Check It Out
by KATHY RYAN
The Page Turners, Kyle Public Library’s book group, met in January to select books for 2011. The Page Turners get together at the library every third Thursday from 6:30-8:00 p.m. for a lively literary chat. All readers are welcome to attend. (The following plot summaries are based on Publishers Weekly and Amazon reviews)
Feb. 17: “Room: A Novel” by Emma Donoghue
In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space only with his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, “Room” is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances.
March 17: “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson reconstructs the fascinating history of the household, room by room, as he walks through his own home that was built in the 19th century. With waggish humor and a knack for unearthing the extraordinary stories behind the seemingly commonplace, he examines how everyday items transformed houses and the way people live.
April 21: “The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel” by Garth Stein
A lab-terrier mix narrates this heart-warming novel. Enzo is the canine companion of race car driver Denny Swift. Through Enzo’s eyes, we watch as Denny meets and marries Eve, has a daughter, and tries to do the right thing for his family while also trying to succeed on the professional racing circuit. Enzo, frustrated by his inability to speak and his lack of opposable thumbs, watches Denny’s old racing videos and hopes for the day when he can be reborn as a human and race cars himself.
May 19: “Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation” by Cokie Roberts
Roberts introduces a variety of women and explores how they used their wit, wealth or connections to influence the men who made policy during the early days of the United States. While we know the names of a least some of these women (Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Eliza Pickney), we know little about their roles in the Revolutionary War, the writing of the Constitution, or politics. As high-profile players married into each others’ families it seems as if early America – or at least its upper crust – was indeed a small world.
June 16: “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man’s turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners’ plans to give him a “necktie party” (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by “the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn’t operate in his own home town.” Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wilkerson’s magnificent, extensively researched study of the “great migration,” the exodus of 6 million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an “uncertain existence” in the North and Midwest.
July 21: “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen
Freedom is a wrenching, funny and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family. Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock and a stolid budding lawyer, almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues – mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock’n’roll, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them.
Aug. 18: “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad
Dark allegory describes the narrator’s journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region. Masterly blend of adventure, character development and psychological penetration.
Sept. 15: “Breaking Night” by Liz Murray
In this harrowing tale of her childhood in the Bronx, Murray’s straightforward and no-frills prose hits hard. Even before she could speak, Murray watched her parents’ mainline cocaine at the kitchen table, and her parents often blew the welfare check on drugs in the first week of the month, leaving the family starving the remaining three weeks. Murray tells of bearing the weighty burden of young protector to her parents before finally moving to the streets when it was less unhappy – and perhaps safer – than staying at home. In high school she wrote an essay about her experiences that won her a college scholarship, and went to Harvard.
Oct. 20: “The Soloist” by Steve Lopez
On the streets of the inner city, Los Angeles Times columnist and novelist Lopez stumbled upon a story that changed his life when he encountered a homeless African American man standing on a corner coaxing memorable music from a two-stringed violin. Thirty years earlier, Nathaniel Ayers was studying classical bass at Juilliard when he experienced the first in a series of schizophrenic episodes that turned his musical dreams into a nightmare. Now Ayers spends his days on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, fighting off rats and drug-frenzied fellow homeless, and serenading passersby near the Disney Concert Hall. Lopez quickly becomes an integral part of Ayers’ life, bringing him new instruments and even facilitating arrangements at a homeless shelter. But as he navigates the complex world of mental illness, Lopez discovers that good intentions (and good connections) are often powerless in the face of schizophrenia, a potent, prickly, unpredictable disease.
Nov. 17: “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee
“In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans, and more than 7 million humans around the world, will die of cancer.” With this sobering statistic, physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee begins his comprehensive and eloquent “biography” of one of the most virulent diseases of our time. An exhaustive account of cancer’s origins, The Emperor of All Maladies illustrates how modern treatments--multi-pronged chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, as well as preventative care--came into existence thanks to a century’s worth of research, trials, and small, essential breakthroughs around the globe. This book is a very human history of an elusive and complicated disease.
Dec. 15: “Just Kids: From Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel: A Life of Art and Friendship” by Patti Smith
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren’t always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late ‘60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices or until the world was ready to hear them. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his métier as a photographer, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her friend’s delight, from a poet into a rock star. Smith’s memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and artful, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous, with the oracular style familiar from her anthems like “Because the Night,” “Gloria,” and “Dancing Barefoot”.
