The Mayor's Tongue; The Legend of Colton H. Bryant; Interpreter of Maladies

Nancy's "Abraham Lincoln Book Club" post has been hanging out there for weeks. Not everything I've been reading recently is public humanities-related, but I thought I'd mention a few, just to keep things rolling. So to speak. Something for me, something for work, something for my book club.

First is Nathaniel Rich's The Mayor's Tongue, a new first novel by the 27-year-old senior editor of The Paris Review. This is the kind of novel I like--conceptual, philosophical, intertextual, etc. (ask me about Stephen Marche's ambitious Shining At the Bottom of the Sea). It is really two stories, one of a young man on the trail of The Great Writer (also on the trail of his love); the other of two elderly gentlemen, one of whom must trail the other back to the land of their past. All roads lead to Italy in this book, pleasantly enough. A kind of fabulism or magical realism comes to the fore early, and, as the book evolves, it gets tricky, with failed communication, translation, interplay of reality and storytelling the apparent themes. I enjoyed it, as expected, but someone is going to have to explain it to me. Sometimes just going along for the ride is good enough; you don't have to know where you have been. If you have book groups that enjoy experimental or alternative fiction, this might work. Stephen King blurbed it; "brimming with brio," he said.

Next was Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, similarly, a very new book, Wyoming-based, about the life and death of an oil-rig worker. The author is famous (I am told), the book is getting attention, and I hated it so thoroughly that I took detailed notes and wrote a lengthy review. Kim has wisely suppressed the review, since she's trying to get Fuller for our book festival next fall. I'll be long-gone by then, at Tengboche Monastery in the Khumbu, writing my Three Jiggers of Gin. If you promise not to pass it on, I'll share the review with you. It was great fun to write. It's an awful book.

Third was Jumpha Lahiri's 1999 Interpeter of Maladies, our book club selection for the month. Whenever it is her turn, one of the women in our group always chooses something outside our comfortable Euro-American box--always to our edification. (I, on the other hand, always choose something I have already read). Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories of contemporary Indian culture and its Diaspora. If you have a reading and discussion theme on world lit, cultural globalization, etc., this book would be a good choice. It is engaging, well written--she is one of those writers that makes writing look easy--and full of interesting, enlightening, and discussable material. It has a bit of a "welcome to my world" feel throughout, but Americans need to experience other cultures and especially their perspectives on us. As a friend says, it would be a disgrace if, having globalized the world, we failed to globalize ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln Book Club

Our humanities council is planning for a statewide reading and discussion program called "Indiana Reads About Lincoln." So many books to choose from, but which ones would be appropriate for a public audience? You know the wish list: in print, reasonable length, general interest, author who might be available for a talk.

Here are a few I've been considering:

• David Herbert Donald, Lincoln at Home: Two Glimpses of Abraham Lincoln's Family Life
• Tom Wheeler, Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War
• Paul & Stephen Kendrick, Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union

Any nominations from the floor? Anybody else planning a similar series?

Wow...some of my favourite books are on this list. What does that say about me, eh?

While reading a Wikipedia article about the Lorax (see the Missouri Council's blog), I came across a tidbit about it being a banned book. The Lorax? A banned book...seriously? I clicked through to the link they provided to the Dixie State College Library website and was surprised, not to mention mildly amused, by the selections included in the list. Some of the reasons given are just downright silly, if not absurd. (Or in the case of Fahrenheit 451, painfully ironic)

This sent me on a tangent, and after a little webferreting, I thought I would share a few of my favourite banned books and the "explanations" of why they are banned.

Riddle me this: What is/are your favourite banned book(s) and why was it/they banned?

Enjoy.

From Dixie State College Library
Fahrenheit 451
by: Ray Bradbury
Banned for being "dangerous", this book is set in the future, when all books are banned and people called 'firemen' enforce the laws against them. 451 degrees is the temperature that paper catches fire.

To Kill a Mockingbird
by: Harper Lee
Banned as recently as August 2001, in Oklahoma for "racially charged language."

James and the Giant Peach
by: Roald Dahl
A frequently banned author, this book was banned in a Florida elementary school because "it promotes the use of drugs, tobacco, and whiskey."

Of Mice and Men
by: John Steinbeck
Second most banned book in the U. S. in the 1990s. Banned for "racist language" in Florida and "vulgar language throughout" and "profanity" in Georgia.

A Wrinkle in Time
by: Madeline L'Engle
L'Engle is one of the 1990's most-challenged children's authors. This book was banned because it "challenges religious beliefs".

The Joy Luck Club
by: Amy Tan
Published in 1990, this book was banned because it "conflicted with the values of the community."

The Color Purple
by: Alice Walker
Banned from high schools in Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the 1990s as "X-rated smut".

The Catcher in the Rye
by: J. D. Salinger
Banned because of "profanity, reference to suicide, vulgarity, disrespect, and anti-Christian sentiments" in 1991.

The Bridge to Terabithia
by: Katherine Paterson
Another Newbery Award winner, banned because of "anti-religion, language, and discussion of death."


From Forbidden Library
1984 . George Orwell. Harcourt. Challenged in the Jackson County, Fla. (1981) because the novel is "pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter." Big Brother doesn't want people reading such things.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Anne Frank. Modern Library. Challenged in Wise County, Va. (1982) due to "sexually offensive" passages. Four members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee (1983) called for the rejection of this book because it is a "real downer."

The Color Purple. Alice Walker. Harcourt. Challenged as appropriate reading material for an Oakland, Calif. High School honors class (1984) due to the work's "sexual and social explicitness" and its "troubling ideas about race relations, man's relationship to God, African history, and human sexuality." This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was finally approved for use by the Oakland Board of Education after nine months of debate. Banned in the Souderton, Pa. Area School District (1992) as appropriate reading for tenth graders because it is "smut."Removed from the Jackson County, W.Va. school libraries (1997) along with sixteen other titles.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Roald Dahl. Bantam; Knopf; Penguin. Removed from a locked reference collection at the Boulder, Colo. Public Library (1988), where it had been placed because the librarian thought the book espoused a poor philosophy of life.

A Light in the Attic. Shel Silverstein. Harper. Challenged at the Cunningham Elementary School in Beloit, Wis. (1985) because the book "enourages children to break dishes so they won't have to dry them." Removed from Minot, N.Dak. Public School libraries when the superintendent found "suggestive illustrations." Challenged at the Big Bend Elementary School library in Mukwonago, Wis. (1986) because some of Silverstein's poems "glorified Satan, suicide and cannibalism, and also encouraged children to be disobedient."

My Friend Flicka. Mary O'Hara. Harper; Lippincott. Removed from fifth and sixth grade optional reading lists in Clay County, Fla. schools (1990) because the book uses the word "bitch" to refer to a female dog, as well as the word "damn."

Where the Sidewalk Ends. Shel Silverstein. Harper. Challenged at the West Allis-West Milwaukee, Wis. school libraries (1986) because the book "suggests drug use, the occult, suicide, death, violence, disrespect for truth, disrespect for legitimate authority, rebellion against parents." Challenged at the Central Columbia School District in Bloomsburg, Pa. (1993) because a poem titled "Dreadful" talks about how "someone ate the baby." On the other hand, this book does present the negative consequences of not taking the garbage out.

And while not one of my favourite books, per se, I find the irony overwhelming.

The Bible The holy book of Christianity, it was claimed in Minnesota that its "lewd, indecent and violent contents are hardly suitable for young students."

Food for Thought

Humanities Montana created a Key Ingredients reading and discussion series in 2006. Some of the selections were pretty specific to our state/region, but others would work well anywhere.
Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber
How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher
The Raw and the Cooked by Jim Harrison
Feasting and Fasting with Lewis & Clark: A Food and Social History of the Early 1800s by Leandra Zim Holland (Hey, it was 2006!)
Staying Home: Reflections on Food, Farming and Place edited by Kristi Johnson
A Taste of Heritage: Crow Indian Recipes and Herbal Medicines by Alma Hogan Snell
Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker

I would highly recommend Abu-Jaber, Fisher, Harrison, and Walker. Also, My Year in Meats is a terrific novel, and full of discussion possibilities. We didn't use it here in Montana because it is so relentlessly anti-meat. This is cattle country.

I know that other councils have created their own series for Key Ingredients. Might be a good question for Humtalk2

Kirby Larson, Hattie Big Sky

In a few weeks, we will announce our 2008 One Book Montana choice, Kirby Larson's novel Hattie Big Sky. It was one of three Newberry Honor Books in 07 and has received a variety of other national honors and awards. It is a coming of age novel, set in the northeastern Montana of 1918, as a sixteen year old woman attempts to "prove up" on her late uncle's 320 acres of dry-land farming. It is finely written, meticulously researched, richly imagined, engaging throughout. Although it has been pitched as a YA entry and is indeed a "young woman coming of age" novel, I know of quite a few middle-aged males (including yours truly) who have found it to be an unusually rewarding book. The back-drop against which its ten-month story unfolds is WWI Montana, a place of ugly patriotic frenzy. (The good citizens of Lewistown actually burned down their brand-new high school when the superintendent refused to remove all books written by Germans). Many of the issues that Larson raises and addresses, skillfully and dramatically, alas, are still with us. We'll be pitching it in our One Book Montana program as an opportunity for intergenerational reading and discussion. Several schools already have indicated interest in school- or grade-wide student/parent reading programs around it. More information is at http://www.hattiebigsky.com/. Come to think of it, Teej, there is quite a bit more about agriculture and food in Hattie Big Sky--especially food's centrality in social matters--than in Winter Wheat. Even a few frontier recipes!

Food in Fiction

Here in South Carolina, we are trying to create a new book discussion series to accompany our tour of Key Ingredients: America by Food. We are looking for five fiction books in which food plays a central role but that are highbrow enough for a scholar to be willing to discuss them. (i.e. The astonishingly large number of food-themed mysteries with corny titles, such as Bread on Arrival and Roux the Day, would probably not work.)

So far, my list consists of the following possibilities, although no group of five seems to gel together very well as a themed set. Moreover, the two books that appear to be out of print are two of my favorites!

• Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
• The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood
• Hunger, Elise Blackwell (out of print)
• Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
• Winter Wheat, Mildred Walker
• The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
• The Good Earth, Pearl Buck
• The Devil's Larder, Jim Crace (out of print)
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
• A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

Does anyone have thoughts or suggestions? What is your favorite food-centric piece of fiction? (Suggestions of short stories and poetry are also welcome!)

Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand

Nancy Pearl says you should give a book fifty pages; if you are over fifty years of age, then it's fifty, less the number of years over fifty. So I should have given this book only forty pages, and I wish I had, but I'm an inveterate optimist, the writing is sometimes lively, and I am always interested to see what fluff publishers will let you get away with when you have a readership. I (can't believe I) read the whole thing.

The subtitle of Truss' book is "The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door." I read her Eats, Shoots & Leaves, enjoyed the novelty, and picked up Talk to the Hand on the premise that it might be relevant to our interest in civility, civic discourse, etc. I'm sorry to say it's no more than an idiosyncratic, somewhat Brit-oriented, extended rant, cute at times (cloyingly), but utterly devoid of any insights, useful or positive strategies or suggestions. (Well, on the very last page, 201, she does conjecture, with Aristotle, that "if you practise being good in small things..it can lead to the improvement of general morality"...but that's about it). Sample observation: people talking on cell phones in public is not annoying nor rude, she says: it "humanizes" them. I'd tell you what the six reasons were, but they are so pedestrian they don't bear mentioning. "Talk to the hand, coz the face ain't listening," she says, alludes to the Jerry Springer Show.

Read something else.