Arboretum Library: Book Club Reads from 2013

"Each of Cooder’s eight stories contains at least one murder, usually more. They center on ordinary people—[…]—whose lives are warped, derailed, or ended by the schemes of gangsters, grifters, extortionists, murderers, policemen and fanatics. […] Los Angeles Stories focuses on the negative space around the pivotal changes occurring in Los Angeles at mid-century, evoking the texture of an era that spawned ‘La La Land.’ from Cristóbal McKinney, Zyzzyva.com.

"Cooder writes with Chandler-esque pepper and an eye for character." --Rolling Stone Los Angeles Stories is a collection of loosely linked, noir-ish tales that evoke a bygone era in one of America's most iconic cities. In post-World War II Los Angeles, as power was concentrating and fortunes were being made, a do-it-yourself culture of cool cats, outsiders, and oddballs populated the old downtown neighborhoods of Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine. Ordinary working folks rubbed elbows with petty criminals, grifters, and all sorts of women at foggy end-of-the-line outposts in Venice Beach and Santa Monica. Rich with the essence and character of the times, suffused with the patois of the city's underclass, these are stories about the common people of Los Angeles, "a sunny place for shady people," and the strange things that happen to them. Musicians, gun shop owners, streetwalkers, tailors, door-to-door salesmen, drifters, housewives, dentists, pornographers, new arrivals, and hard-bitten denizens all intersect in cleverly plotted stories that center around some kind of shadowy activity. This quirky love letter to a lost way of life will appeal to fans of hard-boiled fiction and anyone interested in the city itself. Ry Cooder is a world-famous guitarist, singer, and composer known for his slide guitar work, interest in roots music, and more recently for his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries, including The Buena Vista Social Club. He has composed soundtracks for more than twenty films, including Paris, Texas. Two recent albums were accompanied by stories Cooder wrote to accompany the music. This is his first published collection of stories.

Here are the questions we discussed January 8, 2013:
• How did the fact that some of the stories didn’t seem “finished” effect your interpretation of what was happening?
• Could you envision the landscape? What stayed in your mind?
• How did you handle all the ambiguities? Give an example?
• Are there plot points you don’t understand? What are some different interpretations?
• How did his work as a musician affect his work as a writer?
• Tell me about what you think the strength in the stories was?
• What was your favorite part that was related to music?

“[…]examines that San Francisco, a physically compact place that contains multitudes, through a series of elegantly rendered maps and cleverly researched and well-wrought essays conceived by more than a dozen writers, cartographers and artists. Passing through these newly mapped territories, we begin to see that "place," as Solnit emphasizes, is an imprecise word, and even the idea of an atlas is beyond subjective[…]from Lynell George, LATimes.com.

What makes a place? Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically--connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge’s foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock’s filming of Vertigo. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures--butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more. Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us--or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai. CONTRIBUTORS: Cartographers: Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel Designer: Lia Tjandra Artists: Sandow Birk, Mona Caron, Jaime Cortez, Hugh D'Andrade, Robert Dawson, Paz de la Calzada, Jim Herrington, Ira Nowinski, Alison Pebworth, Michael Rauner, Gent Sturgeon, Sunaura Taylor Writers and researchers: Summer Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin, Heather Smith, Richard Walker Additional cartography: Darin Jensen; Robin Grossinger and Ruth Askevold, San Francisco Estuary Institute

Here are the questions discussed on February 6, 2013:

• How did the maps affect your reading of this book? How did it change your usual reading style?
• Which essay resonated for you the most? Why?
• How was ambiguity handled? Give an example.
• Did you have some different interpretations of any of the subjects covered in the essays? What is your interpretation?
• What was the most astonishing thing you learned about San Francisco?
• Tell me about what you think the strengths in the essays were?
• What is your San Francisco story?
• How did you interpret the juxtapositions of subjects, sleight of hand or depth? Explain.

These eight essays are selective, nostalgic, poison-tipped and fearlessly smart. They’re sharp about Hollywood’s definitions of success and failure, about how actors are manipulated by their employers and pigeonholed by the press. Brooks saw stardom as a “pestiferous disease.” Late in her life she could cherish her solitude.[…] Brooks still shimmers as a rare loner who traveled down that road, her life in ruins — and then came back. -- Janet Maslin, NYTimes.com.

"Louise Brooks (1906-1985), one of the most famous actresses of the silent era, was renowned as much for her rebellion against Hollywood as for her performances in such classics as Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Collected here are eight autobiographical essays by Brooks, vividly describing her childhood in Kansas, her early career as a Denishawn dancer and Ziegfeld Follies "Glorified Girl," and her friendships with Martha Graham, Charles Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart and others."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Here are the questions discussed March 6, 2013:

• What does Lulu’s Hollywood look like?
• Which essay resonated for you the most? Why?
• Why did she walk away?
• How did she make her way in the world? Can you give an example of how these struggles continue?
• What was the most astonishing thing you learned about Hollywood?
• Tell me about what you think the strengths of the essays were?
• What is your Hollywood story?
• How did you interpret who she chose to write about? Explain.
• How does she portray the relationship of New York to Hollywood?
• What did the George Eastman House do for her?

[…]”A variety of strange, exotic things call the Nevada desert home. […]This rich, diverse environment forms the backdrop of [...] an exceptional debut short fiction collection […]. A writer of great precision and greater restraint, Watkins is a natural storyteller whose material enriches that gift rather than engulfing it. […]Proud and ever-enduring, Nevada now has a book to match its spirit. And one doesn’t have to be from the Battleborn state to recognize and appreciate literature that resonates like this. from Matt Gallagher, TheRumpus.net.
Since this book was selected for the Book Club it has been nominated for the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, is an American Library Association 2013 Notable Book, is a Story Prize finalist, and is one of NPR’s Best Books of 2012

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus; Winner of the 2012 Story Prize Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012 Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . . Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly re-imagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on - and reinvents;- her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

Here are the questions discussed April 13, 2013:
“Cowboys, Ghosts”
• Why did she say no to the producer? How do you see the character Razor Blade Baby?
“The Last Thing We Need?”
• Why did he keep writing? What's going on in the last few lines of this story? How do the letters change the story out of a “traditional
“Rondine al Nido”
• Can you tell a little about your small town story or tell about when you wanted to get away from home the most? Why did "our girl" do what she did? What did the end mean about ‘A person can change in an instant.’?
“The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past”
• What new tale does this whorehouse story tell? How does it bear witness to this Nevada only business?
“Wish You Were Here”
• Whose life has changed the most and how? Why does he ask “Where are you?”
“Man-o-War”
• Why was the dog barking at the end?
“The Archivist”
• Did the Miracle bring solace at the end?
“The Diggings”
• This is the longest story in the book. How does it fit in with the others?
“Virginia City”
• Have you ever watched a friendship dissolve? Does this remind you any of your early adulthood?
”Graceland”
• What is your favorite line in this story? Is she going to come out of her grief? Is the sister? This was a very powerful story for me. Were there passages that were powerful for you? Explain.
• How do all the stories relate to each other?
• What is your favorite image or passage in all these stories?

"[…]no ordinary book about conifers. Rather, it is a the tale of a voyager whose personal journey took him into the far reaches of the Klamath Mountain range of northwest California and southwest Oregon to present the conifers of the region for admiration, study and conservation. […]The reader joins […]in search of breathtaking vistas described by some of the most beautiful, image-laden language this review has ever read. — from Ronald J. Elardo, Conifer Quarterly, Summer 2012.

Here are the questions discussed May 1, 2013:

• What was your favorite conifer? Why?
• What was your favorite hike? Why?
• Tell me about the author. What did you learn about him?
• If there was one thing you would change about the book what would it be?
• What part of the book would you be sure not to change?
• Tell me what you might do differently around conifers now.
• Do you have any stories in this landscape or with these plants?
• Can you relate where you are living now to any part of this landscape? Which part?

"The small, dry towns that lead eastward from Los Angeles to Indio, across the lap of California, form an island chain in a sea of sand, each with its own biome and yet each enough like the other to form, in aggregate, one place. It is in this insular region that [...the] novel, operates, studying closely the evolutionary winners and losers of the area. […]There are subtleties and shadings visible only to those with adapted eyes, and it is those subtleties that Greenland crafts into a wild social farce, dependent on fine distinctions. ."-- from Alison Powell, Los Angeles Review of Books.

Seth Greenland's timely novel is a smart and darkly amusing dissection of the American way of life in all its sordid glory. Set in the hardscrabble California desert community of Desert Hot Springs and the manicured enclave of Palm Springs, the novel lives at the intersection of the Old Testament and Elmore Leonard. In this sun-blasted territory, with its equally arid culture, a fiercely contested congressional election is in progress. The wily incumbent, Randall Duke, is unburdened by ethical considerations and his opponent, Mary Swain, is a sexy and well-financed newcomer who does not have a firm grip on American history or elemental economics. This is the ideal setting and cast of characters for Seth Greenland, one of America's finest satirists. The Angry Buddhist convincingly explores mendacity in tis modern American forms: contemporary politics, middle class sexual mores, the criminal justice system, and the limits and cost of filial love. Green land is able to mix satire with crime to produce humor that is vibrantly caustic and subjects that are alarmingly authentic. 'The Angry Buddhist unfolds with Dexterous ease. It makes a fine high-end beach read for election season.' Janet Maslin, The New York Times 'Recalls the recent fictive universes of Elmore Leonard, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers . . . The Angry Buddhist is a wild entertainment as well as a novel about the way we live now that dares to dance with the profound.' Richard Raynor, The Los Angeles Times 'It is the human extremes that are Greenland's subject, and he captures the high and low end with a crafty gaze.' Alison Powell, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Here are the questions discussed June 8, 2013:
• Were you able to have any sympathy for any of the characters? Why? Why not?
• What did you think when you were reading the physical descriptions of all the people in the book? Why?
• What did the ending mean to you?
• If there was one thing you would change about the book what would it be?
• What part of the book would you be sure not to change?
• Were you surprised when the author of the blog was revealed? How did that revelation shape your reading?
• Many of the characters in the book don’t appear “likeable.” How did this affect your reading experience?
• What were the author’s best descriptions of the landscape?
• What did you take in from the “dog book” and the Buddhism?

"Chabon is one of the most gifted painters in the history of American literature [...]Such vividness doesn’t require a wide field of play, just a few square miles of the Bay Area and a bottomless empathy for its inhabitants. [...He] writes so well about music […]; his talent […]is for performance, in the sense that his language dazzles and challenges and delights[...] That’s how the novel’s conclusion, a decidedly mixed one for Brokeland Records, comes to feel redemptive, even triumphant. That’s how, […]the audience in front of the page can enjoy that aftermath free from the burdens of nostalgia, discovering in those broken pieces something quite beautiful indeed.” — from James Santel, Los Angeles Review of Books

"An immensely gifted writer and magical prose stylist" -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times; New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen's Union); to discover The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us to Telegraph Avenue in a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. In Telegraph Avenue, Chabon lovingly creates a world grounded in pop culture;Kung Fu, &;70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music;and delivers a bravura epic of friendship, race, and secret histories.

Here are the questions discussed August 7, 2016

• What did you think about how the author approached race? Julie’s sexuality?
• Could you see the neighborhood? If so, explain a passage the made that happen? If not, why not?
• Why records?
• Did you believe Archy’s trajectory?
• What did you think about the “I’m sorry”s?
• Were there any parts of the story that you had trouble believing? Made you feel uncomfortable?
• What about the glove?
• Is there any reconciliation with Luther?
• What did you think about the hearing about the hospital?
• Was the confusion about all the characters deliberate? Why? Why not?

"The narrative of Latin America poverty and the "broken beauty" of places like Iguala is buried deep in the psyche of Los Angeles and other U.S. cities. Our recent history has been shaped by Latino immigration. We live amid a million unknown tales of family longing, loss, ambition and dysfunction. Grande relentlessly mines this thematically rich terrain in [the book.] With two deeply flawed adults at its center [...]it's a brutally honest book that avoids the sentimentality that permeates many Latino immigrant narratives." - from Hector Tobar, LATimes.com.

From an award-winning novelist and sought-after public speaker, an eye-opening memoir about life before and after illegally emigrating from Mexico to the United States. Mago pointed to a spot on the dirt floor and reminded me that my umbilical cord was buried there. “That way,” Mami told the midwife, “no matter where life takes her, she won’t ever forget where she came from.” Then Mago touched my belly button . . . She said that my umbilical cord was like a ribbon that connected me to Mami. She said, “It doesn’t matter that there’s a distance btween us now. That cord is there forever.” When Reyna Grande’s father leaves his wife and three children behind in a village in Mexico to make the dangerous trek across the border to the United States, he promises he will soon return from “El Otro Lado” (The Other Side) with enough money to build them a dream house where they can all live together. His promises become harder to believe as months turn into years. When he summons his wife to join him, Reyna and her siblings are deposited in the already overburdened household of their stern, unsmiling grandmother. The three siblings are forced to look out for themselves; in childish games they find a way to forget the pain of abandonment and learn to solve very adult problems. When their mother at last returns, the reunion sets the stage for a dramatic new chapter in Reyna’s young life: her own journey to “El Otro Lado” to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent father. In this extraordinary memoir, award-winning writer Reyna Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous early years, capturing all the confusion and contradictions of childhood, especially one spent torn between two parents and two countries. Elated when she feels the glow of her father’s love and approval, Reyna knows that at any moment he might turn angry or violent. Only in books and music and her rich imaginary life does she find solace, a momentary refuge from a world in which every place feels like “El Otro Lado.” The Distance Between Us captures one girl’s passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. A funny, heartbreaking, lyrical story, it reminds us that the joys and sorrows of childhood are always with us, invisible to the eye but imprinted on the heart, forever calling out to us of those places we first called home.

Here are the questions discussed September 4, 2014.

• How did the writing style affect your reading of the book?
• Is the narrator reliable? Why or why not?
• Why do you think she wrote this book?
• What was the most shocking part of the story for you?
• What did the father do right? The mother? The stepmother? The grandmother?
• Was there any part of the story that was confusing for you? If so, what?
• Tell about a cultural aspect of their life in Mexico that was new to you.
• Tell about an aspect of their life in Los Angeles that was new to you.
• Was the author judgemental? How?
• What did the father achieve that the mother couldn’t? How did he get the 4 plex?

“[...She] is a deft stylist, and her observations take place so close to the personal as to unearth surprising truths in even the most over-scrutinized things, inviting quotation in the form of aphorism. On the love between husbands and wives, she writes: “It was the kind of love that gazed up at you from the bare white flood of your headlights — a wide-eyed love with the meekness of grass-eaters.” Without the grass-eaters of course, this startling explanation could not take place, and part of [her] project is to expose what other creatures can help us understand about ourselves. Taxidermy […] is a ready-made synecdoche for her exploration of extinction, preservation, and endangerment. “—from Jenny Hendrix, The Boston Globe.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet is "one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation" (Scott Timberg; Los Angeles Times). Salon praised her for writing that is "always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself." The Village Voice added, "If Kurt Vonnegut were still alive, he would be extremely jealous." This stunning new novel presents Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death and the dissolution of her family. Embarking on a new phase in her life after inheriting her uncle's sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy, Susan decides to restore the neglected, moth-eaten animal mounts, tending to the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails; Meanwhile an equally derelict human menagerie; including an unfaithful husband and a chorus of eccentric old women; joins her in residence. In a setting both wondrous and absurd, Susan defends her legacy from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion's unknown spaces. Funny and heartbreaking, Magnificence explores evolution and extinction, children and parenthood, loss and revelation. The result is the rapturous final act to the critically acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream.

Here are the questions discussed September 4, 2016:

• Is she really a murderer?
• What was the point of the basement and all the talk about extinction?
• Why was the basement sealed?
• What was the point of the taxidermy?
• How does the book deal with grief?
• Do you think the author had ever been to Pasadena?
• Was it authentic for you? Did that matter?
• Was there any part of the story that was confusing for you? If so, what?
• What do we know about Hal?
• Was Susan ever honorable?

“[...] Stavans is thrust into a fictional mystery about a group of real people whose history is largely unknown to most Americans: the "crypto-Jews" of New Mexico. Steve Sheinkin, with an appealing palette of earth-toned colors, creates the illustrated world in which this story unfolds. "What interests me in all this is the way people create stories to survive, to affirm who they are, to make a stand," "That's what authenticity is all about: the personal belief that each of us is unique, that deep inside there's a light that guides our path." That light burns also in certain New Mexico homes, where people have lighted candles on Friday evenings for generations-- without knowing exactly why they're doing so.” — from Hector Tobar, LATimes.com

When young Rolando Pérez falls to his death from a cliff outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, the mysteries immediately begin to accumulate. Was he pushed or did he jump? What are the documents that Rolando was willing sacrifice himself to protect from his family, the police, and the Catholic Church? And what does a colorful concha pastry have to do with any of this? In the midst of the investigation, Professor Ilan Stavans arrives in Santa Fe to give a lecture about the area's long-buried Jewish history. He's looking forward to relaxing afterwards with an evening of opera, but his presentation on "crypto-Jews" attracts unexpected attention, and soon Ilan is drawn into a desperate race to find the long-lost documents that might hold the key to Rolando's death. Ilan's detective work leads him to taco joints, desert ranches, soaring cathedrals, and, finally, deep into the region's past, where he encounters another young man: Luis de Carvajal, aka "El Iluminado" a sixteenth-century religious dissenter. In a tale of martyrdom that eerily echoes Rolando's, Carvajal fled Spain for colonial Mexico at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, searching for his religious heritage--a hunt for which he, like Rolando, would pay the ultimate price. In El Iluminado, esteemed literary critic Ilan Stavans and author and illustrator Steve Sheinkin present a secret history of religion in the Americas, showing how thousands of European refugees have left a trail of ghostly footprints--and troves of mysteries--across the American Southwest.

Here are the questions discussed October 2, 2016:

• How is the story enhanced or changed by the graphic novel form?
• What’s the deal with the academic rivalry?
• Why is it so dramatic or forbidden to learn the history?
• Why is the graduate assistant carrying a gun?
• Is there truth to the story? Why/Why not?
• Do the illustrations add to your understanding of the landscape?
• What is the trajectory of the plot?
• Were you able to understand the religious references? Why? Why not?
• Why didn’t Irina give Ilan the evidence?
• What did you think of the broader philosophizing such as the questions about what is a home?
• Why did the author feel the need to turn it into a superficial mystery rather than a more in-depth study of the history of the people in Santa Fe?
• What did you think of all the hidden lives?

"[...] unlike any ever written on the architectural and civic makeup of Southern California. In 316 brief, numbered entries, […he] relates the history of Lakewood's first major post-war suburban housing development, and of his own family's history there[…]. He is also defending suburban living and its architecture against the familiar charge that it is fundamentally about escapism and materialism. […] he writes. "But they were wrong." The houses in Lakewood […] instead gave their owners just "enough space to reinvent themselves." In other ways the book and [his] personal story cut against the grain of typical suburban history. […He] is deeply reflective and unusually settled; there is a rooted constancy to his life and to his writing.”— from Christopher Hawthorne, LATimes.com.

Part memoir, part history, this collection of essays is a portrait of the author's coming-of-age. It is concerned with the way a place shapes people's lives. In the 1950s, as the American suburbs were hurriedly built, planners and social critics denounced the right-angle grid and small spaces; but the effect on human lives in suburban streets was not foreseen.

Here are the questions discussed November 6, 2013:

• Why does the author juxtapose the very non-personal tales of his life with the very detailed history of Lakewood and it’s land?
• What was your favorite Lakewood fact?
• Did this story resonant with any of your childhood memories?
• How did the format of the book effect your reading of it? Good? Bad?
• What do the chapter numbers mean?
• How did his Catholicism and the other religious references effect your reading of the book?
• Whad’ya think about the pictures?
• Were you able to understand the religious references? Why? Why not?
• What are the strengths of the book? What not so much?
• How did the author’s exploration of the broader history of Los Angeles and Levittown fit with his exploration of the history of Lakewood?
• Why didn’t he ever call it Lakewood? Did he call it Lakewood?
• Was he accurate in his thoughts on the landscape and trees?
• Why is it called Holy Land?

“In 1946, young Claire Fejes was a painter and sculptor in New York City. […She] went—to Fairbanks, last stop on the Alaska Railroad, in the heart of the immense northern territory, where Joe Fejes intended to mine for gold. In her […]memoir, Fejes tells of a remote outpost where a hardy breed of Alaskans overcomes loneliness and of her own soul-aching artistic and cultural isolation. She describes characters such as Eva McGown, a one-woman social-service agency who wears powerful violet perfume and speaks with a sweet Irish brogue; and Fabian Carey, a trapper who loves the wilderness as fervently as he does opera, literature, and art. Like her vivid paintings, the author portrays the men and women for whom survival and self-sufficiency is foremost in post-war Alaska”.— from Publisher’s website.

An internationally known Alaskan artist, Claire Fejes came to Fairbanks in 1946 and discovered a remote outpost, powerful friendships, and cultural isolation.

Here are the questions discussed December 4, 2013:

• Could this have been anyone’s “move” to Alaska story?
• Does the Alaska landscape shape the author's art? How? How not?
• Could you follow any of the story of the creation of art meeting the landscape with struggle and evolution, logistical difficulties, lack of advanced instruction, etc.?
• What was your favorite thing you learned about Alaska from this book?
• Particularly in the beginning the language was very straight forward and seemingly simple? How did that effect your reading of the book?
• What did you think about her repeated compulsions to do art?
• What did you think about the illustrations?
• Was the trajectory the book took surprising to you? What did you think about the last pages?
• Were there any surprises for you about how Fairbanks grew as a town?
• 
  What are the strengths of the book? What not so much?