LAVA Discussion Book Candidates for 2006

This list comes from several sources, including LAVA members, other book clubs, various lists of “The Year’s Best Books,” etc.  Several were carried over from the previous voting list. There are 24 books on this list, but we will choose only 8 of them to read in 2006, which means that many worthwhile books unfortunately will be excluded from the final reading list.  As before, the most popular runners-up will be included in the next list of candidates.

(Why do we choose only 8 books to cover 12 meetings per year?  We don’t read a book for January because that month is occupied with choosing the next list of books.  In March we read the book chosen by Writers and Books for the “If all of Rochester Read the Same Book” program.  In July and September we see a film at the Little instead of discussing a book.  Therefore we need to choose only 8 books to cover the next 12 months.)

LAVA members are invited to research these book candidates in bookstores, libraries, on the web, etc.  Bring this list and your thoughts to the special January meeting at my house at 6 PM on Friday, January 6, which will be devoted to sharing information and opinions on these books (and eating good food!) 

After that meeting, but prior to the voting deadline of Friday January 27, please “mark your ballots” and get them to me. First review our guidelines for choosing LAVA discussion books, which reflect some of the things we have learned about choosing discussion books over the years.  Then, using a system similar to the one used in the Olympics, rate each book individually on a scale of 1 to 10, using 10 to indicate books that you think would generate the best Lava discussions.  Write your rating for each book in the margins of this list. Last year, several members simply rated each book as we discussed it during the January meeting and handed their list to me as they left, but you can use any method you prefer as long as you get the list to me by January 27.

The candidates are divided into three groups:  shorter fiction, shorter nonfiction, and longer works.  This division doesn’t affect how you cast your vote, but it does affect how the final reading list is created.  As before, if no nonfiction book is among the top vote-getters, the most popular nonfiction book will go on the list anyway to assure that we get a little variety in our reading.  Any of the longer books that are among the top vote-getters will be assigned to the August and October meetings because we will have two months to read them (because we will films during July and September instead of discussing books).  If more than two of the longer books receive a high number of votes, some of them will be pushed forward to August and October of the following year.

We try to choose books with a sufficient number of copies in the library system, but we have never specified what that number is.  To help us decide on a book-by-book case, I included a count of the number of copies in the library system for books that weren’t best-sellers. 

Candidates for Regular Meetings (fiction)

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan.  208 pages, 1999, winner of the Booker Prize.  “A sharp contemporary morality tale, cleverly disguised as a comic novel.”  Library Journal: “Two lovers of feisty Molly Lane, both influential men, make a pact upon her death that leads to tragedy.”  The Independent: “Amsterdam is a pitiless study of the darker aspects of male psychology, of male paranoia, emotional frigidity, sexual jealousy, professional rivalry and performance anxiety....Despite the darkness of the themes, or perhaps because of them, Amsterdam is extremely funny in a black sort of way."  Washington Post: “As sheerly enjoyable a book as one is likely to pick up this year.”  LAVA read McEwan’s Enduring Love in 2003. 

By the Lake by John McGahern, described by one reviewer as “beyond doubt the most important living Irish novelist.”  384 pages, 2003.  The Economist ranked it one of the ten best books of the year: “Gentleness and warmth infuse this novel, which is a memorial to a rapidly vanishing way of life was well as a testament to the enduring connections, both among men and with the land, which have shaped the Irish character and spawned its traditions.”  Yale Review of Books: “The almost invisible plot purls peacefully, like an ancient steam aware that it does not need to hurry to get where it's going.  The relationships among the characters form the core of the novel.”  (Bill’s comment:  I recently read this book and I agree with the reviewers, but I found it to be surprisingly challenging.  The author refrains from explaining what is going on.  Instead, the reader listens to the conversations in the book and slowly gets the drift of what is happening.  I’m not recommending against the book, just advising that it requires closer attention than you might expect from the reviews.)  14 copies in library system.

Eventide by Kent Haruf.  300 pages, 2004.  Like Plainsong, which we read in 2001, the setting is a small town in Wyoming, and a major theme is the possibility of constructing family from friendships.  Publishers Weekly: “Haruf's follow-up to the critically acclaimed and bestselling Plainsong is as lovely and accomplished as its predecessor. . . While there is much sadness and hardship in this portrait of a community, Haruf's sympathy for his characters, no matter how flawed they are, make this an uncommonly rich novel.”  Kirkus Review describes it as “melancholy truths set to gorgeous melody.”  Washington Post: “A kind book in a cruel world. . . [with] honest impulses, real people and the occasional workings of grace.” 

The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter.  320 pages, 2001.  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 create 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.  16 copies in library system.

Howards End by E. M. Forster.  336 pages, 1910.  The book is centered on the interaction between two families: “In the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, Forster perfectly embodies the competing idealism and materialism of the upper classes, while the conflict over the ownership of Howards End represents the struggle for possession of the country’s future.  As critic Lionel Trilling once noted, the novel asks, ‘Who shall inherit England?’”  This novel was made into a Merchant Ivory film and is the basis for Zadie Smith’s new novel On Beauty.  A Norton Critical Edition is available with additional background information.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth.  361 pages, 2000.  The main character of this PEN/Faulkner Award-winning book is an elderly professor named Silk who is forced to resign because of a remark that is misinterpreted as being racist.  Publisher’s Weekly: “Then, in a dazzling coup, Roth turns all expectations on their heads, and begins to show Silk in a new and astounding light, as someone who has lived a huge lie all his life, making the fuss over his alleged racism even more surreal.  The book continues to unfold layer after layer of meaning.  There is a tragedy, as foretold, and an exquisitely imagined ending.”  Nadine Gordimer, in The Times Literary Supplement (International Book of the Year Selection): "Philip Roth's The Human Stain is the best novel he has written."

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin.  352 pages, 1813.   Jane Austen’s most popular novel was recently adapted to film yet again. “A sharp and witty comedy of manners played out in early 19th Century English society, a world in which men held virtually all the power and women were required to negotiate mine-fields of social status, respectability, wealth, love, and sex in order to marry both to their own liking and to the advantage of their family.”  A Norton Critical Edition is available with additional background material.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.  384 pages, 2004.  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."

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  319 pages, 2002.  This Booker Prize winner is another 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.

Love in the Time of the Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Nobel Prize winner.  348 pages, 1988.  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.”

The Metamorphosis by Frantz Kafka.  About 60 pages long, depending on the edition; 1915.  The Norton Critical Edition (218 pages) is recommended because of its additional background material.  The story is about Gregor Samsa, a young man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has changed into a giant cockroach.  His father and his employer are intolerant of his new condition, with tragic results.  This story exemplifies the term “Kafkaesque.”

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.  304 pages, 2005.  “All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny.”  Hint: they are destined to be “doners.”  Publishers Weekly: “an epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature.” The Times (UK): "A clear frontrunner to be the year’s most extraordinary novel."  Kirkus Reviews: “A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience.  Send a copy to the Swedish Academy." Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day, which we read in 2002.

Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr.  214 pages, 1988.  Doerr received her BA at age 67 and published this book, her first, a year later.  According to 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader's Guide, “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.”  20 copies in the library system.

A Summons to Memphis  by Peter Taylor.  209 pages, 1999.  “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. . . Through a final, wrenching irony, Phillip eventually comes to understand the wellsprings of his father's character, and he is able to achieve empathy and forgiveness. . .  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.   10 copies in the library system.

Washington Square by Henry James.  248 pages, 1881.  Written by one of the great American novelists and a classic chronicler of “Old New York” society in the mid-1800s, this novel focuses on a wealthy family and its surrounding neighborhood.  The father has never hidden his disappointment in his plain daughter, and now she has fallen in love with a dashing young man who actually makes her feel good about herself.  Should she marry the man she loves, even though he may only be after her money, or should she obey her father, who threatens to disown her?  This novel follows her dilemma over the course of several years.  It has recently been made into a film called The Heiress.  James also wrote The Turn of the Screw, which LAVA just read.

Candidates for Regular Meetings (non-fiction)

Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine by Robert Owen, a staff writer for the New Yorker.  320 pages, 2004.  The biography of the man who led a long and uncertain struggle to develop the product that has been so important to the world and especially to Rochester.  Booklist: “While sensitively portraying Carlson's self-effacing personality, Owen entertainingly presents the surprising story behind an indispensable technology.”  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.  If this book is chosen as a LAVA book, Bob and Audrey Gundlach have agreed to participate in the discussion and share some of their personal stories about the early days of an obscure little company with big ideas.

The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic by David Shenk.  304 pages, 2001.  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.”  The 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.”  18 copies in library system.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.  256 pages, 2005.  Publishers Weekly: “Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitt's search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior.”  This current best-seller deals with everything from “the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns.”  Malcolm Gladwell, author of two recent best-selling nonfiction books, says Levitt "has the most interesting mind in America."

A Mind at a Time by Mel Levine.  336 pages, 2002.  Levine is a respected professor of pediatrics and a former Rhodes scholar.  “Some students are strong in certain areas and some are strong in others, but no one is equally capable in all.  Yet most schools still cling to a one-size-fits-all education philosophy.  As a result, many children struggle because their learning patterns don't fit the way they are being taught.  In his #1 New York Times bestseller A Mind at a Time, Dr. Levine shows parents and those who care for children how to identify these individual learning patterns. . . He questions the frequent diagnoses of attention-deficit disorder in children and, instead, offers parents and educators insights into brain development.”  Publishers Weekly:  “This is a must-read for parents and educators who want to understand and improve the school lives of children.

Songlines by Bruce Chatwin.  304 pages, 1988.  The title refers to the way native Australians found their way across vast distances by memorizing songs that contained clues about the landscape, enabling them literally to sing their way across the continent.  Australia is criss-crossed by hundreds of these songlines.  New York Times: “Part adventure-story, part novel-of-ideas, part satire on the follies of ‘progress,’ part spiritual autobiography, part passionate plea for a return to simplicity of being and behavior, The Songlines is a seething gallimaufry [hodgepodge] of a book.”  Chatwin quit his high-ranking job at Sotheby’s auction house in the 1960s to begin a life of world travel and to develop a new kind of travel writing.  12 copies in library system.

Longer Books (suitable for meetings in August and October)

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow.  544 pages, 1953.   One of the most honored of all U. S. writers, Bellow won the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and three National Book Awards. “The novel follows the adventures of a lifelong dreamer named Augie March, who only through failure after failure finally succeeds in the end.”  “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 said, “The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel.  Search no further.”  Salman Rushdie apparently expressed similar thoughts, but I can’t find that quote.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, one of the most prominent modern novelists.  480 pages, 1996.  A fictionalized account of an actual 1843 episode in which a 16-year-old housemaid was tried for the murder of her employer and his mistress.  Booklist: “Grace's enduringly enigmatic tale embodies Atwood's signature theme—the myriad ironies and injustices of women's lives—and, as she portrays a fictionalized Grace in prose as elegant as Eliot's or Wharton's, she also gleefully exposes all the hypocrisy, sexism, ignorance, and fear embedded in Victorian culture . . . . This is a stupendous performance and bound to win Atwood even greater acclaim.” 

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barak Obama.  453 pages, 1995.  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 role in the decades ahead.  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.” 

Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt.  386 pages, 2004.  This book was a finalist for the National Book Award.  Greenblatt, a Harvard professor, is a leader of the new historicism school of literary criticism, “a much debated movement that attempts to place literature within a social, political and economic context.”  William E. Cain of the Boston Globe: “Vividly written, richly detailed, and insightful from first chapter to last, Stephen Greenblatt's fascinating biography of Shakespeare is certain to secure a place among the essential studies of the greatest of all writers. But Will in the World is also a disquieting book, because ultimately it is based less on hard fact than on conjecture and speculation, much of it credible and convincing, much of it not.”  Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker: “Greenblatt’s book is startlingly good—the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read.”  21 copies in the library system.