What We Thought: Doc by Mary Doria Russell

Why didn’t Doc go home to Georgia and his family? How did unmarried women support themselves in the Old West?

Members had sympathy for John Henry "Doc" Holliday, despite his criminal, and some would say immoral, behavior. It was suggested that his having a terminal illness, tuberculosis, influenced his reckless acts, but all agreed he was a true gentleman at heart.

The wild and lawless society of the Old West didn't have much use for dentistry, Doc's chosen profession, so he had to turn to gambling on card games for income. The atmosphere in saloons where he “worked” put him in contact with nefarious characters and loose women. All in all, members of the group felt sorry for Doc, as he was portrayed by the author, and felt that his reputation as a gun fighter, card shark, and womanizer was based more on rumor than fact. Unmarried women of the Old West faced a hard life unless they had money and family to depend on. There was no welfare at that time so women and children were on their own.

Education was limited and employment and business opportunities were scarce and generally available for men only. Many women turned to prostitution as a common occupation; however, once in the “sporting” life it was difficult to leave it even if they wanted to change the direction of their life. Doc’s empathy and regard for “working girls" impressed readers, who felt that his appreciation and defense of them was unusual for men of his time.Maria Katarina "Kate" Harony was a determined woman who was able to live that life in the way she wished. It was decided that she and Doc had a dedicated relationship that worked for them. 
Book club members enjoyed reading Doc because the characters were believable and the events were so well written that the scenes were vividly remembered, e.g. Doc playing the piano at the Christmas party with Kate and the Jesuit priest from Kansas, Alexander Von Angensperg,dancing.
This passage was acknowledged by all as a good example of the humor that threads through this work of historical fiction: “For the rest of his long, eventful life, Alexander Von Angensperg might have topped just about any war story told in a Jesuit residence. He could have listened, and nodded, and acknowledged each man's most colorful adventure, and then achieved an awed, respectful silence with just six words: 'I heard confessions in Dodge City.'”

What We Thought: The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields

The Evening Readers Book Club discussion of Jennie Fields’ The Age of Desire began with a show of hands of how many members liked the book. Most did, and a few said they loved it. Some were put off by the content and did not finish reading it.

Members who liked the story were not happy with the selfish and indulgent behavior of practically all of the main characters, especially Edith Wharton. She was careless and carefree in the pursuit of a passionate relationship with an unsympathetic lover at the expense of her marriage and respect of her one lifelong, true friend and confidant. It was decided that Edith’s behavior was typical of the time period, the Gilded Age, and her place in it as a wealthy woman and famous writer. People are a product of their times and unacceptable and uncomfortable behavior today would have been tolerated and even recognized as normal then.

It was decided that the book was not a chick book, but was true historical fiction and for the most part an accurate representation of a particular time frame in the life of Edith Wharton. Members were satisfied with the epilog and Edith’s life after she ended her affair with the journalist William Fullerton and divorced her husband. Finally she dedicates herself and her resources to find fulfillment in helping others. She also realizes what a great friendship and collaboration her former governess Anna brought to her life. Sadly, she came to this realization very late in life and did not have much time to make up for her neglect.

All were fascinated with pictures of The Mount -- Edith’s grand country place in Lenox, Massachusetts -- and the connection with Brockton, Mass. The Mount has been fully restored and is a tourist destination with lovely gardens and an enormous mansion.

This Month's Selection: Doc by Mary Doria Russell

 

 This month's Evening Readers Book Club selection is Doc by Mary Doria Russell, a national bestseller when it was published in 2011.

From the publisher:

Born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday arrives on the Texas frontier hoping that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Soon, with few job prospects, Doc Holliday is gambling professionally with his partner, Mária Katarina Harony, a high-strung, classically educated Hungarian whore. In search of high-stakes poker, the couple hits the saloons of Dodge City. And that is where the unlikely friendship of Doc Holliday and a fearless lawman named Wyatt Earp begins— before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral links their names forever in American frontier mythology—when neither man wanted fame or deserved notoriety.

The Evening Readers Book Club will discuss Doc on Tuesday, November 19, at 6:30 p.m., but you don't have to be a member of the group to add your comments to the discussion. Read along with us, or tell us what you thought, if you've already read this book!

This Month's Selection: The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields

From the Publisher

For fans of The Paris Wife, a sparkling glimpse into the life of Edith Wharton and the scandalous love affair that threatened her closest friendship

They say behind every great man is a woman. Behind Edith Wharton, there was Anna Bahlmann—her governess turned literary secretary, and her mothering, nurturing friend.

When at the age of forty-five, Edith falls passionately in love with a dashing younger journalist, Morton Fullerton, and is at last opened to the world of the sensual, it threatens everything certain in her life but especially her abiding friendship with Anna. As Edith’s marriage crumbles and Anna’s disapproval threatens to shatter their lifelong bond, the women must face the fragility at the heart of all friendships.

Told through the points of view of both women, The Age of Desire takes us on a vivid journey through Wharton’s early Gilded Age world: Paris with its glamorous literary salons and dark secret cafés, the Whartons’ elegant house in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Henry James’s manse in Rye, England.

Edith’s real letters and intimate diary entries are woven throughout the book. The Age of Desire brings to life one of literature’s most beloved writers, whose own story was as complex and nuanced as that of any of the heroines she created.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Age of Desire.

 

The Evening Readers Book Club will discuss The Age of Desire on Tuesday, October 22, at 6:30 p.m., but you don't have to be a member of the face-to-face group to add your comments to the discussion!

 

What We Thought: The Memory of Running

Combined Book Club Potluck!

This evening’s Book Club meeting began with a hot and cold dish supper enjoyed by everyone.  Afternoon and Evening Book Club members look forward to the biennial event show casing tasty treats including vegetarian casseroles and home style favorites of chicken, spicy sausage and other tempting ingredients.

After dinner the group moved from the Community Room to the Library’s  front room for desserts; decorated cake, trifle, cookies, and even chocolates and a discussion of author Ron McLarty’s The Memory of Running. This book evoked strong reactions and opinions about family issues and the treatment of psychiatric disorders during the past fifty years.

 

All agreed that the author wrote a beautiful story about difficult subjects. There was enough humor to lighten up the overall sadness of the character’s lives. Familiar locations in Rhode Island enhanced the background of events as the characters moved through the highs and lows of life.

The story revolved around family and the love and devotion of parents and children as well as goodness radiating from all of them. The Memory of Running is a story of hope and resilience that exists throughout experience despite life’s trials.

This quote from one of the group inspired Book Club members and was a fitting conclusion to the evening’s program, “In a dog-eat-dog world Smithy wore Milk-Bone underwear.”

This Month's Selection: The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty

This month is the special Combined Book Club Potluck meeting, when Evening Readers and Afternoon Readers get together for supper and conversation. The Combined Book Club Potluck is Tuesday, August 20, at 6:00 p.m.

 

Bring a dish to share that night, or join us on the blog the next day!

 

This month's selection is The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. Here's what some reviewers have said about this debut novel:

 

"Smithy is an American original, worthy of a place on the shelf just below your Hucks, your Holdens, your Yossarians." —Stephen King
"Endearing . . . it’s a ride worth taking." —USA Today
"In The Memory of Running, professional actor and long aspiring novelist Ron McLarty has invented a character so fully and elegantly defined that the book soars with originality and life." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Captivating . . . McLarty unspools passage after passage of devastating grace and melancholy, and his taciturn hero hooks himself to your heart." —Entertainment Weekly
"Riders who hop onto the back of Smithy Ide's bike and ride America with him will cherish the journey. I loved this sad, funny, life-affirming novel." —Wally Lamb

 

Click here to read an excerpt from The Memory of Running.

 

What We Thought: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

The evening’s discussion of Rules of Civility by Amor Towles was highlighted with a lovely assortment of refreshments tied to the theme of 1930s-era entertaining. Members served themselves from an overflowing bowl of non-alcoholic mint green punch reminiscent of gin drinks which the characters drank liberally throughout the book. Cookies and bar nuts accompanied drinks and put everyone in a jolly mood.

 

After much discussion it was decided that the book more or less accurately presented the time period of the 1930s and the effects of the Great Depression on different levels of social classes. Choices made by the characters and results affecting them were a major theme. The choices varied depending on the circumstances and morality of characters and determined the courses of their lives. Some choices were well-considered, especially by Katie who enjoyed a contented and successful life. Others, like Tinker, learned the hard way what can happen when choice is made without conscience. Eve, the character with the most spunk, was adventurous and spontaneous. She was admired by most, but not a model of propriety for anybody.

 

Some lives and careers were cut short by ill-considered and quickly made decisions. Did Eve ever contact her parents after leaving New York for home? We decided that the author left it unknown so readers would think about it.

 

The author has written a sequel, a novella about Eve (Eve in Hollywood) after her character leaves the story, but no one was very interested. One member commented that she thought of Eve as Jean Harlow. Members were reminded of their own youthful adventures and contrasted them with the wild and carefree antics of those in the story. All of the members enjoyed hearing about high times at dances and nightclubs on and off the Cape. When asked who would recommend this book to a friend, all raised their hands. 

Favorite Quotes

“In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions -- we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”

“How rich does one have to be to buy a very handsome man?”

From Rules of Civility by George Washington: “Never bring a fork to your mouth when you have a knife in your hand.”  

This Month's Selection: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year- old named Katey Kontent. Armed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future.

The story opens on New Year's Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her boardinghouse roommate Eve happen to meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a ready smile. This chance encounter and its startling consequences cast Katey off her current course, but end up providing her unexpected access to the rarified offices of Conde Nast and a glittering new social circle. Befriended in turn by a shy, principled multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow who is ahead of her times, Katey has the chance to experience first hand the poise secured by wealth and station, but also the aspirations, envy, disloyalty, and desires that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her orbit, she will learn how individual choices become the means by which life crystallizes loss.

 

Read along with the Evening Readers and comment here any time!

What We Thought About Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins is a collection of stories about individuals, the choices they make and the results of those choices. Some of the lives of the characters turned out the way they wished and others, despite their best efforts, were ruined. Book club members felt like the stories were love stories, reality for the characters. However their lives turned out, it was their story to tell and to live. "Life is not like the movies."

 

Set against the backdrop of the romance of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton during the filming of the multi-million dollar movie, Cleopatra, Beautiful Ruins is a grand story about how situations affect people by either spiraling out of control or being redirected. Do events control people or do people become the masters of their fate to ensure a happy and satisfactory life?

 

These quotes from the author describe the direction of the story:

“His life was two lives now; the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.” ...

“Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same, Pasquale. The smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”

 

The author neatly ties up all loose ends at the conclusion of the book which group members wholeheartedly appreciated. It was easy to see whose life was on the right track and whose life was ruined. The book discussion elicited many personal connections to the characters' stories and general enjoyment of the book

 

The description of the Adequate View seemed realistic, and the group would have been happy to visit the cliffside hotel and meet Pasquale, his mother, and his aunt.

This Month's Selection: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

This month's selection is Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. Join the group for a face-to-face discussion on Tuesday, June 18, at 6:30 p.m. or join the discussion online starting June 19th.

From the publisher:

The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his  funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 . . . and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later. 

“Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.” —Richard Russo 

“A ridiculously talented writer.” —New York Times

Browse inside the book at HarperCollins.
 

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

The Holmes Evening Book Group met last night to talk about Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. The book is a nonfiction account of people living in abject poverty in Annawadi -- one of the slums beside the airport in Mumbai in the Indian state of Maharashtra (formerly known as Bombay). The title is a reference to one of the many billboards advertising luxury home goods and other products that the Annawadi residents living in shanties made of scavenged materials will never come into contact with and that partially block tourists' views of the sprawling slum.

The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, immersed herself in Annawadi to research and write this book, which is composed entirely of the thoughts and actions of Annawadi residents whose lives the author focused on. (The author doesn't write about herself and her experiences at all, except for her author's note at the very end.) The hopeless lives of the Annawadians were so foreign and depressing to many in the group that it seemed difficult to feel a connection to them. Foreign aid was described as going to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and  officials and never reaching the people who need it, which was another discouraging fact contributing to a sense of hopelessness.

The group discussed the rampant corruption described in the book and compared it to recent incidents of political, judicial, and law enforcement corruption in the U.S. Talk also turned to the idea of a global economy and whether a turn towards buying goods that were made in America may be taking place.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers received many excellent reviews, but will not be making the list of this book club's favorites! Recommended as a better choice for a book about Third World poverty: Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

Have you read this book? Please share your thoughts!

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

The Evening Book Club met April 29th to discuss The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton. Most agreed that the ending was the best part of the book and that it was well worth reading through the entire plot twists and character descriptions to get there.

The story was hard to get into but got better as more was revealed. All of the annoyances and layers were true to life and seemed realistic, especially the unraveling of hidden secrets and the consequences of resulting tragedies. One member was very surprised at the ending while another said that she had picked up clues early in the book.

The descriptions of time and place – World War II England and the post-War years – were very well done. The family home, especially the kitchen in the farm house, was described so perfectly that members could see it. Members said that their opinion of the main characters, Dorothy and Vivienne changed as their true lives were discovered. There was some discussion about Dorothy’s children and how their natures reflected the lives of both Dorothy and Vivienne – especially Laurel, Dorothy’s eldest, who was a lot like the positive side of Dorothy. Vivienne has a more spiritual and introspective life than Dorothy which first appeared in her childhood and resulted in her retreating into herself as an adolescent and on into adulthood. Members generally agreed that Jimmy was a likable character despite his checkered background. He was a good and true friend to both Dorothy and Vivienne. Vivienne’s husband was not as likable and no one really cared about what happened to him...

Club members said that they would likely read another book by Kate Morton. The Forgotten Garden and The House at Riverton were recommended by others.

Have you read The Secret Keeper or any other books by Kate Morton? Add your thoughts to the discussion through the comments!

This Month's Selection: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

This month we are reading Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo.

Join us May 21st at 6:30 p.m. for a face-to-face discussion, or read this National Book Award winner along with us and share your comments on the blog, starting May 22nd.

From the publisher, Random House: 

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.