Like last year, January’s ski trip was a bust. Too little snow too early in the season canceled
our Sierra excursion. Instead we met in February at Tom’s to see if Irving
Stone’s 1938 work of biographical fiction (think The Agony and the Ecstasy, only much earlier and mercifully shorter)
justified its selection as our first title of 2015. The verdict on Sailor on Horseback: with a middling 6.4 rating, it didn’t quite
deliver the goods. It certainly wasn’t the subject matter, as we all have a
soft spot for local favorite and hero of Tales
of the Fish Patrol, Jack London. (Indeed,
Irving Stone himself was a San Francisco native.) Maybe it was the dated writing, the clutter
of detail, or—as Stan put it—the fact that Stone “kept droning on,” but no one
was actively applauding when the votes were tallied (except perhaps Tom, our
resident Jack London fan). No matter. All in attendance enjoyed Tom’s food and wine
pairings. (Was it really Mondavi, Tom?)
March had us only two years removed from Sailor, as we brought back another local
writer and past MBC author, John Steinbeck, but this time on an adventure down
to Baja with his 1940 travelogue, The Log
from the Sea of Cortez. With fellow
traveler and field biologist Ed Ricketts providing some of the narration,
Steinbeck took cover from the furor over The
Grapes of Wrath by embarking on a collecting expedition to Baja California
with a notebook in hand. His
descriptions of marine life were frequently interrupted by a variety of
philosophical and humanistic meditations.
Stan called them rants, and for once I had to agree. While I criticized his constant riffing as
self-indulgent and repetitive, others were much more forgiving. Larry and Glenn
found the digressions refreshing, and Paul who likened these digressions to those
in Moby Dick found enough to keep
himself reading the interesting parts. All of us, however, enjoyed Armando’s stories
of his field work in the Sea of Cortez and especially the slide show of his
most recent trip just a week before our dinner.
As an added touch, Armando’s main course (blue fin tuna) was caught,
cleaned, and packed in the very locale described by Steinbeck. For that we gave
Mando a huge thumbs-up and Steinbeck a very respectable 6.8.
For April, Doug
convinced us to give short form fiction a try, and he sealed the deal when he
offered to prepare and email us a packet of short stories with a combined page
count of less than 100! Not only were we
engrossed by his selected stories (George Saunders’ Sea Oak took top honors in the length-of-discussion category), but
every one of us claimed to have done the reading (impressive, even if some were
embellishing a little). With selections
from Jess Walters (Anything Helps),
Tom Perrotta (The Smile on Happy Chang’s
Face), Dennis Lehane (Until Gwen),
Steve Almond (Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets
Punched), and others, there was something for everyone. With such impressive writing, I had high
hopes our next selection would be from one of these men, but George tortured us
and then steered us back to Gabriel Garcia Marquez (recall, we read News of a Kidnapping) and the work that sealed
his Nobel Prize, Love in the Time of
Cholera. In June, we'll find out whether a 50-year deferred romance in the Caribbean piques our interest as much as Bernie's lost appendages did in Sea Oak.
