MYSTERY READERS'  BOOK CLUB
Meetings on SECOND MONDAY of each month, at 12:00 noon

SHARING LIFE STORIES
To register, please contact Sharon Miller at 415-393-0113 or by email

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Thursday, March 18 at 6:00 pm
An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard
The discussion will be led by Moira Johnston.

"Ms. Dillard has written an autobiography in semimystical prose about the growth of her own mind, and it's an exceptionally interesting account. She is one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly wide-awake than human beings generally get to be. (Thoreau once said he had never met a man who was fully awake - but he was forgetting about women, and he hadn't met Ms. Dillard.) She is a stunning observer. There is a passage in this book, a rather long one, in which she talks about adult skin as perceived by a child. She begins with an event: herself as a little girl, pinching up the skin over one of her mother's knuckles, and watching in fascination as it stays ridged up instead of instantly returning to smooth shapeliness as a child's hand does. The passage grows into a meditation on how parents (in her case, very young and very good-looking ones, though she didn't know it then) physically appear to a child. It seemed to me, reading it, that skin had never been adequately described before." - Noel Perrin, NYTimes Book Review

Thursday, April 15 at 6:00 pm
A Moveable Feast & A Moveable Feast: the Restored Edition, by Ernest Hemingway
The discussion will be led by Richard Reinhardt.

What is it exactly that explains the continued fascination of this rather slight book? Obviously, it is an ur-text of the American enthrallment with Paris. To be more precise, it is also a skeleton key to the American literary fascination with Paris (and contains some excellent tips for start-up writers, such as the advice to stop working while you still have something left to write the next day). There are the 'wouldn’t be without, even if you don’t quite trust' glimpses of the magnetic Joyce and the personable Pound and the apparently wickedly malodorous Ford Madox Ford. Then there are the moments of amusingly uncynical honesty, as when Stein and Toklas met Ernest and Hadley and 'forgave us for being in love and being married—time would fix that.' The continued currency of that useless expression the lost generation becomes even more inexplicable when it is traced to a stupid remark made by Gertrude Stein’s garage manager, and such quotable fatuity, however often consecrated by repeated usage, is always worth following to its source. Most of all, though, I believe that A Moveable Feast serves the purpose of a double nostalgia: our own as we contemplate a Left Bank that has since become a banal tourist enclave in a Paris where the tough and plebeian districts are gone, to be replaced by seething Muslim banlieues all around the periphery; and Hemingway’s at the end of his distraught days, as he saw again the 'City of Light' with his remaining life still ahead of him rather than so far behind." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic

Thursday, May 20 at 6:00 pm
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, by Mary McCarthy
The discussion will be led by Theodora Rossi.

"[Mary McCarthy] never spares herself at all. The vanities and ambitions, the resentments and misunderstandings, the small triumphs and the scarring disasters that marked her early years are set forth with remarkable candor, so that her book is the most incisive contribution to the story of her development as an artist that we shall ever have. Talk about a Lost Generation sounds glib and becomes vague when you read this book about a writer who was harshly given every opportunity to become one of the lost, and yet went on to create in modern idioms a style based on classic Latin satire. " - Charles Poore, NYTimes Book Review

Thursday, June 17 at 6:00 pm
One Writer's Beginnings , by Eudora Welty
The discussion will be led by Sarah Ballard.

"Beguiling as autobiography and . . . profound and priceless as guidance for anyone who aspires to write serious fiction . . .. It may, at that, not be possible to convey to someone else that mysterious transfiguring gift by which dream, memory and experience become art. Yet, in these few pages, Eudora Welty seems to have followed the trail . . . to the richness of her maturity with a gracious and warming clarity.." - Los Angeles Times Book Review

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