Book club

Smith College Club of the East Bay

Nine stalwart readers gathered at Betsey’s on October 18, 2009 to discuss Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. Class of 1946 to 2004 and every decade in between were represented, some had finished the book, others read some, and all brains engaged to discuss what we know about neurology, language, biology.

People had enjoyed the anecdotes that illustrated neurological observations and the science behind them, and especially Ramachandran’s curiosity about why things happened, which led him and his research team to explore really creative ways to test, observe, measure, and help heal – especially people with phantom limb pain. After the discussion, Nancy was inspired to go back and read the book more thoroughly, given the positive feedback by most of the group!

Those who had read previous book club selections Musicophilia, and/or How the Mind Works agreed that having read one book on the brain helps with the next. Your first neuroscience book is the hardest.

Perhaps we should all brush up on basic biology before we read further on the topic of neurology, or maybe get a science professor to speak at our annual spring faculty speaker event? Several books were suggested on this and related topics; perhaps we will return to them after one more, easier-to-digest “brain book” followed by a cycle of novels.

Next meeting we will be selecting fiction to read for December – please start thinking of suggestions! Remember: the book must be in paperback, and should be one you have read and know would be good for the club to read. If you want your suggestion in the reminder email, so others have time to consider it, send Sherrill the title, author and what you like about the book sometime between now and November 9, so she can include it in the reminder. Review our ongoing list of suggestions, and add your own, on our Google spreadsheet.

Additional reading related to the brain, if you're interested:

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin (2006) – reportedly more engaging than the Sacks book we read in September, about how our brains process chords, etc.

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker (1994) – organization of language in our brain

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker (2003) – disputing the idea, saying that biology also plays a part in defining who and how we are

Next book club meeting:

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Susan & Mimi's in Oakland

(directions in email to Book Club)

Recommended: See her TED talk and interview on Oprah; links available at http://www.mystrokeofinsight.com/

In 1996, 37-year-old neuroanatomist Taylor experienced a massive stroke that erased her abilities to walk, talk, do mathematics, read, or remember details. Her remarkable story details her slow recovery of those abilities (and the cultivation of new ones) and recounts exactly what happened with her brain. Read proficiently by the author, this is a fascinating memoir of the brain's remarkable resiliency and of one woman's determination to regain her faculties and recount her experience for the benefit of others. Taylor repeatedly describes her "stroke of insight"-a tremendous gratitude for, and connection with, the cells of her body and of every living thing-and says that although she is fully recovered, she is not the same driven, type-A scientist that she was before the stroke. Her holistic approach to healing will be valuable to stroke survivors and their caregivers, who can pick up suggestions from Taylor's moving accounts of how her mother faithfully loved her back to life.

Schedule
We use a rotating-day pattern for scheduling, so we spend less time at each meeting setting the next date, but also have variety so that people with set, conflicting schedules will be able to attend sometimes.

Sharing suggestions for future readings
Browse current suggestions or add your own to our Google spreadsheet. You must have a Google account to edit the list. (A Google account is free and does not obligate you to anything else--sign up from the link there.) To edit the list, click on "Edit this page" at the bottom, sign in to your Google Account (if not signed in you can modify but not save), and when you have finished your edits, choose Save from the File menu. The public web page version is updated at five-minute intervals, so it may take a little time to see your changes. If you are not able to edit the document, you can send your suggestions to Sherrill and she will try to get them posted.

This spreadsheet will give readers a chance to learn something about the proposed books beforehand, helping us reach a more informed choice. We’ll see how this goes, and decide on further refinements as needed. As we are currently reading in the subject of economics, you are encouraged to evaluate--and add to-- the suggestions in that subject area.

Have books lying around unused? Sidnie '08 needs books for her Vallejo school students as she serves her year with Teach for America. "My students do not have books at home. I need books spanning a third grade to sixth grade reading level that reflect multiculturalism, if possible. Really, I will take anything. There are 20 of us in the district from Teach for America, so whatever I can't use, I can donate." Email Sidnie if you have books you can donate.

If anyone has spare time, it would be great to incorporate our old list of suggested titles to the Google spreadsheet: EBSCBookSuggestionList.pdf (file last updated 6/04, but surely includes gems we'd still like to read).

Scroll down to see write-ups about books we've read lately and the discussions that ensued.

Buy books at local bookstores!

There are frequently used copies of bookclub books at various local bookshops. See the list of East Bay local bookstores at http://www.nciba.com/bookstores/east.html.

Smithie favorites include Black Oak in North Berkeley, Pegasus in downtown Berkeley, Pendragon and Diesel in Rockridge, and Walden Pond on Grand near Lake Merritt.

List of books our club has read since it started in 1994:

Donations raised at EBSC Book Club meetings go to the scholarship fund the club sponsors (details on the About the club page).

If you order books from Amazon, please use this link or the link on the AASC page so that Smith benefits from your purchases! The Alumnae Association receives a contribution every time you purchase a book from Amazon.com through the Smith web site. Your purchases help to support programs for alumnae and undergraduate students. Thank you!

Five of us gathered at my house last Thursday, September 17, 2009, to discuss Oliver Sack's Musicophilia. (Hopefully the smallish turnout was not due to my lack of a specific email announcement of the September book. I included it with the August play announcement, and had meant to send out a separate mailing after the play, but did not get to it. Apologies to those who missed the information.)

We started off with a few minutes discussion of the play (Samuel Beckett's Happy Days), since Catherine, Jane and I had all attended. Jane said she and her family had generally disliked the play, finding it too lacking in action and plot for them. But they had a great time at the event anyway, especially enjoying the discussions they had during the picnic. Catherine connected with the play somewhat more, as she found the main character brought to mind her mother, who always presented a happy outlook, and avoided expressing dissatisfaction or unhappiness.

As we turned to Musicophilia, it was lovely to welcome back Kathy Orsini, who has been too busy with grad school to come to book club lately. She was particularly interested in this topic, having spent time working with the elderly, and thinking and reading about the use of music in managing dementia. We all found many parts of this book fascinating, and the conversation ranged widely, from deeply personal reactions to the Alzheimer's and Parkinson's stories, to musings about whether poetry's form and focus on rhythm would make it have similar powers to music. This book illustrated things about the power of music that we wished we had known about earlier, and would want to draw upon in the future. (Or sooner: Catherine went right out and enrolled her son in piano lessons.)

Thanks to Kate for organizing our summer theater outing this year. We had great luck with the weather, enjoying a lovely summer evening picnic and performance of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days at CalShakes on August 30. The weather was not too hot, not too cold, the food was yummy, as always, our picnic tables were far enough from the pre-play lecture that we did not get scolded for talking too much, and we had a lovely group of fabulous Smithies to socialize with before the play. The lead actress, Patty Gallagher, did a wonderful job in her role, although to me Beckett seems like more of a winter playwright to me. A bit too grim for summer outdoor theater, to my taste.

~Sherrill

Thanks to Nancy for hosting our discussion of Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, on Tuesday, July 21. We got off to a rather wandering start, as I asked for some impressions of the previous month's meeting with Professor Cheung, which I'd missed. Eventually we did get to July's book, however. The general consensus seemed to be that the book supports the idea that the immigrant experience is much the same everywhere. Most people found it an enjoyable read, although Kate wondered if the prose had suffered in translation. I read it in Italian, but since I'm not a native speaker, it is not that easy for me to judge style. Having the Italian copy handy allowed us to sort out something which had confused Jennie. The dates listed in one of the "yell" sections had been incorrectly translated: January had been translated to June in one entry, so that sequential entries that were four days apart in the Italian version were six month apart in the English version. It seemed like an odd mistake to make.

During the discussion, I mentioned that I expected a Rashomon-style story, and was surprised to find that not everybody was familiar with the term, which refers to Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, in which a crime witnessed by four individuals is described in four mutually contradictory ways. The film is based on two short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, "Rashōmon" (for the setting--Rashōmon was the former main city gate in two Japanese capital cities, Heijokyō (now Nara City) and Heiankyō (now Kyoto) ) and "Yabu no naka", otherwise known as "In a Grove" (for the story line). The term "Rashomon effect" is now used in psychology; it is the effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it.

~ Sherrill

Ruth MacNaughton led the initiative to organize our faculty speaker for this year: professor Floyd Cheung on Thursday, June 18. Ruth was very impressed with professor Cheung when she attended an alumnae college lecture he gave at reunion last year. The lecture was based on his "Narratives of Internment" class about the WWII Japanese internment camps. We asked him to select a book for us, and he wrote: "I've decided that Mary Matsuda Gruenewald's Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps would work best. It covers the history well while also telling a personal story. I can supplement the book with selected poems and film clips during my presentation."

Many thanks to Aimee for hosting the faculty-speaker book club for the third year in a row!

About 10 of us gathered May 20, 2009 to discuss Carlos Fuentes' The Crystal Frontier -- most of us read the translation, but at least one made it through much of the original Spanish. We appreciated Fuentes' political views portrayed in the stories more than we enjoyed the literature itself: the novel consists of nine short stories, some of whose characters affect the lives of characters in other stories, but the narrative threads were subtle. Several readers did not enjoy the stories enough to finish the book, though at least one liked the book -- and that makes for a good discussion!

Although we touched on the concept of a borderland, and how people exist on neither/both sides of a divide such as the Mexico/USA border, our conversation meandered away from the specifics of the book to experiences of Mexican dental care, the beauty of the Spanish language with its "buenas tardes" compared to our English "hi," and on to upcoming EBSC events (next month's faculty-spearker book club) and Smith's engineering program and reunion! Sherrill was back for her 25th and Nancy for her 50th, and they both commented on how articulate, pleasant, and interactive the Smith students they met were. (Surprisingly, we did not discuss the previous day's local election.)

Thanks to Kathryn for hosting our May meeting!

Thanks to Ros for hosting our third economics-themed book discussion on the warm, summery evening of Tuesday, April 21, 2009. Around ten of us circled her living room and shared what we knew of how economics works, the policies and politics, from how Sarbanes-Oxley means well but makes things difficult for companies to observations about the banking and mortgage industries.

Additional reading, if you're interested (thanks, Mimi!):

Great "illustrated" version of an explanation of the current economic crisis: http://discuss.epluribusmedia.net/node/2730
Reference explaning the historic steps to our current deregulation: http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/zariphop/pdfs/ProtterTheFinancialMeltdown.pdf
Interactive explanation of a CDO (collaterized debt obligation)
http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2007/12/cdo

Thanks to Jane for hosting a great discussion of economics! We were joined by Mary's daughter, Katie, in her first year of college majoring in business, rounding out an assortment of ages, interests, and backgrounds of our six-person group on Thursday, March 19, 2009.

Although the reading assignment was a bit scattered, from John Maynard Keynes' Essays in Persuasion which not everyone read to several Foreign Affairs magazine articles, each woman also brought information from other readings, lectures, and experiences. Keynes was the father of spending to cure a recession, so his ideas are relevant today as Obama's government tries to increase infrastructure which will not only improve our roads and alternative transit, but provide jobs to the thousands who have been laid off in the past year.

Next month's book illuminates some of the deregulation that occurred during the 1980's, and from the Powell's review, it sounds pretty entertaining! It will be helpful to understand more about how we got into this mess.

Economics may seem like a dry topic in some ways, but truly it affects us all at some level. We are looking forward to reading something different for our May meeting, and are ready to start choosing a summer theater outing (read the script, see the play) so bring ideas for shows as well!

TIP: Reminder to check your free credit report at www.annualcreditreport.com. Catherine recommends checking one agency every 4 months, as they tend to overlap information. There are 3 agencies so that's once a year free per agency.

For reference, we selected Monica's idea to read a bunch of articles, both historical and current:

February 18, 2009, was the first of our three economics-themed discussions. From 1946 to 2006 (though no representatives from the '70's), readers found The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi eye-opening, depressing, and a wake-up call.

A professor at Harvard Law School, Warren has been in the news lately, as she chairs the oversight panel appointed by Congress to monitor the spending of the $700 billion bailout money. We, too, would like to know what the banks have done with "our" money! Several readers had seen, heard, or read recent interviews with Elizabeth Warren.

We talked about living frugally, the American independent-spirit, and of course a sprinkling of political commentary. (The discussion was quite interesting, despite this lack-luster write-up!)

Thanks to Betsey for hosting!

Many thanks to Aimee for hosting our discussion of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini (2007) on Tuesday, January 20, 2008. Naturally conversation diverted to the inauguration, as well as the Afghanistan exhibit at the Asian Art Museum that several readers had seen with our docent-led tour by Anne Adams '73 on January 17th.

Our group ranged from class of '65 to '05, and included our prodigal sister from England, Ginny, who follows what we read and joins us when she's in town. Although everyone found the story engaging, several readers were unimpressed with Hosseini's writing, finding it heavy-handed, and occasionally unbelievable. We imagined that he had composed the novel from stories of many different women, stitching together a patchwork of real experiences not always neatly.

We talked about the power of "home" and sense of nationalism that leads Afghanis to return. Even those who managed to leave want to go back to their country, despite the struggles of living there, because although it is war-torn, Kabul is still home, it is familiar, and it is filled with memories.

Most of us thought The Kite Runner was a better book, perhaps based more on Hosseini's own, direct experiences. For information about one of many school projects in Afghanistan, see the website for Trust in Education (www.trustineducation.org). Three Cups of Tea, which we read in 2007, describes Greg Mortenson's nonprofit the Central Asia Institute, that is also focused on education especially for girls. See www.threecupsoftea.com for more information.

Kate welcomed a dozen of us to her charming apartment with a lovely assortment of treats plus delicious hot chocolate on the chilly evening of Tuesday, December 16. Reactions to André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name were more or less evenly divided among the group. Some felt that Aciman had effectively captured the all consuming obsession of the 17-year-old narrator, while others disliked the writing and book structure, or simply weren't that interested by the story. Jane appreciated the way the book celebrated the sense of touch, not just in the sex scenes (which were generally agreed to be hot) but also in Elio's physical experience of his surroundings. Some enjoyed the unresolved details that were interwoven into the story, while others found them frustrating, or felt they undermined the believability of the story. Most were unsatisfied with the latter part of the book, feeling that the book would have been better as a short story or novella. My own experiences spending time at the Italian beach in summer, and going to a book signing during my most recent visit, made those aspects of the book resonate for me.

As we moved on towards picking a book for our next meeting, Nancy instigated a more general discussion of how our books are chosen, noting that while our relatively free-form method has usually worked well, some have expressed frustration with our recent choices, and would like to consider other methods. Various ideas were brought up, and after some discussion, we came to a few conclusions: We want to continue to read both fiction and non-fiction. We do not want to lose the possibility of following paths of interest as they come up, so don't want to choose books too far in advance. The idea of reading several books in series in a given general area was seen as a good way to help focus the selection process, as it would allow members to research books they'd like to read in that area. All agreed that books should be read before being suggested, to reduce the chances of real duds. Also, sharing suggestions early would be useful so people could think about them beforehand.

In conclusion, members are encouraged to send me (Sherrill) suggestions for future areas of interest, and also, any specific book suggestions for each upcoming meeting. I will try to organize these and include information in my reminder email (sent approximately one week before each book club meeting). This will give people a chance to learn something about the proposed books beforehand, helping us reach a more informed choice. We’ll see how this goes, and decide on further refinements as needed.

All this notwithstanding, because of the club's planned visit to the Afghanistan Art exhibit, for January we decided to read Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (review below).

Starting in February, we plan to focus on economics for a few months, starting with Janet's recent suggestion, The Two-Income Trap, by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi. A professor at Harvard Law School, Warren has been in the news lately, as she chairs the oversight panel appointed by Congress to monitor the spending of the $700 billion bailout money.

Our January meeting will be held on inauguration day, but since it will all be over except for the dancing and drinking by that time, we figured it would not be critical conflict.

~ Sherrill

About 14 Smithies from classes '47 to '05 crowded into Nancy's living room on Thursday, November 20, 2008 with delicious pumpkin bread as well as Mimi's birthday cake! As with other harvest seasons, we read a book about food, but Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was not as well-received as Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma which we read last year. Perhaps Kingsolver was preaching to the choir here, and her narrative of the year her family spent eating locally didn't capture our attention.

Many readers felt that the book got off to a very slow start, and repeated much of what we read in The Omnivore's Dilemma. Jennie felt that Kingsolver's emphasis on local, as opposed to organic, made the books complementary. Those who managed to stick with it did appreciate some of the more humorous sections of the book. (The turkey sex was especially interesting...) The conversation moved on to other food and farming related topics, including interesting anecdotes from Monica, Ruth and Janet about their jobs on local farms near Smith during WWII.

A discussion of Jennie's experience working on a farm in France led to a discussion of the Biodynamic Agriculture movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture), about which a Smithie friend of Mimi's had done a documentary film, by chance.

A brief extract from the Wikipedia page describes it thus:

Biodynamic agriculture, a method of organic farming that has its basis in a spiritual world-view (anthroposophy, first propounded by Rudolf Steiner), treats farms as unified and individual organisms, emphasizing balancing the holistic development and interrelationship of the soil, plants, animals as a closed, self-nourishing system. Regarded by some proponents as the first modern ecological farming system, biodynamic farming includes organic agriculture's emphasis on manures and composts and exclusion of the use of artificial chemicals on soil and plants. Methods unique to the biodynamic approach include the use of fermented herbal and mineral preparations as compost additives and field sprays and the use of an astronomical sowing and planting calendar.

Because December is a busy time, we've chosen a shorter work of fiction (with sex, set in Italy...) for our next meeting.

~ Sherrill

Going around Betsey's living room on the mild evening of October 16, 2008, 13 introductions by class year jumped from '05 to '65 to '95 to '55, from '93 to '03 to '46. One of the best selling points for making the effort to go to bookclub, people say, is for the community of thinking women of all ages. This month in particular, at peak election season, readers were eager to discuss religion and politics, why philosophic works haven't replaced the bible, how Palin can be touted as an expert on autism, that Sam Harris' book Letter to a Christian Nation was reactionary to some but for others provided welcome arguments. We're not convinced that religion should be abolished, as he proposes, but his point about stem cell research being done on embryos with 150 cells doing no harm was well taken. He did not discuss spirituality outside of organized religion.

Considering alternatives to mindlessly following bible-based church teachings, we heard about local Buddhist and Unitarian communities, discussed how schools play a role in teaching morality to children, and went off on a tangent about language requirements and No Child Left Behind (testing only in English). People shared their stories of being raised with and without religion, how they rebelled or not against what they learned. We acknowledged the value of the music in many practices, how the repeated rituals provide structure and a sense of community, if not beauty and mysticism.

Religion provides tradition and community for many people... what are the other ways to teach right and wrong, to gather people together, to share information? Is it possible to cherry-pick sections of the bible, of tradition, of ritual? Should spirituality be separate from our government? How can we truly separate church and state in the United States while honoring many cultures and religions? Is tolerance enough?

Keep talking about it!Take the conversation out of our living rooms and into the newspapers, the grocery line, the bus, and all the way to Washington.

Don't forget to vote November 4th!

A lively group of 17 filled Jane Robinson's living room Tuesday evening 9/16/08 to discuss Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel. It's safe to say that most every Smithie who attended the bookclub discussion was deeply moved by this woman's jaw-dropping courage, supreme intelligence, and tenacity. Born in Mogadishu to traditional Somali parents and raised to adhere to strict Muslim law and the order of Somali clans, Hirsi Ali suffered female circumcision at the hands of her grandmother and endured years of abuse from her mother. After escaping an arranged marriage, she sought asylum in Holland where she would not only become a citizen but be elected to parliament. In the years that followed, she would speak out fearlessly against the oppression and victimization of women in Islam and push for social reforms in immigration. She would also receive countless death threats from Muslim extremists and be stripped of the Dutch citizenship she so cherished. Now living in the US under high security, she works for the American Enterprise Institute and continues to voice her controversial yet respected voice for the protection of Muslim women, children and immigrants.

Hirsi Ali is a strong, introspective writer. Her chronicle of the horrific events that she lived through forced many of us to examine our beliefs about cultural relativism and what she condemns as the Westerner's toleration of abuse in Muslim immigrant populations. This sparked a debate about the question of respecting religious practices while preventing acts that constitute abuse in a religious context. Many heard a call to action in her words and were inspired by her ideas of equality and freedom.

Kate Cohen passes along this link to an article from Eve Ensler's V Day organization which reports on a Kenyan girl who recently died of female genital mutilation: http://v10.vday.org/news-alerts/cry-of-a-girl

Heartfelt thanks to Monica for her organization of our very successful outing Sunday afternoon July 20th, 2008, to the California Shakespeare Festival's performance of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. True to form, fog was billowing about overhead and there was quite a stiff breeze, but our potluck picnic featured plenty of delicious food and the company was excellent, of course. It was nice to meet spouses, partners and friends, as well.

Several of us had read the play beforehand, although not all. (I was glad I had, since it made the somewhat iffy acoustics less of a problem.) It is very interesting to see how much difference, not just in tone but in meaning, the interpretation of a line can bring! Although this was not the best performance I'd ever seen at CalShakes, it was lively and nicely staged, and a good time was had by all. See the EBSC photos page.

For August, we had chosen to read poetry. At our June meeting we selected the Billy Collins collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room. However, since that meeting, there has been a new development. As part of their orientation to Smith, incoming Smith students have been assigned Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of poetry Native Guard, which explores the complex memory of the history of the American South. As you know, we generally read along with the incoming students. So I suggest we read both for our August meeting. (Trethewey's book is 64 pages, in paperback. Collins' is 192 pages. You can always skip around a bit, but you might want to get started!)

Since poetry is often best appreciated as a spoken form, everyone is invited to pick a poem (or one from each book) you'd like to read aloud to the group.

~ Sherrill

Thanks to Catherine for hosting a Mexican-themed bookclub meeting to discuss The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea on the warm evening of June 17th 2008. A dozen readers, classes 1947 to 2002, gathered in her living room to discuss the long book which most had managed (and struggled) to finish. It wasn't a slow read once everyone got going, but it is 528 pages. Some said it paled in comparison to the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude, but many in the room loved it, hailed it our best book of the year. The story was engaging and unpredictable and unfolded to the sainted heroine coming into her power and using it for good. She was a religious figure, but she preached politics. She healed the sick, but she didn't work during the night and she knew she couldn't save everyone. The characters were many and the details of their wounds explicit. The scenery was rich and visible through the descriptions of the land, the revolution intermingled everywhere.

We were amazed that the story is based on a real person, a distant relative of the author, and how smoothly he wove fact and fiction together. We talked about the relationships between the main characters, and our lack of education about the Mexican revolution and the importance of raising our consciousness about the history and politics of Mexico and Canada, our geographical neighbors.

Wikipedia history of the period in Mexico

Thanks also to Anne, visiting from France, who did Internet research that enriched our collection of facts for the discussion.

More about Teresita from the author on his website.

Ruth worried that we would melt in our books during the heat wave on May 15th, but instead we were able to comfortably sit out on her deck into the warm evening, many of us in sandals and sundresses. Ten of us from classes 1947-95 talked about the content and import of Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, as well, of course, as our thoughts on how his future and that of our country may influence each other. Older alums talked about what the party conventions were like many years ago, when the candidates were not elected ahead of time as now typically happens through the primaries.

We debated the hot topic of whether voters are more likely to elect a woman president or a black president, and several readers shared their ambivalence about supporting Clinton because she is a strong woman contender, yet allowing that Obama has a freshness that we may all need.

We enjoyed Obama's writing and the clarity with which he expressed his ideas, and admired his statesman-like quality which was so evident in his speech on race.

A More Perfect Union - Watch Barack's speech on race in America and building a more perfect union. (37 minutes)

Barack Obama's Speech on Race - The text as prepared for delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, as provided by his presidential campaign March 18, 2008.

Several readers had read Dreams of My Father as well, and appreciated the content and delivery of each. We wish we had a book of Clinton's to read that would provide as much insight into her politics and policy ideas!

Thank you, Ruth, for hosting!

Thank you to Monica for hosting our April 16th discussion of Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky. While Maggie felt the book did not give a very balanced view, focusing as it did on a relatively small segment of the French population, all were impressed by her writing (and perhaps just as important, the work of her translator), and her ability to capture her characters' experiences so vividly. The effects of war and occupation on ordinary people and their differing reactions are illustrated very well. The fact that it was written contemporaneously to the events, and our knowledge of Némirovsky's fate, made reading the book much more intense.

The topic of military occupation led us to a discussion of our own occupation of Iraq. Janet, Nancy and Monica have been attending a course offered by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, titled Conversations in History. They were especially struck by host Harry Kreisler's recent interview with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, U.S. Army (ret.) Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State (2002-2005), discussing the break down of the national security process in the administration of George W. Bush. They highly recommend the video of the interview (duration 58:25) in which Colonel Wilkerson offers an insider's view of the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal that drove American policy in the wake of the Al Qaeda attack on 911. The Vice President's manipulation of the policy process, he argues, led to a lack of a post conflict planning for Iraq and the failure to abide by the Geneva conventions. Wilkerson also analyzes the motives of Cheney and Rumsfeld, their penchant for secrecy, and speculates on the long term costs to American democracy, power and prestige.

On a related subject, Sarah spoke up for the dismissal of law professor John Yoo from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School as advocated recently by the National Lawyers Guild. In a memorandum written the same month George W. Bush invaded Iraq, John Yoo said the Department of Justice would construe US criminal laws not to apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. According to Yoo, the federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming and stalking do not apply to the military in the conduct of the war. Academic freedom and grounds for dismissal of tenured professors were warmly discussed in our group. Christopher Edley, Jr., Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law expresses his position on the subject (and John Yoo) in this essay.

As usual, our discussion touched on a wide range of topics, many politically focused, which led us to our book selection for May: The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama. (At least one person said she'd bought the book awhile ago but not gotten around to reading it yet, and it certainly is topical, so we decided it was time.)

Here’s a review from Publisher's Weekly:

Illinois's Democratic senator illuminates the constraints of mainstream politics all too well in this sonorous manifesto. Obama (Dreams from My Father) castigates divisive partisanship (especially the Republican brand) and calls for a centrist politics based on broad American values. His own cautious liberalism is a model: he's skeptical of big government and of Republican tax cuts for the rich and Social Security privatization; he's pro-choice, but respectful of prolifers; supportive of religion, but not of imposing it. The policy result is a tepid Clintonism, featuring tax credits for the poor, a host of small-bore programs to address everything from worker retraining to teen pregnancy, and a health-care program that resembles Clinton's Hillary-care proposals. On Iraq, he floats a phased but open-ended troop withdrawal. His triangulated positions can seem conflicted: he supports free trade, while deploring its effects on American workers (he opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement), in the end hoping halfheartedly that more support for education, science and renewable energy will see the economy through the dilemmas of globalization. Obama writes insightfully, with vivid firsthand observations, about politics and the compromises forced on politicians by fund-raising, interest groups, the media and legislative horse-trading. Alas, his muddled, uninspiring proposals bear the stamp of those compromises.

(posted by Sherrill)

We had a terrific turnout of around 35 people on Wednesday, March 19, for a discussion of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking lead by Jennifer Walters, Smith's Dean of Religious Life.

Dean Walters started off by introducing herself and mentioning a project she's been involved with recently on defining success, including a five-day January term course called "Get A Life", in which juniors and seniors began to develop a habit of reflection about their own values and goals. They talked and wrote about themes inherent in making life decisions, including perfectionism, risk-taking, tolerating failure and family narratives of success. Many alumnae in the audience agreed that they could use such a seminar now! She also mentioned that she had taught The Year of Magical Thinking in combination with Going Sane, by Adam Phillips during J-Term 2006.

We then moved on to a discussion of the book, with Dean Walters first asking if anybody had a negative response. Several alumnae found Didion cold, self-absorbed and/or personally unlikable, and some were surprised at the lack of spirituality in her approach to death, but others (especially readers of her other books) felt that Didion was more open in this book than usual, and that exploring experiences through words is how she makes sense of them.

The personal reflections that the book engendered tended to differ based on the age of the reader. Older alumnae found themselves considering the possible loss of their own partners, while younger alumnae were more likely to be dealing with the loss of parents. Several in the group shared their personal experiences and reflected on how Didion's story and storytelling compared with their own, and in some cases, helped them understand it better.

Dean Walters pointed to the liturgical patterns found in the book, and noted especially the power of Didion's introductory words, repeated again later in the book, to invoke the rapidity and profoundness of the change in her life:

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Didion's relentless search for understanding the technicalities of what happened and the exact timing of events struck a chord with many, and was echoed by an alumna who had lost her father and experienced a similar pattern. Also remarked on was the fact that the interludes of more "technical" information interspersed with her memories helped the structure and flow of the book considerably.

Dean Walters was asked what the reaction of undergraduates was to the book, in comparison to ours. She said that they tended to focus more on Didion's reactions: the magical thinking of the title, and how her mind reacted to her situation, rather than the more personal aspects of the loss. This is perhaps explained both by their age and also that they were reading it in conjunction with Going Sane which explores the delicate balance between sanity and insanity.

All in all, it was a very interesting and enjoyable evening. As might be imagined with a group this large, there was a certain amount of waiting your turn to be heard, but I think (hope!) most were able to offer their comments.

Just down the hill from the Mormon Temple in Oakland, Sherrill hosted a small but lively bookclub discussion of Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer on Thursday, February 21, 2008. With five Smithies and a visiting mother in Sherrill's cozy, firelit living room, and one Smithie on speakerphone, our diversity spanned not only geographical location but several decades of graduations (as usual). The technological participation also included several comments Sherrill received from people who couldn't attend the meeting but shared their thoughts about the book via email.

We were all fascinated and horrified with the information we'd learned in the book, specifically certain Fundamentalist Mormon practices such as older men marrying girls as young as 14 (usually pressuring them with threats of hellfire in the afterlife if they don't do as they're told). Although no Mormons were present at our meeting, most everyone has known Mormons, who were probably the mainstream Mormons, not the Fundamentalists who are the ones who believe in polygamy. Despite their reputation for traveling on international missions, Mormons in daily life, in our experience, do not talk about being Mormon nor prosthelytize.

The strong community that the Mormon church provides does seem valuable, and in one anecdote it helped one man to overcome addiction and continue to law school and a successful family and life. A years-ago magazine article Jennie's mother read described how the plural wives enjoyed each other's company and appreciated sharing the husband and the child-rearing.

At the philosophical level, Krakauer spent a chapter near the end covering the legal issues surrounding Ron and Dan Lafferty's murder trial; we discussed how to live in a society of people, we all have to agree to follow the rule of human law, because God's law, as those brothers claimed to follow above all else, is too subjective. If a man follows his god's command, is he insane?

Conversation also touched on former presidential candidate Mit Romney, the Mormon voting bloc, the current case of Warran Jeffs, comparison to Islamic Fundamentalism and that strong, male-dominant community, the mystery of the sacred undergarment (perhaps not unlike the Jewish Orthodox tallit katan?), and the confusing order of Krakauer's storyline, which jumps from past to present and from place to place so that it's sometimes hard to remember all the names.

Sixteen Smithies circled up in Maggie's living room on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 to discuss Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants after catching up with each other while getting tea and snacks. Everyone enjoyed the book, though several thought it fluffy and predictable and the ending a little much (yet abrupt). Returning to this month's book intermittently, conversation diverged to Devil in the White City which was suggested last time but not selected (but may be for a future meeting) and the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, animal rights and zoos -- particularly the San Francisco Zoo which has been recently in the news, and, typically for this group, to the upcoming primaries.

We also ended up having several book suggestions, each igniting a small discussion, finally, after a re-count, the (slim) majority voting for Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) by by David Cay Johnston, but it's not yet available in paperback, so we will read the second place finisher in the voting, Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven for our February meeting. Other suggestions included Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky (NYT review).

After the meeting was over, many people lingered, chatting in small groups about various topics including gyms and exercise approaches, children and family names, and the upcoming Festival of Women Authors at the Berkeley YWCA (among many other interesting local events we wish we had time to attend!).

Thank you for hosting, Maggie!

Already a supporter of the Central Asia Institute, Nancy hosted a warm discussion on December 11, 2007 of Three Cups of Tea: One Man's One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace...One School At A Time by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin. Some people were put off by the writing, which particularly in the beginning is not so good, but once the story gains its momentum, it doesn't even matter. This story of one man's effective passion to help mountain villagers build schools in northern Pakistan compelled many of us, yet the marketing pitch that hovers underneath the story and the lucky access to funds for his efforts turned other readers sour at Mortenson (who did not write the book, it was more of a biography about him -- though did provide journal entries and immense amounts of other information).

Despite the heat of the discussion about the book (always better for the clash of strong opinions!), the subject soon shifted to US foreign policy, then to the 2008 presidential elections, the impact of Oprah's endorsement of Obama, and on to Smith's reputation and our various experiences there from the era of house mothers and no men allowed to the 2000's when students have every resource needed to succeed from tutoring to stress-reduction workshops. Touching on the range of mother-daughter relationships from very close (talking every day, sharing almost too much information) to distant (deliberately establishing space between), we wrapped up with some book suggestions and had a strong preference for fiction next time.

Our November exploration of Jane Austen's Emma occurred at multiple events:

The "real" book club meeting was held at Betsey's on Wednesday, November 14th. Sherrill reports: "I arrived late, so missed some of the discussion, but in the part I did join we discussed the class system so evident in Austen's work, especially Emma, and wondered whether Austen was simply vividly illustrating what she saw, or offering a critique, however mild. We also offered some ideas on modern writings that explore character and setting as Austen does, and touched on Zadie Smith's work as in some ways similar. Thanks to Betsey for hosting!

A small group of folks who were unable to make that meeting instead gathered at Catherine's the previous evening for a viewing of the 1996 film production of Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the title character, and Jeremy Northam as her Mr. Knightley. Attendees were at various stages of reading the book, which provided interesting differences of perspective on the movie. We all enjoyed this film version, which was very well cast, with the notable exception of Ewan McGregor as Frank Churchill. His acting was unexceptionable, but he had a very peculiar fluffy hairstyle, which made it hard to see him as the dashing Mr. Churchill.

Our double feature also included the 1995 Clueless, an adaptation of Emma set in Beverley Hills, with the brutal class society of high school standing in for the English countryside. Most attending had seen Clueless years ago, although not all had realized it was based on Emma. While we found it amusing and it certainly evoked a particular time and place, its wit did not seem quite as sparkling when one had recently read Austen's original.

Back to non-fiction for December!

We welcomed two new faces to book club at Catherine's on Thursday, October 11: Ruth McNaughton and Frances Bell, as well as many old friends. Catherine had a nice assortment of treats, and her organic farm box prominently displayed. :-) Thanks for hosting!

As expected, our discussion of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma was lively and interesting. Some felt that Pollan's tone was a bit precious or self-absorbed at times, but all found sections that resonated strongly, and believed the book very worthwhile. All of us came away feeling that US industrial food production is even worse than we had feared.

Whole Foods comes off poorly in the book, but Catherine reported some very interesting developments since its publication. John Mackey (Co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Markets) engaged in discussions with Michael Pollan, first in public letters and then in a live Q & A forum in Berkeley, and many changes have been made at Whole Foods. A video of the Berkeley discussion is available on the Whole Foods website: john-mackey-and-michael-pollan-discussion and was highly recommended by Catherine.

You can read their letters back and forth from Pollan's website: pollan_mackey_letters.

Another point of discussion was what can we do to help change the situation. Michael Pollan's answer is the farm bill. Ruth sends this link to an NPR interview with Pollan and others: How the Farm Bill Affects What We Eat.

For a bit of relief, we opted for fiction for November, and scheduled the December meeting, so folks could plan ahead.

Of the group that gathered at Aimee's on September 5 to discuss M.F.K. Fisher's book The Gastronomical Me, only I had read any other Fisher before. I think it gave me a different perspective from others, most of whom seemed to feel that they weren't getting enough information from the author about her life and times, only ruminations on food. Since I'd read other Fisher, I knew better what to expect, and the few autobiographical details that she did reveal were more interesting to me as well, most likely. Unsurprisingly, it also helped if you were interested in cooking.

Here are some details I got from Wikipedia, to fill in some of the blanks:

Fisher was born Mary Frances Kennedy in Albion, Michigan. While studying at the University of California in 1929, Fisher met her first husband, Alfred Young Fisher. The couple spent the first formative years of their marriage in Europe, primarily at the University of Dijon in France. In 1932, the couple returned from France to a country ravaged by the Great Depression.

During the Fishers' years in California, they formed a friendship with Dillwyn "Timmy" Parrish and his wife, Gigi. Later, in 1938, Fisher was to leave Alfred for Timmy, referred to as "Chexbres" in many of her books, named after the small Swiss village on Lake Geneva close to where they had lived. The second marriage, while passionate, was short. Only a year into the marriage, Parrish lost his leg due to a circulatory disease, and in 1941 took his own life. She was involved in a number of other turbulent romantic relationships with men and women.

Fisher later bore two daughters. Anne, whose father Fisher refused to name, was born in 1943. Kennedy was born during Fisher's short-lived marriage to Donald Friede, which lasted from 1945 to 1951.

After Parrish's death, Fisher considered herself a "ghost" of a person, but went on to live a long and productive life, dying in California in 1992 at the age of 83. She had long suffered from Parkinson's disease and arthritis, but lived the last twenty years of her life in "Last House," a house built for her in one of California's vineyards.

(posted by Sherrill Lavagnino)

Our annual theater outing this year was to a Woman’s Will production of Romeo and Juliet, performed in the Chapel of the Chimes on August 9. The setting was perfect for a play whose final scenes take place in a crypt, although unfortunately the acoustics were bad, and the staging made it difficult to see from where most of us were sitting. A few of us met for a nice picnic beforehand out in the field by the cemetary.

Thanks to Monica for hosting 15 of us in her lovely sun-porch-living-room-with-a-view on Tuesday, July 31, 2007! We discussed Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy and Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, a pair of novels (yes, despite the title "autobiography," Grealy explained it was a novel, and she is a writer) about Lucy's life and Ann's friendship with her.

Considering autobiography as novel is a challenge: several of us had thought of it as an autobiography, and therefore questioned differences in her telling compared to Patchett's, and we didn't even explore the nature of memoir writing and how inevitably the writer sees the life differently from at the moment she lived it!

We did discuss self-image: the beauty Grealy sought in vain and the love she thought would follow; Patchett's success as a writer (we read her Bel Canto a few years ago) compared to Grealy's one book in her short life; the difficulty of Lucy's life as a child with cancer and nearly 40 grueling and invasive surgeries on her face and jaw, and her loss of hope and addiction at the end of Lucy's life.

Having two points of view on the same life made for interesting conversation -- some readers related to one or the other of the authors more, and the differing perspectives on the shared parts of their lives provided a broader view of what Lucy's life was like than just she, herself, could present. The discussion of the books led to explorations of similar experiences in our lives, such as how friends at Smith helped each other through life's challenges. Across the ages, most of the group was glad to have read the two books in combination even though it was a heavy assignment for summer!

Monica started us off with a discussion about aging and exercise being recently back from her 60th reunion on the warm evening of Wednesday June 13, 2007 at Sophie's house in Berkeley. Gradually we moved on to our book of the month, The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar, whose main character, Bhima, was a woman in her 60s who worked as a servant for a Parsi woman. While the world of mistress-and-servent seemed like distant past to us, some speculated that in the American South some of those relationships between benevolent employer and long-time servant of the family, and indeed the arrangement of working mother and nanny is reminiscent, yet less interactive than Sera and Bhima sipping their tea from cups they do not share, one on a chair and the other squatting on her haunches. Umrigar's writing was engaging and although the time in the book moves backward and then forward again, no one felt distracted by that.

Several women mentioned other books about India and Indian culture in the U.S., and even suggested reading another because this was so engaging. Many of the stories are vastly depressing because of the difficulty of life for lower-caste and/or poor people in India, yet important for us in our privileged, Smith-educated position to be aware of as citizens of the world!

Sophie, thank you for hosting!

On Thursday August 9 we will have our annual summer theater outing to see Romeo and Juliet at the Chapel of the Chimes.

Thanks to Nancy for hosting book club on Thursday, May 17, 2007.

Sophie sends this write-up:

Eleven of us gathered for the book club meeting on May 17 at Nancy's house to discuss Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World by Peggy Orenstein. The conversation was lively as four generations of alumnae shared their own stories of choices they had made -- and the impact they felt those decisions have had on their lives. The range of experiences shared in Nancy's living room was as wide as that of the people interviewed in Orenstein's book. Some have chosen not to have children, others are single mothers, others have had their children later in life. We also looked at how expectations and issues have changed over the past four decades: finding a "Job" after college graduation has given way to selecting and meticulously orchestrating a "Career"; staying home to raise the children seems to have evolved from being a given, to being anti-feminist, to becoming somewhat of a status symbol today. A more prominent topic today also is the dynamics of juggling children, family, and work as a lesbian couple. Overall, the group felt that women have many more choices available today. And yet, most readers identified with the women in the book, who were reluctant to assume the role of the primary breadwinner -- though the Smithies last night said they enjoy the responsibilities and independence that come from contributing to the overall family assets. The younger alumnae noted that some of the book's messages might well influence their upcoming decisions on marriage, children and work. Ultimately, the group felt that the title of the book is very accurate and that more changes in the choices women can and do make are yet to come.

Thanks to Betsey for hosting April 25th's discussion of Jeanette Winterson's Written On the Body. The meeting was enjoyable as always, although the book did not seem as controversial to our book club group as it may have been when published in 1992. To the question "What gender did you think the narrator was?", most replied, "Female", though Jane said "Male", unhesitatingly. Several actively tried not to choose while reading, as I did. (I was unsuccessful, however, and could not help thinking it was a woman.) While the language of the book was praised, few found its vision of love "revolutionary" as the Washington Post Book World was quoted as saying on the back cover. Many suspected that the narrator's affair with Louise, although trumpeted as an entirely new experience, might end up as just another in a long list of ex-lover stories.

At the meeting we chose Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma for our May book club. However, it turns out it is not yet in paperback. So, we'll put that off awhile, and instead read an alternate.

Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood drew quite a crowd to Jane's living room on February 13th, 2007! About 17 readers spanning the usual age-range (class of '47 through '05) discussed the graphic form of story-telling, comparing it to films and story-boarding, measuring whether each picture tells 1000 words and whether for certain content the image carried more weight of immediate impact than a verbal description would do. We wondered if syllabi for Smith coursework include any graphic novels or comic books, and whether this medium is literature or not. Certainly it told the story of a girl's life growing up in Iran under the Shah and afterwards, of her educated, liberal, privileged family's struggles under the regime that pulled girls out of schools and forced women to cover their heads in public, where friends and family members were imprisoned and tortured, and the author's teenage punk phase had to be lived indoors behind the black curtains protecting their privacy. Both the content and the medium provided much to discuss about this book, and several readers recommended the sequel for more information about the next chapter in Satrapi's life.

Thanks to Jane for hosting!

Twenty readers filled Sherrill's living room on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007, with plenty to say about the observations and ideas in Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs; Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture and our own experiences and musings on the culture we are part of here. There was great interest across the generations, each wanting to hear what the other thinks about the phenomenon of women participating in the "raunch culture" and whether it's possible that is actually a way for women to take power over their sexuality. In some ways it seems like a backward slide from the staunch feminism of the '70s... or maybe it is a pendulum swing from which our culture can return to a more balanced position? Like the book, our group did not conclude with a solution for shifting "sexy" to a healthy relationship to sexuality, real women's empowerment, and true equality between the sexes. There's more work to be done!

More than a dozen of us met last night (November 29, 2006) at Betsey's to discuss Zadie Smith's On Beauty. We were pleased to welcome Sophie, a first-time attendee, and welcome back others who had been long absent.

Due to the size of the group, Betsey directed the meeting with a firmer grip than is usual in our typically rather free-form discussions, starting off by asking about why we thought the title was chosen. We also explored our reactions to various characters, and questions of infidelity and forgiveness. On the question "is infidelity forgiveable?", several young alumnae among us leaned towards a hard-line approach, while some older alumnae felt that each situation needed to be evaluated on its own merits. Most found the book compelling, even though the characters were generally unappealing. Many thanks to Betsey for hosting!

-- Sherrill

Hi everyone,
I wanted to let you know that I discovered that the book we read recently, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq, has a part 2 with her more recent blog entries. Here is where you can find info from Amazon.com. Also at that discussion we talked about various blogs, so I wanted to send out the websites for the ones I mentioned. One progressive political blog is Fire Dog Lake (www.firedoglake.com), and one of the leaders is a Smithie. I also mentioned Daily Kos, which is at www.dailykos.com. Two common places where people start and maintain their own blogs are: www.blogger.com and www.livejournal.com. Happy blogging!

Katherine D'Amato ('03)

A good-sized group made it up the long and winding road to Patricia Ditton's house in the Oakland hills on October 23rd to discuss Baghdad Burning, a young Iraqi woman's blog about life in Bagdhad after the US invasion.

The writer's remarkable ease with the English language was widely admired, and we spent some time discussing our overall reactions to her writings as well as the blogging phenomenon. Those who had read the print version were more likely to have read in a linear start-to-finish fashion, although some skipped around. Those who read online were much more likely to jump around chronologically.

Many of us expressed concern and frustration about the ongoing problems with the US involvement there, and the astounding amounts of money that have been spent for rebuilding projects that have not been completed, or in some cases even started. Monica offered up the idea that if the US focused our security efforts on protecting specific, targeted, rebuilding projects, perhaps some practical results could be achieved on the ground, which could improve the lives of Iraqis in a specific area or neighborhood and undermine support for insurgent activity there.

-- Sherrill Lavagnino '84

Usually we read the first-year Smith class assignment for our September meeting, but they read Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder which our club read earlier this year. Instead we read A New Life by Bernard Malamud ©1961 and had quite an interesting discussion at Nancy's, with our signature age range from class of '47 to '05. Janet had read a biography of Malamud by his daughter, and there were several parallels between this novel and his life. Our discussion did not center on starting a new life in the West (as several of us have done), but more on the relationships and dynamics between characters in the book.

Annual play: Each year the bookclub reads a play and goes to see a local production. This August, bookclub read and attended Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams (Live Oak Theater production in Berkeley, August 12, 2006). In this play, "the self-loathing, sexually angst-ridden Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon seeks refuge in a hidden Mexican hotel." Our group included several Smithies plus friends and partners, and we quite enjoyed the show. Many of us had read the play before seeing it, and from brief conversations at intermissions and on the way out, the characters and relationships on the stage were much more complex than the written script had indicated.

One of the key points in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (©2000) is the importance of context, and we noted the importance of place for good bookclub turnout. Recent meetings had smaller attendance--attributed to last-minute and too-noisy locations. Intrigued to check out Point Richmond on July 18, 2006, many of us were delighted at the scenic drive and the view from Monica's beautiful apartment, and 15 of us sat comfortably in a light-filled room. Discussion was good because not everyone bought the concept that there is a tipping point as Gladwell describes it. Because the book considers various factors in how trends and epidemics spread, discussion expanded to scenarios such as "Great-uncle Jim" and his Mississippi levees idea that needed a good "salesman" 90 years ago in addition to the fascinating examples and case studies covered in the book (which are at least as memorable as Gladwell's "law of the few," "stickiness factor" and "context" in affecting trends, or his thesis "that ideas, products, messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do," according to Publisher's Weekly). We appreciated the book for its provocation of thought as much as for its interesting reading and content.

Gathered around the big table at Tully's coffeehouse in downtown Berkeley on June 20, 2006, about eight readers discussed Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (who recently won a Pulizer for her novel Giliad). The beautiful prose was so intoxicating that several of us had to re-read passages such as "The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted." We explored this haunting novel for threads and explanations of what it says about family, and the importance of people once they're gone through details and obsession about the grandfather and mother, and how aunt Sylvie responds to the threat of Ruthie (the narrator) being taken away from her... and were unable to draw conclusion or moral from the story.

Though told from the perspective of one girl telling the story of her life as an adult, much of the book was description not dialogue, and though she did not sound sad, we found the book overall to be quite depressing. Another story of unconventional childhood that seems particularly daunting is Jeannette Walls' memoir Glass Castle (2005).

Many thanks to Ros for hosting us last-minute on May 18! Nancy, Maggie, and Jennie gathered in the evening light of Ros' coastal Alameda living room and talked about Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken.

We found that the writing was laugh-out-loud funny at times, and the research by the Harvard students, "TeamFranken," quite thorough. We found we didn't know much about Ann Coulter, who Franken lambasted throughout the book (she has written several books criticizing the "liberal left"), and there were several familiar points from Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas and George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant. Although Franken's book is based on facts, in careful response to lies he points out in conservative publications, but it is clearly for a left-wing audience. Bringing humor to the depressing progress of "liberal" body politic, Franken's book does start to reframe the debate, as Lakoff advises we must to really counter the careful phrasing that depicts even moderate citizens as "pro-death" and supporters of tax impediments.

A large group of around 20 Smith alums (from the classes of '46-'05) gathered on April 25th at the beautiful Montclair home of Jane Robinson to discuss Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, '86. A spirited discussion began immediately, as everyone in the group responded strongly to the book and had lots to say.

Many people voiced their frustrations at the choices made by the individual characters chronicled in the nonfiction work. We wondered why birth control was never a viable option to the many teens who are having their third, fourth, and fifth children before they themselves reach the age of 21. Despite the many comments around individual decisions, the discussion centered on the failure of the system--from public elementary schools to various social services--that are dysfunctional and unable to effectively help those people who need it most.

Some of the important themes gleaned from the book were around poverty (class), gender dynamics, race, and cultural differences. Some people found it hard to understand why a young mother of four would spend money on new name-brand sneakers for her children, instead of on medication or basic food products. On the other hand, we talked about how the title Random Family aptly describes the support network formed in the Bronx inner-city. Jessica, one of the main characters of the book, was incarcerated for 7 years for her involvement in her boyfriend Boy George's large-scale heroine business, and therefore her children went to live with Milagros--a family friend with problems of her own. Even when Jessica gave birth to twins in prison, Milagros took the infants in indefinitely, without asking anything in return. That alternate notion of family is at the core of the book. Young women spend time and energy trying to impress neighborhood boys who, in turn, spend their time on the street (and in prison), while the girls are left to struggle to raise the children.

Many Smithies brought their own experiences to the table. We heard about one woman's time in Harlem working with inner-city youth in the 1960's, and many people talked about the Oakland and Berkeley Public school system. Although most of us were raised with far more privileges than the characters of the book, many of us related to the essential needs expressed by the characters: love, support and stability. We all wanted to pass Random Family to teenagers or others who could possibly relate to young women like Jessica and Coco, in hopes that their life examples (as portrayed by LeBlanc) could serve as a warning about the consequences of one's decisions--as well as an illustration of how people struggle to love, work, and create families in our own country.

It was a really exciting book club meeting and I personally feel fortunate to have been present for the interesting perspectives and ideas expressed by all the Smithies there!

-- Elana Jacobs '05

You may remember the interview with LeBlanc in the Summer 2003 Smith Alumnae Quarterly.

We met March 30, 2006 at Betsey Warrick's lovely abode and discussed Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. Discussions centered around the themes, characters, plot, setting, usual literary stuff. Wide range of opinions and emotions about the book, with some people intrigued and others unengaged by his writing style. Thanks to Jean Lusson for suggesting the following web site to learn more about Pynchon: http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu.

Thanks Mary for this funny quotation explaining what the book is about -- copied without punctuation, as written!

Vineland plot-summary
Feminist film collective 24fps covers a college revolution led by Weed Frenesi falls for fascist Brock because of her genetic weakness for uniforms Brock asks her to set up Weed's murder, she goes along for no good reason Fleeing Brock, Frenesi marries Zoyd completely at random, Prairie born Fleeing Zoyd, Frenesi marries Fletch(?) settles into life as gov't informant Brock entraps Zoyd with pot-bale, releases him (why?) as a welfare-loony DL enlisted by Ralph to kill Brock, attacks Takeshi by mistake -> partners [Uneventful years?] Frenesi freed from gov't obligations due to budget cuts Brock mounts final revenge campaign (why?), seizes Zoyd's home Prairie meets DL, learns Frenesi's story Prairie and Frenesi reunited in Vineland (w/Sasha and Zoyd, etc) Brock's try at abducting Prairie interrupted by Reagan's serendipitous order Prairie, too, is smitten by Brock's fascism, even as her family is reunited http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/faq/BargerFAQ.html#vinesum

Thanks to Nancy Spaeth for hosting the February 28, 2006 discussion of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. To those who wondered if the hostage incident in the book was based on a true story, Mary found this reference on a State Department web site:

In December 1996, 14 MRTA members occupied the Japanese Ambassador's residence in Lima and held 72 hostages for more than four months. Peruvian forces stormed the residence in April 1997, rescuing all but one of the remaining hostages and killing all 14 group members, including the remaining leaders. The group has not conducted a significant terrorist operation since and appears more focused on obtaining the release of imprisoned MRTA members.
http://library.nps.navy.mil/home/tgp/tupac.htm

So, it would appear her book was based on this incident, as other Amazon readers claim.

Overall, people loved the book and its themes of love and music. It read like an adult fairy tale, despite what we agreed was an overly abrupt outcome. Those who hadn't reached the end were not too dismayed that we had to reveal the outcome to discuss the story!

Somehow talking about the roles of the few females in the book, we gravitated to themes of gender, work, and family life. Nancy pointed out that both Betty Friedan and Wendy Wasserstein died in recent weeks, and perhaps that is why we discussed those themes. (We considered reading some of seminal feminist books and texts and wanted to schedule reading Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc in the future.)

What do 19 Smithies (from class of 1946 to 2005) think of Alice Munro's short stories in the collection called Runaway (the title of the first story, originally published in The New Yorker)? Quite a mixture of opinions! In the course of almost two hours on January 19, 2006, everyone spoke and discussion was good because some people didn't like it, some liked the writing -- particularly her sharp descriptions of mundane details -- and others said they had to re-read whole paragraphs to grasp them.

We struggled with the format of short stories not being long or robust enough to fill out the characters to the point that we could really know them (though they stay with us), that the book left gaping holes in the stories of these women's lives and we're left wondering what happened in between. One suggestion about the variation in response to those gaps was that with age and/or life experience the reader may more easily fill in spaces in the story, may more easily accept things going unexplained. Munro describes life events from the perspective of women's experience -- which conditions are often difficult and trying -- with almost-psychological insight. These stories are rare in that they capture human life events, the kind of things people are often hesitant to discuss. They "air dirty laundry," exploring the parts of women's lives that they might not be proud of, the struggles and peculiarities of personality they encountered in their lives in small-town Canada, the shadows of their experience, in several cases over a wide span of years in their lives. As readers we know we're not getting the full picture, but we are offered the private side of the characters, which is not necessarily welcome or comfortable. (Somehow we did not get to "Trespasses", the story about the adopted daughter, which deals with some difficult issues and could be an excellent discussion.)

Meghan asked whether short stories, of necessity like poetry in how concise and deliberate each phrase must be, are better when we listen to them rather than read them, and we mused about listening to a Checkov story together (if anyone has a good short story on CD, we can try to fit in listening to it at an upcoming book club gathering). For those who don't like short stories in general, it was torture that several other collections of short stories were suggested for our next meeting, and after several suggestions including Housekeeping, a novel by Marilynne Robinson (decided it was too similar in tone to Runaway) and What's the Matter with Kansas? (now out in paperback), we settled on Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (arguably part of the contemporary "book club canon").

Afterwards, about 8 people stayed on to watch Jennie's housemate Juliet's showing of "A Good Uplift," a 13-minute documentary by Juliet's friend Faye, about a bra shop on the lower-east side of Manhattan. Donna commented, "the book discussion and the video content went amusingly well together."

Short stories/collections mentioned

Brokeback Mountain (New Yorker 1997) is in Close Range : Wyoming Stories (paperback came out in 2000) by Annie Proulx. There is a book called Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (paperback) that contains Annie Proulx's original short story version of Brokeback Mountain as it appeared in The New Yorker along with the screenplay to Ang Lee's film by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. The movie is in theatres now.
Interpreter of Maladies stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
Anton Checkov, short story master (he published over 40) and reference point (The Boston Globe review of Runaway says Alice Munro "outjoices Joyce and checkmates Chekhov")
Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

In from the rain on Thursday, December 1, 2005 at Maggie's house, we debated the merits of this "new genre" of Chick Lit that made the cover story of the recent SAQ and raised the ire of the literati.

Lots more notes coming soon--it was a great evening! --Ed.

On Tuesday, October 25, 2005 Betsey hosted the discussion of Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer.

The EBSC book club has previously read Kidder's Soul of the New Machine, and many have read Home Town about the non-Smith side of Northampton, and House. Mountains Beyond Mountains discusses Farmer's public health programs in Haiti, Peru, Russia and Boston and his efforts to develop best practices in treatments for AIDs and multi-drug resistant TB. For further reading on Farmer's work, see the Partners in Health web site www.pih.org. For more information about the book, see www.mountainsbeyondmountains.org

At the meeting, the group asked these questions: What word(s) would you choose to characterize the book? What role did the search for money play in Farmer's life? What choices were involved in his life? Consequences? What qualities in Farmer did you identify? Were you inspired by his philosopy, energy, work? What would you talk about if you found yourself in a room with Farmer? What kind of support system is needed for his kind of endeavor? Why would you recommend the book? For answers, talk to readers who attended... at the next meeting!

Changing sets from an EBSC board meeting to bookclub meeting at Sherrill's house on September 22nd, readers chatted about Smith students and prospectives, leading nicely into a discussion of Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher, this year's assignment for entering Smith students to discuss during orientation meetings in the houses.

Each year Smith College selects a book to be read by all entering students over the summer before they arrive. The author of the book is invited to campus during orientation to address the Smith community through reading, reflection, and sharing their experiences of writing the book. This is a highlight of the orientation program! For more information about the book, see http://www.perugiapress.com/books2004_kettle.html. This book of poetry about Appalachia is not widely available. Some of us waited a few weeks for an Amazon order and others shared scarce copies. We highly recommend it to those who have not read it, and we wondered if Smith managed to open some eyes and hearts amongst the new students.

Set in a mining town in West Virginia in 1920-21, the poems were able to convey the different voices of miners and their family members more nimbly than a novel could. With an introduction explaining the facts of the time and place in history, including the miners' struggle to survive in the company town where they were forbidden to unionize, and subsequent uprisings, the poems filled in the spaces between historical fact with emotion and poignant details.

One of the early poems in the book explained that "kettle bottom" was what the community called the petrified tree on the mountain the miners were digging. We talked about the poems that touched us the most--the middle section, Ravens Light, and the one about the blue coat. We pondered what it's like for incoming students to read the book, what it is like for them to read about how those people suffered, if it puts into perspective the great privelege of attending Smith, for all the sacrifices many people make to get there.

All the readers gathered at Nancy's on August 25, 2005 were glad we'd read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. We pondered the title, which evoked for several of us Middlemarch, a British town, or a New Jersey county and which is almost trite in its double entendre. Usually when everyone likes a book, the discussion can be brief, but we enjoyed the tangents that arose out of individual's observations, such as that it is an immigrant story, a multi-generational story, and explores the cultural anomie at a different angle from some of the other immigrant stories we read earlier this year.

We enjoyed having a biologist in our midst for some of the scientific questions related to the book's narrator and main character, Calliope or Cal. Conversation touched on the subtle differences between sex and gender (sometimes propriety, sometimes political) and society's need to know whether a baby is a boy or a girl and the different ways even strangers interact with an infant or child based on presumed gender. Most of us felt that the author did capture the adolescent girl experience, that much of what we read resonated with our memories of being young girls, and yet there seemed some premonition that something was different for Callie. We noted that we continued to refer to Cal as "she", possibly because that's how we had known the character for most of the book, though in the end Cal is living as an adult male.

Related to Callie's barbership experience and the importance of hair to her (and his) cultural gender identity, Catherine showed up for our meeting with a shaved head and anecdotes about how dramatically people react to changes in other people's appearance, and how differently people respond to long blond hair vs. nearly bald head.

Inevitably topics meandered away from the book, and the whole group lingered over topics of education, Gertrude Stein and the Japanese emperor as marine biologists in Woods' Hole, travel, and personal histories. Thanks to Nancy for hosting!

Lounging in the living room at Jennie's house the warm evening of June 29, the gathered readers weren't all thrilled with Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. Several readers wanted more depth on each of the plants (apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes), but most all had learned a few new things. However, we were all skeptical about the premise of plants manipulating humans to cultivate their species or variety. We did wish for a gardener's perspective on some of the ideas.

Although the apple section pointed out that Johnny Appleseed was popular because those early apple trees brought hard cider to the frontier, the marijuana section discussed the effect of THC on perception and memory, and the potato section raised the issue of genetic modification, none of this news sparked in-depth debate. We nibbled organic grapes and tomatoes, chatted about various topics tangentially related to the book, and headed off into summer.

The group of eight Smithies discussing Lakoff's book Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives at Ruth's on May 17th was a little dispirited. People were discouraged about the burden of getting the progressive agenda defined and promoted, and wanted more from the Lakoff book in terms of prescriptions on how to move forward. Two readers made compelling statements about their efforts to speak civilly with the their elders/family members about the conservative shift in the country.

In this book, linguistics professor George Lakoff (author of the influential and more extensive book on the subject, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2nd edition 2002) explains how conservatives think and how to counter their arguments. He outlines the traditional American values that progressives hold but are often unable to articulate. Lakoff also breaks down the ways in which conservatives have framed the issues and provides examples of how progressives can reframe the debate.

Seven of us (and one late-comer) settled down in Betsey's living room and after very little small-talk launched into the question of why White Teeth by Zadie Smith has the title it does. Certainly there were subtle references and ironies, but we weren't clear. Two people had read it years previously and remembered it as being good, recent readers had mixed responses about which parts of the book were too slow, too unbelievable. Criss-crossing the room were disagreements about the interest and development of the characters, the plausibility of some of the relationships, and the viability of gracefully covering all the necessary details for its rather complex cast list and plot, but also appreciation for how much she covered in one first novel and the dialects of language she captured in print.

Like The Gangster We Are All Looking For and even Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, this book explored cultural and generational fractals: bifurcation and repetition, teenage rebellion and idealizing homelands.

Trying to describe the book in a sentence, we proposed "the absurdity of the immigrant experience in modern North London" and "immigrants concerned with losing their culture just as locals worried about immigrants shifting their neighborhoods." Looking at the book from this broader perspective, we noticed the theme of fanatical groups throughout the book, from the Jehovah's Witnesses to the Muslim K.E.V.I.N. group, which merits more discussion perhaps, but we diverted to marvel at the ideas about The Rapture--something not everyone knows about. (For more information see the description from Wikipedia and some more depth and history at www.religioustolerance.org/rapture.htm.)

Shuffling though an abundance of book-title suggestions and continuing some discussion of politics, we decided to step away from stories of immigrant experience and dive into social-political musings.

A few of us were already seated in Sherrill's living room on March 8, nibbling cheese and crackers, when a loud knock brought us to attention: It announced the arrival of police officer Veramo. We recognized Catherine, though she did look different in her "costume,"--her police officer's complete uniform missing only the radio. She did the routine she uses with Girl and Boy Scout troops who learn about policing, describing each item on her "bat belt" and let us try it on, feel its weight, and shake our heads in wonder. Thanks to Catherine, this was no ordinary book club meeting, but a community education session.

Catherine and her friend from the Oakland Police, Jonna Watson, were an impressive show-and-tell to accompany our discussion of Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You: Stories by Laurie Lynn Drummond, which Catherine had recommended to the group--as well as to other police officers she knows. A quick read, this well-written collection of stories describes five female police officers' experiences in Lousiana. Catherine and Jonna talked about parts of the book that really resonated with their experience, and also about differences: the level and amount of training (which is much higher in California), counseling and relief after high-stress or traumatic calls, etc. They expanded on the book by adding some of their own stories, and confirmed that women police feel held to a higher standard than men, that they have to prove themselves.

Catherine seemed thrilled to bring her two worlds together for an evening, though she knows her life and her sanity rely on her keeping them separate most of the time. The uniform and the persona that goes with it need to be something she can take off when she goes home to her family--and something she can put on when facing brutal humanity.

"In this stunning debut collection of short fiction, Laurie Lynn Drummond mines her eight years as a cop to tell the stories of five female police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In prose as unflinching as the job itself, each woman's story -- like each call in a police officer's day -- varies in its singular drama, but all the tales illuminate the tenuous line between life and death, violence and control, despair and salvation." - San Diego Union-Tribune

Though we talked more about the women, police life, and the content of the stories, it was likely because the book was so well-written and the characters so vividly portrayed that we wondered, worried, and marveled at them. We also marveled at and appreciated the women sitting in the room with us, for whom these kinds stories are not fiction.

A dozen of us, well-fortified with a variety of snacks, settled into Kathryn Kasch's living room to discuss Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman on February 16th. We all thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated this cerebral account of the Polish author's intellectual adjustment upon immigrating to Canada. We marveled at the meticulous choice of words in describing both her childhood in Poland, her adolescence in Vancouver, and her coming-of-age in the big U.S. American culture of the '60's university scene. As 3/4 of the gathered readers have lived in another country for some period of time (rather remarkable in itself), we felt especially sensitive to the cultural references of language that go far beyond translation of text, and admired Hoffman's mastery of both.

At our January 20, 2005 meeting at Catherine Veramo's house in Oakland, we discussed a book written by one of our members, Ros McIntosh, titled Live, Laugh and Learn: Tales of Tumultuous Times, published by Infinity Publishing. The book is a series of real-life vignettes from wartime experiences in Germany to family life in California. Ros attended Smith on a Fulbright scholarship, and has lived in the US ever since, though she often visited friends and relatives in Europe. Started as a way to share parts of her life with her daughters, Ros expanded her writing to include her experience as a studious, hard-working mother in California. We were glad to hear she is considering expanding on the first part, which describes some of her experiences as a child in eastern Germany before and during WWII. We were intrigued and eager to fill in more detail and the connections between the stories, as this particular perspective, as not-Jew and not-Nazi, is rare in the literature we know of about life in that time in Germany. (Ros' father refused to join the Nazi party, and he and the family relied on their many connections and the diplomacy of their Scandinavian mother.)

Christopher, the narrator, completely drew us into his story in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. He told it in such an accessible and straight-forward manner, accented with mathematical equations and diagrams of his thoughts and surroundings. We had some discussion about whether he was mildly autistic or has Asperger's syndrome (considered to be on a different place in the spectrum of socially-challenged mentally brilliant people), as well as how the author was able to portray this way of thinking.

Not surprisingly, discussion at this November 17th book club also branched out into politics and the different approaches readers have in responding to the recent election and subsequent conversations in the diverse media.

Ros McIntosh had brought a bag full of her books, and we bought copies to read for the January gathering. Betsey challenged us to read up a bit on WWII history to have more to add to the discussion (the book begins in Germany, 1939).

Many thanks to Maggie for hosting!

NOTE: Book club will not meet in December. In January we will read Live, Laugh and Learn: Tales of Tumultuous Times by Ros McIntosh '55. Betsey already started reading Ros' book: "As a German child whose family was caught in the turmoil of WWII, she writes a very compelling story. It's a history review and raises many questions of policy including why our governemt was so reluctant to help Jews at the beginnning of the war in Europe. It should make for a lively discussion and also applaud another one of our group for a literary achievement."

Though not everyone had finished reading the whole 9/11 Commission Report (it was easier for government and history majors, it seemed), the discussion reflected passion and amazement, frustratration and inspiration on October 15th in Betsey's living room. We were pleased that it was so readable; impressed at the depth of explanation about Muslim culture and history; frustrated that so many uncoordinated agencies of our federal government harbor suspicions and hold on to power so that sharing of information is next to impossible; appreciative of the credible conclusions of the committee; and appalled that we see no progress in enacting the recommendations that conclude the report.

No smoking gun is revealed, but the report poses lots of questions as to who really is responsible for what and how decisions come about. Several members present decided to write (snail or email) to our representatives in Congress about the urgency for Congress to act on the Commission's report. Accordingly, Jane Robinson wrote the following template letter which can be modified in any way the writer sees fit.

Dear Senator Boxer,

We are writing to ask your support for the enactment of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report. We, members of the Smith College Club of the East Bay, have just read the report in its entirety and we feel that implementation of its recommendations is crucial.

Sincerely,

Smithie name

Many thanks to Betsey Warrick for hosting!

You can download the 9/11 Commission report for free in PDF format if you prefer to read it online. Printing it all out would probably cost more in paper than buying the book.
See http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/index.htm

The 9/11 Report
by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
636 pages, St. Martin's Paperbacks; (August 2, 2004) $6.99 list
This is the New York Times edition, which supposedly includes nearly 70 pages of NYT articles on the formation and activities of the Commission (but it doesn't include end-notes).

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
516 pages, W.W. Norton & Company; (July 22, 2004) $10 list

For September, we joined the incoming first-year class of Smith in reading The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Lê Thi Diem Thúy. Thirteen of us trickled in by 7:30pm to the lounge of Jordan's restaurant at the Claremont Hotel Thursday night the 23rd, including some old and new faces. We took the opportunity to go around the circle and introduce ourselves--name, year, and occupation. Turns out that our experiences (career or other activities and interests) shape our interpretation of what we read! Betsey, with years of working with refugees, focused on the experience of the immigrant, while others found it to be more simply the story of a girl or an almost-autobiography told in pieces. We were baffled by the title. We discussed the writing style, which, in its use of beautifully crafted descriptive vignettes, bordered on poetry, yet was also very effective prose. We all enjoyed the quality of the writing and the way the author was able to present the perspective of a small child as she saw the new world around her.

Why did Smith select this book as the required reading for this year's incoming class? The group was unable to conclude any obvious reason, other than perhaps that it is the story of a young woman with many different experiences in her life embarking upon something new and unknown--just as new students at Smith are.

After gazing in awe from Nancy Spaeth's window at the low-lying fog completely covering the bay on August 11, gathered readers started with a discussion of Eve Ensler's play, The Good Body, last month's book-club outing. We were curious to know what teenage daughters thought of it, which seemed to vary as for grown-ups: humorous, saddening, resonant, or angering. Those with few body issues found the play less engaging. Either way, it ignited discussion about body image, which is good to have in the open especially for teens.

Everyone found this month's book, The Kite Runner, well-written and poignant, the characters and scenery so well portrayed that we could picture everything, uncomfortable as that can be sometimes in the course of this story. After noticing a few pat literary devices that were balanced by the compelling story and other plot twists, we mused about the author (see http://www.khaledhosseini.com for more information) and the history of Afghanistan. Without coming to a definite conclusion, we also discussed whether the ends justified the means in the case of the US bombing Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban. Is life better now? Was it worth the price?

This year we moved our annual summer theater event to the ACT instead of shivering at Shakespeare under the stars. Quite a large group of book club members, guests, and a lone San Francisco Smithie had a pleasant evening Friday, July 23rd. Most of the group met for dinner beforehand at the Grand Cafe, then headed over to the Geary Theater for Eve Ensler's latest play, The Good Body. Although we didn't get much of a chance to exchange reactions afterwards, all would probably agree that she is an extremely dynamic performer and deals with important themes in her works. Several book club members brought their daughters; it would be interesting to hear their reactions. Thanks to Lynne for organizing!

Many thanks to Kate for hosting us June 23 for our discussion of Play It As It Lays. All felt that Joan Didion's writing was evocative and skilled. Reaction to the characters was fairly universal distaste. We did note an interesting parallel with The Country of the Pointed Firs, in that location plays such an important part in both books. In truth, we actually didn't spend much time on the book before moving on to other topics of general interest.

Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs & Other Stories introduced us to interesting characters of late-nineteenth-century, coastal Maine. After admiring Martha Iverson's lovely view and charming garden on Friday evening, May 28, we talked about the simple and rustic life depicted in Jewett's stories juxtaposed with the richness of the personalities who populated the tiny, sea-worn town of Dunnet Landing. We discussed how the narrator was ever present in the scenes, yet we knew so little of her; the focus is on others. The lack of plot in The Country of the Pointed Firs, pointedly remarked on in various introductions (different editions were read by different people), was not seen as having much relevance for our reading experiences, although it seems to have significant literary importance. Overall, the group seemed to enjoy the "other stories" even more, as they provide more depth to the characters.

On April 14th we discussed Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Beautiful language about an awful character was the majority opinion about this historically controversial piece of literature. Many of us had read all or part of the book decades ago, and still didn't love it even after having read Azar Nafisi's insights last month. As expected, though, it was an entry into very interesting discussion, and therefore a good choice! Thanks to Sherrill for hosting.

10th Anniversary Book Club

10 years of books and a crowd of happy readers (click for names)

March 30, 1994 was the first EBSC book club meeting. In honor of the anniversary, Sherrill collected a list of all the books we've ever read, and orchestrated having a copy of all but one present for our books-and-people photo-shoot at Ruth Ganong's. Sherrill will send the picture to the SAQ along with an article about the book club.

Ruth Ganong generously hosted our anniversary book club meeting to discuss Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi on Thursday, March 25, 2004. A crowd of 15 alumnae looked at books arranged in the kitchen, toasted with champagne, ate chocolate cake, and filled Ruth's living room for an energetic discussion about the book, English literature, history and politics, what life was like in Iran, and Muslim culture in the USA.

Book: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi, in paperback 384 pages. One review: http://www.powells.com/review/2003_05_27.html

Other books about the Middle East the club has read over the years include Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks and Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong.

-------------------------

From Kathy: During our discussion of Reading Lolita in Tehran, I asked a trivia question about which state first granted women the right to vote. My Garden State pride was shining, but actually there is no one correct response. New Jersey was the first jurisdiction worldwide to do this, but it was conditional & it was revoked 30 years later.

1776 - 1807 New Jersey: granted only to propertied women & was revoked in 1807.
1839 Pitcairn Islands
1839 Wyoming Territory (and thus, Maggie is correct in that the Wyoming Territory was the first where the right was unconditional & continuous until federal law was enacted in 1920.)
1881 Isle of Man
Etc.

SOURCE: Chronology of Worldwide Woman Suffrage, International Museum of Women, 101 Howard St., San Francisco http://www.imow.org

Betsey Warrick hosted the February 19, 2004 book club meeting where seven of us discussed Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (c) 1975, 224 pages. "A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity."

We had a fairly lively discussion with an intrigued response: The talk-story approach with all its ghosts, perhaps, made it challenging for some readers to get through the book. However, we found it worthwhile to do so, having enjoyed the images evoked such as the visiting sister-in-law and appreciated that the characters were different at different times (and places) in their lives.

Ros McIntosh generously hosted the book club meeting on Thursday, January 22.

Book: Some of Us Did Not Die by June Jordan, Basic Books 2002. 304 pages.

Some of the essays in the book were published in the The Progressive, one of which you can read online: http://www.progressive.org/jord0301.html
One obituary of June Jordan: http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,11617,740747,00.html
One book review: http://www.hprob.com/fall2002normreviews/junejordan.htm

An intimate group of four, we greatly enjoyed discussing the essays in Some of Us Did NOT Die by the late June Jordan, poet and UCB professor. Previously unfamiliar with the author, we found her essays addressed many and varied civil rights issues with facts, figures, contemporary political references, and rightous rage--from MLKJr. to breast cancer, Black English as a language expressive of Black culture to socio-economical discomforts on vacation in the Bahamas. Discussing a book of essays is immensely well-suited to book club (for future reference) as we could talk about issues in the essays, and jump around discussing those that had interested us most, even if not everyone has read the whole book.

December 2003

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Talking about The Awakening and Their Eyes Were Watching God together in December provided interesting observation and commentary on women authors writing "before their time" and only appreciated much, much later, and now studied in high schools as well as college level as part of the burgeoning women's/feminist literary canon.

Previous readings:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (November 2003)

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (October 2003)

Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare (including performance at CalShakes, August 2003)

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaadje (July 2003)

Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (June 2003)

A Woman's Education by Jill Ker Conway (May 2003)

Atonement by Ian McEwan (April 2003)

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (March 2003)

and many more (we have a list going back to 1994 if you're interested)