October Book Choice

The book we selected is Juliet by Anne Fortier. We will begin discussion of this book Friday, November 5. Enjoy this book. We all need a little more romance in our life!

Next Book Club Choices

I think we had a great discussion about Diamond Ruby. If anyone has more comments, feel free to continue discussion via the comment section.

In the meantime, Beckie is hosting the next Ethereal Reader book club. Here are her book choices:

Juliet: A Novel -- Anne Fortier
The Sculptor -- Gregory Funaro
The Queen of the Big Time -- Adriana Trigiani
Whistling in the Dark -- Lesley Kagen

Please vote via an email to Kris (kzmclain@comcast.net) by next Saturday, September 25.

Diamond Ruby

I’m not a huge baseball fan, but I am a fan of historical novels that provide a good sense of time and place – particularly if I am interested in the place.

Diamond Ruby provided both of those, and it made me enjoy the book more than I perhaps would have otherwise. The 1920s have always interested me because so much was going on at the time. The world was between wars, Prohibition was wreaking havoc nationwide, and then, of course, there was the suffragette movement -- women were fighting for the right to vote. (Doesn’t it seem absolutely astounding that women couldn’t vote yet in the 20s?)

New York City was sort of the poster child for all that was happening during this time, and Ruby, the main character of the novel, it seems, was impacted by most of the things that were happening. Her mother was a suffragette, her brother was involved in bootlegging, much of her family died from the Spanish influenza, brought back from World War I.

Question 1: In Diamond Ruby, we read about the opening of the Coney Island Boardwalk, Yankee Stadium, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Prohibition, the influenza epidemic and women's rights, to name a few things. Was there something regarding the time frame or Brooklyn setting that most interested you?

I thought most of the characters in the novel were interesting, though sometimes seemed to be caricatures. And frequently I thought the dialogue was unrealistic. I would think, “That’s not what a real person would say; that’s what someone in a cartoon would say.”

Having said all of this, I thought that the story told by Joseph Wallace was extremely interesting and fun to read. I often had a difficult time putting the book down. I thought it was so much fun to meet some of the real-life characters, and see how they were laced in and out of the book’s story. It led me to look many of them up in Wikipedia to find out their real story.

Question 2: It seemed like all of the characters epitomized either good or evil – there weren’t really any in-between sorts of characters. Who was your favorite character, and why? Did you find the “bad guys” to be realistic?

My favorite character, besides Ruby, was her niece Amanda. She seemed so solemn, strong-willed, and loyal. Her instincts seemed true, and her undying love and devotion to Ruby touched my heart.

While the “bad guys” were a bit predictable, I still found them to be fairly compelling – perhaps that degree of evilness is just interesting. In the back of the book, the author notes that he sort of liked Chase, which I really couldn’t quite understand. While he did seem to have a soft side for Ruby, he still didn’t hesitate to do what he had to do, even if it hurt her. To me, David Wilcox was the most despicable character.

Question 3. The author is currently working on a follow-up novel to Diamond Ruby that takes place in 1926, three years after the time period of this novel. As you finished reading Diamond Ruby, what did you envision her life being like three years later?

I love to envision what happens to characters after the book ends. In my mind, Ruby doesn’t continue playing professional baseball, because I know that the baseball commissioner, in real life, eventually prohibited women from playing. But I think she plays baseball in some capacity, and is able to provide a living for her nieces through her skills. She gets married, maybe to that FBI guy, and they all continue to live in Helen’s house – one big happy family.

Lots more to say about this book but I’m going to let you all tell me what you think.

August/September book club

And the winner (by a significant margin) was Diamond Ruby, by Joseph Wallace. Discussion will begin September 12. That gives us 5-1/2 weeks. If anyone thinks that isn't enough time, please comment and we will refigure a deadline.

Enjoy the book!

August/September Book Club Choices

I am hosting this month's book club. Here are the books from which you will choose: The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton; Joy in the Morning, by Betty Smith (who wrote one of my favorite books of all time, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn); Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks (nothing says summer reading like a book about the plague); Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster; and Diamond Ruby, by Joseph Wallace (based on the true story of Jackie Mitchell, a woman pitcher who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in a single game, and was promptly prohibited from playing baseball by the baseball commissioner (isn't that a surprise?).

Email your vote to me at kzmclain@comcast.net by Tuesday, August 3.

Let the Great World Spin

Everyone has a story. I believe one could pull aside any checker at Walmart, for example, talk to them for a bit, and find that there is something remarkably interesting about their life.

This book seems to indicate the author agrees with me. However, I have mixed feelings about the way he presents his characters and their lives to his readers. Sometimes I literally couldn’t put the book down; other times I would toss the book on the bed and think, “What in the hell is he talking about?” Overall, I found Let the Great World Spin to be a good read.

One of my favorite things about the book was the way he presented the characters one at a time, and then eventually weaved them all together in the courtroom. For the most part, I found his characters interesting. The author, however, only gave a one-dimensional blip about each character – just enough to grab my interest. I would have loved to know the characters better. For example, we learn that Lara and Ciaran end up together, but how did that come about? What did Lara ever see in her weird and self-centered boyfriend ? What made her suggest they leave the scene of the accident, and then be so unable to forgive herself?

In an interview in the back of the copy of the book I read, the author says that the book became more about ordinary people on the street walking a tightrope just one inch off the ground. Which character and situation touched you the most as an ordinary person walking a tightrope one inch off the ground? The character for whom I had the most sympathy was Claire, whose loss of her son broke my heart. But my favorite character was Gloria, whose ability to love was endless.

Tying all of these stories to the tightrope walker in 1974 was creative, I thought. It seemed significant that the author used this particular true-life incident as his central theme because the World Trade Centers have become so symbolic to us of how we are all tied together as Americans. In the same interview, the author says he was very affected by 9/11. He stated that the only way to shake the dust off from that day was to go backwards to different points of innocence. He went back to 1974 to explore war (Claire/Joshua) and art (Lara), liberation theology (Corrigan), and issues of technology (phone phreakers – and goodness gracious, what was up with them?). McCann says that for him, the towers got built back up when the two little girls got rescued by strangers. Using that same imagery, the towers got rebuilt up for me when, following her mugging, Gloria took the cab back to Claire, who so desperately needed her friendship. Was there a time or story in the book when the towers got built back up for you?

McCann says that Corrigan is the first character who came to him when writing this book and that he is the one who introduced him to all of the other characters. He says that he was sad when Corrigan died and there were times when he wanted to roll back the stone and apologize to him. I really liked Corrigan as a character, but he was a puzzle to me. While he clearly used his role as a priest, or a brother, or a monk, or whatever he was, to help those who really needed his help, I never understood why he became a member of a religious order. I didn’t ever get a sense that he became a priest (or whatever he was) because he had an extraordinary love of God. His need to care for those around him almost seemed painful. And his death so early in the book really took me by surprise. Could you tell that Corrigan played an important role in the novel for the author by the way he presented him?

Finally, can someone (perhaps an English teacher?) explain to me why the author chose to use dashes instead of quotation marks, ala Cry, the Beloved Country? And even more confusing, why did he do that for most of the book, but in a couple of instances, use quotation marks? Yikes. That made my head explode.

Overall, I would give the book a 7 or 8 out of 10, for the interesting characters, the strong sense of place (the Bronx in the 70s) and the interesting way in which the author tied it all together in the end.

Our July Book Selection

The book receiving the most votes was Let the Great World Spin: A Novel, by Colum McCann. Discussion will begin in five weeks -- July 23, 2010. Enjoy reading.