Book Club for Writers
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How does the Writers’ Book Club differ from other book clubs? For starters, the group doesn’t so much discuss the book as dissect it. Members want to discover what it is about the writing itself that makes the book work or, in some cases, not work. Also, we consider how we can “borrow” the author’s techniques for our own writing. Disagreements abound and are always part of the fun, as is the food. For example, we downed grilled cheese sandwiches during our discussion of In the Deep Midwinter, in which the characters indulge in 1950s comfort food.
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The Writers’ Book Club A writer is a reader moved to emulation If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write |
Book Club for Writers meets the third Thursday of the month
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Location in Tom’s weekly email
RBWG Book Club Selections 2018-2019
OCTOBER 18 Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn
This story, which was made into a movie starring Robert DeNiro, is poet Nick Flynn’s recounting of his troubled relationship with his father, who after abandoning his family when Nick was young, shows up as a homeless man in the shelter where Flynn was then working. But the story isn’t why I suggest it. Flynn, who is a poet, writes beautifully and each short chapter is written in a unique style--sometimes in second person, or as list of Truths and lies, in the fashion of a Harper’s Index, as a list of things drunks (which has father was) say. A unique way of writing a compelling story without getting caught in the chronological trap of “and this happened” that all too many memoirs fall into. (Maribeth Fischer)
NOVEMBER 15 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler: I read her latest, and it’s fine, but it’s going to be hard back for a while. Talking to Sarah about it at a Free Write, we started discussing other, older Anne Tyler books and I realized I’d love to read one of them (which I won’t do unless I am forced) and I’d love to talk about her work because her books feel easy—easy reading, nothing that grabs you in the writing, nothing especially gorgeous or brilliant, that slows you down so you say, Oh look! And yet, when I see that she has a new book out, I feel glad. I know it will be good—whatever that means. I’d love to figure it out. Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer, so I’d like to revisit that one.(Maribeth Fischer; 13 votes)
DECEMBER 13 (Second Thu to avoid getting too close to the holiday) The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison (creative nonfiction). This is a fantastic writer, who is a master at weaving the personal into larger contexts in her nonfiction. While she is always a part of the story, her story never is the main story—she weaves research, other people, other stories into hers. And what I most love is how she wrestles with her subjects. She isn’t just telling the reader about something, isn’t just telling us an interesting story. She is interrogating it, twisting it sideways, turning it upside and trying to understand something beneath the surface. It’s what essay writing should be, what I aspire to in my writing, which is why, selfishly, I want to study her work more closely. (Maribeth Fischer; 11 votes)
JANUARY 17 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston has received some notoriety this past winter and Afro-Am lit certainly has. Also, it has a wonderful hurricane in Key West that should interest some of our readers. Janie, the major character, is searching for a voice and for personhood. As a (black) woman she finds both difficult to achieve. Hurston bases her novel in a real time and place. This is not a psychological or a sociological study however. It is a fully realized novel with unforgettable characters and scenes. (Sharon Hoover; 14 votes)
FEBRUARY 21 Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson. (Rehoboth Reads chosen book) Bryan Stevenson—a Milton native and Cape Henlopen High School graduate—was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
MARCH 21 The Hundred Year House by Rebecca Makkai. I fell in love with Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, which is a bit long for us and in hard back, but I liked the book enough to want to read more of her. The Hundred Year House fascinates me because of the plot structure—I’ve never read anything that really does go backward as this book does—starting in the present and ending in 1900. It’s like Russian Nesting Dolls, the story of 2000 opens and inside is the story of 1955 and then you open that one and there is the story of 1920-something and inside of that…I am a little amazed that it works, and again, am hungry to discuss and see what others say and think. And, it’s about an artist’s colony and the creative process in a way. (Maribeth Fischer; 6 votes)
APRIL 18: Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser (poetry). In his Pulitzer prize-winning collection, Kooser is, as always, a poet who is a master of description and one who is also easily accessible. He sees what we fail to notice in everyday life, and he calls our attention to it in poems about creamed corn, tattoos, gyroscopes, and yard sales. The poems in this collection are quiet, but they deal with deep subjects such as aging, loss, and memories. (Gail Comorat; 16 votes) POETRY
May 16 Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles. Draw Your Weapons is a reading experience like no other. Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature, and theology, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defense of life lived by peace and principle. “It is a literary collage with an urgent hope at its core: that art might offer tools for remaking the world.” The blurb captures so much of what I loved in this book: the collage format works beautifully, and is something I’d love to learn how to do as a writer: but I also love what this book is about—the story of two very different men involved in two separate wars and how they turned to art to deal with their experiences, it is also the story of Sentilles, who became immersed in the stories of both men. The language is poetic, the use of research never overwhelming, and the way the diverse topics are all woven together is stunning. My favorite book of 2017. (Maribeth Fischer; 8 votes)
Books We Have Read Since April 2009
NONFICTION
The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown (August 2016)
I Could Tell you Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory.Before Night Falls, Patricia Hampl,
Winter Journal, Paul Auster
For the Time Being, Annie Dillard
She’s Not There, Jennifer Finley-Boylan
The Big Sea. Langston Hughes
Local Wonders, Ted Kooser
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
Everybody Was so Young: The Love Story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, Amanda Viall
The Suicide Index, Joan Wickersham
Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. Anthony Doerr
Wild. Cheryl Strayed
Let Me Finish, Richard Angell
In the Garden of the Beasts, Erik Larsen
POETRY
Here, Bullet, Brian Turner
Necessary Light, Patricia Fargnoli
This Bed Our Bodies Shaped, April Lindner
Kettle Bottom, Diane Gilliam Fisher
Fast Animal, Tim Siebles (April 2015)
They, Sue Ellen Thompson, (December 2015)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
We Live in Water, Jess Walters
The Queen of the Tambourine, Jane Gardam
The Things They Carried, Tim O’ Brien
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannary O’ Connor
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
We Live in Water, Jess Walters (July 2016)
Angel On My Chest, Leslie Pietrzyk (March 2016)
NOVELS
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn
The Green Road, Anne Enright
My Antonia, Willa Cather
The Speed of Light, ELizabeth ROsner
How Starbucks Saved my Life, Michael Gates
Silver Girl, Leslie Pietrzyk
Me Before You, Jo Jo Moyes.
The Turner House, Angela Flournoy.
The Animals, Christian Kiefer
Station 11, Emily St. John Mandel.
A Spool of Blue Thread, Anne Tyler.
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, Chris Cleeve
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
Mayhem. Robert Janes
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Transatlantic, Colum McCann (2016)
The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Kahajan
Vanessa and her Sister, Priya Parmor
Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O’ Nan (May 2016)
Worth Dying For, Lee Child,
Euphoria, Lily King.
All the Light We Cannot See,Anthony Doerr.
Trans-Sister Radio, Chris Bohjahan.
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
An Officer and a Spy
Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks
The School of Essential Ingredients, Erica Bauermeister,
City of Light, Lauren Belfer
Kindred, Olivia Butler
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
In the Deep Mid-Winter, Robert Clark
Little Bee, Chris Cleve
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Michael Dorris
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald
In the Woods, Tana French
Hide, Lisa Gardner
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
A Lazarus Project Aleksandar Hemon
And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini
Someone Else’s Love Story, Joshilyn Jackson
The Dead, James Joyce
A Short History of Tractors in Ukraine, Marina Lewycka
I’d Know You Anywhere, Laura Lippman
Martin Dressler, Steven Milhauser
The Husband’s Secret, Liane Moriarity
The Paris Wife, Paula McCain
The Giant’s House, Elizabeth McCracken
Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Skin of the Lion, Michael Ondaatje
The Cats Table, Michael Ondaatje
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
Every Last One, Anna Quindlan
Look Again, Lisa Scottoline
Rules of Civility, Amor Towles
Crossing to Safety, Wallage Stegner
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Evening, Susan Minot
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kunder
PLAYS
The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Location in Tom’s weekly email
RBWG Book Club Selections 2018-2019
OCTOBER 18 Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn
This story, which was made into a movie starring Robert DeNiro, is poet Nick Flynn’s recounting of his troubled relationship with his father, who after abandoning his family when Nick was young, shows up as a homeless man in the shelter where Flynn was then working. But the story isn’t why I suggest it. Flynn, who is a poet, writes beautifully and each short chapter is written in a unique style--sometimes in second person, or as list of Truths and lies, in the fashion of a Harper’s Index, as a list of things drunks (which has father was) say. A unique way of writing a compelling story without getting caught in the chronological trap of “and this happened” that all too many memoirs fall into. (Maribeth Fischer)
NOVEMBER 15 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler: I read her latest, and it’s fine, but it’s going to be hard back for a while. Talking to Sarah about it at a Free Write, we started discussing other, older Anne Tyler books and I realized I’d love to read one of them (which I won’t do unless I am forced) and I’d love to talk about her work because her books feel easy—easy reading, nothing that grabs you in the writing, nothing especially gorgeous or brilliant, that slows you down so you say, Oh look! And yet, when I see that she has a new book out, I feel glad. I know it will be good—whatever that means. I’d love to figure it out. Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer, so I’d like to revisit that one.(Maribeth Fischer; 13 votes)
DECEMBER 13 (Second Thu to avoid getting too close to the holiday) The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison (creative nonfiction). This is a fantastic writer, who is a master at weaving the personal into larger contexts in her nonfiction. While she is always a part of the story, her story never is the main story—she weaves research, other people, other stories into hers. And what I most love is how she wrestles with her subjects. She isn’t just telling the reader about something, isn’t just telling us an interesting story. She is interrogating it, twisting it sideways, turning it upside and trying to understand something beneath the surface. It’s what essay writing should be, what I aspire to in my writing, which is why, selfishly, I want to study her work more closely. (Maribeth Fischer; 11 votes)
JANUARY 17 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston has received some notoriety this past winter and Afro-Am lit certainly has. Also, it has a wonderful hurricane in Key West that should interest some of our readers. Janie, the major character, is searching for a voice and for personhood. As a (black) woman she finds both difficult to achieve. Hurston bases her novel in a real time and place. This is not a psychological or a sociological study however. It is a fully realized novel with unforgettable characters and scenes. (Sharon Hoover; 14 votes)
FEBRUARY 21 Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson. (Rehoboth Reads chosen book) Bryan Stevenson—a Milton native and Cape Henlopen High School graduate—was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
MARCH 21 The Hundred Year House by Rebecca Makkai. I fell in love with Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, which is a bit long for us and in hard back, but I liked the book enough to want to read more of her. The Hundred Year House fascinates me because of the plot structure—I’ve never read anything that really does go backward as this book does—starting in the present and ending in 1900. It’s like Russian Nesting Dolls, the story of 2000 opens and inside is the story of 1955 and then you open that one and there is the story of 1920-something and inside of that…I am a little amazed that it works, and again, am hungry to discuss and see what others say and think. And, it’s about an artist’s colony and the creative process in a way. (Maribeth Fischer; 6 votes)
APRIL 18: Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser (poetry). In his Pulitzer prize-winning collection, Kooser is, as always, a poet who is a master of description and one who is also easily accessible. He sees what we fail to notice in everyday life, and he calls our attention to it in poems about creamed corn, tattoos, gyroscopes, and yard sales. The poems in this collection are quiet, but they deal with deep subjects such as aging, loss, and memories. (Gail Comorat; 16 votes) POETRY
May 16 Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles. Draw Your Weapons is a reading experience like no other. Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature, and theology, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defense of life lived by peace and principle. “It is a literary collage with an urgent hope at its core: that art might offer tools for remaking the world.” The blurb captures so much of what I loved in this book: the collage format works beautifully, and is something I’d love to learn how to do as a writer: but I also love what this book is about—the story of two very different men involved in two separate wars and how they turned to art to deal with their experiences, it is also the story of Sentilles, who became immersed in the stories of both men. The language is poetic, the use of research never overwhelming, and the way the diverse topics are all woven together is stunning. My favorite book of 2017. (Maribeth Fischer; 8 votes)
Books We Have Read Since April 2009
NONFICTION
The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown (August 2016)
I Could Tell you Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory.Before Night Falls, Patricia Hampl,
Winter Journal, Paul Auster
For the Time Being, Annie Dillard
She’s Not There, Jennifer Finley-Boylan
The Big Sea. Langston Hughes
Local Wonders, Ted Kooser
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
Everybody Was so Young: The Love Story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, Amanda Viall
The Suicide Index, Joan Wickersham
Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. Anthony Doerr
Wild. Cheryl Strayed
Let Me Finish, Richard Angell
In the Garden of the Beasts, Erik Larsen
POETRY
Here, Bullet, Brian Turner
Necessary Light, Patricia Fargnoli
This Bed Our Bodies Shaped, April Lindner
Kettle Bottom, Diane Gilliam Fisher
Fast Animal, Tim Siebles (April 2015)
They, Sue Ellen Thompson, (December 2015)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
We Live in Water, Jess Walters
The Queen of the Tambourine, Jane Gardam
The Things They Carried, Tim O’ Brien
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannary O’ Connor
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
We Live in Water, Jess Walters (July 2016)
Angel On My Chest, Leslie Pietrzyk (March 2016)
NOVELS
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn
The Green Road, Anne Enright
My Antonia, Willa Cather
The Speed of Light, ELizabeth ROsner
How Starbucks Saved my Life, Michael Gates
Silver Girl, Leslie Pietrzyk
Me Before You, Jo Jo Moyes.
The Turner House, Angela Flournoy.
The Animals, Christian Kiefer
Station 11, Emily St. John Mandel.
A Spool of Blue Thread, Anne Tyler.
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, Chris Cleeve
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
Mayhem. Robert Janes
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Transatlantic, Colum McCann (2016)
The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Kahajan
Vanessa and her Sister, Priya Parmor
Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O’ Nan (May 2016)
Worth Dying For, Lee Child,
Euphoria, Lily King.
All the Light We Cannot See,Anthony Doerr.
Trans-Sister Radio, Chris Bohjahan.
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
An Officer and a Spy
Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks
The School of Essential Ingredients, Erica Bauermeister,
City of Light, Lauren Belfer
Kindred, Olivia Butler
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
In the Deep Mid-Winter, Robert Clark
Little Bee, Chris Cleve
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Michael Dorris
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald
In the Woods, Tana French
Hide, Lisa Gardner
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
A Lazarus Project Aleksandar Hemon
And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini
Someone Else’s Love Story, Joshilyn Jackson
The Dead, James Joyce
A Short History of Tractors in Ukraine, Marina Lewycka
I’d Know You Anywhere, Laura Lippman
Martin Dressler, Steven Milhauser
The Husband’s Secret, Liane Moriarity
The Paris Wife, Paula McCain
The Giant’s House, Elizabeth McCracken
Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Skin of the Lion, Michael Ondaatje
The Cats Table, Michael Ondaatje
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
Every Last One, Anna Quindlan
Look Again, Lisa Scottoline
Rules of Civility, Amor Towles
Crossing to Safety, Wallage Stegner
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Evening, Susan Minot
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kunder
PLAYS
The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
