Hi everyone, our September read was The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung. The book received praise from all book club attendees and a summary of the plot is found at the end of this post.

Our October read is the book Just Mercy written by Bryan Stevenson. A print copy of the book and the audiobook on CD may be requested from StarCat, the eBook and downloadable audiobook may be requested from the Digital Catalog; and there are three different study guides for the book available, on-demand, via Hoopla – and below the September book summary, you’ll find information on how to access Hoopla.

As usual, if anyone can’t get a copy of the book – let me know and I’ll request one for you and also send it to you if that is helpful.  And if you’d like to call the library to request a copy, please feel free to do that too – our number is 607-936-3713.

Our October book club meeting will be held via Zoom on Friday, October 9, 2020 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

If you’ve previously registered for a book club meeting, you’ll receive an email reminder with the Zoom information, the first week of October. If you’re new to the group – welcome!

You can sign up for the October book club meeting by clicking on the follow link

https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/bookclub-just-mercy/

And here is the summary of our September read:

The Tenth Muse Summary

The title The Tenth Muse refers to the story of the Muses of Ancient Greek mythology; the daughters of Zeus, who were immortal and could inspire mortals, but were not allowed to create art of their own. They could only inspire mortals to create art. When the tenth and youngest muse came of age, she refused to pick an art to use as an inspirational tool, so mortals could create great works of art. Instead, she was fiercely determined to sing her own songs and not be limited to the songs humankind created. To be able to sing songs of her own creation, the youngest muse had to give up all her immortal gifts including her mortality. And so, she gave up her immortality to gain the ability to sing her own songs, blaze her own path and simply be herself. It is said that she is reborn in each generation; and that analogy allows the reader to compare the Tenth Muse to Katherine, the protagonist of the novel, whom the reader first meets as a young girl. Katherine was so brilliant at mathematics as a child, that she was taken to task by her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Linn, for quickly doing the math problems in hear head and answering the questions verbally. Mrs. Linn demanded that Katherine stick to the format of doing the math problems on paper, as instructed, and not offer verbal answers even though they were the correct answers. Katherine’s parents instructed her to treat Mrs. Linn with respect and do as she was instructed; so she quietly refused to be limited to the role of an obedient child student; doing the math work quietly in school as instructed; and in her spare time, reading every book she could find, in the school and public library, on mathematics to further sharper her math skills.

The author, Catherine Chung, is very adept at weaving the threads of the three main stories of the novel together.

The first story is the story of young Catherine, a girl who loved math and science, in an era when women were not supposed to study math and science; nor for that matter to work outside the home. The social norms of the day were the guidelines, that had most women staying in their traditional roles as wives and mothers and not working outside the home. So the first story weaves the threads of what it was like if you were female and bucked those norms in the 1940s and 1950s. Katherine has to work twice as hard as her male counterparts at college, and even gives up the love of her life, Peter Hall, after he submits her work for publication without her permission and receives a co-credit for the work he did not deserve;  but she is eventually very successful as a mathematician, in her own right, despite the challenges she had to overcome and the discrimination she encountered along the way.

The second story is of Katherine’s quest for mathematical truth found in proofs. Admittedly, I am not a math fan; and I say that as the author makes the mathematical part of the text; illustrated by Katherine’s exceptional determination to prove mathematical problems, most especially the famous Riemann Hypothesis, perfectly accessible. Katherine loves math. She loves the way solving mathematical problems, give you an undisputable truth in the proof that proves a hypothesis is true. And although, I’m not a math person myself; the book is so well written and Katherine so well described as being a brilliant and enthusiastic mathematical detective, who is determined to solve mathematical mysteries, that I can just as enthusiastically root for her to succeed.

And the third story woven through the plot, features threads of another kind of mystery and subsequent revelations. At the beginning of the book, Katherine is introduced as the daughter of a Chinese mother and a white American father. The couple met while the father was serving in Europe during World War II. When Katherine is in high school, her mother abandons the family without a word. And after her mother leaves, the first of several jaw dropping revelations occur. Her father tells her that he and her mother were never married. And later her father’s new wife Linda tells her that the women she thought was her mother, wasn’t in fact, her mother at all. Fast forward to Katherine’s college years and after her father has a heart attack, he reveals that not only was her mother not her biological mother, but he is not her biological father. He tells Katherine the truth of her origins as far as he knows it. He tells her she was taken to an orphanage in France at the end of World War II; and that while he was recovering from injuries suffered in combat, he walked to orphanage every day to visit the children. One of the nuns at the orphanage persuaded him to take Katherine home with him; because she thought the baby might be harmed, if anyone found out she was the daughter of a Jewish woman and a Chinese father. Her father told Katherine that the story goes that her biological parents were taken away by the Germans. And that her parents left her sleeping in a box, wrapped in a blanket, with a small black notebook that featured all sorts of mathematical hypothesis and problems. A good Samaritan found Katherine after her parents were taken away and took her to the orphanage. Thus, the third thread of the story has Katherine on a quest to discover who she really is; by discovering who her parents were. When Katherine is working on a graduate project in Germany in the late fifties, she does some investigating and finds some information about her parents from people that knew them; she also finds an unscrupulous second-cousin, who she later determines became notable in his field by publishing the mathematical works her mother, his cousin, did as an unofficial college student in Germany in the 1940s.

Suffice it to say, quite a bit goes on in the book The Tenth Muse; it is one of those titles that warrants a second reading so the reader can catch more of the fine details surrounding the three main plot threads.

The book is highly recommended by the members of the SSCL Adult Book Club!

Have a great day everyone!

Linda

 

The August read was The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

Our September read is The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung.

Our September Adult Book Club meeting, via Zoom is today, Friday, September 11, 2020 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

If I already have your email address you should have received the Zoom invite for the meeting – if you haven’t received it let me know by sending an email to me at reimerl@stls.org

If you’re new to our book club – welcome! You can easily register for todays’ meeting by clicking on the following link which will take you to the library’s calendar page for the Sept book club:

https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/bookclub-10th-muse/

Book club meetings are on the second Friday of each month from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our October meeting will be held on Friday, October 9, 2020 and will feature a discussion of the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.

And again, if you’re new to the club and wish to register for the October online gathering – here is the link:

https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/bookclub-just-mercy/

And if you’ve previously registered for a book club meeting, and thus I have your email address, you’ll get an email reminder about the October meeting, along with the Zoom link, the first week in October.

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I was a bit swamped during August and didn’t get to a summary of the August read – The Giver of Stars, so here, in as brief of a nutshell as I can create, is a description of the plot and main characters.

The book is set in Baileyville, Kentucky in the 1930s and chronicles the experiences of a group of women who participated in the Pack Horse initiative, a federal public works program that paid women to take books, and thus promote reading, to people living in rural Kentucky. The women were collectively referred to as the Pack Horse Librarians and they encountered a number of trials during their pack horse tenure, including fighting to rise above the commonly held belief of the day that women should keep their opinions to themselves, have children and be chained to the hearth and home. The opening chapters of the book introduce the cast of characters including the two lead librarians Margery O’Hare and Alice (Wright) Van Cleve.

Margery is an independent and fiercely self-reliant woman. She is a native of the Baileyville area, grew up with an abusive father named Frank, and has a beau named Sven that she loves but doesn’t wish to marry because, as a result of her upbringing, she has a hard time relying on anyone other than herself. Margery’s family had a long-standing feud with the local McCullough family and the book opens with Margery, on her librarian delivery rounds, being stopped in her tracks by a drunken Clem McCullough who is blocking the path ahead and refusing to let Margery pass. Margery is able to get by Clem and continue on her rounds. However, later in the book Clem is found dead and Margery is accused of murdering him by hitting him in the head with a book. Margery is arrested and taken to trial, despite the evidence against her being circumstantial, only to be acquitted when Clem’s daughter, Verna, who knew first hand how horrible a person he was, lies under oath saying that Clem was a big reader and intended to return the book he had checked out and the potential murder weapon – ironically, the book is the early feminist classic Little Women.

 

Alice Van Cleve is the second lead librarian. Alice is introduced as a young English woman who is too independent and spontaneous for her family’s linking. Alice Wright meets the charming and rich Bennet Van Cleve and his father Geoffrey, while they are vacationing in England. The father son duo departs England to travel to continental Europe; and when they pass through England on their way back to America, Bennett proposes to Alice and she accepts. Alice expects that life in America will be full of glamourous parties and theater outings and is vastly disappointed when she arrived in Baileyville to discover how rural the area is; and how dull her life is as the new wife of the heir to the richest man in town. Alice has servants to cook and clean and is expected to do nothing beyond being a quiet homebound wife and have children – which leaves her bored to proverbial tears. Alice attends a town meeting to discuss the Pack Horse Librarian project and much to her new family’s surprise she volunteers to be a pack horse librarian. Alice’s challenges include a husband who sometimes treats her coldly and at other times treats her as a friend – but never as a wife; and a bullying father-in-law – Geoffrey Van Cleve, owner of the local mining company and the richest man in town with all the power and influence that position entails. Geoffrey Van Cleve tries to stop Alice from working as a packhorse librarian and even works hard to close down the project by unscrupulously using his influence to smear the librarians and later, to get the sheriff to arrest and Margery for the murder of Clem McCullough.

Early in the story the reader is introduced to Fred Guisler who offers the librarians his barn to set up their library and who is able to see women as more than wives and mothers – he is able to see them as individual people with thoughts, desires and abilities. Alice and Fred fall in love during the book but are convinced they can never be together since Alice is married. And then a great plot point appears – that reading can change a persons entire life. This plot point unfolds when Alice is talking to Fred about the notorious little blue book in the library; a book that offers information on how to be a good mountain wife, including how to engage in sex. Alice is tearfully telling Fred that she and Bennett have never done anything like that – when Fred realizes that Alice’s marriage to Bennet has never been consummated, and thus, can be annulled.  Fred shares that information with Alice; and with that information Alice is able to quietly annual her marriage to Bennett and to get his father Geoffrey to stop harassing the librarians. Geoffrey stops his interference to keep Alice from revealing to the world that her marriage to Bennett was unconsummated thus making Bennett seen as less of a man in the eyes of the society of the time; a reflection that would cast a shadow on Geoffrey as well.

The other librarians include:

Mrs. Brady, an organizer of the initial meeting to recruit pack horse librarians. Mrs. Brady initially supports the librarians, volunteers her daughter Izzy to be a librarian, later believes Geoffrey Van Cleve’s falsehoods about the librarians and ceases to support them; only to later determine Van Cleve’s accusations against the librarians are false and to again patronize the librarians.

Izzy Brady is Mrs. Brady’s daughter. Izzy has had polio and wears a leg brace something she is initially embarrassed about; she comes out of her shell during the book, is able to ride a horse to deliver books and is found to have an incredible singing voice. Izzy goes on to become a professional singer.

Sophia Kenworth is a librarian who has worked in a big city library and who is exceptionally organized. Margery knows Sophia and her brother William and is grateful to their family as they helped her learn to read as a girl, after her father refused to send her to school. Sophia is recruited to work at the library by Margery, despite the fact that doing so is dangerous for a black woman in the 1930s. After Verna McCullough testifies that her father had checked out the book Little Women; Sophia “borrows” the library check out ledger and notes that Clem McCullough had indeed checked out the book but never returned it.

Beth Pinker is an independent young woman and salty talker, who grew up with a house full of brothers and who, it is revealed at the end of the book, secretly brewed and sold moonshine to save money so she could fulfill her dream of traveling to India.

Also of note, although not a librarians is the character Kathleen Bligh. Kathleen is a strong woman who lives in the mountain country with her family including a sick husband, Garrett, who dies leaving her both heartbroken and on her own to raise their family. After Margery is arrested for Clem’s murder, Kathleen goes out to his cabin to talk to his daughters and, it is implied, helps to convince Verna McCullough to testify against her father, lying under oath, in order to get Margery acquitted.

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The general consensus of the book club members was that The Giver of Stars was a light but enjoyable read. The group also discussed the accusations another author, Kim Michele Richardson, made against Moyes for the similarity in the plots of their latest books, both of which focus on the pack horse librarians.

One attendee had read Richardson’s book, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek: A Novel and mentioned that she thought that was an even better book on the pack horse librarians.

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL