides details.

Suellen Grealy, Lucy Grealy's sister, was unhappy with this book's intrusion on family privacy, as she explains in this article in the Guardian. Ironically, she herself discusses family issues in this article with considerable frankness.

The Wikipedia articles on Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy.

Charlie Rose's video interview with Lucy Grealy.

A review of the book in the New York Times by Joyce Carol Oates.

Ann Patchett's web site.

This New York Times review of Lucy Grealy's book, Autobiography of a Face, provides additional insight.