Natalie picked an older short story collection from Joyce Carol Oates. Haunted was actually somewhat difficult to acquire since it's not on Kindle and there were only a couple copies at the Half Price Books stores across the metroplex. It turns out this may have been a sign because there is nothing particularly remarkable about the stories in this book. The shtick is that each story devolves into menace and/or violence at some point. A few of us had a hard time reading some of the stories and suffered flashbacks to ​American Psycho. ​Megan rejects this kind of trash completely--especially since pretty much all instances of violence in this book were directed toward women. I, however, have to admit I found myself drawn by the expectation of evil at the start of each story--the kind of giddy tension you feel at the start of a horror film, but this couldn't help me accept 2 particularly terrible stories here.

​On the technical side, a few of the stories suffer from a sense of incompleteness--they end abruptly before a true revelation of events. The technique perhaps works in my favorite story of the collection--"The Premonition"--but it was hard to tolerate in others. We also have 2 overtly derivative stories: "The White Cat" (after Poe's "The Black Cat") and "The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly" (A retelling of Henry James' ​Turn of the Screw from the perspectives of the ghosts).

​All in all, this one didn't thrill us--although Natalie, our horror aficionado, got exactly what she was expecting from Oates in this one.

​We have shocking news: Robert has officially broken up with Book Club! We're utterly heartbroken. Perhaps it was the overabundance of cat videos on our group Snapchat. Oh well. We've had some fun over the last 2 and a half years. Take care, Robert.

​Also, this recent NYTimes article by Judith Newman seems relevant: "Dear Book Club: It's You, Not Me"

This is one of those books which masquerades as a novel but is actually a book about writing and being a writer. It is, however, endlessly quotable, and Virginia Woolf is a genius, there's no denying that. Our hero/heroine is Orlando--born a privileged boy in the Elizabethan era, he spends the time seeking his purpose and attempting to write poetry. Time turns out to be an inconsequential element in the story as we are catapulted through several centuries with some characters dying and others, like Orlando, living on inexplicably. Half-way through the book, some mystical goddesses perform a rite which turns Orlando into a woman. This doesn't really bother him/her, and she proceeds to live a posh, yet eventful life entertaining the English geniuses of the various decades. Her carriage ride with Alexander Pope is particularly memorable.

One of the chief joys of Woolf's wit are the absolutely accurate observations about the attitude differences between men and women. I would have rated this book higher if it weren't for how any semblance of plot seemed to dissolve at the end. That is, I'm told, a very Virginia Woolf thing to do, but I prefer more backbone in my stories. Additionally, in between the brilliant bits, there were boring stretches and poetic meanderings, which didn't amuse most of us.

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”  

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.” 

​“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.”  

“The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.”

​"In justice to her, it must be said that she would infinitely have preferred a rapier. Toads are clammy things to conceal about one’s person a whole morning. But if rapiers are forbidden; one must have recourse to toads." 

Robert, as is his fashion, picked a book in translation. The original is Italian, and apparently Elena Ferrante is something of a big deal in the literary world. It was nice to be introduced to her through Ann Goldstein's translation, which reads fluently.

​The story is an examination of an intense friendship between Lenu (our narrator) and Lila (the titular friend). Interestingly, we begin from the perspective of Lenu as an elderly woman. Lila has apparently gone missing, which she does often in an attempt to be "invisible." Lenu proceeds to relate the entirety of their friendship's history--beginning in their childhoods in a small village in Naples. Though the novel focuses on such small details, down to the very glances they give one another, the plot doesn't seem to drag. Or perhaps the magic is that the plot winds through its dramas primarily to give us a psychological study of the girls. The study is fascinating as we probe Lenu's mind for clues as to the thoughts of Lila and others through their words and actions. Characters exchange roles from villain to prince to monster as events progress, and the cliffhanger at the end is tantalizing.

​Clearly, we liked this one a lot. The only thing that kept some of us from handing it 5 full stars is the fact that it's only the first novel in a quartet, and it may not be possible to fully evaluate the story without finding out how these girls turn into the characters we see at the opening.

“There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.”  

​“I knew - perhaps I hoped - that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.”  

"You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

Maurice, Maurice--this often-overlooked book is something of a gem. It takes place in England in the 1910s and follows the title character through his prep-school, college, and young adult years. At school Maurice meets the studious and attractive Clive, and Maurice soon discovers that he himself is "an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort."

​What follows is an unremarkable romance save for the fact that it is about gay men in the early 20th century. Therefore, this is practically a queer-lit classic. Though the plot is simplistic, Forster's portrayal of the characters shows his attention to authenticity of feeling and sexual identity. This is by no means a masterpiece, but it is a short, enjoyable read--full of English schoolboy slang and charm. And, heavens to Betsy, we're even given a happy ending!

“It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.”  
“Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul....”  

P.S. The movie, despite Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves, is hardly worth seeing--except for perhaps that scene where Maurice rolls Clive in a rug. XD

​P.P.S. Read E. M. Forster's note at the end. Robert didn't think it was important. It was.

There is so much to love about Kathryn Davis' ​The Thin Place​--except that Robert, Natalie, and Kristen didn't love it. Well, poo on them, this book was fabulous. It's about a small town in Vermont and its varied, endlessly interesting inhabitants who dip in and out of the dramas of their lives to brush against a wondrous metaphysical realm that runs like a tapestry through this book. This magical realist realm isn't so much another dimension or plane of existence, as the title or book jacket might lead you to believe; rather, it is like a consciousness of the poetic interplay of memory and history and spirituality.

​I know I'm making little sense here, but I promise the book makes quite a bit of sense--although, you do have to get comfortable with mystery, miracles, unresolved story threads, and a smorgasbord of characters. When trying to come up with a characterization of this book, the best I could say was that it's a mashup of ​The Fall of the Year (the-fall-of-the-year-shell-shack.html), The Monsters of Templeton (the-monsters-of-templeton-ida-claire.html), ​and the ​Welcome to the Night Vale podcast.

Davis shows her endless creativity in this piece, and I love how we weave in and out of characters' thoughts through free, indirect style. You even get chapters from the perspectives of dogs, cats, beavers, and lichen! Add this to your reading list along with whatever else Kathryn Davis has written (Megan and I  throw in a good word for ​Duplex, ​which is just as good as, though trippier than, ​The Thin Place).

"The glacier rode the world, and the world let it change it, like a girl riding her lover and turning his prick to foam."

​"George was gay as a box of birds."

​"If you are a single woman and you invite a couple for dinner, you may be asking for trouble. If only for the duration of that dinner, you may be required to lend your presence to the formation of a three-sided, three-dimensional object, a drama with three starring roles--Adam, Eve, Snake."

​"The minds of twelve-year-old girls are wound round and round with golden chains, padlocked shut, and the key tossed out the car window on the way to the fast-food restaurant. This is probably a good thing, since what they keep in there isn't always very nice. Human sacrifices, cockeyed sexual adventures both sadistic and masochistic, also kitties with balls of yarn and puppies chewing on slippers and soft pink babies and disembowelings."

​"Life has nowhere to move, being everywhere, doesn't move though it's always in motion, is the leaf is the trash is the girl's pierced navel the worm the cat's paw the lengthening shadows."

Opinions were sharply divided over Mark Twain's posthumously collected stories in ​Letters from the Earth​--and by divided opinions I mean that I loved it and nearly everyone else hated it. Natalie and Kristen have never liked anything they've read by Twain, and this book did nothing to change their minds. Megan, Robert, and our guest John have read and liked Twain in the ​Huck Finn and ​Tom Sawyer ​novels. Megan and I also adore ​The Diaries of Adam and Eve.

Letters from the Earth​ is a bit of a strange animal to begin with. The bulk of it is made up of stories centered around antediluvian Biblical passages and characters, while the rest is a hodge-podge of previously published, unpublished, and unfinished essays and story sketches. The title story consists of letters written by Satan to the other archangels as he spends time in exile on Earth. The framing device is problematic since the "God" and "Satan" of Twain's story are wholly separate characters from those in the Bible. Twain seems to have sought this angle to heap harsh satire upon Christians' extrapolation of God's character as drawn from scripture. Twain does get pretty damn harsh about the biblical God and his followers, and it's understandable why his daughter delayed this book's publishing out of fear for her father's reputation.

​For my part, I love Twain's satire and essays in general, and I felt the jokes, though spiky, land with a fair amount of truth in this book. Megan disagrees, finding Twain's tone to be self-important and his style wordy. (You'll have to judge for yourself based on the snippets I pulled for the following section.) Though these bits were unpolished and many unfinished, I felt like I was getting to see Twain knit his classic zingers. Letters from the Earth ​testifies to Twain's amazing creativity, and for those who are already die-hard fans of his satire, this book will reward their curiosity about what else Twain had cooking in his brain.

Satan's letter about Adam and Eve: "Results followed. By the name of Cain and Abel. And these had some sisters; and knew what to do with them."

​Leading up to the story of Noah: "By help of those visiting foreigners the population grew and grew until it numbered several millions.  But it was a disappointment to the Deity. He was dissatisfied with its morals; which in some respects were not any better than his own."

​Satan on the invention of hell: "...as the meek and gentle savior [Jesus] was a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament."

​From Methuselah's diary: "[The Jabalites] worship no god; and if we in goodness of heart do send a missionary to show them the way of life, they listen with respect to all he hath to say, and then they eat him. This doth tend to hinder the spread of light."

​Twain on the idea of repentance: "[People who do not repent their good deeds] ought to be in heaven; they are in the way here."

​From "The Damned Human Race": "An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it is reasonably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for him; but that would be just like an oyster, which is the most conceited animal there is, except man."

Indra Das' The Devourers ​reads like unruly fan fiction. I personally apologize, Book Club, for putting us through this disaster, but what was I to expect from the Goodreads reviews which compared this author to the likes of Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman? Actually, I probably should have expected exactly what we got--Teen Wolf in India. Okay, maybe that's being unfair. ​Teen Wolf (the MTV show) has its moments, whereas this really has none.

​What's so bad about a story with hermaphroditic, shape-shifting, horny werewolves, you ask? Well, it's not necessarily the premise itself, but somehow the story managed to get mangled in several unfortunate fantasy tropes. I'll list them rather than expound on them: (1) too much narrating of the rules of the fantasy world, (2) an absurd and boring framing device, (3) overly explicit and grotesque sex, (4) a rape-driven narrative, (5) long and vapid descriptions about what color everyone's eyes are, (6) long and vapid descriptions about everything else. There are other off-putting aspects to this work which belong uniquely to this plot (mostly weird scatological stuff), but I'll spare you.

​Was there anything redeeming here? Reaching, I'll say I liked the setting overall, and though the descriptions needed more editing, I liked getting street scenes of Kolkata and its food. Also, the one principal female character, though stuck in a rape narrative, is still a compelling character. Perhaps my favorite scenes were of her riding on the back of one of the beastly shape shifters--a scene reminiscent of Lucy and Susan's ride on Aslan in ​The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe​, though, when you start thinking of that, you find you'd rather be reading C. S. Lewis.

I feel its heat, smell its pungent musk of blood-spiced piss and shit and mud-caked hair, feel it ready to lope out of this distant corner of my vision, on sinewy legs covered in fur, shimmering under streetlights eclipsed by its size.

​"One question, foreigner. How do you speak my language so well?" you asked.
"A dead man taught me, after I ate him, just as the Christ taught his disciples the love of their God after they ate him."

It's sad to say that we did not find Heinlein's classic very compelling. The premise is interesting: set in the 2070s, the moon is populated by former convicts-turned-colonists who begin to resent Earth's stranglehold over their market enterprises. The revolution is led by reluctant computer technician Manuel Garcia O'Kelly-Davis and 3 conspiring comrades--Wyoming Knott, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, and a sentient supercomputer named Mike. Mike is the best character in the novel--which perhaps isn't saying much since the other three are pretty dull--and his scientific curiosity about humanity traces through an honorable line of characters from Holmes to Spock to Data.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress​ has a plot that moves along well and expounds on interesting details that amount to a sort of blueprint for revolution-planning, ideological control, polyamory, and libertarianism (TANSTAAFL!). However, there are some problems with this "how to do revolution right" approach. Though Heinlein gets to show off his customary attention to social system details and earn his "hard science fiction" label, his utopian instruction manual falls flat since almost all of the revolutionary work is done by Mike the supercomputer--leaving few relevant things to say for human grit. In fact, with Mike magically taking so many variables out of the equation, its a wonder Heinlein insists on showing us all the math, so to speak.

And now we come to the biggest sins of the book. Though Heinlein's futuristic vision outpaces our timeline quite a bit (Heinlein saw us colonizing the moon by the 1990s), his lunar society still feels like it's stuck in the 1960s. The female characters are shamelessly sexualized and relegated to traditional roles of birthing and care-giving. Even though we have a female revolutionary in Wyoming, she is never really allowed to contribute intellectually or be much more than an emotional wreck or sexy decoration. Also, there is a problematic black-face sequence, which shows little sensitivity to discussions of race in this supposedly mixed society. Book Club is a harsh critic.

Kristen had us kick off 2017 with some sci-fi. (Also, congrats, Kristen, for sticking with us for a whole year!) Michel Faber's ​The Book of Strange New Things​, however, was not the best sci-fi any of us has ever read--mostly because there is nothing much strange or new here. As the book cover intimates, this story involves a journey through space which separates a devoted, married couple. The husband, Peter Leigh, gets selected by a mysterious company for the post of Christian missionary to aliens on the planet Oasis. He, with his wife Beatrice's assurances, takes the trip. Subsequently, their relationship becomes strained.

​Yes, he meets aliens; yes, the aliens are anthropologically interesting; yes, there is a bit of mystery and discovery in the story--and yet--nothing much seems to happen. Faber sets up some interesting interpersonal dynamics between characters only to leave you wishing he had taken his creative set-up in different plot directions. At every fork in the plot, Faber takes the less interesting turn. Consequently, there isn't much satisfaction in the denouncement of this piece. What it did do, however, was take us along for a story. None of us found the book tedious, and reading it was an innocuous way to pass some hours.

​The most interesting part of this story, perhaps, is the fact that Peter and Beatrice are treated as devout and intelligent evangelicals. The portrayal of their Christian faith is prominent and convincing--that's something rarely seen in fiction that is not specifically aimed at a believing audience. It's too bad Faber didn't have more of a sermon to give us.

Maya Angelou's poetic power is unsurpassable in her second memior Gather Together in My Name. ​See the "Memorable Lines" section below for examples of her surreal descriptions and lovely, erudite prose. Each of us was impressed with the language and Angelou's incredible escapades between the ages of 17 and 19--except, of course, for Robert, who was neither impressed nor entertained by a life he doesn't feel he can relate to (He was, however, tickled by Angelou's commentary on Russian writers).

​It's difficult to critize Gather Together'​s story because it is all actually true, and these crazy things happened to Angelou in her late teens. Though a few of the events and her descriptions are uproariously funny, if I had to name my predominant feeling throughout this book it would be concern for the spur-of-the-moment life choices she made for herself and her small son at that time.

I was young, but I was also stupid.

​You had to be very careful in speaking to whites, and especially white men. My mother said that when a white man sees your teeth he thinks he sees your underclothes.

​During this time when my life hinged melodramatically on intrugue and deceit, I discovered the Russian writers. One title caught my eye. Not because I felt guilty raking in money from the doings of prostitutes but because of the title's perfect balance. Life, as far as I had deduced it, was a series of opposites: black/white, up/down, life/death, rich/poor, love/hate, happy/sad, and no mitigating areas in between. It followed Crime/Punishment.

​There is a much-loved region in the American fantasy where pale white women float eternally under black magnolia trees, and white men with soft hands brush wisps of wisteria from the creamy shoulders of their lady loves. Harmonious black music drifts like perfume through this precious air, and nothing of a threatening nature intrudes. The South I returned to, however, was flesh-real and swollen-belly poor.

​And he melted into the darker darkness.

​His face was no wider than my outstretched hand, and the usual rich brown color was dusty like an old chocolate bar exposed to the light. A smile struggled free and limped across his lips.