W.R. Surles Memorial Library

Transcription

This is a great day for reading, you know we should all just go home and luxuriate in the rain, and start reading. I'm going to give you some, terrific suggestions - I thought they were terrific - I hope you'll find something in this list that sounds good to you. So, the first one is, ... Well first let me say, I love coming to, these kinds of annual Friends meetings because it just does my heart good to see people who love libraries, love reading, love- love what libraries mean in our society as much as I do. So, I want to thank Nancy Patton for inviting me here today. So. The first book, oh, let me just say one more thing. I speak a lot in parenthesis, I once did a book review for the Washington Post and when, you know, I wrote the book review - it was a memoir by one of the Washington Post critics so I knew I would probably have to give it a good review, and thank goodness - because I don't lie about books - thank goodness I liked the book a lot but I wrote my review in my normal way and my writing is all done in a very conversational manner. And, when I got- I got a note back from the Editor after I sent him the review and he said: "Oh," he said "great review, but damn, those parenthesis." And then he proceeded to take them all out. Now, I used to say that I speak in parenthesis, now I realize that I have always been far ahead of my time, and what I'm really doing is using hot links. You know? So I will move away from the main body into, you know, hot link us away to something else. I'll try not to do that too much. I've always felt that one of the things that I can bring to this world, of alerting people about books that they might want to read, might enjoy reading, is that I have always searched for those hidden treasures. Those books that don't get a lot of reviews, those books that are frequently overlooked until you learn about them in some way. And the highest compliment, that somebody can give me about my book reviews - for example, yesterday I- yesterday morning I spoke at the literacy source fund-raising breakfast in Seattle and the executive director came up to me and she said: "Well, I got your list." And it was basically this same list. She said: "When I looked at your list I realized I only had read, or even knew about, one of the books." And I thought that is the best thing that somebody could say because it means that I'm doing exactly what I want to do: Bringing to readers' attention books that they might not find out about any other way. So, let's you know, I'm gonna talk about these books and, ah, I hope some of them sound good to you. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Ah, this book is, probably one of the two best known books on the list. It just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It was my- it was my fav- well one of my two favorite novels from 2013. I thought it was absolutely an amazing novel on many levels. The author is a Nigerian writer who came first to the United States when she was to go to college and now splits her time between the United States and her native country. And this book, which is her fourth book of fiction - I will just say in parenthesis: (I did not particularly like any of the other ones, which is interesting, that I just loved this one. Although the other ones were very popular as well.) This is a book that's very autobiographical. Everything that I've read, everything that I've seen about her life - Chimamanda Adichie's life and the main character in this book says to me that there's a lot of autobiography in this book. And indeed the main character in this book is a young Nigerian woman who comes to the United States to go to college, and it's in the United States when she gets here that she learns what it is like to be a non-American black. Okay? This is a book that when you- when you hear the author speak - and she's done a terrific TED talk, which you can easily access and listen to - when she talks about this book she describes it as being about three things: race, hair, and love. And I have to say, I bought into all of those three things. I thought it did just a terrific job. But the one that I was the most interested in was- was what she has to say about race, and about race in 21st century America. And what race looks like from the perspective of someone who is not an American black person. And the main character in this book writes a blog about being a non-American black - and Adichie wrote a blog about being - a very popular blog - about being a non-american black. But one of the things she says - you know I've just found I've never found another novel that talks about race from this perspective, and it's so interesting. When you're living in Africa - she says when you're living in Africa, you don't consider yourself black. That's not how you define yourself. If you're going to define yourself in anyway, you're going to define yourself by your tribe, or even by your social class within that tribe. But you don't describe- you don't think of yourself as black. But when you come to the United States you are defined, first and foremost, by the color of your skin. And that distinction, somebody looking at that, looking at the state of the world, the state of the United States, the state of race relations here, from that perspective is so- was so fascinating to me. Now I don't want- the book is not weighed down by any of this. I mean, this is this is a book that, really just I've found is gorgeously written and moves along at just a very very nice pace. But it includes- gives you all that added value in addition to being a good story. So I highly recommend Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The next book The Man in the Window by Jon Cohen is one of the series of books that I have chosen to have reprinted in a series called Book-lust Rediscoveries. And the Book-lust Rediscoveries is thirteen - a baker's dozen - novels that were all published in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, but have been out of print for years and years and years. And these are really just hidden treasures. I mean these are just wonderful wonderful novels that I am so excited to introduce to a whole new generation of readers. And The Man in the Window is one of my all-time favorites. It's the story of a young man named Louis Malone. And Louis Malone lives in a small town outside Philadelphia which is called- which the author calls Waverly, Pennsylvania. In reality it's Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. But Louis Malone and his parents have lived in Waverly for a long time. Louis was born there, he grew up there, he still lives with his parents at age 35. And this is because when Louis was 16 years old he was working in his father's hardware store, and a fire broke out. And you can imagine a fire is gonna be dangerous enough, but in a hardware store where you have all of those paint thinners and turpentine, all those highly combustible ah, ah, things in there, how awful that would be. And indeed, Louis was burned so severely in that fire in his dad's hardware store, that for the next nineteen years - and we meet him when he's 35 - the next 19 years he has chosen not to go out of his house in the daylight. And so none of the neighbors have seen him, he's referred to as the Monster of Waverly, because no one has- no one knows what he looks like. Even in the house where he just sees his mother and father, he wears a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap low on his forehead to hide those scars, and he wears a bandanna over his mouth and chin to hide those scars. And then one day, when Louis is 35, for a reason, this is one makes a really good book discussion because there's just so much to think about and to talk about in the book. But one day, during Louis' 35th year, he falls out of his bedroom window on the 2nd floor of his house. Now he is not seriously injured, he lands, luckily, on a rhododendron bush, and so that breaks his fall. But he breaks his arm landing after the bush on the ground. And all the neighbors who have been so interested in this "monster" who lives near them rush over to see what he looks like, and incidentally to see if he needs any help. And they take him to the local hospital. And in the hospital he meets a young woman named Iris Shula who is normally an intensive care nurse, but is covering the emergency room the day that Louis is brought in. And Iris is described by her father in the book - and her father adores her, they have a wonderful relationship - Iris is described by her father as being 4'9'' and 155 poorly distributed pounds. Now I have to say - and perhaps this is a parenthesis or a hot link - I have to say that generally when a book is being described as being "heartwarming," or "will bring tears to your eyes," or, "you'll close the book and you know, just feel redeemed by it," "it'll change your-," all those sort of sappy things that you sometimes read that books are about. If a book says that, if a blurb says that about any book, I don't read that book because it's not the kind of book that I like and I always fear it's going to be manipulative and not something I- emotionally manipulative and not something that I'm interested in. But I have to say that The Man in the Window is heartwarming. It is absolutely one of those books that you will laugh - it's very funny - and tears will come to your eyes. It is just one of those books that when you finish reading it, you just want to hug it, you know I call those hugging books. You just want to hug it because it's such a wonderful, wonderful story. And Louis, and Iris, and their parents, and the people that they meet are just- they will just remain in your minds and hearts forever. Now that makes it sound a little sickening, but it's not. It's an absolutely wonderful, wonderful, wonderful novel. Jon Cohen the author also writes screenplays, movie scripts, and he wrote the screenplay for Minority Report which is very different from this book - as you might be able to already tell. That's The Man in the Window by Jon Cohen. The next book is called Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink. This is another book, this is non-fiction, it would make a terrific book for book discussion groups. It also just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction. So this was a year, you can tell, that I highly approve of everything that the National Book Critics Circle, did in award- giving their awards. Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink is the story of a hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Those of you who read the New York Times might have read a long excerpt of this last year, last summer in, the New York- the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Even if you read that, which I did, the book is still well worth reading and well worth getting. So, Five Days at Memorial is the first two thirds of the book is an almost hour-by-hour account of what happened at that hospital as they got the word that, you know, this Category Five hurricane was approaching New Orleans, and then when the hurricane hit, when the levies broke, and the days following that. So, that's the first two-thirds of the book, five days worth of what happened at this hospital. The second third- the last third of the book is the story of the legal case that arose when a doctor and two nurses were accused of murdering several of the patients in the hospital. And you might remember reading about that. This is an important book and a terrific book for many reasons. One of those is I am fortunate enough to be a good friend of Ann Patchett's, and I always value her opinion on books. And I had read this book last year and just thought it just was fabulous and she sent me an email recently and she said she was reading this book, five days at Memorial, and she said: "It's just like a thriller," she said, "I can't put it down. I just want to find out what's gonna happen next." Which was exactly my, my feelings when I was reading the book. So, it's, it's a book that presents very very very important issues in a very readable manner. And the reason- one of the reasons why I think it's gonna be such a good book for a book group, is that among the issues that it raises are all of these ethical issues dealing with medical questions. I belong to Group Health in Seattle. So my hospital in Seattle is, I believe, Virginia Mason. When I was reading this book I kept asking myself: Well, I wonder if Virginia Mason has a disaster preparedness plan that everybody is aware of and that's been updated. Did they know where the extra generators are in case power goes out? All of these things are raise- are just issues in the book. One of the major things that the book deals with, and indeed this- this is one of the reasons that there was the lawsuit against this doctor and two nurses, is that it was like a war zone where you have to triage. And they had to decide what patients to get out- to try to get out of the hospital, what patients could stay in the hospital until everybody was evacuated, they hoped. Do you, for example, try to get out those patients who are the sickest, those patients who are going to die without constant medical attention? Do you get them out first? Or do you get out the patients who are likely to survive, you know, who are the healthiest patients? And how do you decide? And especially how difficult it must be to decide when disaster is approaching faster than you could really come to a kind of logical decision about that. Sheri Fink is a terrific journalist and one of the strengths of this book I think is, that she- is that a reader would be hard pressed to figure out what she thinks of what happened at memorial. That is, she never takes a stand. This is not a hatchet job. You reach the end and you learn what happened with the grand jury, with the nurse- with the two nurses and the doctor, and you have no idea what Sheri Fink thought of that. To me that's a great thing in non-fiction, because then it's left up to you. She's giving you the facts, and letting you make up your mind. It's a terrific, terrific book, and I highly recommend it. And I highly recommend talking to your doctor about disaster plans for your local hospitals. Because there's going to be an earth quake here one of these days, just like they knew in Katrina- in New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina- that a- that a hurricane, they would get another hurricane and the levies would not be stable. The next book is a collection of short stories by a writer named Tim Horvath. And if any of the- if any books on this list really fit my mission to highlight these small, hidden treasures, Understories fits that mission the best. It's a collection - as I said - it's a collection of short stories and a novella. And they're the kind of short stories that I call elastic realism. That is, they're intensely, they're intensely, real. They're not set in a fictional place, they don't have unicorns, they don't have dragons. They're not fantasies, they're real. But the reality that he writes about is very stretchy, it's very elastic. And things happen in these stories that maybe are not gonna be your ordinary thing to happen, but he makes it so plausible. It's absolutely they're just great. And one of my favorite short stories in this book is set in - it's actually a novella, it's a long, long short story - but it's set in on a college campus, in a department of umbrology. Now I suspect that many of you are as- would- would be as unfamiliar with that word as I am, it has nothing to do with umbrellas. I looked it up - umbrology is the study of shadows. And so this is set in a department of umbrology at a prestigious college, and it's a department that combines scholars from many different- it's a multi-disciplinary department. So there are people in that department who are studying shadows in the terms of, for example, the Japanese shadow puppets. Or there are people who are studying, shadows as they appear in movies, or people who are studying shadows, who as they appear in paintings and there is somebody on the campus in that department who is studying shadow as shadows pertain to the world of spies and spy craft. So naturally, the CIA gets interested in this department of umbrology, and the story is set around that. It's a- it's just absolutely- it's just- I mean it's a- it's just priceless. Another one of my stories- another one of my favorite stories in here is about, it's about... Tim's stories are very hard to say exactly what they're about. But this is about some kids who are concerned about the issues of extinction and animal species going extinct. And he says in here - and this will just give you a sense of his sense of humor and the way he writes - but he has these kids talking and one of the kids says to the other- he- this kid says: "You know, I'm really tired of the fact that we humans have to do everything when it comes to extinction." He says: "I think it's time for those animals to take control of their own fate." So that's the kind- that's the kind of thing, that just makes this book absolutely worth- worth reading. And it's published by a very small press called Bellevue Literary Press which is associated with Bellevue Hospital in New York, and they publish fiction that deals with - they say - with medical, you know- sort of loosely taken medical issues, I didn't see anything about medical issues in this book at all, but you know, there it is. I'm very happy they published it. So that's Understories by Tim Horvath. The next book is another non-fiction. This is a great book for anyone who loves- loves literature, and who loves biography. The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing is a group biography of six American writers who all had close relationships with alcohol. So, these six writers include John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, a poet named John Berryman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, and I think there's one more. Especially writers like Hemmingway and writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, there's been so much written about their relationship with alcohol. I mean, you could read a lot about writers and alcohol, there are many books about that. What Olivia Laing brings to this book that makes it so wonderful, is that she's a young British writer and she's a terrific reader. That is, she looks at what these authors write in terms of their relationship to alcohol and how that affected their life. And it- it's that kind of, that kind of fresh reading of these authors that most of them we're very familiar with, I think that makes this book so special and so interesting. It's wonderfully written the title The Trip to Echo Spring is a reference to a scene in a Tennessee Williams play where one of his characters gets up in one of those Tennessee Williams-ish discussions that they always have, and says: "Well I'm going to Echo Spring." And it turns out that Echo Spring is the liquor cabinet on the other side of the room from where they're having that discussion. So, Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring. It's just terrific. Belle Cora by Phil Margulies, if you're looking for a a great historical novel, if you, if you know, if the last historical novel that you read was, say Gone with the Wind, and you're looking for another great heroine just like Scarlett O'Hara. You know the strong, strong woman, gosh Belle Cora was wonderful. This is set at the turn of the 20th century, in San Francisco. And it opens on the day of the San Francisco earthquake. And then goes back into time so we see the main character, Belle Cora, as a child, and how she got to that place in her life. And her life was fascinating. It's based on, the book is based on the life of a real, San Francisco Madam, and I- the author not only did a lot of great research, but he transformed all that research into this really page-turning book, where you come to care for this woman. You really like her, you really want her to succeed, and just to move with her through all the different experiences in her life. It just- it's just such a pleasure. So, that's Belle Cora by Phil Margulies. The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty. I love mysteries, but I- but I have a hard time finding new mysteries, because I want something in my mysteries that's more than just the plot. I want what I call added value. I want something there that will interest me beyond just who killed whom. And The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty is a book that does exactly that. It's the first book in a trilogy about a young Irish policeman named Shaun Duffy. So I'm gonna just "parenthesize" and say that (my mother had many quirks she disliked many things in this world, and one of the things she disliked a lot was Roget's Thesaurus. She just for some reason did not care for that. And I certainly remember that she didn't care for it. But the one thing that she despised above all else, was- were trilogies. She just- and she was a big fantasy reader and fantasies are trilogy-heavy. And she would just always ring her hands and, you know, and say: "Why did they have to write in trilogies?") So, now we're going back to The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty. The Cold, Cold Ground, the first in a trilogy, forgive me, mom. The Cold, Cold Ground is set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1981. 1981 was the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland. The troubles being the way we refer to, or the way the warfare between the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, and the Protestants in Northern Ireland, their really- the hatred and warfare there on the streets of Belfast, and all over Northern Ireland. 1981, the book opens in 1981, which was the year that of the hunger strike, in, when Bobby Sands - some of you might remember Bobby Sands starved himself to death in protest of the Protestant government, And that's when the book opens, that year. So, Shaun Duffy who is a policeman - the policemen in Northern Ireland are called the Royal Ulster Constabulary it's a primarily Protestant police force, and Shaun Duffy is a Catholic. Mm 'kay. He's- he's a Roman Catholic who has joined the police force, which means that he is hated by everybody. Okay, he's hated by his fellow policemen, because they don't trust him, because he's Catholic. He's despised, and- and infuriates the Catholics, the IRA, because he's betrayed them. And there he is in this kind of middle ground. Now you add all that in where you learn so much, where you feel like you're in Belfast then, and you see what it was like for those people to live there. You add to that kind of, you know, great setting, you add this terrific mystery, and you get The Cold, Cold Ground. I'm happy to say that the second book in the series, and the third book in the series, are just as good. Thank goodness, because that's another problem with series books. The first one might be great, but the second one not so much, and the third one, you know, Katie barred the door, we don't want to read it. So if you like mysteries, The Cold, Cold Ground is a book for you. It's fabulous. The Wind Is Not a River by Brian Payton. This is a book I think that will- that will appeal to a lot- a lot of people. A lot of different kinds of readers. Brian Payton is a Canadian writer, and this is a book set - a historical novel - set during World War II. And it takes place during the time- it takes place in the- in the Japanese- there was only one World War II battle on American soil. And that was in the Aleutian Islands. And most people don't know very much about that. And this is a book that takes place at that time, in that place. The main character, there is a husband and wife that are the two main characters. The husband's brother was killed in- in the in Europe, fighting. And the newspaper man, the husband, decides that he- he needs to be part of the war. So he goes up to the Aleutians to- to- intending to write about it, but he gets caught up in the attack by the Japanese. Meanwhile, his wife is in Seattle, try- and trying to find out what happened to her husband when she stops getting letters from him, or any kind of news. And she, in a very interesting way, finagles herself up to Alaska as well. It's a terrific novel, beautifully, beautifully written. The kind of novel where you want to underline good sentences, and read them to people. But again, it has that added dimension that I'm always looking for in a good book, where I come away from it having learned, very painlessly, something about the world, that I didn't know. The next book, Plum & Jaggers by Susan Richards Shreve, is another book in that series of book lust rediscoveries. And this is the story of four children, the McWilliams family. And they are orphaned in 1979, when a bomb goes off on an Italian train. And it's a book that- that's the first chapter. That's the first few pages of the book so I'm not giving anything away. But the first- the- that event, that death of their parents in this violent way, the sudden, violent death of their parents that leaves the children orphaned, this is a book that explores what happens to them. How that effects them for the rest of their lives. Especially the oldest son, who was the one who was 11 when his parents died, and he has the most memories of them. And one of the things that the four children, as they grow, end up doing is starring in, well, a reality television show. Now, this book was written in 20- this book was published in 2000, and you know, there wasn't- there were the loud- there was- you know, the program about the loud family, do you remember them, in California, well that was on PBS, I remember but there, reality TV was not what it is today. So, to have the sort of reality TV show that Susan Richards Shreve was just able to sort of conjure this up. But the TV show that Sam McWilliams, the oldest son, has written for his siblings is always set, it always takes place, in a dining room. And the children sit on, two of them on either side of the long, rectangular table. The place for the mother at the end of the table, and the place for the father at the foot of the table, or vice-versa, are left empty, and there's an unexploded bomb underneath the table. That's the setting for the show. It is so good, this book is so good. It's a book that was so far ahead of it's time. We talk all the time now about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, this is a book about PTSD, but before anyone talked about it. Before it became part of our national vocabulary. It's about kids, and it's about kids responding to that kind of tragedy, it's wonderful. Amy Falls Down by Jincy Willett. Gosh, this is, this is one of the funniest books. This is a book, if you, if you have any interest in the world, the literary world, the world of publishing, the world of creative writing, masters of fine arts and creative writing. Any of that, if you have any interest in that, this is a book for you. It is hysterically funny. The main character Amy, was introduced in an earlier book by Jincy Willett a book called The Writing Class. You don't have to read that first. Amy Falls Down is- absolutely stands on its own. The first book that I read by Jincy Willett was a book called Winner of the National Book Award, that's the name of the book. And that, just that title, should give you an idea of her sense of humor. Because, I mean, that's a brilliance title for a book. Because you know, you're walking down a table, that's you know, book- a table that's displaying new books, or whatever, and you see this, and you sort of say: "Oh, winner of the National Book Award. I didn't know that won the book award, I''ll have to try it." And plus, Winner of the National Book Award has a librarian as one of the main characters, of course I love that. But Amy Falls Down is about a writer, a woman in her sixties, who wrote four wonderfully reviewed, and barely sold any copies of her four earlier novels collections of short stories. Very much like Jincy Willett herself, whose books were well reviewed, but nobody bought them, despite that great title. So this is the main character, Amy, in her early sixties - she's about 62, I think - hasn't written anything for decades, and is eeking out a living teaching writing to eager adult students. One day she gets a phone call from a reporter, and the reporter says: "I'd like to do a story about you as one in a group of people that I'm interviewing, in a story called Where Are They Now?" You know, sort of has-beens, who are not successful. And Amy, reluctantly agrees. The morning of the interview, Amy is out in her garden, with her dog, planning to plant something. And her dog trips her, and she falls and hits her head on the stone birdbath in the garden, and is knocked out. She comes to, and she makes her way back to the house, knowing that someone is supposed to come to the house for something, but she's not sure what. And this woman comes to the house, and Amy has no idea what she says to her, except the woman turns out- the woman writes a fabulous article, very funny article, about everything that Amy appeared to have said. When Amy had no memory of saying any of that. And as a result of that article Amy is catapulted back into the world of literary fame. And so she's invited to speak on National Public Radio, and she's invited to literary conferences, and, you know, this is a book that, there is something very astute, and very ironic, and biting, on every single page about publishing, and about literary fame, and writing. It's absolutely terrific, don't miss this book. The last book on my list is this is actually the second book in another mystery trilogy, so I would ask you to- I made a mistake, and I would cross out Countdown City, because you need to start with the first book, which is called The Last Policeman. The Last Policeman is set in a little bit in our future - I hope a long time from now, actually - in a small town in New Hampshire. And the main character is a young policeman on a town's police force. And it's set at a time when scientists have determined that- that an asteroid is gonna strike Earth. And Earth is going to be - if not destroyed immediately - everything is going to be changed about it. So, if you're not killed right away, as a result of the immediate impact, then you know, you'll die a long, probably not happy, death. Or, in any event, we won't have Friends meetings like this anymore. So this news, you know, not only the date the asteroid is gonna hit Earth, but the hour, and the sec- the minute it's gonna hit Earth. That news really changes- makes everybody have to decide how they're gonna live their life, knowing it's gonna come to an end on this date, at this time. So some people that don't want to face what's happening kill themselves. Other people just leave their lives. You know, they just walk off from their life and disappear into, whatever other life they wanna live for the time they have available to them. Other people just start checking off things on their bucket lists, things they've wanted to do, and start doing them. Now, the main character, this young policeman, is given the task of investigating what everyone is sure is a suicide, but he suspects is murder. And nobody else on the police force is really interested in following through on this, because what difference does it make. Okay? But he's determined to figure out what happened. And that's in the first book, The Last Policeman. Again, I'm very happy to say that the second book, which takes us a little bit closer to that, you know, that asteroid hitting Earth, is just as good. And the third book will be out this summer, and I've put off reading it because I'm really nervous that it won't be as good as the first two, and I don't want that to happen. But I will eventually have to read it. So, Ben Winters, very young writer, and- and this series which I think has an overarching title, but, The Last Policeman will get you everything you need to know to find the book is so wonderful. So, those are - I think I counted - eleven, or thirteen. Two, four, six, eight, ten, eleven, books which I hope will take you through the summer. And, give you a lot to read thank you so much.