Hi everyone, before I get started with the notes for the May meeting, our June meeting info is:

Book Club Title: We Live in Water: Stories by Jess Walter

Book Club Review: From Booklist *Starred Review* This is the first collection of short stories, all of which have appeared previously in Harper’s and McSweeney’s, among other literary publications, from the much-acclaimed, best-selling Walter (Beautiful Ruins, 2012). With their visceral depictions of the homeless, the bereft, and the marginalized, often presented with a signature blend of wicked humor and heartbreaking tenderness, Walter’s intense stories speak directly to the contemporary American experience. In “Anything Helps,” a homeless father has lost his wife to a heroin overdose and his son to social services. Determined to buy the latest Harry Potter novel for his son, he brings a practiced eye to his begging, opting to go “to cardboard.” In the title story, Walter expertly uses the tropes of crime fiction to tell the grim story of an unrepentant gambler who steals from the wrong person, and his young son, who is forever haunted by his father’s disappearance. In “Don’t Eat Cat,” Walter turns to zombie fiction to unleash a hilarious satire of political correctness (“I’m not one of those reactionaries, but hiring zombies for food service? I just think that’s wrong”). Wildly entertaining and thought-provoking fiction from a prodigiously talented writer. –Joanne Wilkinson for Booklist

Date & Time of Meeting: Friday, June 10, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.

How to Sign Up for the June Book Club: You can sign up for the June book club gathering by emailing me at REIMERL@STLS.ORG or, by filling out the short online registration form via the following link https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/bookclub_we_live_in_water/

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May Book Club Notes:

Our May 2020 Book Club read was Teá Obreht’s second novel Inland.

To sum it up, the book follows two characters, Nora Lark a thirty-seven-year-old housewife living in Amargo in the Arizona territory in 1893, and Lurie Mattie a wanted man and cameleer.

Nora’s story is told in the third person and Lurie’s in the first person. And the reader eventually realizes that Lurie is telling his story to his camel Burke, seemingly from the afterlife. Nora’s story unfolds during one day in 1893, whereas Lurie’s journey is followed from the 1850s to 1893.

The book has two big threads, one being time and the other being want. In this case “want” meaning a need or desire for something.

The cliff notes version of Nora’s story is that she is at the family home, outside the town of Amargo, Arizona Territory. There is a drought, the Lark family is almost out of water and Nora mentions numerous times during her story her desire (want) for water. Nora’s husband, newspaper editor Emmett Lark, has gone to find the water merchant and was due back with water days ago. And Nora’s two eldest sons, Rob & Dolan, who are supposed to be getting the weekly newspaper printed have disappeared from the newspaper shop. Thus Nora, is waiting for Emmett’s return, looking after their youngest son Toby, Emmett’s mother and Emmett’s clairvoyant cousin Josie, while wondering where her missing sons and husband might be.

Meanwhile, Toby & Josie insist that they have seen a monster on the property and Nora does not believe them. Also of note, Nora talks to her long-dead first-born child, a daughter named Evelyn who it seems for most of the book is a figment of her imagination.

The cliff notes version of Lurie’s story is that he is introduced to the reader as a young immigrant child in the 1850s. He loses his father to illness shortly after they arrive in America, realizes he is clairvoyant and can see ghosts, stays with the landlady of the boarding house he and his father were living in after his father dies, is later sold to a man who turns out to be a grave robber, escapes from detention on a farm with brothers Hobb & Donovan Mattie and goes on a robbing spree with the Mattie Brothers.

While working with the Mattie Brothers Lurie inadvertently kills a young man in a fight and is followed down subsequent years by a sheriff determined to right that wrong. Toward the end of his tenure with the Mattie Brothers, the younger Mattie brother Hobb dies. And Lurie ingests Hobb’s want/desire to rob and is forever after stealing small objects to appease Hobb. A short time after Hobb dies, Lurie winds up in ill health and Donovan leaves him – leaving him only his (Donovan’s) canteen full of water.

Lurie recovers his health, discovers camels and his love for them and joins the U.S. Camel Corps, led by a man named Jolly. Then one day, the Camel Corps arrives in a town where they have just hung a notorious criminal. Lurie goes to the town square where the hanging occurred and discovers Donovan’s ghost whose want is thirst; so Lurie takes on Donovan’s desire for water and keeps adding water from rivers he passes to the canteen Donovan gave him before they parted. Lurie is eventually forced to leave his companions in the camel corps when the sheriff who is hunting him gets too close. When he leaves, he takes his best friend and confident, a camel names Burke, with him.

At this point, I should mention that Lurie’s need (want) evolves during the story and it is that someone should remember the things he has seen in his life – that they should not be forgotten.

Years go by, and Lurie is surprised to encounter his old camel corps leader and friend Jolly again. At first it seems Lurie might stay in the same town Jolly lives in with his wife, but eventually Lurie & Jolly hear of wild camels nearby and the call of the trail and adventure reaches them. Lurie & Jolly find the wild camels and then begin a camel shipping business, carting water and other items to where they can be sold. Subsequently they join a geological survey team that offers them money to go with them, and cart water a long way on camel back, to their survey site. Once at the site, Jolly and Lurie begin to suspect that they will never get paid. So Jolly steals one of the large black rocks (probably a piece of Obsidian) found at the site thinking they can sell it. They try to sell the black rock and the word gets out they stole the rock, and they are tracked down by a group of people who can’t believe the rock they have is what was stolen, as it doesn’t appear to be worth much. Lurie & Jolly get away from the men and separate, Jolly goes home, and Lurie and Burke go on. Shortly after they part, Lurie is accosted by another group of men looking for that same not-so-precious stone and they don’t believe him when he says he doesn’t have it. He is shot in the leg while trying to get away from them and is then tied tightly to Burke’s saddle.

Then after the many years we’ve followed Lurie & Burke and we’ve gotten to the evening of Nora’s story, their stories collide. The “monster” that Nora’s son Toby and cousin Josie insist they have seen is actually an aged and partially blind Burke the camel who has obviously been fending for himself for many years, Burke still carries the remains of the long-dead Lurie tied to his back. It is implied that the ghost of Evelyn drew Burke and the ghost of Lurie to the Lark homestead. And Nora, for safety reasons, and taking pity on the aged camel, shoots Burke – and the desire that Burke and Lurie have felt, wanting to be buried together takes place; but not before Nora has discovered Donovan’s old canteen, drunk of the water within and received mental images of the places Lurie had been in his life. She also sees the future, a future where she has sold the family newspaper to the rich, demanding Merrion Crace to get her two elder sons out of trouble, a future with a grown and prospering Toby and one in which her son Rob married her cousin Josie.

All in all, Inland was quite a read!

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Other Book Recommendations by Club Attendees:

This month the following books were recommended by book club members

The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman: Philip Pullman returns to the parallel world of His Dark Materials–Malcolm Polstead and his daemon, Asta, are used to overhearing news and the occasional scandal at the inn run by his family. But during a winter of unceasing rain, Malcolm finds a mysterious object—and finds himself in grave danger.

Inside the object is a cryptic message about something called Dust; and it’s not long before Malcolm is approached by the spy for whom this message was actually intended. When she asks Malcolm to keep his eyes open, he begins to notice suspicious characters everywhere: the explorer Lord Asriel, clearly on the run; enforcement agents from the Magisterium; a gyptian named Coram with warnings just for Malcolm; and a beautiful woman with an evil monkey for a daemon. All are asking about the same thing: a girl—just a baby—named Lyra.

Lyra is at the center of a storm, and Malcolm will brave any peril, and make shocking sacrifices, to bring her safely through it.

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The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout: Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan—the Burgess sibling who stayed behind—urgently calls them home. Her lonely teenage son, Zach, has gotten himself into a world of trouble, and Susan desperately needs their help. And so the Burgess brothers return to the landscape of their childhood, where the long-buried tensions that have shaped and shadowed their relationship begin to surface in unexpected ways that will change them forever.

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Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . . Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

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Holes by Louis Sachar: Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys’ detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes.

It doesn’t take long for Stanley to realize there’s more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment—and redemption.

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House of Sprits by Isabel Allende: The House of the Spirits, the unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.

One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate.

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Mosaic: A Novel by Joseph Catalano: In the early 1980s, two mosaics purchased by Art Termini from the Vatican Mosaic Studio in Rome were stolen from his home on Titan Court in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. The FBI, along with local and state police, tried in vain to find the thief. Mosaic is a novel based on a true story. Art Termini grew up in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward, a Sicilian enclave in the heart of the city.

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The Tiger’s Wife by Teá Obreht: Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

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Note: Plot descriptions are from the publishers

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SSCL Book Blogs:

The Adult Book Club hosted by our very own book club host, Linda Reimer, features info on upcoming book club meetings, monthly reading titles and the monthly meeting notes – it is found at https://ssclbook.club/

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SSCL Book & Tech Talk is hosted by SSL librarian Linda Reimer and features a few tech tips but mostly focuses on Readers and Viewers advisory for those looking for something new to read or watch. The Book & Tech Talk blog can be found at https://sscltech.com/

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STORY MUSING is a blog hosted by our Adult Services Director, Michelle Wells. Michelle for short reviews on anything from books to movies to music. Check it out weekly for new ideas for what to read, watch or listen to. Story Musings is found at http://storymusing.blogspot.com/

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Be well & have a good day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL