• A Biography of Ben Franklin
• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
• Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
• Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
• The House on Fortune Street, by Margot Livesey
• Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
• Eventide by Kent Haruf
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.  The full text is available on the internet.
• Benjamin Franklin by Edmund Morgan
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
• The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands

Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack was the source of many of the quotes for which he was famous.   Here is the 1753 edition.

This discussion of Franklin's inventions has links to several interesting images.

Franklin also invented a musical instrument called the Armonica.   Here are a reenactment of Franklin playing the armonica and a play-it-yourself simulation.

PBS has a nice web site devoted to Franklin.

Discussion questions (for the Brands biography)

Images of Franklin

Every March we open our discussion to the general public to discuss the book chosen for the annual "If All of Rochester Read the Same Book..." program by Writers & Books.  Bel Canto is about a hostage crisis at an ambassador's mansion in Peru that unfolds in unexpected ways under the influence of the singing of a world-famous soprano.

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

The author's web site also has an interview and discussion guide.

Bel Canto's plot is patterned after the hostage crisis in Peru in 1996.   The bonding that sometimes occurs between captors and hostages is known as the Stockholm syndrome.

Reviews of Bel Canto

Patchett says she listened to the singing of Renee Fleming, the renowned opera star who grew up here in Rochester, to imagine the voice of Roxane Coss, the opera singer at the heart of the story.  Patchett and Fleming later became friends and did a joint interview about Bel Canto with NPR.

The hostage crisis begins just after the singer finishes an aria from Dvorak's Rusalka.  The opera parallels Bel Canto in some respects: love comes with transformation, the lovers cannot easily communicate (she is mute), love ends in death.  Here is Anna Netrebko singing "The Song of the Moon," the famous aria from that opera.  ("O, moon, stand still a while, tell me where is my love.  Tell him that I embrace him tightly, that he should for at least a while remember his dreams!  Shine on him, wherever he is.  Tell him I am here waiting!")

Patchett says that Bel Canto was strongly influenced by Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, which is about a group of people in an artifically isolated setting who, among other things, listen to great music and notice that time is not moving in the usual way.

Bel Canto is a style of singing.   After the book was published, Renee Fleming produced a CD called Bel Canto.

This novel is a fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who abandons her family to run away to Europe with architect Frank Lloyd Wright.  There she becomes the translator for Ellen Key, a Swedish women's rights advocate who rejects conventional ideas of marriage and divorce, and is torn between the desire to achieve her full potential and guilt over abandoning her children.

An interview with the author inside the house that Wright built for the Cheneys, with lots of photos.

An NPR interview with the author that includes a brief recording of Frank Lloyd Wright's voice.

Reviews of Loving Frank

Frank Lloyd Wright was raised in a Unitarian household with a progressive attitude toward child-raising.  Wright's mother bought her children a set of building blocks designed by Froebel, a kindergarten pioneer, which Wright later said helped develop his sense of the interplay of geometric forms.  ("Those blocks stayed in my fingers all my life.")

The young architect established his home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), which today contains the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.  Ed and Mamah Cheney were living in Oak Park when they admired the nearby Huertley House, which was designed by Wright, and decided to have him build a smaller house for them, the Cheney House (now a bed & breakfast).   A short distance away is perhaps Wright's first masterpiece, Unity Temple, home to the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Oak Park.

Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum are particularly famous Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.

Locally, Wright built the Boynton House at 16 East Blvd here in Rochester, NY, and designed the furniture for it.

Architecture is sometimes said to be a "sermon in stone."  Here are more of Frank Lloyd Wright's "sermons."  Fittingly, Wright designed the church building for the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Madison, Wisconsin, which his parents helped establish, which he attended as a child, and of which he was a member during the last years of his life.

Wright built Taliesin (pronounced "tally ESS in") in Wisconsin and lived there with Mamah.  Here is a slide show with over a dozen photos.

The eight short stories in this collection share a theme of generational problems of immigrants from India.  We focused our discussion primarily on those last three stories, which are closely linked.  Lahiri's earlier collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Several reviews

An informative interview with the author in The Atlantic

A video interview with the author by Charlie Rose

Discussion questions from the publisher

The author and most of her characters have roots in Bengal.  If the two halves of Bengal (the predominantly Hindu Indian state of Bengal and the predominantly Muslim country of Bangladesh) were united into a single nation, it would have a population of a quarter of a billion people and be one of the most populous on earth.

The book has several Indian/Bengali references:

• Page 163 of the paperback version mentions a photo of Neel's annaprasan (its toward the bottom of the screen), a ceremony at which a child eats solid food for the first time.
• On page 243 Hema's mother wore a bindi
• On page 258 Kaushik imagines his father at his wedding, wearing silk kurta, which is referred to here as a "pajama set." An every-day item in India, it is the origin of the western sleeping garb of the same name.
• On page 267 Kaushik's mother hung a Madhubani painting in the guest room.
• Hindu weddings are mentioned in several of the stories.

On page 318, toward the end of the last story in the book, Kaushik and Hema travel to Volterra, an ancient Etruscan town, and a few pages later Kaushik adds photos of Volterra to his web site.

• On page 319, "They looked down at the ruins of a Roman ampitheatre, and over the walls at the Balze, a precipice beneath which the earth had fallen away, once claiming a church, always threatening to take more of the town.  Beneath the Porta all'Arco, the Etruscan Gateway, three featureless blackened heads gazed down like sentinels upon them, and upon the world they had left behind."
• On page 331, just before lowering himself into the sea, Kaushik thought of the Etruscan statue L'Ombra Della Sera (named The Shadow of the Night because it reminded a poet of the shadow of a man at night), which resembles the modern sculptures of Giacometti.

A Dutch stock analyst in Manhattan is directionless after his wife leaves him and takes their son with her in the aftermath of 9/11.  He finds companionship in a cricket team made up of immigrants from many countries and hangs out with a entrepreneur from Trinidad whose business life has a shady side.  Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award, this novel became an instant best-seller when President Obama mentioned that he was reading it and said it was "an excellent novel."

This novel generated an unusually large number of reviews.  These are especially insightful:

• Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times
• James Wood in the New Yorker
• Novelist Siri Hustvedt in the Washington Post
• Sean O'Hagan in The Observer
• Andrew Anthony in The Observer

An interview with the author on public radio.

A long and informative four-part interview with the author that includes details about the process of writing Netherland: 1   2   3   4  

Discussion questions from the publisher

Slate, an on-line magazine, produces monthly audios from a book club formed by its own three critics.  Here is their 45-minute discussion of Netherland.

Cricket is a mystery to most Americans.  Here is a four-minute video overview and the Wikipedia entry for cricket.

Hans is a member of the Staten Island Cricket Club and so is the author.  In this photo of the team members in 2008, the author is on the far right.

Several reviewers have noted that Netherland echoes The Great Gatsby in several ways.  Chuck Ramkissoon, like Gatsby, is an entrepreneur with big dreams and a mobster as a partner.  Ramkissoon's body is found in a canal, Gatsby's in a swimming pool.  Daisy, with whom Gatsby is in love, makes a cameo appearance in Netherland as a name on a tombstone (page 210).  Both novels are narrated by an acquaintance who comes from a privileged family, and both novels close with lyrical musings on New York City.

Hans lived in the Chelsea in Manhattan, a hotel that housed many famous writers, including Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan.  Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jack Kerouc wrote On the Road while living there.  Hans tells us (page 33) that the residents included a "family with three boys who ran wild in the hallways."  That's a reference to the author's family; O'Neill lives in the Chelsea with his wife and three boys.

On pages 42 and 86-90, Hans tells us precisely where he lived as a child: on the curve of Tortellaan on the ourskirts of The Hague.  Looking out his bedroom window, he could see the nearby sea and the dunes where he played with his friends.  The houses there, he says, are built as semidetached quartets, each with a thigh-high wall in front.  Hans' home must be very near this spot. (Zoom in for wonderful detail. Click on the tiny white square and then "Street View" for a 360-degree street view.)

At the end of the story, Hans, Rachel and Jake ride on the London Eye, which is shown in images 8 through 11 in this slideshow.

On this holiday weekend we traditionally share a restaurant meal and see a film together at the Little Theater.

This novel is a mystery of the heart. Two women who became friends at a university end up living afterwards in the same building. Four interlocking narratives ponder the cause of a subsequent tragedy.

Here are several reviews of The House on Fortune Street.  Interesting, the reviewer in the New York Times says the reader is expected to fit the various sections of the book together Rashamon-style, while the reviewer in the Washington Post, writing four weeks later, specifically says the point of the novel's structure is not to tell a Rashamon-like story but to show how little the main characters really knew of each other's lives.

That same Washington Post review also notes that each of the four sections of the novel is written from the point of view of a different character, and each explicitely resonates with an author or literary work:

• Sean: Keats
• Cameron: Lewis Carroll
• Dara: Charlotte Bronte, especially her Jane Eyre
• Abigail: Dickens, especially his Great Expectations

In the final scene of the novel, Dara and Abigail discuss the two endings that Dickens wrote for for Great Expectations. Here are those two endings.

The author's web site

A video of Livesey discussing her book

The publisher's Reading Guide and discussion questions

An audio clip of Livesy reading from The House on Fortune Street

This article in the Boston Globe describes how Livesey generously helps other writers through the workshops she leads around the country. She and Andrea Barrett, a former Rochestarian and a LAVA favorite (we read Barrett's Voyage of the Narwhal and Servants of the Map) assist each other with their writing, and Livesey mentored David Wroblewski while he wrote The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which LAVA also read.

Here are two short interviews with the author, one in Psychology Today and one in a literary blog, that help explain why she wrote the novel in four sections with separate viewpoints, and why three of them are third-person and one is first-person.

On this holiday weekend we traditionally share a restaurant meal and see a film together at the Little Theater.

This Pulitzer-Prize-winner is a "novel in stories" about a woman in a small town in Maine who has a difficult personality. She can be vicious but she can also warm and caring.

Several reviews of Olive Kitteridge

Wikipedia has an article on Elizabeth Strout and one on Olive Kitteridge that provides a list of characters.

The author's web site

The Paula Gordon Show has a four-minute video excerpt of an interview with Strout plus a 55-minute audio version of the full interview.

An insightful interview with the author

Another good interview

Discussion questions from the publisher and from a community library

Two stories from Olive Kitteridge have been made into a play. Unusually, the actors speak every word in the original, even words that are not dialogue. Here is a two-and-a-half minute video with selected scenes

Eventide is the sequel to Plainsong, which LAVA read in 2001.  Once again the setting is a small town in Colorado and the theme is, as one reviewer put it, "finding family wherever you come across it."

Eventide was made into a play that was performed at The Denver Center for the Performing Arts.  Here is a ten-minute video of selected scenes from the play. A study guide was published to encourage community dialog about social issues raised by the play.

Discussion questions provided by the publisher (scroll down)

The book's cover depicts Yuma, Colorado, the basis for the fictional town of Holt and formerly the author's home town. There is a story behind that cover photo.

Yuma on Google Maps. Note the remarkable green circles created by irrigation systems. (Click on "Satellite" if they are not visible.)

In this brief audio interview the author explains how he learned about ranching.

This long interview with the author provides some interesting information, although it does ramble a bit.

The New York Times published two contrasting reviews of Eventide .  Michiko Kakutani said it has the "measured grace of an old hymn," while Jonathan Miles thought the author was guilty of "dusting the West with sugar."

The setting for this philosophical French novel is an upper-crust apartment building in Paris. The main characters are the building's concierge and a twelve-year-old girl who lives there. Both are extraordinarily intelligent, but they feel they must hide their intelligence to avoid problems with others.

Barbery's web site, with photos by her husband, Stephane Barbery.

Wikipedia has a detailed article on this book (but finish reading it first).

Reviews from the Washington Post and the New York Times.

A key concept in the novel is wabi, "an understated form of beauty, a quality of refinement masked by rustic simplicity," which Renee recognized in Kakuro's gift (p 165), and which he recognized in her. It is often expressed as wabi-sabi, with sabi adding the concept of the beauty associated with the wear and imperfections of age. The BBC has a 90-minute video on wabi-sabi.

Another concept associated with time is kairos, the right moment (p 68, 104), a concept introduced by Paloma but tied to the decision that Renee must make.  It reminds us of Paloma's sensitivity to fleeting beauty in movement, which she describes in her "Journal of the Movement of the World," and especially to her experience of the falling rosebud and her understanding that "beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it." (p 272)  Renee similarly speaks of "The contemplation of eternity within the very movement of life." (p 101)

An interview with the author by Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker, and a summary of Barbery's remarks at a panel discussion.

A summary of one book club's discussion of this novel.

The wabi Pieter Claesz still life that entranced Renee in Kakuro's apartment.

Some stills and a four-minute clip from Ozu's film The Munekata Sisters. Unfortunately the clip does not include the scene with the camelias and the moss at the temple (page 99).

Video clips of the haka performed by New Zealand's All Blacks rugby team (p 39).

A hour-long discussion of the book by three well-informed guests on the Diane Rehm Show on public radio.

This novel was made into a film in 2009.