The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
by Jean Dominique Bauby
This spring the library began hosting a new book club called the Book Lover's Cafe. We meet at the Port Townsend Community Center Lounge the first Monday of the month at 2:30. The group began with a short work of nonfiction, Jean Dominique Bauby's “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Bauby was paralyzed by a brain stem stroke that left him a quadriplegic with "locked-in syndrome" able only to blink the left eye lid to communicate. Bauby helped us empathize with the emotions he felt when he vividly recalled "the simmering memories" of preparing and eating meals and the loss of physical activity and sensual touch. We also noted the lines that the "glory of friendship keeps the vultures at bay". Bauby so appreciated letters when friends wrote of slices from their everyday life rather than spiritual or philosophical bromides.
His writing was neither bitter nor full of self pity. It was a very realistic description of his plight yet full of ironic humor and lyrical flights of imagination.
We also discussed future book club reads. Here are some of the suggested titles.
Life of Pi- Yann Martel
An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a book. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Bel Canto- Ann Patchett
Amazon.com's Best of 2001In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned soprano sings at a birthday party in honor of a visiting Japanese industrial titan. His hosts hope that Mr. Hosokawa can be persuaded to build a factory in their Third World backwater. Alas, in the opening sequence, just as the accompanist kisses the soprano, a ragtag band of 18 terrorists enters the vice-presidential mansion through the air conditioning ducts. Their quarry is the president, who has unfortunately stayed home to watch a favorite soap opera. And thus, from the beginning, things go awry.
The Inheritance of Loss- Kiran Desai
Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.
Elegy for Iris- John Bayley
Memoir by the husband of novelist Iris Murdoch of her life and effects of her struggle with Alzhemiers
The Worst Hard Time- Tim Egan
From The New Yorker On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. People standing a few feet apart could not see each other; if they touched, they risked being knocked over by the static electricity that the dust created in the air. The Dust Bowl was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in "black blizzards," which blew as far east as New York. This ecological disaster rapidly disfigured whole communities. Egan's portraits of the families who stayed behind are sobering and far less familiar than those of the "exodusters" who staggered out of the High Plains. He tells of towns depopulated to this day, a mother who watched her baby die of "dust pneumonia," and farmers who gathered tumbleweed as food for their cattle and, eventually, for their children.
In the Heart of the Sea: the Sinking of a the Whale Ship Essex- Nathaniel Philbrick
Amazon.comThe appeal of Dava Sobel's Longitude was, in part, that it illuminated a little-known piece of history through a series of captivating incidents and engaging personalities. Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea is certainly cast from the same mold, examining the 19th-century Pacific whaling industry through the arc of the sinking of the whaleship Essex by a boisterous sperm whale. The story that inspired Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick has a lot going for it--derring-do, cannibalism, rescue--and Philbrick proves an amiable and well-informed narrator, providing both context and detail. We learn about the importance and mechanics of blubber production--a vital source of oil--and we get the nuts and bolts of harpooning and life aboard whalers. We are spared neither the nitty-gritty of open boats nor the sucking of human bones dry.
by Jean Dominique Bauby
This spring the library began hosting a new book club called the Book Lover's Cafe. We meet at the Port Townsend Community Center Lounge the first Monday of the month at 2:30. The group began with a short work of nonfiction, Jean Dominique Bauby's “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Bauby was paralyzed by a brain stem stroke that left him a quadriplegic with "locked-in syndrome" able only to blink the left eye lid to communicate. Bauby helped us empathize with the emotions he felt when he vividly recalled "the simmering memories" of preparing and eating meals and the loss of physical activity and sensual touch. We also noted the lines that the "glory of friendship keeps the vultures at bay". Bauby so appreciated letters when friends wrote of slices from their everyday life rather than spiritual or philosophical bromides.
His writing was neither bitter nor full of self pity. It was a very realistic description of his plight yet full of ironic humor and lyrical flights of imagination.
We also discussed future book club reads. Here are some of the suggested titles.
Life of Pi- Yann Martel
An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a book. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Bel Canto- Ann Patchett
Amazon.com's Best of 2001In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned soprano sings at a birthday party in honor of a visiting Japanese industrial titan. His hosts hope that Mr. Hosokawa can be persuaded to build a factory in their Third World backwater. Alas, in the opening sequence, just as the accompanist kisses the soprano, a ragtag band of 18 terrorists enters the vice-presidential mansion through the air conditioning ducts. Their quarry is the president, who has unfortunately stayed home to watch a favorite soap opera. And thus, from the beginning, things go awry.
The Inheritance of Loss- Kiran Desai
Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.
Elegy for Iris- John Bayley
Memoir by the husband of novelist Iris Murdoch of her life and effects of her struggle with Alzhemiers
The Worst Hard Time- Tim Egan
From The New Yorker On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. People standing a few feet apart could not see each other; if they touched, they risked being knocked over by the static electricity that the dust created in the air. The Dust Bowl was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in "black blizzards," which blew as far east as New York. This ecological disaster rapidly disfigured whole communities. Egan's portraits of the families who stayed behind are sobering and far less familiar than those of the "exodusters" who staggered out of the High Plains. He tells of towns depopulated to this day, a mother who watched her baby die of "dust pneumonia," and farmers who gathered tumbleweed as food for their cattle and, eventually, for their children.
In the Heart of the Sea: the Sinking of a the Whale Ship Essex- Nathaniel Philbrick
Amazon.comThe appeal of Dava Sobel's Longitude was, in part, that it illuminated a little-known piece of history through a series of captivating incidents and engaging personalities. Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea is certainly cast from the same mold, examining the 19th-century Pacific whaling industry through the arc of the sinking of the whaleship Essex by a boisterous sperm whale. The story that inspired Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick has a lot going for it--derring-do, cannibalism, rescue--and Philbrick proves an amiable and well-informed narrator, providing both context and detail. We learn about the importance and mechanics of blubber production--a vital source of oil--and we get the nuts and bolts of harpooning and life aboard whalers. We are spared neither the nitty-gritty of open boats nor the sucking of human bones dry.
Cris Wilson
1 comment:
I enjoyed the movie and didn't realize it was a book. Looking forward to reading it.
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