We were nothing like the quirky characters in the BBC TV series The Book Group, but we did meet every month or two to discuss a book we’d all planned to read. The key difference with the TV show was that we weren’t all sleeping together. The main similarity was that often a whole night would pass with us barely mentioning the book of the month.
Back in 2004, I was invited along to a group by my then-housemate and my overactive sense of responsibility quickly made me one of the “reliables”, the three or four who would turn up every time and have read the book without fail. The rest of the group was made up of semi-regulars who mostly just wanted to hang out for a beer. It was a great group.
If you’ve ever been a member of a book group, you will likely have encountered the same issues that we did. How do you keep everyone interested? How do you pick a book that everyone wants to read? Do you bother rescheduling for people who never turn up anyway?
Picking books was definitely the biggest challenge. The two men in the group weren’t so keen on some of the more Oprah’s Book Club-type selections. No one was especially keen on books over 400 pages long—who has time? Finding enough copies for everyone was always a challenge, especially for anything left-of-centre.
There’s something to be said for book-choice-by-committee, though. That group and its democratic selection process were responsible for me reading a dozen books that I never would have picked up otherwise. Sometimes this only confirmed my initial impression of the book (My Sister’s Keeper was compulsive but very superficial) and other times it blew my preconceptions away.
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton was the biggest surprise. It’s a phenomenally popular book and one of the biggest landmarks in recent Australian fiction. For some reason, I figured it would be dull and very middle-of-the-road. Instead, it was engaging and beautifully told. Rather than relying on the worn clichés of Australiana, it dug deep into the world of post-war Perth and turned up all sorts of unique characters and situations.
Being in a book group and reviewing books are similar in a few ways. Firstly, you have to read to a deadline and somehow fit a book in with all your normal activities. The deadlines for our group weren’t too strict—every meeting was delayed at least two weeks—but once you factored in sourcing a copy and the rest of modern life, it could be difficult.
The other similarity is being forced to verbalise your opinion on a book. Once we’ve finished with the rigours of High School English Lit, most of us are more than happy to just enjoy a book and leave any analysing to our subconscious. But talking about a book in a group takes you away from vague feelings and impressions and requires you to put boundaries around those feelings. Once you’ve expressed an opinion out loud, it feels more fixed but also more dubious.
This is a mixed blessing. Some books open up under that kind of analysis and you find yourself loving them in a deeper way. Other times you realise that your positive feelings evaporate once they’re aired, especially when you have to defend them. My good feelings regarding Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised didn’t survive the questioning.
It doesn’t matter, really. Some books will change your life, others will amuse you briefly and others will let you down. But talking about a book over a beer in warm pub on a frosty winter with good people, well it’s one of life’s little pleasures.
Lyall Watson, a maverick scientific polymath and explorer who wrote the best-selling book “Supernature” and introduced the “hundredth monkey” theory to explain the sudden and inexplicable transmission of behavior and ideas across social groups, died on June 25 in Gympie, Australia. He was 69 and lived in West Cork, Ireland.
I’ve only just begun to learn about the enchanted life of Lyall Watson with his unorthodox upbringing, his 100th Monkey theory, and the tapeworm he invited into his body and named Fred. Prior to news of his death, and subsequent fanciful obituaries, all I knew about the author was the incredible volume, Gifts of Unknown Things, which has resided among the “special books” on my desk since high school.
At first, I loved the book for its majestic cover illustration and promise of something grounded and true in the world in the way it describes the flight patterns of male flies among other natural, beguiling things. Since, the book has taught me that the little differences between human cultures are the most interesting, and has introduced me to New Age science and futurism, stuff I don’t strictly follow or even really understand, but am strangely drawn to.
I found Gifts of Unknown Things in a box of library donations. The cover caught my eye, and the first page I flipped to featured these words: “Nobody gets used to people’s coming back from the dead...” How do you pass that up? Everything Lyall Watson describes in his books, he does so with rapt urgency, like he’s looking at the whole world for the very first time.
Better late than never to get the skinny on such a fascinating writer.
One thing I love to keep an eye out for in the summer is a good book sale. Not only do brick-and-mortar bookstores tend to put out more sale items in sunny weather to get window shoppers to pause in their strolling, many libraries choose this time to raise funds and shed excess inventory or donations.
After the cold months of shopping online for books, the tactile experience of picking up books and flipping through them at random, weighing the heft of them in your hand, finding a hidden gem at the bottom of a pile—there’s nothing like it in the Internet book-selling world.
Not all book sales are created equal. Last week I went to two library book sales in my county; these events often take place around the US Independence Day holiday, the first long weekend in July. I hit the first book sale late in the day, and as it was clear that the porch of the library contained many tables piled high with books and there was also a gazebo filled with children’s books, plus a separate tent with hardcovers on the lawn, I hoped to find some good deals.
I was stunned to find that the library wanted $2.50 for a used hardcover and $1.00 for trashy romance and sci-fi paperbacks.At a yard sale I would expect to find the latter for a quarter. I should mention this public library is one town over, in a very touristy area, but I wondered as I wandered, does everything have to be expensive here? I quickly gravitated to the $1.50 ‘large paperback’ table and tarp-covered fringe piles, as these were for the most part recent releases, and in good condition—like airport reads that were enjoyed once on the journey and donated upon their temporary owner’s return.
With three copies of Snow Falling on Cedars in plain view, it was even possible to be choosey about the condition of some books, which made the buck fifty a little easier to swallow. I ended up with quite a good pile and was glad I had enough cash with me to bring them home.
I was delighted to pick up a copy of Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (2005). I swooped upon a copy of A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) which looks as though it has never been opened—I always look at the spine of a paperback to see if it has been ‘broken.’ A hardcover copy of Byatt’s book was located on another table, but it was in poor shape and cost almost twice as much, so I stayed with the paperback version. A pristine copy of Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose flew into my hands (with an uncreased spine as well), and for a bit of fun, The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004) by J. Maarten Troost. All in all, I think I came home with about a dozen books, and all the money goes to the upkeep of the public library, so there’s a sense of supporting that venerable institution as well.
A few days later I stumbled upon another book sale of sorts, or the remnants of it. My local public library had a sale going on in the beginning of July and once the piles had been picked over, they moved the remnants to the side of the lawn closest to the parking lot, covered the lot with several tarps, and left it all outside for anyone to take whatever they wanted, gratis. Granted, there didn’t seem to be much left that was worth hanging on to (the library no longer wanted to store these leftovers, so ultimately the majority of these titles were destined for recycling).
Naturally I couldn’t resist checking things over, just in case. A respectable copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth (1991) turned up, and a paperback copy of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs (1988) that I couldn’t allow to be consigned to pulp. A beautiful navy blue copy of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, embossed with gilt, also joined my small pile of rescued books.
Now if only I could find time to read each of my new treasures. Have you found any good summer book sales this year? Keep your eyes open, and let me know what you find.
… (Or an Incredible Simulation!): I once saw an ad on the back page of this rag for an upcoming show featuring a band that billed itself as “Colorado’s #1 Widespread Panic Tribute Band!” This particular bit of hype caught my eye and continues to haunt me to this day, because it’s a very odd thing for a band to call itself. It implies that A) there are apparently enough Widespread Panic tribute bands in Colorado for there to be a clearly superior one, and B) there are enough Widespread Panic tribute bands nationwide to make a state-by-state distinction. This, in turn, leads to two inevitable questions: just how many Widespread Panic tribute bands are there in the world, and why?
Rock journalist Steven Kurutz examines the tribute band phenomenon close-up in his book Like a Rolling Stone: The Strange Life of a Tribute Band (Broadway Books, 2008). Kurutz spent a couple of years following a pair of Rolling Stones tribute bands, the East Coast’s Sticky Fingers and Canada’s the Blushing Brides, on their travels, from playing half-empty dives and wedding receptions to the occasional glory gig in Las Vegas or Amsterdam. Kurutz recalls the growth of the cottage industry in fake rock from its origins in Broadway’s Beatlemania (“not the Beatles but an incredible simulation!”) to its current state as a vast subculture, a network of barely ground-level bands and players who, week after week, leave their mundane day jobs to crisscross the country in cramped vans in order to pretend to be rock stars.
Along the way, Kurutz poses the burning question that has to be asked: why, if one is skillful and practiced enough to play like Jimmy Page or Jerry Garcia or Keith Richards, would one not direct that talent and drive toward original music which could result in real rock stardom? The answers are telling. As anyone in a band, particularly in this town, can attest, playing original music may be good for the soul, but it’s hard on the spirit (and the wallet). The guys in tribute bands have the opportunity to play the music they love for more people than just the bartender, and if that means aspiring, as the Keith for Sticky Fingers does, to be “the Keithiest Keith around,” so be it.
Kurutz’s book is alternately affectionate and sad as he documents the highs and lows of the would-be rock-star life, including the online sabotage wars between Sticky Fingers and its West Coast archnemesis of the same name, the monumental ego of a Mick Jagger who believes he’s now better than the real thing, and the bizarre remora-like experience of a band following the actual Rolling Stones’ tour schedule for an endless series of warm-up shows in sports bars around the country. (At one point, Sticky Fingers plays a gig a hundred yards from the stadium where the Stones are going on, and watches its audience trickle out, primed for the real thing.) For an unflinching look at lives spent forever on the fringe or as a cautionary tale to everyone out there polishing up Eddie Van Halen hammer-ons, Like a Rolling Stone is a fascinating read.
She’d been away so long, I missed her return. It was only while attempting to organise my Firefox Bookmarks tab that I stumbled across new posts on Lou Reads. Prior, I’d not read anything new since January.
It’s good to have her back, and she’s apparently been reading a lot and quickly, so I’m hoping there’ll be fewer month-long waits between posts. Lou’s reviews are some of the best out there—funny, warm, smart, and, most importantly, aimed squarely at the reader as avid as Lou herself.
Check out her latest posts on Mary Roach’s Bonk, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, Geraldine Brooks’ March, and others.
Kate Summerscale has won the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for her book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House (Bloomsbury). Summerscale spent the better part of two years researching and writing the book which details the investigation into the murder of a three-year-old boy at Road Hill House in England’s Georgian countryside. The book focuses primarily on the efforts of Jonathan Whicher, the Scotland Yard detective who solved the crime but destroyed himself in the process. Whicher and his investigations are believed to have directly influenced the detective fiction genre, and the case is credited with creating ongoing public interest in crime and criminal detection. Whicher was one of the first eight Scotland Yard detectives.
The Timesreports on Summerscale’s win, quoting prize judge Rosie Boycott, who commented that The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is “a dramatic page-turning detective yarn of a real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction. Kate Summerscale has brilliantly merged scrupulous archival research with vivid storytelling that reads with the pace of a Victorian thriller”.
Summerscale left her job as literary editor at the Daily Telegraph to write the book. The book is written in the form of a Victorian murder mystery, but Summerscale is quick to point out that her book is not a novel. She tells UK television’s Book Zone that everything in the book is pulled directly from her research from the clothing worn to the weather. It’s a great and lasting tribute to Mr. Whicher, a man Summerscale admits becoming rather fond of as she wrote his story. Her life-altering dedication to telling this man’s story is commendable to say the least. She tells Dan Vyleta at Raincoat Books:
The most interesting facts I gathered about his private life were hard-earned, the fruit of long hours in archives and records offices. His professional life was much easier to unearth. Thanks to digital archives, I was able to find accounts of dozens of cases on which he had worked, and from these I tried to deduce what kind of a man he had been.
On a personal note, I’m thrilled the book is now out in Australia. It’ll certainly make the wait for the next Erik Larson book a little easier to bear.
The books official website is here; read an extract here, and listen to Summerscale discuss the book at The Interview Onlinehere.
