Arboretum Library: Reading the Western Landscape Community Book Discussions 2024

“I just love the way that right from the first pages...[the] characters jump off the page and in this case Sugar Lacey makes her grand entrance, dragging her suitcase, strutting through the small town of the deep south, Bigelow, Arkansas (1950’s) in her high heels, tight dress, brightly coloured wig and nonchalant attitude, peering through the window of the hairdresser knowing that would be where all the talk happens, and on to number 10 Grove Street, her new abode, right next door to Pearl and Joe....McFadden is an author who I will happily read all her work, there’s something reliable and comforting when you sit down with one of her works, knowing you’re not going to want to put it down until it’s finished, but forcing yourself to do so, because you want the experience to linger.”— Claire Mcalpine, clairemcalpine.com,

"In a debut novel that blends the rich, earthy atmosphere of the deep South and a voice imbued with spiritual grace, Bernice L. McFadden tells the story of two women: a modest, churchgoing wife and mother, and the young prostitute she befriends." "When Sugar arrives in 1950s Bigelow - waltzing down the main square of the sweltering tiny Arkansas town as if she has every right to be there - no one tosses out the welcome mat or invites her in for a Coke. The Bigelow women hate her from the minute they lay eyes on her - on the bouncing blond wig and red-painted lips that tell them she has never known a hard day's work. All they know is they want her gone, out of their town, and away from their men." "But Sugar has traveled too far and survived too much to back down now. She parks herself in the house at #10 Grove Street, even though she feels there is something about Bigelow that is calling up the past she prayed she'd left behind." "Deep in her soul, Pearl Taylor knows what it is that Sugar feels, because it happened to her. It was the day her world shut down, the day the devil himself murdered her young daughter, Jude. It wasn't that Pearl stopped believing in God, exactly; she just couldn't trust him the way she used to. Then Sugar moves in next door, and Pearl's life irrevocably changes. Over sweet potato pie, an unlikely friendship begins, transforming the lives of two women - and an entire community."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

[W]e are thrown right into the action with no explanation of who anyone is or what exactly they are doing. The novel is a rollercoaster... And then book two starts and we find out how Dick and Nicole met. And it's calm, beautiful reading that reminds us that those characters once had an easier and happier life. This is where Fitzgerald shines and really introduces you to the most beautiful sentences in literature. [The book] is not as accessible as The Great Gatsby, but once you break through, it's also more beautiful. The story of a couple having and losing love is heartbreaking and Fitzgerald masters the language as no one else to tell this story.”— Emma Holtrust, The Beauty of Literature

Set in the south of France in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic tale of a young actress, Rosemary Hoyt, and her complicated relationship with the alluring American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth pushed him into a glamorous lifestyle, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's decline. Lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative, Tender Is the Night was one of the most talked-about books of the year when it was originally published in 1934, and is even more beloved by readers today.

…[This] should be added to this growing cannon of writing by women that reexamines women’s relationship to nature...[T]he … protagonists are not so much struggling against nature as coming to terms with the possibility that their fundamental humanness is inseparable from the ... the natural world. T]he collection pivot[s] on misperception, both of self & of others, & on betrayals, some purposeful, some accidental...[She] ... reveals the interior mechanisms, the psyches, that drive her ... protagonists to make the choices they do. [S]he ... creates characters whose personalities & choices seem at once very human & clearly woven into the fabric of a larger natural order…[and] … are always gripping, near perfect in their construction, and often wondrous..”— Hasanthika Sirisena, Fiction Writers Review

From a lightning death on an isolated peak to the intrigues of a small town orchestra, the glimmering stories in this debut collection explore how nature--damaged, fierce, and unpredictable--worms its way into our lives. Here moths steal babies, a creek seduces a lonely suburban mother, and the priorities of a passionate conservationist are thrown into confusion after the death of her son. Over and over, the natural world reveals itself to be unknowable, especially to the people who study it most. These tales of scientists, nurses, and firefighters catalog the loneliness within families, betrayals between friends, and the recurring song of regret and grief.

"[...]Its ambition is evident in the apparent humility of its subject: [...] it’s to be nothing more or less than the story of a life. And there is something in even those first paragraphs, an un-show-off-y assurance in the prose, like the soft opening notes of a virtuoso or the first casual gestures of a master artist, that tells us we are in the presence not just of a great writer but of something more—someone who knows life, who maybe even understands it[...;]the presence of wisdom. And wisdom is, of course, perennially out of style".--Tim Kreider, The New Yorker

Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.   William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.   John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

"Taylor is an expert at concentration; rarely deterred, though heavyhearted in her pursuit of truth, her poems are precise, crisp. “Normalcy devastates. Stillness lies to me,” she writes as the author is once again reminded, and here to remind us how purposefully memory can be erased, the way life goes on despite its wounds, that we are just filling the holes with sand until once again, it erodes. Concentrate begs us to do just that for our insured survival."-- Ashia Ajani, Split Lip Magazine

Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins--a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins's murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor's poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against--and between--women of color. Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood's relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor's inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. "Concentrate," she writes. "We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make."

Sanora Babb experienced pioneer life in a one-room dugout, eye-level with the land that supported, tormented and beguiled her; where her family fought for their lives against drought, crop-failure, starvation, and almost unfathomless loneliness. Learning to read from newspapers that lined the dugouts dirt walls, she grew up to be a journalist, then a writer of unforgettable books about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most notably Whose Names Are Unknown. This evocative memoir of a pioneer childhood on the Great Plains is written with the lyricism and sensitivity that distinguishes all of Sanora Babb's writing. What this true story of Sanora's prairie childhood reveals best are the values courage, pride, determination, and love that allowed her family to prevail over total despair.

This long, out-of-print memoir is reissued with new acclaim: "On a par stylistically and thematically with Willa Cather's My Antonia, this is a classic that deserves to be rediscovered and cherished for years to come." Linda Miller, English Professor at Penn State.
"An unsung masterpiece in the field of American autobiography. Arnold Rampersad, author of Ralph Ellison: A Biography.
Editorial Reviews "A wry, affectionate but unsentimental recall of frontiering struggles in Colorado just prior to WWI."--Kirkus
"Babbs engaging memoir recalls a childhood spent on the harsh and wild Colorado frontier during the early 1900s." --Publishers Weekly
"Babbs memories of her childhood in eastern Colorado before World War I. . .relating vividly and with fine and fond recollection"--Library Journal

[The author] is a notable W[estern] A[ustralia] broadcaster and author who has specialised in local, particularly Indigenous, histories since the 1980s. In [the book], Bunbury examines the ways European settlement has shaped Southwest Australia, a biodiversity hotspot of rivers, forests and coastal plains. Bunbury contributes to the complex narratives of the environment since European settlement through extensive oral histories[...] [I]ntroductory and concluding chapters, which give a broader historical context [and], four case studies each detail one particular environmental change[...] As Bunbury notes in the introduction, the book is written in a style reminiscent of a radio script, with long quotes from his sources interspaced with his own sparse narration...--Brad Jefferies, Books+Publishing

When Europeans first settled in Australia, the land withheld many of its secrets from them. There were broad rivers, wide plains and tall forests, all of which, to European eyes, suggested promising sites for settlement. To many of the new settlers, the First Australians were a puzzle. They moved freely through country they knew intimately. They had useful things to say to the European newcomers - if they would listen. What few realised then was that Aboriginal people, and the land they lived in, were indistinguishable. Failure to read the people made it hard to read the country. Invisible Country describes the environmental change that has occurred in south-western Australia since European settlement, through four case studies of the development of local rivers, forests and coastal plains. These stories, compiled through extensive conversations with farmers, ecologists, traditional owners and others who rely on the land, are book-ended by an examination of the historical perspective in which these changes have occurred. It is a reminder that the land owns people, not the other way around, and is the beginning of a conversation about understanding and care for a land we are all lucky to live in.

[...] In what is the first and best book in a six-part series constructed from a serial column in the San Francisco Chronicle, [the book] is smart, guilty entertainment at its best. It's a soap opera. But like, say, Six Feet Under, [the book] purports to be little more than a creative and intelligent soap opera. Taken as such, it is a delight. Vivid characters. A setting -- San Francisco -- that Maupin gives an almost pop-up book feel. And addictive storytelling. [It] is an escapist read. And itself an exercise in escapism -- using what San Francisco represents in the popular imagination to open wide a world of freedom and possibility within its pages, and without.--Jason, Goodreads

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed a singular trail through popular culture -- from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of six novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a wry comedy of manners and a deeply involving portrait of a vanished era.

The book [...] has surprising depth. Orphan visits the stomping grounds of historic and contemporary Los Angeles writers[...] and gathers illustrations, interviews, and reading lists to create a well-rounded resource. While Read Me is a light romp, it has the potential to open new doors to familiar territory—namely the city itself. H.L. Mencken’s famously tart description of Los Angeles as “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis” appears [...], but for some authors, sprawl emerges as a superpower. Los Angeles narratives are layered, shifting; just take a look (or a walk, or a drive) around.--Agatha French, Alta Journal

A colorful, lively, and informed celebration of all things bookish in L.A. past and present, including interviews with current L.A. writers; day trips in search of favorite fictional characters, from Marlowe to Weetzie Bat; author quotes galore; curated lists of the must-read L.A. books; a look at where writers have lived and worked in the City of Angels; and insight into the city's book festivals, bookstores, publishers, literacy nonprofits, libraries, and more. Rich with photographs, book images, and vintage maps.

“[...] Ricketts. [...] whose [...l]aboratories in Monterey was often the center for philosophical musing & lengthy discussion by a bohemian group of liberals during the 1930s [...including John] Steinbeck. [...The letters] suggest […] a great impact not only on Steinbeck but also on other important figures of the time[...Rodger] wisely uses her editorial voice sparingly[...and] lets [the] letters reveal his multifaceted interests that range from Oriental philosophy to music, art, literature, psychology, and philosophy. [...They] are convincing proof that, […], he was an individual whose influence on others is just beginning to be known and whose life is deserving of far more attention.” -- Michael J. Meyer, Western American Literature

This portrait of one of John Steinbeck's closest friends illuminates the life and work of a figure central to the development of scientific and literary thought in the 20th century. Marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts is perhaps best known as the inspiration for John Steinbeck's most empathic literary characters Doc in Cannery Row, Slim in Of Mice and Men, Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, and Lee in East of Eden. The correspondence of this accomplished scientist, writer, and philosopher reveals the influential exchange of ideas he shared with such prominent thinkers and artists as Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Ellwood Graham, and James Fitzgerald, in addition to Steinbeck, all of whom were drawn to Ricketts's Monterey Bay laboratory, a haven of intellectual discourse and Bohemian culture in the 1930s and 1940s. The 125 previously unpublished letters of this collection, housed at the Stanford University Library, document the broad range of Ricketts's interests and accomplishments during the last 12 and most productive years of his life. His handbook on Pacific marine life, Between Pacific Tides, is still in print, now in its fifth edition. The biologist's devotion to ecological conservation and his evolving philosophy of science as a cross-disciplinary, holistic pursuit led to the publication of The Sea of Cortez. Many of Ricketts's letters discuss his studies of the Pacific littoral and his theories of "phalanx" and transcendence. Epistles to family members, often tender and humorous, add dimension and depth to Steinbeck's mythologized depictions of Ricketts. Katharine A. Rodger has enriched the correspondence with an introductory biographical essay and a list of works cited.

Questions discussed on January 24, 2024.:
Ice breaker: Tell us about letters you have written at some point in your life. (Emails, voice mails, or texts are o.k. too.)

What do you think of the world he lived in? And how this time was portrayed in his letters?
What did you learn about this time period, that you didn't know before from these letters?
What do Ricketts letters tell us about a progression of a life in general?
What do you think the editor's reasons were for selecting particular letters? What do you think she left unpublished?
How did beer, wine, etc., etc., fit into Ricketts' life? Music? Art?
Which of his obsessions did you like best? Why?
What did you think of his friends?
What is your favorite letter? Why?
How did the order of the letters fits into the book? Was there a feeling about progression beyond purely chronological? Why?
Favorite line, image or passage?

The Last Friend, the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Tahar Ben Jelloun, winner of the 2004 International Dublin/IMPAC award, is a Rashamon-like tale of friendship and betrayal set in twentieth century Tangier. Written in Ben Jelloun's inimitable and powerfully direct style, the novel explores the twists and turns of an intense thirty-year friendship between two young men struggling to find their identities and sexual fulfillment in Morocco in the late 1950s, a complex and contradictory society both modern and archaic. From their carefree university days through their brutal imprisonment and ultimate release, the two rely on each other for physical and psychological survival, forging bonds not easily broken. Each narrator tells his version of the story, painting a vivid portrait of life lived within and in opposition to the moral strictures of North Africa. Set against a backdrop of repression and disillusionment, The Last Friend is a tale of loss of innocence and a nation's coming of age.

“[The book] focuses on the close relationship formed between Ali and Mamed, who meet as teenage boys growing up in Tangiers in the late 1950s. For thirty years, their relationship thrives, only to experience an abrupt ending. Half of the book is allowed for Ali's depiction of this friendship, followed by Mamed's portrayal of the same period.[...]The reader [...] gets to 'meet' each character twice - once in first-person form, with access to all of his thoughts and emotions, and then again in third person, through the eyes of another. Jelloun masterfully shows [...] how subjective reality is. [...The book] is a beautiful meditation on being human. It reads almost like an allegory or fable[...]” -- Eva Kay, Curled Up With A Good Book

Here the questions discussed on Wednesday, February 28, 2024.

Ice breaker: What do you pine for from some place you are no longer in?

Why "Last" friend?
Were you reluctant or eager to start the second part? Why?
Do you agree with Mamed about jealousy?
What did you think of the ending?
What did you think of Mamed's reasoning?
Why did you think about the writing style and the organization of the book?
Did you get a sense of Morocco?
What did you think about the author's portrayal of women? Does it matter for the book?
Was this a "powerful" book to you? Why/Why not?
What did you think about the pace of the book?
What do you think about the two points of view? Did it work? Was the author able to inhabit both well? Why? Why not?
Do you think the author successfully portrayed the differences/similarities between the two main places? Morocco and Sweden? Was that important to the book? Why? Why not?
Did you assume that the plot had something to do with Mamed's smoking? Why? Why not?
What did you think about the letter and Ali's reaction?
Any ambiguities we need to clear up?
Favorite line, image, or passage?

“[...T]he book is a chronicle of the three years following the author’s college graduation[...As she...] recounts her time through several jobs, companies, and locations, she alternates the narration between the daily grind of the workers and the vistas of startling beauty surrounding them. [...]Beaton captures numerous poignant, sometimes heartbreaking moments throughout the book, but the cumulative effect of her many stories is even more impressive. She creates an indelible portrait of environmental degradation, fraught interpersonal relationships among a workforce largely disconnected from home, and greedy corporations that seem only vaguely aware of the difficult work’s effect on their employees. A fascinating, harrowing, unforgettable book about a place few outsiders can comprehend.—Kirkus Reviews

A New York Times Notable book! One of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2022! Winner of Canada Reads 2023! "An exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival."--Carmen Maria Machado Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark! A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beaton, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush--part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed. Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

Here are the questions on March 27, 2024:

Ice breaker:
Do you have some part of a work experience that you would want or could tell stories about? If so, what would the stories focus on? If not, why not?

What did you think of the drawings?
How do you think she did the drawings? Memory, reference photographs, etc., etc.? What did you think about the drawing style?
Does every workplace have aspects of what is portrayed here? If so, what? If not, why not?
Is the memoir more/less effective because it is graphically portrayed? Why? Why not?
Who is your favorite character? Why?
Why do you think she went back to the oil sands after working in the museum? Would you have?
Would she have been better off at home? Why? Why not?
What did you think of the afterward?
Is this a book of its time as she states in the afterward? Why? Why not?
What did you think about how she portrayed the violence and harassment that occurred?
Why is it titled Ducks?
Favorite line, image or passage?

. [...The novel] is a lush narrative of a young Black woman’s love affair with a filmmaker. [..]They crash in guest rooms and living rooms up and down California, living a bohemian life, making love, listening to James Brown, and arguing about who has sold out. The prose, […] envelops readers in the narrator’s funkified quest for meaning, love, and freedom, and whether they can all coexist (“its not so much behind every great man is a great woman, as much as a great man is a great man and a girl is a girl”). In an afterword, Newman admits she struggled with the rerelease, luxuriating as it does in a lifestyle she no longer endorses. — Publishers Weekly

Alison Mills Newman's innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A "fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English," as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, Francisco is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood. Her wildly original and vivid voice chronicles a free-spirited life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, as well as her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts Movement. Love and friendship, long, meaningful conversations, parties and dancing--Francisco celebrates, as she improvises in the book, "the workings of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth ... the gift of art for the survival of the human heart."

Here are the questions discussed on April 22, 2024:
Icebreaker: Tell about an episode you remember from your early twenties, that, perhaps, shows that you were searching.

Who is your favorite character? Why?
What do you think about the writing? Why?
What do you think about the author's voice? Why?
What about the afterward?
How about the places: LA and environs, San Francisco and Berkeley?
What did you learn about these characters, that time, those places from this book?
How did the book make you feel? Why?
Did you listen to James Brown's "Cold Sweat" album or song? If so, what does it add to your understanding of the story?
What did you think about the ending of the story? Did you anticipate it? Why? Why not?

[...] The tradition was once to keep those personal histories sealed tight […]. But Karr’s refusal to bottle herself up, her refusal to lie, lets us know that era is over. Henceforth, the light will pour in.[...] She is a poet, and so she has a poet’s ease of language, slapping certain words where they oughtn’t traditionally be and creating brand spanking new uses for them. […] And Mary is insightful beyond measure, recalling childhood with the clear-eyed generosity of someone looking down from a possible heaven. Therefore, her truthful book is a beautiful deception: she makes it look easy to do what is hardest, and that is to tell your own story and have it be heard. Mary’s family couldn’t hide their most sacred business from their neighbors. Now Mary doesn’t want to. Neither do we.--Lena Dunham, The Paris Review

"The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club. And to the girl whose father is the club's undisputed champion mythmaker, they exude a fatal glamour - one that lifts her from ordinary life." "But there are other lies. Darker, more hidden. Her mother's unimaginable past threatens the family's very sanity. Mary Karr looks back through younger eyes to exorcise those demons: a mad, puritanical grandmother; a vast inheritance squandered in one year flat; endless emptied bottles; and the darknesses inflicted on an eight-year-old girl. This voice explodes with antic, wit, stripped of self-pity. Miraculously, it makes a journey into joy. Here is a "terrific family of liars redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth.""--Book Jacket.

Here are the questions discussed at the meeting, Wednesday, May 22, 2024.

Icebreaker:
Describe a memory from approximately the same age of child as the protagonist in the book and/or what were the rules about your cleaning chores when you were a kid?

Do you think the way she presents her life helps or hinders her living it?
What do you think about the statement on p. 124 ( of my edition): "which is how lies can tell you the truth." It's about how Daddy's Poppa dying.
Which of the anecdotes do you like best? Why?
What did you think about the writing style? The structure of the book?
Who is your favorite character? Your favorite portrayal of landscape?
Do you believe the stories? Which? Why or Why not?
What makes this book of the time it was written?
Why do you think this was a bestseller?
Favorite line, image or passage

With 161 authors, 400 pages of poetry, over 300 years of coverage (1678–2019), and more than 90 nations represented, the [book] is the most inclusive and the most comprehensive anthology of Native American poetry to date.[...The editors] have done a marvelous job demonstrating how Indigenous poetry is a not a banner but a quilt[...T]his collection is organized by region. [...] To me, this book is a cartography of how Native writers have turned to poetry for centuries as a way of marking, naming, and preserving external and internal landscapes. [...] Rather than an assemblage of solos, [the book] is a chorus..— Dean Radar, Los Angeles Review of Books

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into one momentous volume. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from the massive libraries of oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Dinéh poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. In When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, Harjo offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature.

For Book Discussion on June 26, 2024, the small group walked up to Tallac Knoll at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden with each of us telling about a favorite place or two in the West we have experienced. Once settled in on the top of the knoll we had a wonderful time reading our favorite poems from the book to each other. At the end walking down the stairs after sunset we saw a great horned owl fly by and then greeted it in the very large Coast Live Oak next to the staircase. I speculated from its size and slight fluffiness that it might have been one of this year's juveniles. I'm guessing the owl was speculating why these people were in the Arboretum after the daily closing. It was an evening charged with our sense of place in this world.

[The book] is the story of a waterhole that...has kept travelers from death as they passed through the desert. Tinajas Altas...is a series of potholes filled with murky, smelly water in extreme southwestern Arizona... Five authors chronicle the history and ecology...from the days when Native Americans ground mesquite pods on the granite surrounding the water hole, to the Gold Rush, when the tinajas were a stopover on the infamous...prospectors’ trail from Mexico to California. Today, ...the silence, the scorching heat and the thirst that drive people to the spot continue.”— High Country News

The Devil's Highway--El Camino del Diablo--crosses hundreds of miles and thousands of years of Arizona and Southwest history. This heritage trail follows a torturous route along the U.S. Mexico border through a lonely landscape of cactus, desert flats, drifting sand dunes, ancient lava flows, and searing summer heat. The most famous waterhole along the way is Tinajas Altas, or High Tanks, a series of natural rock basins that are among the few reliable sources of water in this notoriously parched region. Now an expert cast of authors describes, narrates, and explains the human and natural history of this special place in a thorough and readable account. Addressing the latest archaeological and historical findings, they reveal why Tinajas Altas was so important and how it related to other waterholes in the arid borderlands. Readers can feel like pioneers, following in the footsteps of early Native Americans, Spanish priests and soldiers, gold seekers and borderland explorers, tourists, and scholars. Combining authoritative writing with a rich array of more than 180 illustrations and maps as well as detailed appendixes providing up-to-date information on the wildlife and plants that live in the area, Last Water on the Devil's Highway allows readers to uncover the secrets of this fascinating place, revealing why it still attracts intrepid tourists and campers today.

Here are the questions discussed on July 24, 2024.
Ice breaker: Does the book make you want to go to Tinajas Atlas? Why? Why not? And/Or tell about a time you felt you might be in peril on a trip.

Why does it appear to be so hard to make a map that tells the stories in this book?
       Why were some of the maps after the stories?
       What did you like and not like about the maps?
What did you think about the speculative conclusions? Do you agree with them? Or disagree? Why? Why not?
Generally, what was good and what potentially needs improvement about the writing style(s) for this book?
Does it seem that the book is recording more not going to Tinajas Atlas than going? Why?
What was your favorite part of the book? Why?
What other improvements would you have liked to see with this book? Do you think they would be possible to achieve? Why/Why not?
What did you think about as you were reading this book?

“...Better to view him here, I think, as a memoirist -- and more just, the majority of the book is devoted more to his history and to that of his grandparents, first-generation Texas pioneers, than to the bricks and mortar of analysis. ...McMurtry's thin book glitters: His recollections of Texas ranch life -- of cowpokes puzzling over why a local farmer milked his cows before committing suicide, of his own ineptitude as a cowboy, of his childhood fears of poultry and shrubs and, most of all, of his early forays into reading -- are gorgeously drawn and rife with the sort of nimbly vigilant details that have long elevated (and occasionally salvaged) his novels. —Jonathan Miles, Salon.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author presents a memoir of his odyssey from rancher's son to critically acclaimed novelist, in a reminiscence set against the backdrop of the Lone Star State.

Here are the questions we discussed Wednesday, August 28, 2024:
Here are the questions I pondered as I read the book:
Ice breaker: What is or was your favorite fast-food establishment & favorite food there? Why?
What did you like best about the book?
What questions do you have about the book?
What have you been thinking about as a result of the book?
Do you believe his assertion that the land was empty? Why/Why not?
Does he make you want to read about the frontier, the "West", the plains? Why? Why not?
The book is 25 years old. How does that figure into what he writes? Does most of it hold up? Why?/Why not?
Is his world of books gone? Why?/Why not?
Why is Walter Benjamin such a theme in the book?
What did you think about the last chapter?
How do the books/bookstore chapters fit in this book? Why did he put them in?

“... In 2020, Dungy, an English professor at Colorado State, located in the majority-White city of Fort Collins, received a Guggenheim fellowship, allowing her to take a break from teaching and focus on documenting her project of transforming what had been a conventional suburban lawn into a pollinator garden full of native plants...Instead of the conventional nature narrative, [she] offers a more complex, nuanced story in which the experience of nature is vital but is also entangled with race, national and family history, motherhood, and more. The text is the literary equivalent of the garden Dungy gradually coaxed into being: lively, messy, beset by invasive weeds, colorful, constantly changing, never quite under control, and endlessly interconnected". — Kirkus Reviews

A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage. In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it. Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

Here are some questions we discussed on Wednesday, September 25, 2024, that I wondered about as I read the book. Bring your questions too, or pick one from the back of the book's "Book Club Favorites Reader Guide"
Icebreaker: Tell a favorite story about growing something and/or tell about your favorite animals around your dwelling.
What did you gather from the poems? Which is your favorite?
What do you think about how she portrayed the COVID pandemic? Do you feel the rhythms of the pandemic in her writing? Why? Why not? What resonated for you about the pandemic?
What do you think about her reaction to nature books written by men?
What did you think about her assertions on pages 72-75 about "learning" from white men in college, etc. How does that jibe with your studies? Your work life?
What do you think about how she organized the book?
How does the book compare, resonate, move beyond, etc., to other "nature" or "garden" writing?
How do you view her thoughts on religion and church?
How did the chapter on the 2016 election fit in? What is the bindweed metaphor about?
What did you take away from her writing about racism?
What about this book was most moving for you?
How did her transitions between sections work?
Favorite line, image or passage?