Tag Archives: Book Groups

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“Grown-Ups” Can Read YA Books, Too!

This week, our friends at the Swampscott Library announced that they are launching a book group for adults fans of YA books.  This is such exciting news, not only because it’s always fun to meet other reads who share your bookish passions.  It’s also important to help remind readers that anyone can read any books that they enjoy, regardless of where they are shelved in the Library.  Here’s the announcement from Swampscott (click on the announcement to read a larger version):

 

Looking for some books to suggest at the meeting?  Or looking to start exploring YA books for yourself?  You can start by checking out the stellar suggestions from the devoted staff of our Teen Room, as well as some the sensational books below:

The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch: Zombies?  Check.  Historical fiction? Check. Rollicking adventure? Check.  Thoughtful consideration about what actually makes us human?  Surprisingly enough…check.  Daniel Kraus’ 2-part saga stars Zebulon Finch, who is gunned down by the shores of Lake Michigan–and suddenly reanimated into his wild and raucous second life. Zebulon’s new existence begins as a sideshow attraction in a traveling medicine show. From there he will be poked and prodded by a scientist obsessed with mastering the secrets of death. He will fight in the trenches of World War I. He will run from his nightmares—and from poverty—in Depression-era New York City. And he will become the companion of the most beautiful woman in Hollywood.  This is a phenomenally ambitious novel that takes all the elements of the “great American saga”, and injects them with…well….zombies…as well as humor, heart, and plenty of kick-ass action.

The Odds of Loving Grover Cleveland: It’s hard to explain how a novel about grief, mental illness, psychological conditions, and acute loneliness can be both funny and charming, but Rebekah Crane pulls it off beautifully in this one.  Sixteen-year-old Zander Osborne has been sent against her will to Camp Padua, a summer camp for at-risk teens.  Zander is convinced that she doesn’t, and will never, fit in here; not with her cabin mate Cassie, a self-described manic-depressive-bipolar-anorexic. Not with Grover Cleveland (yes, like the president), a cute but confrontational boy who expects to be schizophrenic someday, and not with Bek, a charmingly confounding pathological liar.  But slowly, as the summer wears on, Zander finds herself at home within this group, and falling just a little bit for Grover.  Is it possible she could actually be happy?  What does happy even look like?  And what will it require of her?  If you’re looking for a book that tackles the tough stuff with humor, and has the courage to make the most difficult characters lovable, then this is a read you shouldn’t overlook.

Dreamland Burning: One part murder mystery, one part social commentary, and all together compelling, Jennifer Latham pulls off a dual-narrative book that is well-balanced and truly powerful.  When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family’s property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the present and the past.  Almost a century before, a misguided violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into a racial firestorm. In a country rife with violence against blacks and a hometown segregated by Jim Crow, Will must make hard choices on a painful journey towards self discovery and face his inner demons in order to do what’s right the night Tulsa burns.  Latham brings the horror, the hatred, and the inescapable reality of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot to vibrant and violent life in this book, making a commentary that is as timely as her book is spellbinding.  Readers who enjoyed the historic elements of Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day will love this story, which partly set during the same time period.

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Stories that save you

We all have stories that save us.

I’ve used this phrase a few times here, dear readers, and I really do believe it.  We’ve all had a person who came into our lives precisely when they were most needed, and gave us a new direction, some advice, or perhaps some comfort, and made an indelible difference on our lives.

Books can be like that, too.

Recently, Stephen Fry recorded the entire Sherlock Holmes canon for Audible.com.   You can hear a sample of it in the clip above.

…and let me assure you, the rest is just as glorious.  The best part is that he also wrote and recorded a series of introductions for the various books of stories, talking about the history of the stories, of Conan Doyle’s life (and his friendship with Oscar Wilde!), and Fry’s own relationship to Sherlock Holmes’ adventures.  In one of these introductions, he talks about how Sherlock Holmes saved his life.

And I kind of know what he means.

I found my first Sherlock Holmes story when I was twelve years old.  For some reason, my sixth grade teacher had a copy of six random Sherlock Holmes stories bound together–I know for a fact that “The Sussex Vampire” was the first I read, which is why, even though I know it’s really not one of the better stories, it’s among my favorites.  “The Blue Carbuncle” was in there, as well, which is also one of my all-time favorites.  I brought that book with me on a god-awful camping trip that they made all the sixth-graders take to “build character” and “bond socially”.  I got lost in the woods and nearly drowned, neither of which really helped my intense feelings of awkwardness, which were largely brought about by being taller than everyone else and not having a clue about how to fit into a group of my peers.  But at night, while everyone else was building their character and bonding socially, I hid in my sleeping bag and read about Sherlock Holmes.  Holmes, too, was an outsider; a man who admitted to not having many friends and not fitting in–and who was taller than most people.  And he, with all his weird quirks and socially awkward manners, was the hero of his story.  I also think I learned how to be a good friend by watching Watson.  Watson didn’t try, at any point, to be something he wasn’t.  He expressed everything he felt clearly, and he showed up when he was needed.  When we got back from that hellish trip, I used my savings to buy a huge collection of Holmes stories, which included A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and all the stories up to and including “The Final Problem”.   Having those two around got me through what turned out to be one of the hardest years of my growing up, with bullies and mean teachers and the outdoors all conspiring against me.

Jeremy Brett is the best Sherlock.

By high school, I had read and re-read the entire Holmes canon multiple times.  I actually made a few friends who had read a bit about Sherlock Holmes as well–admittedly, not to the same obsessive level that I had, but who were willing to keep up a conversation with me, or watch the Jeremy Brett adaptations with me.  But college is when Holmes really stepped up to help me out.

I did my junior semester abroad in London, and trust me when I tell you I was living in the creepiest, most unsanitary, and poorly insulated dorm room you can imagine, with some of the least personable people this side of a sitcom.  But I had Holmes.  And I had David Timson’s recordings.  Timson, for the record, is a marvel.  He created a different voice for every character in the entire Holmes world.  And played them all accurately.  I saved up my tiny stipend once a month to buy a new CD collection of stories, and listened to them at night to help me fall asleep in my weird, dingy dorm.  No matter how bad things got, Holmes could set them right.  There is no story that doesn’t end with order being restored, and when you’re living in a place of disorder, that can mean everything. During the day, I learned to navigate London by the walks that Holmes at Watson took in the various stories.  I got hopelessly lost one day trying to get home from Oxford Street, and was about ready to cry when I remembered that Mr. Henry Baker walked from Tottenham Court Road to Goodge Street after his Christmas festivities in “The Blue Carbuncle”, and replayed the scene in my head as I walked.  I made it to the Tube in time to catch the last train home.

In grad school, I became slightly notorious for bringing Sherlock Holmes into every class I took.  Because to know Sherlock Holmes means to understand the tensions within the British Empire.  It means understanding a bit about the Victorian legal system, about social customs and attitudes, and about gender relations.  It also means understanding the impact of railways and travel on the average person in history.  And I made my students read a few Holmes stories for themselves, because they are more fun than a textbook, and more enlightening than my lectures in many respects.  In every case, Holmes was a kind of security blanket for me, easing me into a new, and potentially scary situation by being that familiar, that constant friend, that fixed point in a changing age.

Heck, I even, tangentially, got this job at the library because of Sherlock Holmes.  When I moved back to Peabody, I joined the Library’s Classics Book group in order to make a few friends.  The first book the group read with me as a member?  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I kid you not.   It was those stories that kept me coming back to the Library, and they haven’t gotten rid of me since.

And today, when anxiety crops its ugly head, I plug in my earbuds, or pull out that same battered old volume of Holmes stories, and transplant the angry, insecure voice in my head with Watson’s calm narrative, and Holmes’ practical problem-solving.  These two friends have been with me for twenty years now, helping me through every change in life, and every rough patch that I’ve hit along the way, from practical advice about growing up to navigating a foreign city, from intense historic analysis to calming stress-relief.  Those are the stories that have saved me.

I hope you have some, too.

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Celebrating Virginia Woolf

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Yesterday was the 134th birthday of one of the greatest modernist authors of the twentieth century, and one of the bravest women I have had the pleasure of reading: Adeline Virginia Woolf, born January 25, 1882.

my_niece_julia_full_face_by_julia_margaret_cameronWoolf was born into a family of intellectuals; her father was an historian and author, who counted Henry James and James Russell Lowell as close friends, while her mother was an artist, and a model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters of the late 19th century (her portrait as a child is on the left).   As a result, Virginia got the kind of education that her voracious curiosity needed.

Her life was by no means idyllic, though.  Virginia (and her sister) suffered from breakdowns (later assumed to be a form of bipolar disorder), and both suffered from the trauma of sexual abuse committed by their half-brothers, George and Gerald.  As a result, Virginia spent several years as a young adult in institutions–but though her lifelong battle with her symptoms would hamper her social and personal life, she found a way to work, to think, and to write, even through some of the darkest periods in her life.

Following her father’s death in 1904, Virginia and her brother, Adrian, purchased a home at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.  It was from the address that the famous Bloomsbury Group emerged, including some of the most deep-thinking and daring intellectuals of the period (and Virginia’s eventual husband, Leonard Woolf).

…Apparently, they were also quite the pranksters–Virginia donned a beard in order to help with the “Dreadnought Plot” in 1910, during which several of her Bloomsbury Group convinced the higher-ups in the British Navy that Virginia was a visiting royal from Abyssinia who wanted to see their flagships (which were considered government secrets at the time).

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Virginia Woolf is the bearded gentleman on the far left.

Virginia Woolf was a remarkable innovator of the English language, often writing in streams-of-consciousness that revolutionized the novel.  Her works focus on the psychological and emotional development of her characters, rather than their physical actions or interactions, but does so in a way that is startling easy to grasp, and deeply, often heartbreakingly sympathetic.  One of my favorite moments as a reader came from this passage from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which was a selection for the Library’s Classics Book Group a few years ago.  This scene describes the heroine’s husband, a man of great value–and great flaws:

1770362He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window…the sight of them fortified him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his splendid mind.
It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. …But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q—R—. Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. “Then R . . . ”  (From To The Lighthouse, Chap. 6, “The Window”)

And while Woolf revolutionized the mainstream novel, she was also a champion of the under-recognized: the women who were forced to hide their genius, men whose lives didn’t conform with society’s ideals, and those who, like Virginia, dealt with private, hidden, and yet sometimes overwhelming pain every single day.  She used language as a tool to burrow ever closer to something that unites us all, that cuts through pain and fear and isolation, and forces us to confront ourselves, as well as rethink the way we see the world around us.  Though Woolf’s own battle culminated in her taking her own life in 1941, her battles with her depression and grief remain an inspiration to readers around the world.

And if you are looking to discover more of Virginia Woolf’s words…in her own voice!…then check out this article from The Paris Review, which features the only known recording of Woolf’s voice, giving a talk on “Craftmanship”:

 

Happy reading, beloved patrons, and may you discover the whole alphabet today!