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