Arboretum Library: Book Club Reads from 2018

"“[The book...] focuses for the first time on the range & vitality of artistic traditions growing out of the unique amalgam of Mexican & American culture that evolved in Southern California from 1820 through 1930. […F]eaturing painters, printmakers, photographers, & mapmakers from both sides of the border, this collection demonstrates how they made the Mexican presence visible in their art. [The book] addresses […] how Mexico became California, & how the visual arts reflected the shifting identity that grew out of that transformation." —Publisher’s website.

Following the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848), lands that had for centuries belonged to New Spain, and later to Mexico, were transformed into the thirty-first state in the United States. This process was facilitated by visual artists, who forged distinct pictorial motifs and symbols to establish the state's new identity. This collective cultural inheritance of the Spanish and Mexican periods forms a central current of California history but has been only sparingly studied by cultural and art historians. California Mexicana focuses for the first time on the range and vitality of artistic traditions growing out of the unique amalgam of Mexican and American culture that evolved in Southern California from 1820 through 1930. A study of these early regional manifestations provides the essential matrix out of which emerge later art and cultural issues. Featuring painters, printmakers, photographers, and mapmakers from both sides of the border, this collection demonstrates how they made the Mexican presence visible in their art. This beautifully illustrated catalogue addresses two key areas of inquiry: how Mexico became California, and how the visual arts reflected the shifting identity that grew out of that transformation.   Published in association with the Laguna Art Museum, and as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.   Exhibition dates: Laguna Art Museum: October 15, 2017-January 14, 2018.

These are the questions we discussed on January 31, 2018:
• What is the overarching theme of this book?
• Who is your favorite artist? Why? 2nd favorite? Why?
• What is one thing that might have made this book better?
• What is one new fact you learned and appreciated?
• What surprised you most about this book?
• Any ambiguities we need to try to clear up?
• Has this book changed your understanding of Los Angeles or Southern California? How?
• How about changing your understanding of the landscape of LA or SoCal? How?
• Which artist is not to your taste or aesthetic? Why?
• What did you like best about the book?

“[…P]oetry as observation, […]poetry as piecing together, […] poetry as a way to see beneath the surfaces of a city that still, to some extent, defines itself by surfaces is central to “Wide Awake.” It is both a diverse collection and a consistent one, a framing of voices, all trying to make sense of not Los Angeles in the abstract, but on the most concrete, experiential terms. Lummis is an ideal guide for this endeavor — poet, anthologist, long-time L.A. literary booster [...H]er intent here is not to showcase any particular school or aesthetic, but rather the range of Southern California poetry."— David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

Poetry. California Interest. WIDE AWAKE draws together nationally acclaimed poets and gifted newer writers—one hundred twelve poets of Los Angeles and its surrounding territories—whose work speaks to the humanity, pathos and comedy, of what may be the most romanticized and scorned, disparaged and exalted of the world's great cities. With respect to style, the selections range from the narrative to the more open-ended or non-sequential, classic formal verse to robust vernacular, and in this way speak to the lively state of North American poetry in our age. Poets include David St. John, Wanda Coleman, Cecilia Woloch, Lynne Thompson, Timothy Steele, Kate Gale, Gail Wronsky, Terry Wolverton, Luis J. Rodriguez, Tony Barnstone, Robin Coste Lewis, William Archila and Melissa Roxas.

On February 28, 2018 the group had a poetry reading and discussion. Each member picked 5-10 poems which the group read as a round robin and we discussed our resonance, joy and despair with each. It was magical!

“[…]Smith is trying, as she can, to answer her late mother’s spiritual quest with her own. Her remarkable poetry – she has published three volumes thus far, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Life on Mars– has featured her mother and father before, if in flashes. But [the book] offers a longer, fuller illumination of their histories, as Smith tries to understand her own 1970s-era middle-class Californian upbringing in relationship to the brutality of black life in America during the 1950s.”—Alexander Chee, The Guardian

The dazzling memoir from U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, author of Wade in the Water and Life on Mars. Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, and Oprah.com. In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells her remarkable story, giving us a quietly potent memoir that explores her coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Here is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America.

Here are the questions discussed on March 28, 2018:
• What do you like/dislike about this book?
• Is this book what you expected? Why/Why not?
• Why did she write this book?
• Were there issues in her life that she didn’t confront in the book? What?
• Did her discussions of race, religion, inappropriate actions by teachers surprise you? Why/Why not?
• What surprised you most about this book?
• Any ambiguities we need to try to clear up?
• What is her impression of landscape? How did that fit in the book?
• Did her vision of her part of California resonate with your California visions? Why/Why not?
• What were the biggest influences on her life?
• Can you imagine how her parents were managing through this book? Why? How? How did they do as parents?

“In 1832 Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied and his hired illustrator, Karl Bodmer, journeyed into the heart of America [...] Bodmer’s images alone could have sufficiently described the trip visually, but the rephotography of the same places adds a compelling layer to an already fascinating journey. [...This] is an endeavor that is pleasing and quite entertaining, connecting us in a tangible way to a past that usually seems remote.”— Rachel M. Sailor, The Annals of Iowa

Less than thirty years after Lewis and Clark completed their epic journey, Prince Maximilian of Wied--a German naturalist--and his entourage set off on their own daring expedition across North America. Accompanying the prince on this 1832-34 voyage was Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, whose drawings and watercolors--designed to illustrate Maximilian's journals--now rank among the great treasures of nineteenth-century American art. This lavishly illustrated book juxtaposes Bodmer's landscape images with modern-day photographs of the same views, allowing readers to see what has changed, and what seems unchanged, since the time Maximilian and Bodmer made their storied trip up the Missouri River. To discover how the areas Bodmer depicted have changed over time, photographer Robert M. Lindholm and anthropologist W. Raymond Wood made several trips over a period of years, from 1985 to 2002, to locate and record the same sites--all the way from Boston Harbor, where Maximilian and Bodmer began their journey, to Fort McKenzie, in modern-day western Montana. Pairing sixty-seven Bodmer works side by side with Lindholm's photographs of the same sites, this volume uses the comparison of old and new images to reveal alterations through time--and the encroachment of a built environment--across diverse landscapes.  Karl Bodmer's America Revisited is at once a tribute to the artistic achievements of a premier landscape artist and a photographer who followed in his footsteps, and a valuable record of America's ever-changing environment.

These questions were discussed on April 25, 2018:
• What picture did you like best and why?
• Is this book what you expected? Why/Why not?
• What surprised you most about this book?
• Why do you think he exaggerated the landscape features and made the portraits so apparently recognizable?
• Were there any rephotography pictures that you didn’t agree with? Or was that work pretty accurate? How could you tell?
• Any ambiguities we need to try to clear up?
• Did the captions help? Why? Why not?
• What do you think about these landscapes?
• How does this fit into your knowledge of the western movement of people of European origins?
• Were there any surprises about the rivers for you? Why? Why not?

“[…]It stands out because it says a good deal about Ms. Berlin’s careworn, haunted, messily alluring and yet casually droll stories.[…]In [the book] we witness the emergence of an important American writer, one who was mostly overlooked in her time. Ms. Berlin’s stories make you marvel at the contingencies of our existence. She is the real deal. Her stories swoop low over towns and moods and minds.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times

A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.

Here are the questions discussed on May 23, 2018:
• Which characters in the book did you like best? Why?
• Would you read another book by this author? Why/Why not?
• What surprised you most about this book? What other feelings did this book evoke for you?
• If you got the chance to ask the author of this book one question, what would it be?
• Which character in the stories would you most like to meet? Why?
• Any ambiguities we need to try to clear up?
• Which story did you like best? Least? Why?
• Do the stories tie together? Why? Why not?
• How did her writing style affect you?
• Do these stories seem contemporary? Why? Why not? Was she an author ahead of her time
• Of all the places in the book which did you like best
• Why did the publisher choose not to provide the date of publication for each story?

“Although […]semi-autobiographical, the family Hughes created for Sandy was quite unlike his own. Hughes said: "I wanted to write about a typical Negro family in the Middle West, about people like those I had known in Kansas." Hughes based the fictional town of Stanton on Lawrence, and many of the people, places and events in the novel were inspired by real people, places and events that Hughes knew or experienced during his childhood […].” — Maria Butler, Lawrence Journal-World

When first published in 1930, Not Without Laughter established Langston Hughes as not only a brilliant poet and leading light of the Harlem Renaissance but also a gifted novelist. In telling the story of Sandy Rogers, a young African American boy in small-town Kansas, and of his family-his mother, Annjee, a housekeeper for a wealthy white family; his irresponsible father, Jimboy, who plays the guitar and travels the country in search of employment; his strong-willed grandmother Hager, who clings to her faith; his Aunt Tempy, who marries a rich man; and his Aunt Harriet, who struggles to make it as a blues singer-Hughes gives the longings and lineaments of black life in the early twentieth century an important place in the history of racially divided America. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Here are the questions discussed, June 27, 2018:
• Which characters in the book did you like best? Why?
• Could you visualize the town? What is it like?
• How does this town relate to other books that describe this time period? What is this time period?
• What surprised you most about this book? What other feelings did this book evoke for you?
• What did you think about his grandmother’s advice?
• Was Sandy able to reconcile the different moralities he was exposed to?
• Any ambiguities we need to try to clear up?
• What do you think of this writing style?
• Can we explain why the chapters are arranged as they are? Why?
• What did you think about the ending?
• How much do you think is autobiographical? The author declares that Sandy was not him, but an average town person. Do you agree with that? Why? Why not?

Icebreaker: What was your favorite fruit as a child and why?

“The narrator, Aaliya Saleh, is a septuagenarian literary translator who has stayed in Beirut [...] For most of the novel, she walks through her neighborhood in West Beirut, remembering how it used to be [...] She recalls past lovers and favorite books, as well as the bitterness of her family life. In Aaliya’s case, estrangement from her relatives and from the city she lives in has led to an internal emigration.” —Robyn Creswell, The New York Review of Books

Winner of the California Book Award,
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award,
Finalist for the National Book Award.
"Beautiful and absorbing."-- New York Times
An Unnecessary Woman is a breathtaking portrait of one reclusive woman's late-life crisis, which garnered a wave of rave reviews and love letters to Alameddine's cranky yet charming septuagenarian protagonist, Aaliya, a character you "can't help but love" (NPR). Aaliya's insightful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and her volatile past. As she tries to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left. Here, the gifted Rabih Alameddine has given us a nuanced rendering of one woman's life in the Middle East and an enduring ode to literature and its power to define who we are.
"A paean to the transformative power of reading, to the intellectual asylum from one's circumstances found in the life of the mind."--LA Review of Books
"[The novel] throbs with energy...[Aaliya's] inventive way with words gives unfailing pleasure, no matter how dark the events she describes, how painful the emotions she reveals."----Washington Post

Here are the questions discussed, July 25, 2018:

• What did you learn about Beirut? What is it like?
• Was she unnecessary? Why? Why not?
• Does the book have plot? If so, why, if not, why not?
Does it matter? Why? Why not?
• Why do you think the author chose to write from a woman’s point of view? Does it matter? Why? Why not?
• Is this book about friendship? Why? Why not?
• What did you think about his appropriation of other author’s words?
o What was your favorite of those?
• Any ambiguities we need to try to clear up?
• What do you think of this writing style?
• There were no chapters in this book? What did that do to the story?
• What did you think about the ending?
• Do think some of this is autobiographical? What?
Does it matter? Why?/Why not?
Icebreaker: Can you tell us something about Lebanon that you knew before this story?

Revoyr spins out several parallel narratives in "Southland," deftly skipping back and forth among scenes set in the mid-'90s, the World War II era and the mid-'60s, when the memories of racial harmony in the Crenshaw District were shattered by the ugly reality of racial violence in the streets of Watts. The plot line ... is the stuff of ... a Walter Mosley novel, but it is elaborately intertwined with strands of urban history, family memoir and personal confession, all of it recounted with a certain sentimentality that one does not expect in hard-boiled fiction. — Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

The second novel from the author of the acclaimed book, The Necessary Hunger, Southland is a compelling story of race, love, murder and history, set against the backdrop of Los Angeles. Jackie Ishida is in her last semester of law school when her grandfather dies unexpectedly. While trying to fulfill a request from his wills, Jackie finds herself pulled into the unreported deaths four black teenagers, killed during the Watts Riots of 1965. In the process, Jackie unearths the long-held secrets of her family's history - and her own.

Here are the questions discussed, Wednesday, August 30, 2018:
• What is one thing you learned from the book?
• Tell me about your impression of the author’s writing style?
• Was there anything about the characters that didn’t seem believable?
• What struck you most about the group of characters?
• What kinds of friendship do we have in this book?
• Any ambiguities we need to try to clear up?
• How would we have been able to see what happened to Curtis in the end? How did that add to the novel?
• Did the slipping in and out of several time periods work for you? Why/Why not?
• What did you think about the ending?
• What is your favorite part/least favorite part of the book?
Icebreaker: What do you remember about the Watts Riots or the Northridge earthquake?

“[The book] is widely recognised as his supreme achievement as much a work of compressed brilliance as Chopin’s Ballade No 4. It is also, Isherwood said, “the only book of mine where I did more or less what I wanted to do. It didn’t get out of control.” His fiction was always a transistorised reorganisation of his own self. As he developed, his fictional persona became progressively more complex, yet truer to himself. In this novel, it emerges as a character that’s both independent, yet deeply connected to its author.”—Robert McCrumm, The Guardian

Welcome to sunny suburban 1960s Southern California. George is a gay middle-aged English professor, adjusting to solitude after the tragic death of his young partner. He is determined to persist in the routines of his former life.A Single Manfollows him over the course of an ordinary twenty-four hours. Behind his British reserve, tides of grief, rage, and loneliness surge--but what is revealed is a man who loves being alive despite all the everyday injustices. When Christopher Isherwood'sA Single Manfirst appeared, it shocked many with its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in maturity. Isherwood's favorite of his own novels, it now stands as a classic lyric meditation on life as an outsider.

Here are the questions discussed on September 26, 2018.

• How did the ending add/detract from the rest of the story? Why did our narrator have to die?
• Tell me about your impression of the author’s writing style? What made it great or less than that?
• Was there anything about the characters that didn’t seem believable?
• What did you think about the narrator’s version of grief?
• How was the author’s vision of LA during that time period? What did you like best about his LA/Least?
• Any ambiguities we need to try to clear up?
• Does this novel have aspects of a time that has past? What?
• Were there aspects of his language/descriptions that you enjoyed? What? Anything annoying? What?
• What is your favorite part/least favorite part of the book?
Icebreaker: Describe a time you went to the beach (or some other interesting place) at night during your early adulthood?

“...[The book] tells the story of Sellars’s childhood, her five years at residential school, and the long journey to recovery from destroyed confidence and alcoholism brought on by her school experiences. Sellars...tells a story of programming and deprogramming, of being engrained with the powerful myth of white superiority at home and school, and of the years-long process of unspooling that myth though self-help books, university education and political activism...While Sellars’s memoir celebrates the triumph of returning from the brink, it is also a stark condemnation of historical and extant paternalistic policies and the personal tragedies these policies continue to breed.”—Christina Turner, Canadian Literature

Like thousands of Aboriginal children in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of her childhood as a student in a church-run residential school. These institutions endeavored to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings; forced separation from family, language, and culture; and strict discipline. Perhaps the most symbolically potent strategy used to alienate residential school children was addressing them by assigned numbers only--not by the names with which they knew and understood themselves. In this frank and poignant memoir of her years at St. Joseph's Mission, Sellars breaks her silence about the residential school's lasting effects on her and her family--from substance abuse to suicide attempts--and eloquently articulates her own path to healing. Number One comes at a time of recognition--by governments and society at large--that only through knowing the truth about these past injustices can we begin to redress them. Bev Sellars is chief of the Xatsu'll (Soda Creek) First Nation in Williams Lake, British Columbia. She holds a degree in history from the University of Victoria and a law degree from the University of British Columbia. She has served as an advisor to the British Columbia Treaty Commission.

Here are the questions discussed, Wednesday, October 24, 2018:
• How/Why did Bev succeed?
• Any ambiguities you need help with?
• What did you think about the writing style?
• Can you imagine the landscape? Tell me about it?
• What resiliency did Bev get from her family?
• What do you think about her ideas on “forgiveness”?
• What would you like to apply to your own life (actions, thoughts, etc.) from her successes in hers?
• What are the things in the books that took 9,000 years to learn instead of 200 years?
Icebreaker: What was your favorite/memorable experience in the outdoors in your childhood?

Conant focuses on the day-to-day experience of the scientists, technicians and families stationed at Los Alamos... While her protagonists are brilliant men and women, they're also vibrant characters who chafe at authority, fall in love, argue over housing and drink to excess. …[T]he book highlights the creation of a unique place and time in which that bomb could be built, and Conant brings to life the colorful, eccentric town of thousands that sprang up on a New Mexico mesa and achieved the unthinkable.—Publishers’ Weekly

In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the US government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.

Here are the questions discussed Tuesday, November 27, 2018:
• Did the frame of Dorothy work? Why?/Why not?
• What is Dorothy’s role in this book?
• Any ambiguities you need help with? Was there anything you had to Google rather than getting it from the book?
• What did you think about the writing style?
• What did you think about Robert Oppenheimer and the author’s descriptions of him?
• Even though you knew the ending of the activity that was the main focus of the book, what surprised you in this book?
• How did the author handle the physics? Was there intention to obfuscate here? Why?Why not?
• Are there any leadership lessons in this book for you?
• Are there parts of this story that still seem to be missing? Why? Why not?
Icebreaker: Tell about a time when you surprised yourself and were able to do something you didn’t think you were capable of?

A collection of poetry by Ted Kooser.
“In 1999 Kooser developed cancer and, gave up... for a while, his writing. His return to poetry came in the form of a correspondence with his friend and fellow writer, Jim Harrison, to whom Kooser sent a daily poem pasted on a postcard. The resulting collection...was characteristically self-effacing, avoiding direct references to his illness, and subsuming his experience into metaphors about the countryside around him." —The Poetry Archive

Here are the questions the group discussed Tuesday, December 18, 2018:
• Would you like to read your favorite poem or two? If you don’t want to read it yourself, I’m happy to read it for you if that works.
• What is the best thing about the poems?
• What do the postcards look like? Or what do you think the postcards look like?
• What is the author trying to do with these poems?
• What does this poetry do for you?
• What did you think about the first lines? What did it add? How?
• If you were the poet is there anything with these poems that you would have done differently?
• Any ambiguities we need to clear up?
• Can you imagine the ones he didn’t pick? What are they like?
Icebreaker: What is the coldest place you have lived or have been too?