Silent Book Clubs

It tuns out that the new thing among avid Canadian readers is something called a Silent Book Club – although some have taken to calling them Book Clubs for Introverts.  So how does a silent book club differ from a traditional book club?  As it turns out, in a whole bunch of ways. 

It will probably not surprise any of you to learn that I have never been a member of a formal book club because very few men ever have, really. The main reason that men are not generally book club members is that there are relatively few of us in the first place.  And because male readers are generally unlikely to talk out loud about their reading amongst their peers, most of us don’t know enough interested male readers to form a book club even if we wanted to.  

Of course, a man can always join a book club that would otherwise be one hundred percent female, but for a number of reasons that is not as easy (or as wise) to do as it as first sounds.  Women tell me that having a male join their book club would negatively impact the discussions they have at the meetings, that the women would lose their sense of privacy and the feeling that anything and everything can be discussed within the confines of the group.  They say, too, that having even one man in the group would result in them having to read books they have no interest in and trying to make sure that their agreed upon selections do not look silly to their token male.  And I, as the lone male in the group, would most likely find myself often reading from genres that do not appeal to me and feeling guilty about forcing my own selection onto a less than enthusiastic group. It’s not a promising experience for either gender.

But Silent Book Clubs are a different thing altogether. They work this way:

Once or twice a month, members grab whatever they are currently reading and head to a local coffee shop or bar at a set time.  The meetings, which generally last between ninety minutes and two hours, begin with twenty or thirty minutes of having each member describe what he/she is currently reading and what they’ve been reading since everyone last met.  Next comes one hour of reading during which all members agree beforehand there will be no talking whatsoever.  About five minutes prior to the end of the hour, a designated member gives a five-minute -warning so that everyone can finish up at about the same time. Then it’s up to the individual members as to whether they stay around for more book discussion and socializing.  Some stay, some leave. And that’s it; simple as that.

Other than allowing me to finally become a book club member, there are lots of advantages to this type of club:  

·      There is no pressure to read something just because the rest of the group wants to read it.

·      Members will not be intimidated into keeping their opinions to themselves by more dominant or better-spoken members of the group.

·      There are no deadlines to meet.

·      No preparation is required – just grab what you are already reading and go.

·      Read whatever you want to read, no matter the genre or subject matter.

·      Support a local business or two without having to take a turn hosting (and all that entails) a book club meeting in your home.

·      Learn about what others are reading, what is popular and trending, and what new books are coming soon.  Discover books and authors that would have otherwise been missed or overlooked.

·      Force one solid hour of uninterrupted reading into your busy schedule, an hour away from all of life’s distractions.

The meeting guidelines I’ve described were taken from Vicki Ziegler’s interview on the CBCbooks.ca website. That website includes a five-minute audio file from CBC Radio in which Vicki (member and organizer of a Toronto silent book club) explains the concept of silent book clubs and why they are catching on in Canada. 

I like it.  Now if someone in North Houston is listening…

"Every book...has a soul." - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"Every book, every volume you see here has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it pages, its spirit grows and strengthens." Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

Spanish novelist Carolos Ruiz Zafón is one of my favorite writers. If you enjoy books about bookstores, literature, and writing, and you don't already know this man's books, you need to get hold of one quickly. I think you'll like it...a whole lot.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I suggest that you start with The Shadow of the Wind. This 2001 novel was the first adult novel written by Zafón, and it tells the story of a man determined to identify and find the person personally responsible for destroying every book ever written by author Julian Carax. This was also the first book in a four-book series called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books that was just concluded in late 2018 with the international publication of The Labyrinth of Spirits.

The novels are highly atmospheric, have intricate plots, and are filled with memorable characters. They are not the kind of novel that will be quickly forgotten:

• The Shadow of the Wind (2001)
• The Angel's Game (2008)
• The Prisoner of Heaven )2011)
• The Labyrinth of Spirits (2018)

As you can see from the dates, this was one of those series with way too many years between books, so I plan to "binge read" the four books as soon as I can work them into my TBR schedule.

The Lightest Object in the Universe - Kimi Eisele

I count dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels among my favorites, but having read quite a few of them over the years I’ve started to realize that finding something even a little different in the genre is not easy – not that I’m going to let that keep me from trying.  Kimi Eisele’s The Lightest Object in the Universe is one dystopian novel that does manage to stand out from the crowd a bit. And that’s both the good news and the bad news.

When the world economy finally crashes from all the abuses it’s suffered at the hands of incompetent and criminal manipulators over the decades, it drags governments and the whole power grid down with it.  The United States, it seems, is particularly hard hit by the implosion.  Suddenly, cell phones, personal computers, tablets, and smart watches are little more than plastic bricks of various sizes and shapes. Mass communication is a thing of the past.  Ready or not, everyone is on his own, and survival is something that will have to be worked at every day for the rest of your life.  And it won’t be easy. 

Carson and Beatrix are on opposite ends of the country when it happens. The pair met just days before the collapse, but both of them remember the sparks that flew during the little time they were able to share together before Beatrix had to return to the West Coast.  Now, Carson is determined somehow to make his way from one coast to the other – and he is prepared to walk all the way even without knowing whether or not Beatriz will be there when, or if, he finally gets there.

Author Kimi Eisele

What makes The Lightest Object in the Universe different from most novels of its type is its ever-present sense of optimism and goodwill, a feeling that the good people in the world so overwhelmingly outnumber the bad ones that things will work out in the end.  Everywhere our main characters turn they are met with people willing to share their expertise or whatever else they can spare. Oh, sure, there are some bad guys out there who will gladly kill and rape at the drop of a hat, but they never seem to get the upper hand for long.  But this brings us to the “good news-bad news” scenario I mentioned earlier.

I suppose that Kimi Eisele’s novel exposes me as being more a cynic than an optimist because I was never able to get completely comfortable with an apocalyptic world in which the crime rate is seemingly lower now than it was in the world that preceded it.  This is a world, in fact, in which most of the crime - and even that is mostly theft and relatively minor assault - is perpetrated by pre-teens and teens on bicycles. If already dangerous neighborhoods and large cities are violently tearing themselves apart, it is all happening behind the scenes. This allows the overall sense of optimism to be maintained, but it kept me wondering what was happening elsewhere, and how long it would be before those worlds would collide with this one.  That’s the bad news – at least for more cynical readers like me.

The good news is that this is an uplifting novel, one filled with hope and confidence in human nature, that I enjoyed reading despite my occasional twinges of doubt.  It is more a story about the creation of a new world than it is one about the destruction of an old world.

And that just may be exactly what you need right now, so take a look.

(Book Number 3,413)

"The Day the Ebooks Quit Working"

I cannot claim to understand all the technicalities involved in the process, but according to a recent BBC article, "Consumers who bought ebooks via Microsoft's online store are losing access to their libraries."  Of course, Microsoft will be offering some compensation to consumers unfortunate enough to have purchased or obtained free ebooks directly through the Microsoft browser, but that really offers very little consolation in the long run.  And it serves as a reminder that you really don't own ebooks that you purchase with DRM (digital rights management) included no matter where you buy them, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, included.

In Microsoft's case, it is simply a matter of the company deciding finally to abandon the ebook business for good (after their third failed attempt to compete with Amazon and B&N).  But if three MS attempts teach us anything, it's never to say never when it comes to MS and ebooks, and I would not be at all surprised if they find their way back into the business again at some point.

Amazon has already been known to selectively and purposely reclaim ebooks from readers on more than one occasion, once because they oversold the number of copies of 1984 they were authorized to sell and once because of a dispute with an individual customer of theirs.  From what I recall, Amazon deleted enough copies from customer libraries to get themselves back into compliance with the publisher contract, and I'm assuming that they simply compensated those customers who lost their copy of the classic.  In the other case, the company was in a dispute with a customer over its return policy (claiming that the customer was returning up to 50 items a month), and decided to kill his Kindle by deleting his ebooks and refusing to sell new ones to him until the dispute could be resolved or given up on.  

So there were legitimate reasons in both cases for Amazon to delete something from a customer's library - maybe.  But it doesn't make me feel any better knowing that, for any reason, ebook retailers retain this level of control over something I thought I bought from them for my own. Instead, it appears that I only leased the ebooks stored away in my Kindle.

This is where I get confused as to how all of this works, so if anyone can explain it to me - or correct any misunderstanding I have - I will greatly appreciate it.  In the past, I have received some ebook ARCs from publisher with DRM protection set to kick in at a certain date, and when that date comes the books are no longer readable.  If all the books I buy from Amazon have similar protection, but without a specific date-trigger encoded, it sounds as if Amazon still has a way to trigger the DRM and kill my books.  And that's even if I have a copy on another drive as backup?  

I don't know how it works, as you can see.  But I'm assured that work, it does.  And that makes me angry.  Ebooks are not cheap; they often cost as much as a quality paperback copy of the same book, paperbacks that I can do with as I please without fear of Microsoft or Amazon or Barnes & Noble knocking on my door late some Saturday night demanding their books back.  

Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier's First Gunfighter - Tom Clavin

I grew up during what was once called the “golden age” of television, those days when broadcast television’s three networks were filled with something for everyone: variety shows, situation comedies, dramas, cop shows, and westerns.  Many of those old shows are now considered classics, but for boys my age it was really all about those glorious westerns.  We all were as familiar with the likes of Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill, Bat Masterson, Jesse James, Calamity Jane, etc., as we were with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  Well, if I admit the truth, probably more familiar with them than we were with Washington and Lincoln.  But even as fictionalized as those old shows were, they still managed to do one thing other than simply entertaining the children of the day.  Many of us came away from them with a lifelong fascination with the world those “gunfighters” and their friends lived in - and a desire to find out what it was really like to be them.  And that brings me all the way to my fascination with books like Tom Clavin’s new Hickok biography, Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter.  

As Clavin reminds us, by the time he was thirty years old Wild Bill Hickok was already a bigger legend to the people of his day than Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, or Kit Carson.  And make no mistake about it, those three men were deservedly legendary in the minds of the American public.  Hickok was the first national celebrity to come along after the Civil War, and only his good friend, the extraordinary showman Buffalo Bill Cody (who outlived Hickock by forty years), would even come close to reaching that kind of celebrity. But barely two months past his thirty-ninth birthday, Wild Bill Hickok was dead.

Wild Bill Hickok Himself

It all started on just weeks after the close of the Civil War (July 31, 1865) with a gunfight over Hickok’s watch.  The watch had been snatched from Hickok by Davis Tutt as collateral for a debt that Hickok owed Tutt as the result of a card game.  When Tutt decided to add a little public humiliation into the equation, Hickok decided it was time to call the man out.  But this would be no ordinary duel; instead it took the form of what we have come to think of as the traditional western gunfight where two men face each other to see which is the fastest and most accurate shootist between them.  Obviously, that man was Bill Hickok (whose real name was James Butler Hickok), and a legend was born.  Publication of an account of the duel in Harper’s New Monthly Magazinesome eighteen months later only made it official.  Twenty-nine-year-old Wild Bill Hickok was now a national legend, and he would remain one well beyond his death a decade later.

But this was not all good.  

Author Tom Clavin

The Harper’sarticle implied that Hickok had already killed two dozen men, and that he was the kind of shoot-first-ask-questions-later guy who was likely to kill dozens more before he was done.  Suddenly Wild Bill had a reputation to live up to wherever he went, and just as suddenly there were dozens of people out there who dreamed of killing him in order to enhance their own reputations and fortunes.  Sadly enough, Wild Bill Hickok would not be blessed even with that kind of glorious death.  Rather, his ailing health made it possible for him to be brought down by a cowardly little man with an imagined grudge.

Tom Clavin’s Wild Bill tells you how it happened – and what happened between that first gunfight and Bill’s last card game.

Bottom Line: If you are interested in this period of American history and those most dramatically involved in living it, Clavin’s book Is one you need to read.  It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what Hickok was thinking at the pivotal moments of his life so some of what the author says is necessarily built upon speculation, but Clavin does a fine job in filling in the blanks for his readers.

(Book Number 3,412)

Little: A Novel - Edward Carey

Because I’m in the middle of having both eyes cleared of cataracts, I have been unable to read for the past week, and it may be another three weeks before I’m cleared (or able) to read for more than a few minutes at a time.  Frustrating as the whole process is, though, it will be worth it in the long run because it includes the placement of intraocular lenses in both eyes that just might give me the best eyesight I’ve had since I was about twelve years old.  I’ve been forced to turn exclusively to audiobooks in the meantime, and the good news is that just exactly when I needed it most, I stumbled upon one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever read.  

Simply put, the audiobook version of Edward Carey’s Little: A Novel, as read by the remarkable Jayne Entwistle is an incredible experience.  The plot and characters are wonderfully crafted, but I doubt I would have enjoyed the book quite as much if I had read its printed version.  The novel’s narrator is Marie Grosholtz, and when we meet her the seven-year-old understands very little of the world around her. She sees, though, that she has inherited her mother’s rather prominent nose and her father’s jutting lower jaw, a combination of physical characteristics that will forever keep her from being considered an attractive woman.  On top of this, Marie is so tiny that it is only a matter of time before she is forced to start answering to the nickname “Little.”  Jayne Entwistle tells Marie’s story in a little girl’s voice and accent; a voice so perfectly rendered that Marie comes alive and you find yourself wanting to listen to her all day long.

Reader Jayne Entwistle

Marie’s story begins in 18^thcentury Switzerland where she lives an adequate enough lifestyle with her mother and soldier father until the family’s circumstances take a sudden turn for the worse, one that leaves Marie fatherless.  Desperate to find a new home for herself and her little girl, Marie’s mother jumps at the chance to become the live-in housekeeper for the eccentric Dr. Curtius in Boerne, Switzerland.  Dr. Curtius, an anatomist who creates lifelike models of internal organs to be used by medical students in their studies, is so pleased to learn that the little girl is neither frightened nor sickened by the details of his life’s work that he begins to feel a kinship to her.  And that turns out to be a fortunate for Marie, because when the doctor is forced to flee his home in Boerne for a fresh start in Paris, he brings Marie with him.

Author Edward Carey

Thus, begins the rest of the long, but seldom happy, life of little Marie Grosholtz and her rather ineffectual protector, Dr. Curtius.  But what a life it will be!  Before it is over, the two will witness the French Revolution to a degree much closer than both would have preferred, and Marie will spend some months in Versailles as instructor to minor royalty - where she becomes a friend of sorts to Louis XVI himself.  Despite her great artistic ability and her sound business-head, Marie’s greatest talent will prove to be that she is a survivor.  She is someone who manages, time after time, to overcome circumstances that would have been the end of weaker persons. But survive Marie does, and when she is finally forced to marry in order that she be able to afford to keep her wax works open, she takes the hand of François Tussaud, a civil engineer who proves not to be nearly as wealthy as he has led Marie to believe he is.  But Marie, ever the survivor, thus becomes Madame Tussaud, and the rest is history.

Bottom Line: Little is a fictionalized version of the life of a woman who beat all the odds to become an artist and businesswoman who is still well respected almost 260 years after her birth.  Madame Tussaud’s wax museum has had many imitators over the past two centuries, but the Madame still sets the standard for the rest of them.  Little Marie Grosholtz became a very big woman, and this is her story.  This Dickensian novel is a treat not to be missed.

(From what I understand, the printed version of Little is illustrated by some of Marie’s drawings.  Despite this, I recommend that this one be experienced via its audiobook version because of the superb narration provided by Jayne Entwistle.)