• The Martian by Andy Weir, 369 pages, 2014.
• The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld
• The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
• Dead Wake by Erik Larson
• Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich
• & Sons by David Gilbert
• Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina
• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

When astronauts on Mars are forced to evacuate because of a dust storm, they unintentionally leave one crew member behind. In a desperate struggle to survive, he uses his engineering skills to overcome one obstacle after another. This science fiction novel was made into a popular movie in 2015.

The Wikipedia article on Mars.

The Wikipedia article about this novel has links to several items that appear in the story, such as Pathfinder, the Schiaparelli crater, etc.

A gallery of 50 photos of the Mars landscape taken by the Curiosity rover. Click on the narrow images toward the bottom of the screen to expand each image.

In this interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and TV personality, the author acknowledges that the thin Martian atmosphere cannot actually produce a dust storm strong enough to tip over a spaceship.

A one-hour video interview with the author.

A twelve-minute video adaptation of Weir's popular short story "The Egg." If you have the time, it's worth watching for its theological twist.

A review of the novel in the New York Times.

Every March we open our meeting to the general public to discuss the book chosen by Writers & Books for the "Rochester Reads" program.  This year's choice, The Enchanted, is about an inmate on death row in an old stone prison who experiences his grim life as enchanted, and an investigator who is trying to save inmates from execution. The author is a death penalty investegator.

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

The author's web site.

A 90-second video of the author discussing the book.

The prison in the novel is apparently based on the Oregon_State_Penitentiary.

The narrator's favorite book is called The White Dawn. Denfeld says "it is a story about celebrating life even in struggle."

Scientists say there have been five extinction events in the Earth's history, such as the one caused by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Kolbert presents evidence in this Pulitzer-Prize-winning book that humans are currently causing the sixth.

Kolbert says (p. 107) that proposals have been made to declare the current era to be a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. This interesting article in The Guardian reports that initial steps have recently been taken to do exactly that. Scientists are working on identifying the "signatures" of this epoch in the geologic record.

An interesting nine-minute PBS video that explains the concepts behind the sixth extinction.

The Wikipedia article on the book provides a chapter-by-chapter summary. Wikipedia also has an article on the author.

The first chapter of the book discusses the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center in Panama. Here is more information about it and about Panamanian Golden Frog. Also, here is a short video from the San Diego Zoon on the golden frog.

A nine-minute video interview with the author about this book.

The author's website.

Al Gore's review of the book in the New York Times.

The book's last chapter is called "The Thing with Feathers," which refers to a poem on hope by Emily Dickenson.

The Lusitania, an ocean liner sailing from New York to Britain during World War I, was sunk by a German submarine with a loss of nearly 1200 lives. This suspenseful non-fiction story asks why the British Admiralty did not take obvious steps to protect the ship. LAVA discussed Larson's In the Garden of Beasts in 2013 and The Devil in the White City in 2011.

Here is the Wikipedia article on Larson and its brief article on this book.

The author's web site.

A five-minute video interview with the author about this book.

Photos of the exterior and interior of a salvaged German WWI submarine.

Wikipedia's very detailed article about the sinking of the Lusitania.

Here are the Wikipedia articles on U-boat captain Schweiger; U-boat U-20; Captain Turner; Room 40; architect Theodate Pope, one of the survivors; and Edith Galt, President Wilson's new wife.

Elbert Hubbard, founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, did not survive the ship's sinking.

The reviewer in the New York Times thought this book wasn't as good as Larson's Devil in the White City. (This review includes a dramatic painting of the ship's sinking.) The reviewer in the Washington Post asks a series of great "what were they thinking" questions.

An elderly Catholic priest (who is secretly a woman living as a man) has served on an Ojibwe reservation for decades. The Vatican sends an envoy to investigate stories about a woman on the reservation who may be a false saint. This novel has been described as "by turns comical and elegiac, farcical and tragic." The author herself is Ojibwe.

The Wikipedia article on Louise Erdrich, who, among other things, owns a bookshop in Minneapolis called Birchbark Books.

A central character in this novel is Nanapush, whose name and personality are similar to that of Nanabozho, the creator-trickster god.

A lengthy review of the book in the Los Angeles Times.

A brief video segment of Louise Erdrich discussing what it is like to learn the Ojibwe language.

In the end notes, Erdrich refers to Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who lived his adult life as a man, sucessfully hiding the fact of his birth as a woman.

Discussion questions for the book.

The Ojibwe survived winters and long journeys by preparing and eating pemmican.

Publisher's description for this novel: "A famous reclusive writer and his three sons find their bond tested by the weight of long-held secrets and a cumbersome legacy shaped by boarding school, Hollywood, and the elite circles of the publishing world."

The review in Newsweek says, "Because Gilbert's novel itself is by turns challenging and multilayered, weird and hilarious, dazzling and flawed, and attempting to sort it out in a critical light will take a little time." That's probably why some of the reviews of this book are unusually deep. A good example is the review in the New Yorker by James Wood.

The reviewer in the Guardian analyzed the book from the viewpoint of realist vs. experimental novels.

A frequent topic in these reviews is Gilbert's use of the "unreliable narrator." This brief (five-paragraph) review in Vanity Fair talks about little else.

Here is an interview in Guernica magazine with the author about this book.

A three-minute spoof video by the author in which he tours the fictional Andrew Dyer's neighborhood and interviews people about his books. Actress Brook Shields appears (I think) about 1:50 into the video.

The male characters in the novel all went to Phillips Exeter Academy before college. Its beautiful library was designed by Louis Kahn, who also designed the First Unitarian Church. There is a cryptic reference to Kahn's Exeter Library on page 426.

A pivotal scene in the novel occurs at the Frick Collection on Manhattan's upper east side. Formerly a mansion, it is now a small art museum with an amazing collection.

The author examines the rich social environments of elephants, wolves and orcas and their capacity for perception, thought and emotion. He combines those observations with the latest findings on the human brain, which leads him to question previously held distinctions between humans and other animals. The author was the recipient of the MacArthur "genius grant."

The author's web site.

A twenty-minute TED talk by the author about this book's topic.

An enthusiastic review in the New York Review of Books

Examples of orca sounds

The video of a crow solving an eight-step puzzle. which the author mentioned on page 193.

A video of Kanzi, a Bonobo, demonstrating his vocabulary skills.

A video with the different calls that vervet monkeys make depending on the danger that has been spotted.

A video of a dolphin seeking and receiving assistance with removing a fishhook, which the author mentions on page 369.

The narrator of this Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel is a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon. While building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles, he secretly works as a spy and reports back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The story is a fast-paced and savagely funny exploration of identity.

The author's extensive web site

How do you pronounce "Nguyen," the author's family name? The author's web site offers this explanation: "Is it pronounced Noo-yen? Or Win? It's never pronounced Ne-goo-yen. The Win version is closer to the Vietnamese and seems to be the favored choice for Vietnamese Americans."

A 20-minute video of the author's interview with Charlie Rose.

This review in the Guardian compares this novel to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which also dealt with issues of identity.

This review in the New York Times points out one of this novel's "sly ripostes and upendings" of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, which was the subject of the fictional narrator's undergraduate thesis. In Greene's novel, the narrator's Vietnamese lover is passive," but in this novel, Sofia Mori is anything but.

Several reviewers noted that "the auteur" in this novel and his film "The Hamlet" remind them of Francis Ford Coppola and his film "Apocalypse Now".

The author (page 234) refers to listening to "a heart-soaked version of Pham Duy's 'City of Sadness.'" I couldn't find that song, but here is Pham Duy's "Rain on the Leaves".

The Wikipedia article on the chaotic Fall of Saigon in 1975.

The softback version of this book contains two informative pieces that are not in the hardback version:

• "Our Vietnam War Never Ended", an article in the New York Times by the book's author
• An interview with the author that explains several points in the book

Reviews in the New York Times and the Guardian.

An interview with the author about this book in the New York Times.

This interview with the author notes the novel's similarity to Gulliver's Travels, The Odyssey and Pilgrim's Progress

The Wikipedia article on the author.

An eleven-minute video of a PBS interview with the author.

For more information about what the Underground Railroad actually was (and wasn't), here is an excellent and lengthy article by a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist in the New Yorker.

The medical experiments on unsuspecting African Americans in the South Carolina chapter echoes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

The chapter on Tennessee references the brutal expulsion of Native Americans from the southeastern U.S. via the Trail of Tears.