September Book Selections

Having survived MBC's theological period -- A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cain, and Zealot -- my offerings for September's meeting are, for a change, agnostic although still philosophical.   They include: Two fiction and two non-fiction; Something new and something old:  Two sport themed  and two not; Two new authors, two not so new.     Here they are in no particular order:

1. The Rise of Superman;
2. The Art of Fielding;
3. A Tibetan Peach Pie; or
4. Moby-Dick.

The Details:

(1) The Rise of Superman -- Steven Kotler, 198 pages -- I always worry about reviews that use hyperbole like "ground breaking", but having read the book, my summary (note -- I 've summarized each of the four reviews below as these book reviewers must get paid by the column inch) of the Goodreads review is not far off the mark:

An exploration of how extreme athletes break the limits of ultimate human performance and what we can learn from their mastery of the state of consciousness known as “flow” In this groundbreaking book, New York Times–bestselling author Steven Kotler decodes the mystery of ultimate human performance. Building a bridge between the extreme and the mainstream, The Rise of Superman explains how these athletes are using flow to do the impossible and how we can use this information to radically accelerate our performance in our own lives. At its core, this is a book about profound possibility, what is actually possible for our species, and where—if anywhere—our limits lie.

(2) The Art of Fielding -- Chad Harbach, 512 pages -- This book was previously proposed by another MBC member.  At that time, I had not read it.  Last Christmas, my daughter gave it to me and I enjoyed it enough to offer it again to MBC.   My summary -- so we don't transition too quickly from our recent fascination with biblical references --  of the Chicago Tribune review of this book is

There should be a Biblical saying — For if a new novel, for which the publisher has paid an enormous amount of cash, lives up to its hype, all shall considered themselves blessed — and if that novel cometh from the Midwest, homeland to Floyd Dell and Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jim Harrison, then all shall be twice blessed. This should apply to "The Art of Fielding," which Little Brown had much bruited about and whose hefty hardcover we can now hold in our hands. It's a baseball novel, meaning it's a novel from which one can extrapolate about all life on earth. It's a college novel and thus a coming of age novel. It's a novel about families, by birth and by life-choices, and a novel about how to live, how to love and how to die. It's a novel about how to read and how to write, and it's all in all the most delightful and serious first book of fiction that I have read in a while.

(3) A Tibetan Peach Pie, Tom Robbins, 362 pages -- This is Tom Robbins recently published memoir.  I read Still Life with Woodpecker and may have read his more famous book, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (but that part of my college life is a little hazy).  For sure, I have not read this book (but will), so to give it its due, here is my summary of the New York Times review:

The story of how Tom Robbins became Tom Robbins is a pretty good one, and in relating it, he’s written his best book in many years. “Tibetan Peach Pie” should be sold in one of those marijuana vending machines now extant in Colorado. Like them, it provides an afternoon’s affordable buzz.

(3) Moby-Dick -- Herman Melville  640 pages --  Alright, so the length is probably a "bridge too far" for  MBC.  I've included it because I'll now read it after not so subtle references in The Art of Fielding (see above). I assume no review of this book is needed.

Do I have a suggested favorite?  Yes.  My suggested read is the first book -- The Rise of Superman.  While Stephen Kotler is probably not a Pulitzer candidate, The Rise of Superman should lead to a lively MBC debate around the book's premise -- that extreme athletes can attain a state of consciousness (he calls the "flow) that allow them to push beyond what was thought to be the limits of human performance. Further, how can we mortals (sorry Stan) tap into this state of consciousness or do we already do so without realizing it. Oh, BTW did you notice -- its 198 pages (not counting the bibliography).

Voting begins now.  As my Chicago brethren  might say -- vote early, vote often.  -- Larry

Dan Celebrates Black History Month With Onion and Joy Juice

 
Acknowledgments
Dan spared neither effort nor expense to ensure a satisfying evening last Tuesday. Hard spirits came first, with an assortment of whiskies that included a bottle of Joy Juice with Little Onion on the label. Once we tucked in to dinner, several John Brown-inspired varietals were poured, courtesy of the graphics arts division of San Marino Cellars.
 

Strong stuff, but a suspect likeness

John Brown: A Family of Vintners

Even with so much "giddy water" lubricating our evening, none of us missed the chance to fill up on Dan's tri tip and jambalaya. We did leave room, though, for a slice of pie that was 9 parts Jack Daniels to 1 part pecans. Eyes watering and throats burning, we turned our attention to the book that inspired such hospitality.

The Book
Most know James McBride for his deeply affecting memoir, The Color of Water, in which he examines race relations in the 50's and 60's through his own mixed-race upbringing. Our McBride selection, The Good Lord Bird, presents a different segment of black history, but also with a mixed-race child as narrator. Seen through the eyes of a slave boy involuntarily rescued (and thereafter dressed and addressed as a girl) by John Brown, the story is both poignant and hilarious as Brown and his outlaw band ultimately meet their destiny at Harper's Ferry two years later.

As a group, we were divided in our impressions of McBride's latest novel. Roy took issue with its historical accuracy, complaining that the pre-war reference to eating pheasant was sloppy (since pheasant wasn't introduced to America until the 1880's) and the caricature of John Brown as a nutcase fails to acknowledge that Brown was demonized by post-war historians with an axe to grind. Peter found the story slow and purposeless, but (like Dean) he enjoyed reading it in conjunction with seeing 12 Years A Slave. Most of the rest of us were less critical. John enjoyed the colorful vernacular, Doug and others appreciated the mixed motives of both Free Staters and Pro Slavers, Glenn and Paul remarked on Onion's story as a narrative of disguise, hiding, and survival (yet failed to mention The Book Thief!), and Jack and George (with murmurs from the rest of us) enjoyed a novel they might not otherwise have selected on their own--although George loudly objected to the cross-dressing conceit at the heart of the novel.

One indicator of a book's popularity is how many of us are able to finish it in time. In this case, 14 of us did, including Larry in absentia. Kudos to McBride. Unfortunately, his talents couldn't overcome the vote-canceling antics of Dean and Roy, who were egged on by Doug's pre-emptive 10. With a 7.6 average rating, McBride still produced a superior contribution to the MBC booklist.

Next Up
Due to Stan's upcoming travels, it fell to me to propose titles for our next dinner.  Because I pressed hard for my favorite read of 2013, the group graciously turned down Ishiguro's Remains of the Day and Walter's Beautiful Ruins in favor of The Dog Stars by Peter Heller.  Next month we'll find out if others are as intrigued as I was by Hig, the protagonist at the center of a world undone by disease.

2013 Redux

In June we gathered at Roy's, ate well from his table loaded with food from Sol, and discussed Michael Ondaatje's second-most famous novel, The Cat's Table. Recalled from a much later vantage point, Ondaatje's narrator describes his journey as an 11-year old from Ceylon to England.  Ostensibly an account of 21 days aboard ship, the novel proved to us to be so much more.  Ondaatje gave us a beautiful examination of wayward youth, lost innocence, misplaced recollections, and the pain of  friendships also misplaced. With no one dissenting, we happily awarded Ondaatje an 8.1 for a story so well told.

July arrived and, instead of simple afternoon cocktails at Doug's, we dined and discussed Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King.  Surprisingly, we were to a man slightly underwhelmed by a novel that otherwise boasted so many of the elements necessary for our approval.  Eggers' protagonist, Alan Clay, an American businessman in his mid-fifties, has bottomed out financially and is desperate to redeem himself with a sales commission on a deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  The product:  a holographic telecommunications system.  The client:  King Abdullah.  The setting:  a speculative city waiting to be built in the desert. With a huge nod to Waiting for Godot,  Eggers' story of ambition and failure, of a father's love and a spouse's betrayal, of a disappearing old economy and a mystifying new economy unfolds in a series of reflections and diversions as Clay waits and waits for the King to appear for a promised presentation of the hologram. We found Clay alternatingly pathetic and sympathetic, and perhaps because none of us has suffered so keenly the emotional toll of middle age, we couldn't quite forgive Clay his inability and unwillingness to move ahead.  A mildly pessimistic novel tempered our optimism and produced merely a solid rating (6.5).  Like Eggers' protagonist, our rating could and should have been better.

We declared a bye in August and reconvened in September at George's house for a fine German dinner, with schnapps from Roy and a drinkable Malbec (with an Urban label!) from Doug.  We had to decide whether we erred in selecting The Book Thief as our reading for the month.  Amid criticisms that Zusak's novel was written for young adults, boasts a female protagonist, and exceeded our 500-page limit, we nevertheless concluded that it was well worth the extra pages.  Set during WWII in Munich, and told from Death's perspective (yes, Death is the first-person narrator), Zusak's story centers on young Liesel Meminger, a girl whose poverty combined with her fondness of reading compels her to steal books.  With heartbreaking commentary on Jews, Jesse Owens, hunger, schoolyard bullies, bombs, Nazism, heroism and selflessness, and above all parental love, Zusak had us early in his story.  We all but admitted that our 7.7 rating would have been higher but for the book's YA designation.  Shame on us!

We met at Jack's in October and, with mouthfuls of tri tip and roasted autumn root soup, we dug into The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint.  Written by Brady Udall (to us baby boomers, better known for his relationship to Reps. Morris and Stewart Udall), Edgar Mint is about as bleak a novel as we've read to date.  Yes, there is redemption and closure (of sorts) at the end, and more than a little black humor en route, but Edgar's journey is filled with so much pain that the reader can only cringe as the obstacles mount. His story begins when, while living with his alcoholic mother, his head is run over by a mail truck.  He is taken to a hospital where his only solace is--you're not going to believe it--a urinal puck! Thence to an Indian reservation reform school where bullying and beatings are routine and supervision absent.  And then to the dysfunction of an adoptive Mormon family.  And all the while, in the background lurks the strange and seemingly predatory surgeon to whom Edgar owes his life.  We argued over the transitions between first and third person POV (Doug and Stan), we agreed that Udall is wildly imaginative (Paul and Larry), we found in Edgar the consummate survivor (John), and generally marveled at the co-existence of stereotypes and eccentrics in this coming-of-age/survival/nativist tale.  Udall really made us work for it, so we gave him a solid 6.8 for his and our combined efforts.

We bypassed November and met at Paul's in December. In recognition of Dashiell Hammett's role in the development of the noir genre (both book and film), Paul's menu went berserk.  Starting with a black truffle brie and black olives, then to an entrée of black rice, black beans, and blackened chicken, Paul had us wash it down with sips of Johnnie Walker Black. Dessert, naturally, featured blackberries.  Way to go, Paul!  As for Hammett, his The Maltese Falcon managed to stand up to the passage of time.  But since the entire genre has been co-opted, adapted, and reinvented many times over, the novelty was absent.  Dean felt it read a little like a Law & Order episode.  Moreover, the dry, potboiler writing felt stilted when compared to the sharp dialog we recalled from the movie.  Several of us (Larry, Tom, and Paul) found ourselves mentally toggling back and forth between Hammett's original tough-talking Spade and Bogart's archly classic cinematic version. All of us, though, enjoyed the 1920's San Francisco backdrop, from old street and hotel names to the city's colorful and checkered history as a port of embarkation to the far east.  As a quick read and a sentimental mood piece, we favored TMF with a 6.9 rating.

Tom Takes Us Down the Colorado

Acknowledgments
Last Monday, Tom did what John Wesley Powell was unable to do:  he fed his men exceedingly well as he took them on a journey down the Colorado River.  How?  He prepared Julia Child's ineffable boeuf bourguignon, paired it with roasted potatoes and two salads (thanks to John for contributing the garlic radicchio), and concluded with man-size helpings of his legendary strawberry shortcake.  With bottles of the always drinkable San Marino Cellars followed by Roy's distilled spirits, the meal washed down well.  As for the book, well...see below.

The Book
Powell's account of his 1869 expedition down the unexplored canyons of the Green and Colorado Rivers made for tough reading.  According to Wallace Stegner, Powell publicized his expedition hoping Congress would appropriate funds for further exploration of the Colorado River.  But to broaden its appeal (and, I dare say, extend its serialization in Scribner's), Powell prefaced his account with a lengthy exposition on the geology of the region, inserted pictures and commentary on random native artifacts, and embellished his diary notes with details from later expeditions.

Our 4.3 rating says it all.  Those who read all of the 400-page Penguin edition (fewer than half the group) were disappointed to learn that Dean and Dan had managed to find a 135-page hardcover edition containing only Powell's account of the actual expedition.  Gentlemen, thanks for sharing.

Bitterness aside, we were taken by the arduousness of Powell's trip (how many times did they lose their oars and have to fashion new ones from downed trees?), the primitive instruments (who knew you could calculate altitude with a barometer?), and the meager rations they subsisted on (only tobacco and coffee were in generous supply; Powell's men had their priorities).   As a self-funded, one-armed Civil War veteran supported by a ragtag group of men, John Wesley Powell's exploration of the Colorado frontier was truly remarkable.  His account, however, wasn't.

Next Up
We dine next at Roy's, armed with (unabridged) copies of The Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje's recent follow-up to his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient.  We will decide if this novel is--despite the afterword's disclaimer--a thinly-disguised memoir of Ondaatje's boyhood journey from Ceylon to England.

Middle America, Middlesex, and an Ending

With apologies to John, Larry, and Peter, here is an abbreviated and belated summary of three outstanding evenings in the preceding months.

Last December, we arrived at John's house with exceedingly low expectations.  With 1950's Iowa as his backdrop, and knowing that Roy had already mined the era to produce his Midwestern Manhattan-style sandwiches for our discussion of In Cold Blood, John's menu choices appeared limited. Or so we thought. John surprised us by pulling from his warming oven individual foil boxes he'd hand-filled with gourmet meat loaf, organic spuds, and fresh veggies.  Not Swanson's.  Not Hungry-Man.  Just outstanding!

Our reaction to The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid was more muted. We enjoyed Bryson's many references to a childhood that resembled our own.  From Glenn's memory of the x-ray measuring machines in shoe stores, to Larry's recollection of hi-fi cabinets and early color TV's, to our collective memories of delivering newspapers and driving to Disneyland--Bryson had us reminiscing about simpler times.  But it wasn't enough to achieve more than a middling 7.0 rating.  As noted by Paul, Bryson's memoir, while funny and evocative, is a book about not very much.  There is an aimlessness to the narrative that left many of us wanting more.  So we helped ourselves to dessert, talked about growing up, and relaxed in the company of John's excellent guests, Mark and Don.

In early January,  we went skiing.  And a good thing, too.  By late January the snow in the Sierras was declining fast and very little more came our way.  Fortunately, our bye month gave us an extra 30 days to finish reading Jeffrey Eugenides' best known work, Middlesex.

When we met in February, Larry's dinner nicely captured the Greek immigrant story at the heart of Middlesex with servings of lamb and beef gyros (on two types of homemade pita bread!) followed by  assimilationist brownies a la mode (yes, the vanilla ice cream was also homemade).  The book was received almost as well as the dinner.

Many considered it a rich, evocative tale (multi-layered, according to John) that suffered from a single, significant distraction:  the lengthy revelation that the main character, Callie, is a hermaphrodite.  Doug, who was born only 5 miles from Greek Town, wasn't convinced of its import but figured it was Callie's fate given the secret of her forebears. Contrast that with Paul who, having read the novel on his iPhone, complained that the first 2100 pages were mere foreplay to the main act (presumably the reader's epiphany about Callie, but as usual Paul wasn't saying). From there our discussion evolved into commentary about the Greek  diaspora (who knew Peter's hometown of Melbourne boasts the second largest expat Greek community?) and of course hermaphrodites (Terry warned us not to research the subject via Google images; Armando noted that post-coital snails eat their penises to separate). (Editor:  My notes are quite specific on this last point.)  Our 7.5 rating was boosted by Stan who proclaimed the novel "a brilliant work of art," despite having read it over five years ago and retaining only the dimmest recollection of the story line.

Peter's dinner on March 19 was a well-conceived and even better executed St. Patrick's Day meal, replete with corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and competing apple and rhubarb pies.  Maybe it's his Commonwealth upbringing, but leave it to Peter to serve up Irish food to accompany our discussion of Julian Barnes, an oh-so-English contemporary novelist.

Barnes' The Sense of an Ending generated an unpredictable reaction.  Unlike Banville's The Sea, an equally introspective novel that had most of us on the fence, we all genuinely liked Barnes' effort.  Like Banville, Barnes delves deeply into the fissures of unreliable memory, in this instance through the perspective of Tony Webster, a retiree who discovers a painful part of his past.  For most of us, the pleasure of this novel was the gradually building suspense that precedes the narrator's realization of the pain he'd caused his school friends long ago.  But not quite all were entranced by Barnes' skillful prose.  Paul, always the contrarian, found the characters uniformly unlikable. His dissenting 5 failed to keep this gem of a novel from pulling down a very respectable 7.5 (an above average rating, especially for a Booker Prize winner).