The Good News Book Club

7/2019 It All Comes Back To You - Beth Duke (Julie) DNR
6/2019 The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Bobby) DNR
4/2019 Darling Girl - Terry Watkins (Silke) ****
2/2019 Palace of Treason (Lisa) DNR
12/2018 Home Fires - Kamila Shamsie (Reza) ****
9/2018 A Man Called Ove (Cory) DNR
7/2018 The Perfect Horse (Julie) DNR
6/2018 Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Bobby) *****
5/2018 10% Happier by Dan Harris (Bob) DNR
3/2018 Being Mortal - Atul Gawande (Silke) *****
1/2018 It's All Relative - A. J. Jacobs (Lisa) DNR
12/2017 My Italian Bulldozer - Alexander McCall Smith (Marie) ***
11/2017 Refuge - Dina Nayeri (Reza) ****
9/2017 A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles (Cory) ***
7/2017 Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan (Julie) DNR
6/2017 What Is The What - Dave Eggers (Bobby) ****
4/2017 I Hate To Leave This Beautiful Place by Howard Norman (Silke)
2/2017 News Of The World by Paulette Jiles (Lisa) DNR
1/17 The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Reza) *
11/16 The Nightengale by Kristin Hannah (Cory) DNR
9/16 Outline by Rachel Cusk (Julie) ***
8/16 The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith (Lisa) DNR
7/16 A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sarah Corbett (Bobby) DNR
5/16 All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Marie) DNR
3/16 Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht (Reza) ***
2/16 The Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal (Cory) ****
12/15 Big Little Lies by Liane Moriaty (Julie) ****
11/15 (Bobby)
9/15 One Step Too Far by Tina Seskis (Lisa) DNR
7/15 The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel and Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer (Julie) ****
6/15 The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins (Reza) ****
5/15 The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday (Cory)
2/15 Me Before You by Jojo Moyes (Bobby)
12/14 The Constellation of Vital Phenomenon by Anthony Marra (Lisa) DNR
11/14 The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti (Bob) **
9/14 The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez (Marie)***
8/14 The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Reza) ****
6/14 Where'd You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple (Cory) ****
4/14 The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (Julie) DNR
3/14 Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead (Bobby) ****
2/14 Truth In Advertising by John Kenney (Lisa) ****
12/13 Signal and Noise by Nate Silver (Bob) ****
11/13 The Cuckoo's Calliing by J.K. Rowling (Marie) ***
9/13 The Unlikely Pilgramage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Reza) ***
7/13 The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (Cory) DNR
6/13 Out of the Easy - Ruta Sepsys (Julie) DNR
4/13 The Dirty Life (Bobby) DNR
3/13 Wild - Cheryl Strayed (Lisa) DNR
1/13 Touching The Void - Joe Simpson (Bob) ***
11/12 American Dervish - Ayad Akhtar (Reza) ****
9/12 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (Cory) DNR
7/12 A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block (Julie) ****
5/12 The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (Bobby) *****
4/12 Faithful Place by Tana French (Lisa) ****
2/12 The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Marten Troost (Bob) DNR
1/12 The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper (Marie) DNR
11/11 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Reza) DNR
9/11 The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (Cory) ****
8/11 This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper (Julie) ***
6/11 Three Junes by Julia Glass (Bobby) ****
5/11 Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote (Silke) DNR
4/11 Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macityre (Lisa) DNR
3/11 The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (Bob) DNR
1/11 Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin (Julie)****
11/10 Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson (Reza) ****
10/10 Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese (Cory) *****
7/10 Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Julie) DNR
5/10 The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Bobby) ****
4/10 Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (Silke) ****
2/10
1/10 The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace (Bob) ***
12/09 Without a Map by Meredith Hall (Marie) ****
10/09 Breath by Tim Winton (Reza) ***
9/09 My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme (Cory) ****
8/09 The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart by M. Glenn Taylor (Julie) DNR
6/09 Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris (Bobby) **
5/09 Lust for Life by Irving Stone (Lisa) **
4/09 Out Stealing Horses: A Novel by Per Petterson (Silke) *****
3/09 Born On A Blue Day by Daniel Tammet (Bob) DNR
1/09 Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen (Julie) ***
12/08 The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Reza) ****
10/08 All New People by Anne Lamott (Cory) ***
9/08 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Julie) DNR
7/08 Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Lisa) ****
6/08 Mudbound by Hillary Jordan (Bobby) ****
5/08 Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich (Bob) *
4/08 The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner (Reza) **
2/08 The News from Paraguay: A Novel by Lily Tuck (Cory) *
1/08 The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Marie) ***
12/07 Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Julie) ****
11/07 A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Bobby) *****
10/07 Honeymoon with My Brother: A Memoir by Franz Wisner (Lisa) ***
8/07 Heat by Bill Buford (Bob) ****
7/07 The Maytrees by Annie Dillard (Reza) *
6/07 Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben (Cory) **
5/07 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (Bobby) ***
3/07 The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud (Julie) ****
2/07 Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell (Bob) ***
11/06 Digging to America by Anne Tyler (Reza) ****
10/06 My Life by Anton Chekhov (Cory) *
9/06 No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Bobby) *****
7/06 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (Julie) *
6/06 Pearl: A Novel by Mary Gordon (Shay) *
4/06 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (Bob) ***
2/06 Prep: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld (Christine) **
1/06 The Known World by Edward P. Jones (Reza) *****
11/05 Saturday by Ian McEwan (Cory) *****
10/05 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Bobby) **

Books: Books to revitalize a neighborhood

With Books as a Catalyst, Minneapolis Neighborhood Revives
Excerpt:
"Along Washington Avenue, between the University of Minnesota and downtown Minneapolis, there were acres of parking lots, a large warehouse-style liquor store and a smattering of commercial spaces that had once served the thriving flour mill district along the Mississippi River, but later became seedy bars and flophouses.
The city tried to rebrand the area as a technology corridor, but not a single dot-com materialized. Instead, three nonprofit organizations formed a partnership in 1999, bought three adjacent warehouses and renovated them into Open Book, which says it is the largest — if not the only — literary and book arts center in the United States.
It is not uncommon for the arts to revitalize a neighborhood, but it is certainly unusual for old-fashioned literature and books to lead the way.
Since Open Book made its debut in May 2000, however, a steady flow of arts organizations have followed, including the Guthrie Theater, designed by Jean Nouvel, who recently won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Then there is the Mill City Museum, the MacPhail Center for Music, Minneapolis Central Library and a few smaller theaters and art galleries."

Books: Richard Price and the art of dialogue

Review from New Yorker on Richard Price's Lush Life. Excerpts:

"Actual speech tends to be dribblingly repetitive, and relatively nonfigurative, nonpictorial. Price, by contrast, awards his characters great figurative powers, endows them with an ability to take everyone’s clichés and customize them into something gleaming and fresh. His new novel, “Lush Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $26), which is filled with page after page of vital speech, shows him inventing a life for dialogue rather than just taking it from life; and this spoken magic is often indistinguishable from Price’s apparently more formal, descriptive prose."

Books: The Advantage of Closing a Few Doors

A good article from the NY Times by John Tierney. Will put this book on my list of books to read.
"Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open."

Books: An Iranian in India, Encouraging Dialogue

An article in the NY Times An Iranian in India, Encouraging Dialogue about Ramin Jehanbegloo's book: India Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India, "a collection of 27 interviews with 27 remarkable Indians that the Indian arm of Oxford University Press has just published. The book is ostensibly about Indian subjects — dance, caste, Parsis, democracy — but it inexorably engages many of the issues that vex Mr. Jahanbegloo’s homeland, including tradition, pluralism, the West and freedom."
Excerpt:

Kapila Vatsyayan, a cultural historian, offers an elegantly simple explanation of India’s survival. “India has so far demonstrated the capacity to hold together two lifelines, one an original, primal, or indigenous, almost immutable line, and the other of ‘change,’” she tells Mr. Jahanbegloo. “No single unit or dimension is totally ‘insular’ or ‘static.’”
Mr. Jahanbegloo finds this an especially trenchant lesson for Middle Eastern countries, which he says have not been able to accommodate a dialogue of cultures. Instead, he says, they have suffered either a modernization from above, as in the case of Iran under the Shah, or a virulent assertion of fundamentalism from below, as with the Taliban of Afghanistan.
“Iranians, like Arabs, have not been able to digest modernity because they did not find a way to create a permanent dialogue between the two concepts,” he said. “It’s either created authoritarian modernity or authoritarian traditionalism.”
Mr. Jahanbegloo credits Indian thinkers for their “soft reading of modernity, not a violent reaction to it.” Missing from his glowing appraisal is sufficient explanation for the violence that persists in Indian life, whether in the guise of Maoist insurgents or Hindu radicals or home-grown Islamist terrorist groups.
“This is what I think is so important to people of the Middle East, particularly Turks, Iranians and Arabs,” he said. “They want to keep their own identity. They want to be proud of their past. But it’s very important to open up to other cultures. Democracy is a result of this. Democracy is a government of dialogue.”

Books: Interview with Dana Gioia

Naghmeh and I went to hear Dana Gioia speak at the HRC (one of the premier literary archives in the US). It was enjoyable and inspiring.
Here are some excerpts from a Statesman interview. He talked about some of these topics in his lecture.

On poetry:
"Poetry is a way of speaking, but it's also a way of listening — and it comes from the same rootstalk as music and song and theater. It's the kind of listening we don't do every day. You might ask, "Well, why do we need to do that?" And I'd say because it's important to have your humanity awakened, and enhanced, and developed, and refined. The trouble and toil we go through in everyday life tends to make us much more withdrawn into our psyches."

On arts and society
"A third trend is that a lot of our institutions — especially academic ones — have lost their ability to reach and speak to society. We have these tremendous subcultures in the arts, but almost no public figures emerging from them, the way Leonard Bernstein or Robert Frost once became part of the public conversation with the United States. Both brought ideas into society, but both brought people to the arts. We're not creating an audience commensurate with our institutions, not affecting society in a way commensurate with the talent that exists in the art world. The arts suffer. The society suffers. And I think youth suffers most because they don't have the power of the arts to fully realize their human potential."

On reading:
"Every group of Americans reads less, and less well than they did 20 years ago. That has terrible personal, social, cultural and civic consequences. Since people read less, they read less well. And since they read less well, they do less well in their academic study, which means they do less well in the job market. . . Reading awakens something to people's humanity. I worry that we're going into an America that's increasingly fragmented, isolated, commercialized, inert. "

On art and emotion:
"Art, especially literature, is one of the ways that cultures have traditionally recognized that you train emotions — you read plays and poems and novels. They allow you to rehearse powerful emotions and see their various consequences. So I think when you take those things out, when you replace novels and theater with video games, you're trading an emotional complexity for a simple adrenaline rush."

Design: Book cover blog

I love well designed book covers. Here is a book cover blog. Coolio!

Books: The debate about poetry

A good post on the Poetry Foundation website: What to do about Poetry that is a response to a New Yorker article: The Moneyed Muse - What can $200 million do for poetry?
The debate between popularity and elitism continues.

Books: Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

A good review of Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra from the New Yorker - Bombay Noir by Pankaj Mishra. Excerpt:
"Playing the endless games of the Cold War, the characters of John le Carré’s novels didn’t think much differently, but Chandra is after something bigger. He has spoken in interviews of the possibility of taking the novel beyond the modern Western conceptions that have defined it, such as of the bourgeois individual who seeks self-knowledge and strives to establish his moral worth before his peers in a historically circumscribed society. Chandra believes that many Indians, pulled between tradition and modernity in a chaotically populous and poor country, have a less psychologically inhibited sense of self and a mythic, rather than a historical, sense of their place in the world.
The philosophical ambition of “Sacred Games” owes much to Bollywood films. To Chandra, these seem to capture the flexible nature of non-bourgeois self-perceptions, moving as they do from documentary naturalism to an epic mode of storytelling without getting bogged down in psychological realism. Dropping his characters into the tumult of recent national history, he occasionally seems to adopt a more conventional mode of novel-writing about India. But his stance, unlike Salman Rushdie’s or Rohinton Mistry’s, is of a calm Homeric objectivity, as he tries to realize afresh what seems, after many long novels from the subcontinent, a particularly Indian ambition to retool the novel as an epic form."

Books: Verisimilitude and veracity

Two excerpts from an article on Arts Journal by Jack Miles - The Da Vinci Coda: Retrospective Reflections on a Pop Culture Phenomenon

A related phenomenon, I would suggest, is the blurring in public discourse of verisimilitude and veracity. Comedian Stephen Colbert’s truthiness, a coinage intended to mock presidential rhetoric, was recently declared “The Word of the Year” by an association of semanticists. But truthiness is a fair synonym for verisimilitude, the “truthlikeness” that novelists have long cultivated in realistic fiction. What strikes me is how large an American political constituency seems fully prepared to accept presidential verisimilitude as a fair substitute for presidential veracity. This willingness to accept plausible official fiction where verified fact would once have been required seems to me to be of a piece with the widespread inclination, in the case of The Da Vinci Code, to read undisguised but only barely plausible historical fiction as settled fact. The same gullibility seems to operate in both cases.
....
Obviously, The Da Vinci Code is not literally about any of that. But the dream history at its center, the history that has attracted all the attention, is a story of how “we” once had something pretty wonderful and “they” took it away from us. In fact, we never had it, and they never took it; but at a time when real peril is mounting and when the line between history and fiction is progressively disappearing, the myth of a past suppression may easily enough made to stand in for the dream of a future restoration. That dream—whether encoded by accident or by design—may be the secret ingredient that has turned this ingenious novel into so gigantic a cultural phenomenon.

Books: So you want to be a writer

A good excerpt from an Atlantic article: So You Want to be a Writer

Galbraith's first suggestion was to resist the fantasy that good writing can only be accomplished during moments of inspiration:
All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand—are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced those moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments. Such is the horror of having to face the typewriter that you will spend all your time waiting. I am persuaded that most writers, like most shoemakers, are about as good one day as the next (a point which Trollope made), hangovers apart. The difference is the result of euphoria, alcohol, or imagination. The meaning is that one had better go to his or her typewriter every morning and stay there regardless of the seeming result. It will be much the same.
He also emphasized the importance of revision. "Anyone who is not certifiably a Milton," he wrote, "had better assume that the first draft is a very primitive thing. The reason is simple: writing is difficult work."

Books / Technology: Books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together

An excerpt from - Scan this book - from the NY Times Sunday magazine:

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of relationships, which is all links really are. There are about 100 billion Web pages, and each page holds, on average, 10 links. That's a trillion electrified connections coursing through the Web. This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book.