Catching Up On Our 2023-2025 Books

After Paul's phenomenal luncheon in July 2023, MBC continued reading and eating, but its online posts went quiet.  Thanks to Larry's initiative, our blog posts resumed last May.  What happened during our hiatus?  Here's a condensed account, with apologies to certain hosts (and authors) for more than a few omitted details:  

September  2023  Host - Larry

We met at Larry's to dine on beef/rice/corn/almonds (yes, those are my notes!) and talk about Ishiguro's (then) latest novel, a prescient tale of AI embodied in a robot named Klara.  Purchased as a companion for a sickly child, Klara develops an intelligence and sensitivity that forces one to ask what it means to be human and to love. As a group, we didn't love the book but we found ourselves deeply affected by its characters and the ambition of its author.  For that, we gave it an 

8.0.

November 2023  Host - Stan

Stan hosted us for our discussion of Geraldine Brooks' novel Horse.  Since our meals are often themed with our books, Stan avoided uncomfortable questions about the provenance of his entrée by serving seafood, not red meat. Once we'd tucked in and begun discussing the book, a clear consensus emerged: no one liked the modern frame story, but everyone liked the novel's inner story.  

The development of American horse racing in the south, as illustrated by the champion Lexington (whose offspring included the famed Preakness), and the role of the enslaved trainers and groomsmen, was a story fascinating unto itself.  What was not fascinating was the forced 21st century story of art, love, and racism.  Nor were we persuaded by the sanitized diction of Brooks' 19th century characters. (The use of the word "slave" is studiously avoided by both oppressor and oppressed.)

If Brooks' intention was to prod her reader into seeing and thinking about a southern economy built on slavery, it certainly worked.  If not for the clumsy framing of an otherwise interesting episode in American history, we might have rated it higher than 6.5. 

December 2023 / January 2024  Hosts - Glenn and Doug

Due to its length, we read Kingsolver's much-acclaimed Demon Copperhead over two months.  In December, 2023 we and our spouses dined in Glenn's barn and shared passing comments about the novel.  But only passing, because Glenn's food and venue were too distracting to allow for more. Then in January, 2024, we retreated to Doug's for a fuller discussion of this 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner.  (We also enjoyed Doug's roast pistachio salmon and his two excellent desserts--a whiskey cake and a toffee cake, the former perhaps a reminder of the substance abuse so central to our story?)

Yes, the novel is long, and yes it's a re-telling of David Copperfield, but it's populated with an unforgettable cast of characters drawn from rural Appalachia (U-Haul, Fast Forward, Maggot, Angus, and of course Demon himself). We found Kingsolver's narrative about the cycle of poverty, domestic violence, and opiate addiction uplifting in spite of its themes.  Our comments said it all: "among my top 5" (Andrew), "did not want it to end" (Jack), "great characters" (Glenn), "fascinating" (Roy), "developed a complex relationship with the book" (Paul, who always develops a complex relationship with our books), and "puts Hillbilly Elegy to shame" (Doug). Our effusive reaction pushed Demon Copperhead to the top of our ratings with an 8.9.

February 2024  Host - Dean

Dean hosted us in February for a discussion of Toni Morrison's 1988 Pulitzer winner, Beloved.  Naturally, we ate as our novel's characters ate--or rather, as they fantasized about eating.  Dean's turkey, homemade bread, butter, and blackberry pie were taken from the meal enjoyed by the novel's protagonists (all escaped slaves) just prior to the arrival of the bounty hunters.

Our enthusiasm waned though when it came time to share our reactions to the book. A rewarding read? Maybe. A painful read? Absolutely.  From the outset, Morrison makes it clear the reader's on an arduous journey.  Her characters suffer almost unendurable trauma, only to realize that freedom cannot exorcise the pain of memory. Morrison's famous line aptly reflects her characters' pain and her white reader's guilt: "...the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay."  Before we set aside our discomfort, we applauded Morrison with an 8.0. 

April 2024  Host - Terry

In April, we gathered at Terry's to share our reactions to Kingdoms of Savannah, a mystery set in today's south but with the legacy of slavery haunting the margins of every page.  Alas, we were not impressed.  But we were impressed by Terry's menu.  With oven-fried chicken, beans, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and chocolate cake, Terry's version of southern comfort food was pitch perfect.

On the surface, Green's novel had the earmarks of a successful southern gothic mystery: a wealthy, landed class bent on protecting its own, a matriarch whose dysfunctional family eventually pulls together, and a murder whose investigation sets fire to it all.  Unfortunately, it had a dime store paperback feel (Jack), plenty of misogyny and twisted characters (Paul), a candy high after our previous titles (Dean), and was overwrought and unbelievable (Doug).  The most interesting plot development (i.e., the revelation that the island targeted for development was the ancestral home of free Blacks who fought for the British during the Revolutionary War) is saved for the end, but by then it was too late for most us.  Our 6.0 rating said it all.

June 2024  Host - Roy

Our book in June gave Roy the perfect opportunity to display his Japanese culinary skills. Accompanying the freshly-caught panko halibut was an egg custard (Chawanmushi), spinach salad with black sesame (Goma-ae), a cucumber salad (Namasu), and bean sprout with sesame and vinegar (Moyashi). 

His bounty contrasted with the bleak post-war environment depicted in No-No Boy, which chronicled the struggles of Japanese-American men who, while interned during WWII, were given loyalty questionnaires. Those who, for reasons of conscience or principle, answered "No" and refused to serve in the US military were sent to a federal penitentiary.  

We all were deeply moved by the plight of the novel's protagonist, Ichiro, who returns to Seattle after the war and can find neither work nor a place in the Nisei community.  We were also touched by Larry's account of his family's internment experience.  However, we were not impressed by the quality of the narrative: few likable characters (including the protagonist), aimlessly plotted, and an ending without closure. If not for its evocation of a seminal moment in our nation's history, No-No Boy would not have earned our modestly positive 6.9 rating.

August 2024  Host - Tom

When Tom hosted us in August, he served us old-fashioned southern food to aid our discussion of a middle-aged man's return home to Memphis, at the request of his sisters, to deal with his father's infatuation with a much younger woman.  Despite its 1987 Pulitzer Award for Fiction, Peter Taylor's finely-etched story of marital, sibling, and generational conflict failed to interest us nearly as much as Tom's menu for the evening.

The writing was fine in an old-fashioned sort of way, but there was too little to sustain our interest.  As a quiet study of southern manners, the story might have worked.  But when the message is simply that there's no escaping 1) your southern roots, 2) your domineering father, or 3) your own miserable relationship, our response is: 1) it's unsatisfying, and 2) it ain't Faulkner. Garth's comment was the most damning: the book felt like Ambien laced with Thorazine.  

September 2024  Host - Jack

In September Jack introduced MBC to Dennis Lehane and his 2023 novel about family, race, and mob politics during Boston's 1974 school desegregation crisis.  With some criticism for its "beach read" feel and its pat ending, we mostly found Small Mercies to be a worthy end-of-summer escape. 

Primed with Jack's excellent shepherd's pie, we dug into Lehane's murder mystery in South Boston and found ourselves mired in a discussion of the effects of school desegregation in the 1970s. Dean saw it in San Francisco, Roy lived through it in Indiana, and Stan experienced it in Marin County. Tom, on the other hand, noted that his large public high school in Siskiyou County was almost entirely white. With those asides, we concluded that the strength of Lehane's novel (apart from a mystery well told) was its ability to paint the various shades of hate and racism in convincing detail.  For that, we awarded him a 7.5.

October 2024  Host - Larry

In October, we convened at Larry's for a delicious paella and a spirited discussion of Percival Everett's 2001 satirical novel, Erasure.  Any discussion of Erasure is complicated by the nested narratives that Everett clearly had fun assembling.  The reader learns at the end that the story is in fact a movie about a story about a book written by an impoverished academic posing as a Black street kid with an authentic new voice. The whole thing is a send-up, the ultimate meta-narrative. So our comments on the story wandered into and out of the main story and the street kid's story (aptly named Fuck) with mostly appreciation for Everett's cleverness.

Doug chided us for falling into the very trap set by the novel's protagonist, a professor who is so white in culture and upbringing that he has to contrive a ghetto story written by a fictional hoodlum in order to sell his work.  But we didn't mind.  Dean liked the Grateful Dead reference in Stagg R. Leigh's name; Larry appreciated the novel's focus on racial identity and belonging; Paul and Glenn enjoyed the implicit taunt to like the story or be seen as racist; and Terry, always the outlier, suggested that the book had virtually nothing to do with race but was merely about selling a winning formula.  We gave the book an 8.2 for its "novel" approach (Stan's pun), and we excoriated Terry for his iconoclasm.

January 2025  Host - Paul

At 945 pages, and in clear violation of our 500-page limit, Lonesome Dove required an extra month of prep, which meant we met next in January.  The delay was worth it:  Paul treated us to a feast of Old West-inspired fare, with appetizers of crickets in molasses, a single roast dove (lonesome indeed!), and cowboy skillet bread.  The rest of the meal (vegetarian chili, pork adovada, brown and white rice, corn bread, and blueberry cobbler) was almost anti-climactic. Even with our stomachs full, we found much to dissect, share, and ultimately praise in McMurtry's magnum opus.  Despite its flaws and its age, Lonesome Dove's greatest virtue is its storytelling, with characters both convincing and compelling. And with few exceptions, it held us captive for almost 1,000 pages. For that, McMurtry's 1985 novel ascended to the top of our ratings with a 9.0.

March 2025  Host - Dan

After a string of novels, Dan brought us back to non-fiction with an account of the rise and fall of Venezuela under the Chavez/Maduro regime.  Fortunately, the food scarcity endemic in today's Venezuela had no effect on our meal, as Dan plied us with a delicious all-Venezuelan menu of stew, beans, rice, plus a tasty chocolate cake courtesy of Penny.

As to the book, our discussion languished at times. The problem with discussing non-fiction is that it's rarely interesting to recite facts to others who read the same facts. Facts need context, and Neumann provided some, but mostly he just expanded a series of articles (he was the NYT's bureau chief in Caracas) into a book.  Our takeaways included: yes, the erosion of democracy in Venezuela's early days of Chavismo feels eerily similar to what we see here today; Venezuela's long decline into authoritarianism can be attributed to a national fascination with strong leaders; and Venezuela's massive oil wealth proved to be its downfall. For a narrative both interesting, tedious, and depressing, we couldn't muster better than a 6.7 rating.

Glenn Goes So Big in the Barn!

On Sunday we met to review Edna Ferber’s novel So Big.  The novel begins in the late 1800s in what was then a small Dutch farming community south of Chicago.  Appropriately, Glenn hosted us (along with Gamin) in their century old barn where you could almost see the horses and smell hay bales from bygone days.

So Big was Ferber’s breakout success both by its sales and its being awarded the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for literature.  So Big focuses on Selina De Jung and her son Dirk (aka So Big) as they make a life for themselves on a small truck farm south of Chicago at the beginning of the 20^th century.

After a peripatetic urban upbringing with a professional gambler father, Selina comes to the farming village of South Holland some 30 miles south of Chicago to teach school.  She marries one of local farmers, but after his death must scrape together a life for her and her young son Dirk.  The book focuses on how Selina uses her artistic instincts to develop a fruit and vegetable brand that eventually brings her top dollar from upscale Chicago grocers and restaurants.  She attempts to instill her artistic and aesthetic qualities into both Dirk and a local boy, Roelf Pool.  In the end Selina is disappointed that Dirk abandons his passion for architecture for the more lucrative career as a bond salesman but is pleased that Roelf is able to find artistic success first in France and then in his return to the States.   In a final ironic twist, the financially successful Dirk is smitten by a young female artist, Dallas O’Mara, only to realize his new wealth does not impress Dallas, who instead is attracted both to the artist Roelf and to Selina.

It was our host’s setting, a rustic refurbished barn and the surprisingly strong literary merit of So Big that won strong praise from the MBC members.  Indeed, the men of MBC all awarded the book scores of 8 or more.  There was general praise for the book’s plot and writing style despite the fact the book was written by a woman and has a female protagonist – a clear violation of our founding credo! 😉

Host Glenn led off praising Ferber’s expressive language in describing the boom or bust life that Selina experiences growing up with an itinerant gambler father.  Glenn hadn’t read the book before proposing it and was genuinely surprised by how good it was.

Dean also enjoyed the book although he is just more than half way through.   Dean  found the premise that a small subsistence farmer could become as successful as Ferber describes seems a bit of a stretch.  But he did appreciate  the book being written in the era of suffrage struggle.

Jack continued the “surprisingly good” theme and praised Ferber for being ahead of her time by portraying strong woman characters succeeding but staying true to their aesthetic principals. Jack saw Ferber promoting a central thesis that beauty is everywhere.

Terry liked the book, but thought he had heard the storyline before.  He enjoyed Ferber’s use of language, particularly when she describes a spring day on the farm.

Andrew enjoyed that Ferber’s style was not too formulaic.  He  focused on the vapidness of the Julie character and how Julie tried to be both a mother figure and a love interest to Dirk.  Andrew also commented on how the success of Roelf, the neighbor boy, as an artist affirms Selina’s belief in artistic beauty above material wealth.

Larry noted the parallels between So Big and The Great Gatsby published just one year apart (1924 & 1925) particularly Gatsby’s Nick Carraway character and So Big’s Dirk De Jong character.  Both have financial and social ambitions in major US cities during the Jazz age.  Both have married girl friends that fuel those ambitions.  But the books had different initial public receptions – So Big being an instant commercial success and winning the Pulitzer, while The Great Gatsby was an initial commercial flop.  Larry too was surprised by how much he enjoyed the book and thanked Glenn for recommending a book he would not otherwise have read.

In the end the members of the Man Book Club are fortunate to have read a well written novel by a woman from over 100 years ago and to have in their own lives supportive female spouses or significant others such that none of us has chased a life of wealth without soul.

--Larry

A Wake for the Dead in Glenn's Barn

Lunch and Acknowledgments

It was a small but convivial gathering last Saturday at Glenn's.  Eschewing our usual weeknight dinner, Glenn treated us to lunch al fresco and used the Cunard Line's menu from 1908 as his inspiration.  With duck pate, anchovies, stilton cheese, mixed nuts, and smoked salmon for appetizers, Glenn followed with roast beef and browned potatoes for the entrée and apple pie for dessert.  As we ate in Glenn's beautifully-restored 100-year old barn, we couldn't help but think of the Lusitania's passengers, dining on the same food at the very moment their ship was struck by a German torpedo.  

Glenn's copy of the Lusitania's 1908 lunch menu 

Dining with Captain Glenn

Our Review and Discussion of Dead Wake by Erik Larson

Although not as infamous as the Titanic's sinking, Germany's 1915 attack on the Lusitania is known by every student of history as an important reason American sentiment began to shift away from isolationism and in support of the Allied Powers against Germany. With that as background to our discussion, Tom answered our most pressing question in the affirmative.  Yes, despite the book's obvious climax, Dead Wake keeps its reader in suspense throughout. 

Like most books we've read, it's strength of story that wins us over.  And that's where Larson's book shines, with an account both informative and gripping. We learned that Cunard's Lusitania and Mauretania were thought to be unsinkable.  As the fastest ocean liners in the world, they operated at twice the speed of Germany's fastest U-boats. So why was the Lusitania vulnerable?  It was traveling at reduced speed to save Cunard money; its hull was lined with empty coal bunkers which, when filled with sea water after the torpedo explosion, forced the ship to list precipitously; and, most damningly, the English (who'd broken the German Navy's code) knew of the U-boat's presence but refused to alert or escort the Lusitania for fear of compromising their codebreakers or risking their destroyers.

Our admiration for story notwithstanding, Glenn's biggest quibble was ours as well: for a sinking that took only 18 minutes, the reader is fed an awful lot of detail, especially about passengers more colorful than significant, in the course of the book's 353 pages.  (That said, who wouldn't want to know about the passenger who survived being ejected from an underwater smokestack?  Or the passenger torn between saving his original sketches by William Thackeray or his copy of A Christmas Carol with handwritten annotations by Charles Dickens?)   

Our Rating of Dead Wake

Our enjoyment of a good story was tempered by the sobering statistics we learned while reading Dead Wake.  Although the ship sank in calm weather, with ample lifeboats and within sight of the Irish shore, almost 1,200 of its 2,000 passengers died.  Fearing more U-boat attacks, the British Navy ordered its nearby cruiser to withdraw, so a flotilla of fishing trawlers and civilian boats was all that was available to perform search and rescue. The Lusitania was prized as a target, not because of its military importance, but because U-boat captains were recognized for the tonnage of their kills.  As one of the largest vessels afloat, the Lusitania was an irresistible trophy.  

Recognizing a good story, but one weighed down by an excess of detail, we gave Larson a solid 7.4.

  

Next Up:  Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides

Dean gave us an interesting list of contemporary classics (Where the Crawdads Sing, Beloved, A Visit from the Goon Squad) plus the controversial American Dirt.  The voting was close, but we rejected all of them in favor of Hellhound on His Trail, Hampton Sides' account of James Earl Ray's assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the manhunt that consumed a nation.

Ask Jeeves (Larry Did)

Many of us knew the Oakland based search engine/question-answer website Ask Jeeves (now just Ask.com) was related to an English gentleman’s personal valet, but the MBC’s September book – The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse—as Zoom hosted by Glenn provided a path to the “Jeeves” origin.

 The book provides a humorous account of British aristocracy in the lates 1930s, a time when the sharp “Upstairs, Downstairs” line between the aristocracy and the working class begins to fade. The Code of the Woosters follows the escapades of English gentleman Bertram “Bertie” Wooster and his manservant, Jeeves. The beauty of Wodhouse’s book is that it is told through Bertie as narrator who believes it is “he” who is controlling the action, while the reader quickly surmises the real brains of the duo lies with Jeeves.  The book then leads the reader on a romp through the daily social pratfalls of the British upper class where, like Seinfield, nothing of substance occurs.

For a short and humorous work, there was a surprisingly wide set of opinions among the meager number of MBC Zoom attendees.  Several including Tom and Glenn found the book enjoyable and a fun read as each chapter unfolds with Bertie dealing with one predicament after another only to be left at chapter’s end in another social “pickle”.  Glenn and Paul appreciated Wodehouse’s ability to turn a phrase in the King’s English. I was in the middle of the pack – liking the lighthearted storyline but only by skipping over some of the 1930s idioms to keep the book moving.  Jack found the book a light farce with unredeeming characters, yet found himself rooting for several of them anyway.  Andrew (for the part he read) and Dean found the book uninteresting and repetitive with each chapter structured beginning with the protagonist extracting himself from a sticky wicket left hanging at the end of the previous chapter, only to be thrust into a new tight squeeze by chapter end.

But the big news of the month was the nuptials of Glenn and Gamin, which was celebrated in this time of COVID through a slightly disjointed webex meeting via the Sonoma County Clerk’s office.  Congratulations to the couple from all of MBC.  Unfortunately, we were not able to throw Glenn the kind of bachelor party that Bertie threw Gussie in the book.  In other news, the Tom/Dan/Dean winery group is well into their 2020 crush with 2 ½ tons of varietals in process.  Tom reported that the crop did not suffer smoke damage from the fires as of the initial press. Overall MBC members continue to grapple with the vagaries of COVID, wildfires and the election.  One member recounted how their parent contracted COVID and survived but with lingering aftereffects.  We do count ourselves lucky, however, as none of us is an essential front-line worker – although Glenn is now married to one.

Up for October is Dean’s recommendation and 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Overstory by Richard Powers.  After reading this, you will not look and feel for trees in the same way. 

--Larry

Glenn's Book Blows!

Lunch and Acknowledgments

Question: what do you get when you pair a strangely-conceived children-abducted-by-pirates story written in 1929 with a gorgeous afternoon in Sonoma County?

Answer:

1.  A contrite host;
2.  A delicious Caribbean-style lunch;
3.  A very spirited conversation;
4.  An appreciation for why no one this side of the pond reads Richard Hughes, an Englishman who lived in a castle; or
5.  All of the above.

Yes, over jerked chicken, spiced slaw, beans and rice, and a mouth-watering rum cake, we checked Answer No. 5 at Glenn's last Sunday.

Since we revel in the accomplishments of our children, we were all proud to hear that John's daughter Ali made the U.S. Women's Senior National Team this month.  Were it an Olympic year, we would be watching Ali striving for gold.  Way to go, Ali!

Our Review and Discussion of A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

A High Wind in Jamaica attempts to tell two stories:  one a swashbuckling pirate adventure and the other a story of children coming of age on the high seas.  It starts with a hurricane in Jamaica whose destruction is so vast that Mr. and Mrs. Bas-Thornton are compelled to send their children home to England while they rebuild.  During the voyage home, the children's ship is overtaken by pirates.  The children are kidnapped by the pirates but by the end of the novel the captor-captive relationship reverses, and when the pirates are captured they find themselves entirely at the mercy of 11-year old Emily Bas-Thornton.   Her courtroom testimony--motivated by a preternatural sense of self-preservation--leads to their execution.

Our discussion began and ended with apologies from Glenn.  For, no matter how promising its premise, HWJ disappointed on every count.  There was too little made of the pirates and too much of the children, according to Tom.  It was, as Dean described, a "very crappy pirate story."  As a children's story, it was even crappier...and mildly disturbing.  Paul characterized it as a nasty version of Peter Pan.  Jack was more charitable and assumed Hughes was writing for a Young Adult market--so presumably the novel's psycho-sexual undertones would avoid scrutiny.  Wherever HWJ fit in the broad category of children's lit, our guest Mark was as underwhelmed as the rest of us.   According to him, memorable children's fiction is invariably anchored by the extraordinary but, with no giant peach or chocolate river to fill its sails, HWJ was just another fantasy cast adrift.

(Ed. Note:  If you're counting, that was three nautical puns in one sentence.)

Rating A High Wind in Jamaica

Not only was HWJ a clumsy attempt at pirate/kid fiction, it was also implausible (Roy), strange (Armando), and Disneyesque (Terry).  With little to justify the hours we invested in it, it's no surprise we gave it our worst rating (5.3) in four years. We're inclined to forgive Daniel Handler for his effusiveness (since we raised our children on his Lemony Snicket books).  But it's astonishing that the Modern Library included HWJ as No. 71 on its list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century.

Next Up: Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

Terry proposed an eclectic set of titles for May:  the civil rights story behind the Groveland murders, Chouinard's entrepreneur-cum-environmentalist business book, a mass market spy thriller by Stuart Kaminsky, and JD Vance's memoir about growing up in Appalachia.  We chose Vance in the hope that his story will help us better understand the angst of the white working class. 

2015 Redux

Redux notwithstanding, I'll start with our early January 2016 ski trip.  The point is, after years of terrible conditions, we finally had enough snow for good skiing.  A day at Sugar Bowl and, for some, a day of cross-country at Royal Gorge, were appropriately exhausting.  They were also necessary, as they provided the spacing between Tom's lasagna, Peter's ribs, Dean's chicken piccata, and endless bottles of wine. Below, we tuck into that famous lasagna....

(L to R: Moguls, Aussie, Crash, Steeps, Hydro, 2XC4US)

Apologies to "Crash," who finally made our ski weekend only to have his wife's beautiful red SUV scarred by an errant (but honest) snowplow driver.

Our ski trip was only slightly consumed with reading.  We had a too-abbreviated conversation about Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets.  Proposed by Terry, and inspired in part by our appreciation of Walter's short story, Anything Helps, Walter's novel about one man's midlife travails was a comic if bittersweet glance back at the Great Recession.  His protagonist felt a little too like any of us:  middle-aged man (check), with kids (check), and beautiful wife whose fidelity is suspect (hmm...not going there), making bad decisions (sometimes), aware of those bad decisions (always), and with an epiphany at the end (time will tell).  We truncated our discussion to avoid spoiling it for those who hadn't yet finished.  But the consensus seemed to be one of great ambivalence.  Sort of funny, sort of painful, sort of true, sort of compelling.  An emailed rating later of 7.0 was surprisingly good for all the sort ofs.

In December, after a 6-year hiatus, we reprised our progressive holiday party. As before, we started at Larry's for appetizers (thank you for the fried lumpia, Larry!), had our entrees and sides at yours truly, and finished with dessert, mulled wine, and more at Terry's.  As usual, every man did more than he was asked to pull off this moving feast for 35 guests.  Special thanks to Tom (two days spent preparing Julia Child's boeuf bourgignon!), Peter (who, too sick to attend, still dropped off his slow-cooked ribs), and John (whose flourless chocolate cake was to die for, but who also sent each of us home with an individually-wrapped persimmon loaf from his kitchen). 

We traveled up to Petaluma in November for a midday meal with Glenn.  Ostensibly, we were there to discuss Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but most of us were happy touring Glenn's new/old house and listening to his plans for the barn (built, we were told, before Conrad penned his magnum opus).  Since he had no recipes from the Congo, and since Belgian food is French food ruined, Glenn turned to Apocalypse Now for inspiration and prepared an excellent dejeuner Indochine. With guest Rob contributing, we shared our thoughts on Marlow's tale of his quest for Mr. Kurtz. Despite the fact that everything has already been said about this story (most of it by college freshmen), our discussion was lively. Was the journey simply one long acid trip (Rob, speaking metaphorically, I think), intentionally purposeless (Terry), exploring darkness in the map's white spaces (Glenn), an indictment of corporatism (or was that mercantilism, Paul?), or just a vehicle for terrific writing (most of us)?  Regardless, our own quest to find Glenn up in Sonoma County left us amply (ful)filled. Enough so that, for the second month running, we lifted a title into our current top five, with an 8.4 rating.

In October, we repaired to Dan's for dinner al fresco and an opportunity to discuss one of the more original works we've read to date.  Violating our selection protocol by offering us only one title, Dan had us read Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.  The title was incongruous, but the book managed to capture our collective fancy.  Whimsical, comic, irreverent--none of these does justice to Moore's re-creation of the Christ story with Biff as his cartoonish narrator.  Like Aslan's Zealot, Moore's Lamb acknowledges that so little is known about Christ's upbringing.  But in Moore's telling, absolutely anything is fair game.  Our comments ranged from "sophomoric" (Doug) and "juvenile" (me) to "refreshing" (Peter) and "meaningful" (Tom).  Quibbles aside, almost everyone found Moore funny and highly creative.  And that, to my surprise, propelled Dan's solo title into our current top five with an 8.7.  Creativity was also to be found on our vino, courtesy of San Marino Cellars' Label Division:
 

Dan and his Disciples

 (P.S.:  Dan, your Jerusalem-inspired meal of lamb and chicken shawarma more than compensated for your rules violation.  But don't tell anyone I said that. Otherwise, I'll let the world know that your own guest, Miguel, confessed that while Lamb may have been funny, it had "no depth.")

We convened in September wondering what Paul had in store for us.  In fairness, we'd been warned that our book's title should be taken literally.  And it was.  Paul's dinner dropped us right into the onion field described by Joseph Wambaugh. Seated outside and in the dark, we all took notice of the table's centerpiece, which was an artful arrangement of planted onion bulbs.  To make sure we got the point, each part of our meal featured onions, starting with an onion dip, then onion soup, and continuing with a delicious onion quiche.  The food unfortunately outdid the book.  Perhaps we were spoiled by Truman Capote, but everything about Wambaugh's true crime account suffered in comparison to In Cold Blood.  Most disappointing was the writing.  Plodding and tedious, the book's best moment was the actual homicide in the onion field north of Los Angeles.  While we all decried the writing, Larry further complained that the story had no protagonist worth caring about.  Indeed, had we cared more, we might not have been content to rate The Onion Field a 5.5.

2014 In Review

With apologies, here’s a belated summary of our meetings in 2014, following our evening imbibing Joy Juice with Dan:

In March, I hosted and had the highest hopes for my favorite novel of 2012, Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars.  This first-person narrative chronicles the post-apocalyptic angst of a pilot (Hig) holed up in a rural Colorado airport with an ornery fellow survivor (Bangley), an aging dog (Jasper), and miles of open (and threatening) prairie around the airfield.  I thought Hig’s obsession with and eventual exploration of the world beyond would capture everyone’s imagination.  It did, but with reservations about Heller's plot contrivances.  At rating time, we gave the novel a modestly positive 7.1.  At least the Filipino food from Ma’s was a hit.

Glenn hosted us in April, with Rory graciously providing the venue.  The dark interior of the McNear House dining room was the perfect atmosphere as we ate stew and discussed Miller’s Cold War classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz.  Most were glad they read (for the second month in a row) this post-apocalyptic novel, but some quibbled with the narrative’s intentionally slow progression (yes, it took centuries before those monks figured out the meaning of a grocery list).  The church/state tension and the hostility towards science were fascinating, as was society's fate in repeating its cycle of self-destruction (barring a technological, not spiritual salvation at the novel's end). Were it not for the novel’s plodding pace, we might have rated it higher than 6.7.

In May, Terry had us reading another period piece, this time from the French Indo-Chinese conflict in the 1950’s.  Graham Greene’s The Quiet American generated ambivalence, as we struggled with the opium-laced duplicity of the English correspondent, Fowler, and the implausibly naïve American diplomat, Pyle.  The book had no likeable characters and instead was an interesting, if disturbing harbinger of the war that followed a decade later in Vietnam.  Following Stan’s loud protestations that Greene’s novel was “not a war book” (no one said it was, Stan), we gave it a thumbs-up rating of 7.1.

Stan hosted us for a twofer in June.  Our chosen book, Saramago’s Cain, was (thanks to the sudden generosity of Random House) twinned with a pre-publication edition of Alan Furst’s latest novel, Midnight in Europe.  Those of us who read Furst’s pre-WWII spy thriller were disappointed.  Thin, poorly plotted, and with unfinished characters.  Enough said.  Cain, on the other hand, was a provocative read for even those whose recollection of the Old Testament had grown dim.  From the Garden of Eden through Cain’s lengthy exile, Saramago's final novel moved along with an almost mystical hum.  Impressed but unpersuaded that Saramago had achieved anything close to the standard he set with Blindness, we gave him the benefit of the doubt with a 6.5 rating.

Following Doug’s summer party in July (thanks again, Doug), we met at Dean’s in August to chew over Reza Aslan’s critically-acclaimed Zealot.  It was mere coincidence that Zealot picked up where Cain left off.  And while no one was pining at the end of the meal for yet another story about the Bible, we were all quite taken by the extraordinary research Aslan poured into this latest account of the story of Jesus of Nazareth.  His thesis that Jesus was less a proselytizer than an overt revolutionary provided plenty of conversation to accompany our meal and as a story was impressive enough to earn a 7.6. And about that meal, Dean did a superb job replicating the cuisine of Israel while operating with a balky hip.  (Glad the bionic version is working well, Dean.)

In September, Larry persuaded us to read Steven Kotler’s controversial work examining the state of “flow.”  In The Rise of Superman, Kotler posits that today’s generation of extreme athletes is achieving extraordinary success by hacking (his term) flow and that this state of being holds promise for all manner of human endeavor.  As a group, we weren’t buying it.  And I mean that literally, as some of us felt that Kotler’s book-length exposition was designed in part to sell his accompanying workshops, seminars, and the like.  While some felt that a state of flow was achievable (Stan and Dan, in particular), no one was willing to defend Kotler’s view that flow is the sine qua non of ultimate performance.  The anecdotes were interesting, but the hyperbole relegated The Rise of Superman to a subpar 5.7.

With the arrival of rain and colder weather, we convened at Peter’s to mull over Dan Brown’s best-selling account of the University of Washington’s 1936 Olympic rowing team, The Boys in the Boat.  To a man, we enjoyed the core story with its (obvious) themes of teamwork, redemption, sacrifice, honor, and the like. But, led by Larry, we panned Brown for larding up a compelling story with extraneous detail and trying too hard to eulogize an entire generation (yes, THAT generation).  We also decried the formula: part Laura Hillenbrand, part Erik Larson, Brown doesn’t quite do justice to either. George shared his early rowing experience in Pocock shells and that rowing gradually disappeared from the national consciousness not only because of the rise of televised sports, but also due to the taint of too many betting scandals. Notwithstanding our quibbles, The Boys in the Boat generated a healthy 7.1 in our final rating.

Roy hosted us—well most of us—in December to share reactions to Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story.  Ok, let’s cut to the chase. Since I didn’t attend, I can’t do justice to the conversation.  But I did collect the votes afterwards and was surprised that Shteyngart, whose peculiar brand of Russian émigré satire isn’t for everyone, managed to pull down a 7.5.  Either Roy’s distillations were especially powerful or I misjudged my fellow MBCers.  Regardless, kudos to Roy for a fine meal (according to my sources), and that’s a wrap for 2014!

A Make-Up for 2012

As club secretary, I must fall on my sword for my repeated failure, over the last year or more, to regularly post summaries of our meetings. I blame Tom A. for initially stepping in to save me, only to later step out and expose my lack of constancy. With that mea culpa, herewith a very quick summary of our meetings since January's A Sport and a Pastime.

In February, Paul fed us victuals from the Kashmir as we considered the story of the 1999 expedition that discovered the remains of legendary British mountaineer, George Mallory.  In Ghosts of Everest, Hemmleb et. al. chronicle their successful attempt to re-trace Mallory's fateful route in 1924 in order to figure out what exactly happened to Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine.  Less successful was the manner in which Hemmleb and his co-authors joined their account with Mallory's.  The story of each expedition was fascinating, but the book's split narrative was awkward and resulted in a modest 6.7 rating. Maybe it was the intimidating presence of our guest and published author/teacher, Andy, that made us extra critical.

In March, we convened at Stan's (yes, another outstanding meal of grilled meat and roast potatoes!) to consider Sherman Alexie's modern-day account of life on the rez in Reservation Blues.  We split over the dream sequences and mystical moments, but were taken by the honesty with which Alexie paints his characters.  Alternatingly sympathetic and scathing, Alexie depicts life on and off the reservation (and his characters' infatuation with music) with a remarkable vividness, especially for those of us for whom the BIA is just another acronym.  The 7.0 rating understated the generally positive tenor of our discussion.

Armando hosted us in April with an ethnic feast that complimented Robert Laxalt's beautifully drawn memoir set in pre- and post-war Nevada.  As men of a certain age, perhaps we were predisposed to fall hard for Sweet Promised Land and its elegiac re-telling of a quintessentially father-son story.  The father, Dominique Laxalt, is a hard-working immigrant (herding sheep in the foothills near Carson City) whose sons achieve fully the American dream (one as a US senator, another as a university professor) but whose heart can't quite forget the family he left behind in a small town in the Pyrenees.  His return home with his younger son is both reunion and closure. Several guys commented that this story continued to resonate long after the pages were turned.  It certainly did for me.  For that reason, it earned an 8.3 rating and climbed into our current Top 5.

We met next in June at my house and enjoyed plenty of sushi and sake as we considered Louis Zamperini's unforgettable odyssey from Torrance, CA to the Berlin Olympics to a POW camp in Japan.  Laura Hillenbrand is a shameless crowd-pleaser whose recreation of the Zamperini story engendered questions from us (and others) about its authenticity of detail. That aside, most of us felt uplifted and exhausted by Zamperini's extraordinary resilience and will to survive.  Our conclusion was to forgive the sometimes tedious and occasionally hyperbolic passages and celebrate--with a 7.4 rating--an amazing story of survival.

In July we declared a bye and instead appeared with spouses and no books at Doug's house for his second annual summer party.  After commiserating with him over his recent burglary, we tucked in and stuffed ourselves.  Thanks again, Doug.

Our last meeting was delayed to September, when Glenn hosted us at Roy's house.  With food from Sol, we were all ears as Ralph Leighton regaled us with stories about Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist who was also his father's colleague at CalTech.  Glenn had proposed and we picked Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, unaware that Ralph Leighton was Roy's brother-in-law.  The book was filled with the infectious humor and antics of a renowned physicist who related his personal story to Leighton in a series of recorded conversations over the space of several years.  From those recordings, Leighton produced this delightful memoir.  Even those of us with little interest in applied physics found in  Feynman (via Leighton) a riveting storyteller indeed. 

On Safari With Glenn

Acknowledgments
For those of us able to find Glenn's house in the outer reaches of Novato (Peter, how long did you drive around the block?), his hospitality was far more generous than that encountered by Theroux on his return to Africa.  Glenn thought briefly about cooking an all-Ethiopian meal, and then prudence took over.  He ordered a complete dinner from a reliably excellent Ethiopian restaurant in Oakland and brought it all the way to Marin for us to enjoy.  Starting with the Tusker beer (thanks Paul and Dan) and samosas, we then moved on to Theroux's personal favorite:  a variety of entrees (in this case, chicken, lamb, lentils, and greens) eaten with a gluten-free bread wrap called injera, which Theroux likened to the taste of a dirty bathmat.  It certainly tasted fine to us, and except for a few carpet spills and aching knees (from eating native style in the living room), our meal was utterly without complaint.

The Book
Paul Theroux's return to Africa, after a 40-year hiatus following his Peace Corps stint in Malawi, proved both eye-opening and profoundly disappointing.  In Dark Star Safari, Theroux reflects upon the Africa he once knew and a new Africa overrun with NGOs whose project-driven handouts perpetuate a legacy of dependency and false hope.

Our response to Theroux's response was equally ambivalent.  Almost everyone used the word "informative" to describe this 485-page travelogue, but thereafter our opinions diverged significantly.  The book was anecdotal, insightful, superficial, repetitive, interesting, and always crotchety.  Every last one of us found the trip through Egypt as tedious as Theroux apparently did, which is puzzling given his willingness to devote 53 pages to his trip down the Nile with a boat full of ugly westerners.

Ultimately, our 7.2 rating reflected a certain intolerance for a book that came quite close to our maximum page length and yet still failed to inspire us.  We were more impressed by Paul's and Stan's African reflections than we were by Theroux's.  In an experiment that likely won't be repeated, we did a blind vote beforehand and came up with a rating a half turn lower (6.7), which suggests that our open voting system may not be as objective as we hope.

Next Up
Terry presented us with several fine options for next month, all of which address America's military experience in Afghanistan.  Our decision:  we're going to war with Sebastian Junger!

Glenn's Hiro

Acknowledgments
Approaching the dog days of summer, with several of us already gone on vacation, Glenn readied his home and welcomed a smaller-than-usual contingent Tuesday night. Well, on second thought, he apparently didn’t ready his home. With his nicely furnished patio still awaiting its bluestone installation, and with a step riser that would have intimidated a Chinese gymnast, Glenn dared us to complain. And none did, as we were much too preoccupied with his food and drink and company to care. Thank you for hosting, Glenn.

Without our resident chemist (Roy went to Hawaii to avoid reading this month’s selection), the drink was merely fine. The food, however, deftly mirrored Uncle Enzo’s fare in Snow Crash. But with delivery by Pico instead of Hiro, taste and texture were both outstanding. As were the vanilla and blueberries suffused with raspberry liqueur. Not content with these amuse bouches, Glenn introduced us to his excellent friend, Judd, an import from Mill Valley who admitted to a fondness for SciFi but who proved to be no Stephenson apologist.

These acknowledgments wouldn't be complete without saluting George's impromptu discourse on the re-creation of an ancient Athenian trireme. He promises more at his upcoming lecture at the St. Francis Yacht Club. And we remain impressed by Glenn's passionate embrace of all things robotic (and that is NOT a reference to Jana, his lovely and intelligent wife).

The Book
Stephenson’s first breakthrough novel, Snow Crash, challenged us. Ostensibly about a not-too-distant society whose culture and institutions have been overtaken by monopolists and hegemonists, Snow Crash describes a real world that is threatened by its parallel, virtual world. The book is long, peopled with techno-thrill junkies, freighted with a mixture of tech talk and Sumerian myth, and it features a plot that could have been served up in half the pages. Did I say it was long? (Editor’s Note: Having read only 230/470 of this novel, I’m still confident I absorbed enough.)

Let’s start with the positive. First, George read it and then convinced his 14-year old son to read it. As a group, we weren’t as impressionable as Evan, but several of us felt rewarded by the effort. Those who liked it tended to be steeped in SciFi, although some had their quibbles with Stephenson’s lengthy, digressive, and slightly baroque style and structure. Larry, who proudly read this precocious digital age novel on his Kindle, described it as “The DaVinci Code on steroids.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement (though Larry might try re-reading The DaVinci Code on his Kindle to see if it's the digital medium that adds the steroids). John, on the other hand, was impressed with Stephenson’s ability to construct a virtual world that extends and distorts our physical world (e.g., the actual replication and manipulation of viruses, language, and even human behavior by virtual means). Judd, who confessed to reading Stephenson’s massive Cryptonomicon (easily twice the length of Snow Crash) and also meeting Stephenson at Book Passage, admitted that Stephenson’s writing has matured since his early efforts. Indeed, Judd’s assessment of SciFi literature validated my own sense of the genre: despite a soaring imagination, the writing quality can be quite uneven.

Everyone who read Snow Crash (and that includes Jack and Dean, who each claimed to have reached p. 63) found Stephenson's 1992 novel amazingly prescient. His Metaverse is eerily similar to the virtual worlds that now populate the cyberspace we’re familiar with. As Glenn noted, the avatars adopted by our children in Club Penguin are just a half step away from the characters’ avatars that fill Stephenson’s Metaverse. And the regular blurring of Metaverse and Reality in Snow Crash is not only intentional, but may be yet another example of Stephenson’s prescience.

In the end, Snow Crash had its adherents but it failed to stimulate a strong response. Our rating of 5.8 puts it below the middle of the pack.

Next Up
Since we are taking August off, we agreed to Doug’s suggestion that we share titles that make for ideal summer reads. No literary awards, no moody narrators, no big words—just easy, uncomplicated stories that read well on the beach or in the mountains. I wish I could capture some of what was said about the titles that were proffered, but instead I’ll trust you to remember and reach for the books that you found most intriguing. So, in no particular order and without referencing authors, here are the titles I was able to scribble onto my Post-It: Any book by Lee Child, The Alchemist, Blood Sucking Fiends, God’s Middle Finger, The Call of the Wild, The Old Man and the Sea, Into the Wild, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Nature Girl/Tourist Season, Blink, North Dallas Forty, Richistan, Stiff, Bonk, Peyton Place, Endurance, Into the Void, and Three Cups of Tea.

For September, Terry gave us three distinct choices: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (Hunter S. Thompson), Ironweed (William Kennedy), and High Jinx (William F. Buckley). Without Terry present to both defend and proselytize, we bickered over page length, topicality, relevance, and even (sacrilegiously) asked ourselves if we could pick a different book altogether. Tom rushed to defend the integrity of Terry’s list and we quickly fell in line. By the narrowest of margins, Kennedy’s 1984 Pulitzer winner won out over Thompson’s 1972 political screed. Ironically, Kennedy and Thompson were quite close friends. Maybe that’s why we had such difficulty picking one over the other. We’ll find out in September if our choice is vindicated.