The Learned Owl Book Shop: Local Book Groups

The Learnéd Owl Book Discussion Groups

Discussion Date	Book	Notes
January 2010	Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Stout)	A collection of 13 connected short stories about a woman named Olive and her immediate family and friends in the town of Crosby in coastal Maine. It is also known as On the Coast of Maine. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009, and was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. (304 pgs)
February 2010	The Conversion (Joseph Olshan)	Suspense. In Joseph Olshan's intelligent new novel, his eighth, it's the spirit of Henry James - of "The Aspern Papers," for instance, and "The Lesson of the Master" - that hovers over the historic Tuscan villa in which much of the story takes place. Olshan's updated Jamesian narrator, Russell Todaro, is a young American in Europe, a stalled writer in an old world that privileges social custom over romantic passion. But Russell is also, to Olshan's credit, a figure whom James could never have created, even if he'd been able to imagine him: He's gay and Jewish. (304 pgs)
March 2010	The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)	The book follows events in the life of a concierge, Renée Michel, whose deliberately concealed intelligence is uncovered by an unstable but intellectually precocious girl named Paloma Josse. It is full of allusions to literary works, music, films, and paintings. It incorporates themes relating to philosophy, class consciousness, and personal conflict. The events and ideas of the novel are presented through the thoughts and reactions, interleaved throughout the novel, of two narrators, Renée and Paloma. (336 pgs)
April 2010	The Tender Bar (J.R. Moehringer)	A memoir. The Tender Bar is the story of a young man who knows his father only as "The Voice," of a single mother struggling to make a better life for her son, and of a riotously dysfunctional family from Long Island. But more than anything else, Moehringer's book is a homage to the culture of the local pub. That's where young J.R. seeks out the companionship of male role models in place of his absent father, where he receives an education that has served him well in his career and where, inevitably, he looks for love, bemoans its absence, and mourns its loss. (432 pgs)
May 2010	The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (Tiffany Barker)	Tiffany Baker's debut novel is the story of Truly Plaice, a woman of giant proportions whose constant growth is a source of amusement, confusion, fascination, and frustration for herself and the small-town folk of Aberdeen County in upstate New York. Born in 1953 to a mother who died during childbirth, a father whose intentions are good but who doesn't know what to do with her, and an older sister who is beautiful and seemingly perfect, Truly is made an outcast by her size and her inability (and, occasionally, her refusal) to fit in. In more ways than one, she just doesn't fit the mold; that makes life in a small town difficult, to say the least. (341 pgs)
June 2010	An Education (Lynn Barber)	This is the original work on which the Academy Award nominated eponymous movie is based. When Lynn Barber was sixteen, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her and offered her a ride. It was an encounter that would change her life. Her parents were as infatuated with "Simon" - the name she gives him in the book - as the adolescent Barber was, and dazzled by his worldliness. Simon introduced her to a world of luxury hotels and posh hotels and trips abroad. The problem was that he was married and had a child. Admitted to Oxford, she studied English literature and "bedded" more undergraduates than she could count, two preoccupations that prepared her for the literary life. In London she got a job at Penthouse, had a brief stint at Vanity Fair, and eventually became one of England's most famous and feared interviewers. Her profiles in The Observer were memorable for their acerbity. At the approach of sixty, her husband, an artist, entered upon a long struggle with cancer. The trials and tensions that followed her husband's diagnosis and subsequent botched operation reveal the complexities of marriage and the hidden mysteries in everyone's life - even a spouse of twenty-two years. (192 pgs)
July 2010	Benny and Shrimp (Katarina Mazetti)	Set in Sweden. This addictively readable tale asks the question: Why is it so impossible to get a relationship between two middle-aged misfits to work? The answer lies in the story of Shrimp, a young widowed librarian with a sharp intellect and a home so tidy that her jam jars are in alphabetical order; Benny, a gentle, overworked milk farmer who fears becoming the village's Old Bachelor; and an unlikely love that should not be as complicated as it seems. Reminiscent of the works of Carol Shields, this quirky, humorous, beautifully told novel breathes new life into the age-old conundrum that is love. (221 pgs)
August 2010	The Help (Kathryn Stockett)	This optimistic, uplifting debut novel is set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to become a writer, is advised to hone her chops by writing about what disturbs you. The budding social activist begins to collect the stories of the black women on whom the country club set relies and mistrusts, enlisting the help of Aibileen, a maid who's raised 17 children, and Aibileen's best friend Minny, who's found herself unemployed more than a few times after mouthing off to her white employers. (464 pgs)
September 2010	American Rust (Philipp Meyer)	Buell, Pennsylvania lies in ruins, a dying - if not already dead - steel town, where even the lush surrounding country seethes with concealed industrial toxins. When Isaac English and Billy Poe, a pair of high-school friends straight out of Steinbeck, embark on a starry-eyed cross-country escape to California, a violent encounter with a trio of transients leaves one dead, prying the lid off a rusted can of failed hope and small-town secrets. This is Philipp Meyer's first novel, and his taut, direct prose strikes the perfect tone for this kaleidoscope of fractured dreams, elevating a book that otherwise might be relentlessly dour to the level of honest and unflinching storytelling. (384 pgs)
October 2010	White is for Witching (Helen Oyeyemi)	Oyeyemi delivers her third passionate and unusual book, a neo-gothic tale revolving around Miranda and Eliot Silver, fraternal twins of Haitian descent raised in a British house haunted by generations of afflicted, displaced family members, including their mother. Miranda suffers from pica, an affliction that causes her to eat nonedible items, which is passed down to her via the specters from her childhood that now punctuate her nightmares. The book is structured around multiple voices - including that of the house itself - that bleed into one another. (192 pgs)
November 2010	Homer and Langley (E.L. Doctorow)	A novel based on true events; a small but sweeping masterpiece about the infamous New York hermits, the Collyer brothers. When WWI hits and the Spanish flu pandemic kills Homer and Langley's parents, Langley, the elder, goes to war, with his Columbia education and his godlike immunity to such an ordinary fate as death in a war. Homer, alone and going blind, faces a world considerably dimmed though more deliciously felt by his other senses. When Langley returns, real darkness descends on the eccentric orphans: Inside their shuttered Fifth Avenue mansion, Langley hoards newspaper clippings and starts innumerable science projects, each eventually abandoned, though he continues to imagine them in increasingly bizarre ways, which he then recites to Homer. Occasionally, outsiders wander through the house, exposing it as a living museum of artifacts, Americana, obscurity and simmering madness. (224 pgs)

Last updated 3/10/10