Book of the Month -- The Great Gatsby

Our book of the month to open the year 2010 is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby. It may be familiar to you from classrooms long ago, or it may be one of those books you’ve always meant to read but haven’t. But there will never be a better time to check it out—again or for the first time—than during The Big Read in Newport, brought to you by the Newport Preservation Society and the Newport Public Library. The Big Read runs from January to March, 2010, and features film screenings, lectures, book discussions, and even a jazz concert. You can see a complete listing of events on our online calendar.

Despite all these wonderful events, though, the novel itself is well worth the read. Set in the glitz of the roaring twenties, The Great Gatsby nevertheless survives as a uniquely American story of hope, love, and tragedy.

The Plot: Midwesterner Nick Carraway comes East to start out in the stocks and bonds profession and is quickly drawn to the fashionably excessive parties thrown at his neighbor’s mansion on Long Island. The neighbor happens to be a mysterious man known as Jay Gatsby, who is fabulously rich, supernaturally charming and totally mysterious. Where did he get all his money? Was he a German spy during the war? Nick soon finds himself befriending Gatsby and learning of Gatsby’s desperately romantic infatuation with Nick’s cousin, Daisy, who is unhappily married. Her husband, Tom Buchanan, a Yale athlete from an elite East coast family, happens to have a mechanic's wife for a mistress. As you can imagine, this tangled web of parties and extramarital intrigue ensnares the characters and the readers as well. Mysteries are revealed, love is declared, but doom lurks just around the corner for these characters. The narrator ends one scene with the ominous sentence, "So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."

Though finishing at just under 200 pages, The Great Gatsby has an unusual depth of meaning for such a breezy read. And its themes of wealth, aspiration, unrequited love, and mortality appeal to us all. The setting, with its sea-facing mansions and tiny cottages, should be familiar to Newporters in particular. Many locals will remember the filming of The Great Gatsby movie at Rosecliff mansion in the early '70s. The Big Read offers an opportunity, within our unique and historic community, to engage with this wonderful book, the accompanying film, and that particularly glittering, decadent period in American history.

Big Read Calendar of Events

The Big Read at the Newport Preservation Society website

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Book of the Month - The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Bookviews’ Book of the Month for October was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – a highly popular page turner with a unique set of characters and a wonderfully exciting plot. Well, Stieg Larsson’s sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire is just as good, if not better than his first attempt.

Lisbeth Salander, the unique, at times bizarre and always fascinating young woman, introduced in his first book, is back and carrying on as she began.

The Plot: Dag Svensson, a young journalist, comes to Mikael Blomkvist and the Millennium (magazine) Board with a proposal: his fiance is writing her dissertation on the sex trade in Sweden and how it is supported by public and private officials who should know better. In order to expose this scandal widely, Svensson asks that Millennium devote its May issue to the sex trade and at the same time publish a book based on the dissertation. Needless to say, many important and several very dangerous folks object.

Because Lisbeth has been doing a bit of her own sleuthing, she becomes linked to this project and manages to become the primary suspect when three people (one of whom is her former guardian) are brutally murdered. Mikael and his magazine are determined to prove her innocent and to publish their expose no matter the cost.

The Wiki article on The Girl Who Played With Fire calls Lisbeth “a punk, avenging angel with boxing skills and a photographic memory.” Despite seeming to be amoral, Lisbeth has a fine-tuned sense of justice and a strict personal moral code upon which she will act (aggressively), if she feels she is right.

I highly recommend The Girl Who Played With Fire. It is a page turner to the very end.

A little bit about the author: Stieg Larsson, a noted Swedish journalist, activist and writer, died in November, 2004, of a heart attack. The three books that form the Millennium Crime Trilogy are being published posthumously. Book three is entitled The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and is due to be published in May 2010. Meg

Book of the Month - The Street Gang

The Street Gang by Michael Davis

Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away,On my way to where the air is sweet.
Can you tell me how to get…how to get to Sesame Street?

As the Google seach page has been reminding us this past week, Sesame Street is 40 years old! Big Bird, the Cookie Monster, Burt and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch – all are names that parents and grandparents and their kids know well. And just in time for this anniversary comes Michael Davis’ Street Gang: The History of Sesame Street.

For those of you who remember back before there was Sesame Street, the concept of combining early childhood education with a television show was, to say the least, unique. Getting a toddlers’ attention by singing the alphabet or using a vampire to learn numbers (remember Count von Count?) was entirely new and many of Sesame Street’s revolutionary ideas were reponsible for the early educational development of many children.

Michael Davis, who was a writer and editor for TV Guide for 9 years, brings his reporter’s expertise and writing skills to the many characters – both real and imaginary – that created the Muppets and peopled Sesame Street for a long time.

Davis begins with a watershed moment for the Sesame Street Gang – the sudden death of creator and master-puppeteer, Jim Henson. As Davis lists some of the people who attended Henson’s funeral (over 5,000 people crowded into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City) you begin to realize how this “simple” children’s show touched many. As Davis says, Henson had invented characters (think Kermit) “that made you smile just thinking about them.”

But Street Gang is more than just a tribute to Jim Henson. It is a look inside that creation called the Children’s Television Network and all the people and effort that went into starting Sesame Street and keeping it up and running despite money crises, critics and detractors.

Street Gang is subtitled The Complete History of Sesame Street and I highly recommend it. It’s fun and educational….and brought to you by the letter “A.” Meg

Book of the Month - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Sometimes I like to read books that have a “buzz.” Such is true for this month’s book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published in 2008 and its sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire is already out, but the Dragon Tattoo book still has lots of people reading it and talking about it.

Here’s a hint. For me (and many people I have talked to about the book) it took about 30 pages to really get hooked. The first chapter is all about a libel trial wherein our protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist, is tried and convicted of libel due to a story he wrote and published in Millennium, the magazine Blomkvist co-edits. The tale of the trial and its results is rather dry reading, but, as the reader comes to find out, everything that happens in that first 30-page chapter is important to later developments.

There are many levels of plot. There is the libel trial and Blomkvists’ efforts to prove that what he said about ruthless industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom was, in fact, true. There is the research (into the many generations of the Vanger family) and the investigation (into the disappearance of Harriet Vanger 23 years ago) that Blomkvists agrees to undertake for Henrik Vangar. There is the series of horrendous murders that Blomkvist accidentally stumbles upon in the course of his investigations. And then there is Lisbeth – the girl with the dragon tattoo, incidentally – her unusual (to say the least) life, her unusual appearance, her unusual outlook and her incredible talent for finding things out. (This is due in no small part to her photographic memory and hacking ability with any computer or program known to man – or woman.)

One of the things that kept me reading was the characters. Blomkvist is a really honest, likeable journalist with a passionate concern for Sweden, its politics and its economy. His co-editor, Berger, is also an honest and hardworking woman. Their relationship is a curious blend of the traditional and very modern. The Vanger family, from Henrik the patriarch, to his sisters and brothers, their wives and sons and daughters are all well-drawn and memorable. But Lisbeth is the character that, once met, held my interest and astonishment throughout.

And Steig is very clever, because he intersperses what are sometimes longish explanations of what Blomkvist is investigating with a single paragraph that keeps tabs on Lisbeth and her sometimes bizarre activities.

This book is not for the faint of heart or the squeamish. It is, however, a very good story, with some real suspense and dread. I highly recommend it. I am planning to read The Girl Who Played with Fire very shortly! Meg

Book of the Month - The Magicians

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Reason for reading: I read lots of reviews about lots of books, but the review of Grossman’s latest book (he also wrote The Codex), intrigued me. First of all, the reviewer compared it to Harry Potter and Hogwarts and I have been looking for books that are as good and as enjoyable as J. K. Rowling. Also, it sounded like a very clever mix of science fiction, reality show and magical realism.

First line: "Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.”

Plot in a (not so short) nutshell:

A group of young people are selected to attend Brakebills, a college for young magicians. They muddle through several years of magical education, pass some unusual tests, graduate and arrive in the “real” world, with not a clue what to do with themselves. (Clearly guidance counselors were not a staple at Brakebills.)

After drifting and drinking around for a while, they decide to go on an adventure to Fillory (read Narnia) to put some meaning into their lives. In Fillory they certainly have adventures, only the adventures are very real, difficult, desperate, and lead to several casualties. Our “hero” Quentin winds up in a coma for several months, gets well, shoots a Questing Beast, gets three wishes and wishes to go home.

Once home he tries to shut off all magical impulses, as well as all emotions and ambitions. He is finally rounded up by the friends who survived the Fillory expedition and they decide to return – and do it right this time.

Quite frankly I did not know what to make of this book. It seems to be a cross between (among?) Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Dead Poets Society and the Matrix. And if that doesn’t confuse you, imagine how confused I was.

When children go through the looking glass or into a wardrobe, they bring all their innocence and child-like beliefs with them. When adults (or, as in this case, young adults) push a magic button and find themselves in another dimension they bring all their character flaws, doubts and cynicism, bad manners and bad habits.

The Magicians was slow to start (I kept waiting for something to happen); full of surprises and incongruities; peopled by characters who are not very admirable. The only thing is I couldn’t stop reading it. You decide if you want to try. Meg

Books of the Month - The Hour I First Believed and Columbine

The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb
Columbine by David Cullen

Mr. Lamb’s book, The Hour I First Believed, is a work of fiction whose main characters are a young couple, one a teacher and one a school nurse, who both happened to have worked at Columbine High School on Tuesday, April 20, 1999 – the day when 12 students were killed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, seniors, who then took their own lives.

Lamb describes well the horror of that day, but his focus is the effect of the tragedy, first on the narrator's wife, and then by extension on the narrator's own life. Worlds were changed forever that day, and Wally Lamb does a credible job of taking us inside the event and it aftermath.

David Cullen’s book, Columbine, is, in many ways, revisionist history. Reporters, law officials and the general public have, for a long time, had a certain “take” on the events at Columbine – and Cullen’s thesis is that this “take” has been incorrect. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were not social outcasts on the fringe of their high school world. Klebold had been accepted at college, had recently gone to his prom with a date, and was part of a definite circle of friends. Harris was a bit more on the periphery, but was also part of that circle of friends. He had a steady job and just recently been given a promotion.

Cullen’s bottom line is that Harris was a pyschopath and Klebold suicidal and malleable. It was a deadly combination.

What struck me in both of these books was that evil – as a force? an emotion? – was also a character. And the complicated nature of that force (whatever you call it) that drove these two boys to planning and carrying out a massacre with spirit and enthusiam is chilling.
I urge you to read both. It is quite an education. Meg

Book of the Month - Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Stout, won the Pulitzer Prize award for fiction this year. Olive Kitteridge is the title character in a series of 13 stories, all taking place in a fictional Maine town, Crosby, and all focusing on Ms. Kitteridge and her interaction with family and various townsfolk. What makes this novel special is Olive herself. Olive is a retired, seventh-grade math teacher who is “quick, sharp, big, gossipy and not an easy force to reckon with.”

Along with Olive’s character, the rustic locale of small coastal town Maine becomes a character in itself. Author Stout was brought up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire and she knows whereof she speaks. The combination of town, town characters and Olive makes for a classy and captivating read.

Other Pulitzer Prize winners for 2009 are:

History – The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed
Biography – American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham
General Non-fiction – Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon. Meg