SEPTEMBER BOOKSHARE MEETING

Greetings Book Lovers:

Last night was our 'end-of-summer' meeting and since the evenings are now getting dark earlier and are much cooler, we met indoors rather than out on the deck. Kind of sad in a way. It was good to be together again, though, and to share some of the books we have enjoyed in the past month. Some we liked and some we didn't. It's always interesting to hear about new books and especially those that we've never heard of and possibly never would have except for this group. This is what makes Bookshare so worthwhile for us. It is here that we come to learn about wonderful books that can enrich our lives and touch our souls. Here are the books that we discussed:

ANN WING:

1) "The Full Cupboard of Life" by Alexander McCall Smith.

Precious Ramotswe is on the case again in this delightful fifth installment in the bestselling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, this time assisting the self-made founder of a chain of hairdressing salons who wants to unearth the real intentions of her four suitors, each possibly more interested in her money than her heart. As fans know, though, sleuthing takes second place to folksy storytelling in McCall Smith's wry novels. This time around, Mma Ramotswe is distracted by her long-prolonged engagement to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, Gaborone's best mechanic; it seems she will never be married, despite her fiancé's honorable intentions. He installs an extra large seatbelt in her car to keep her safe (she is quite comfortable with her "traditional build," despite the new, slender fashion of modern woman), but an altercation with another mechanic and the prospect of a charity parachute jump keep his mind off matrimony. A drive for decency motivates Mma Ramotswe and her friends-among them Mma Potokwani, the imperious matron of the local orphan farm, and Mma Makutsi, assistant at the Ladies' Detective Agency and founder of the Kalahari Typing School for Men-and Smith's talent is in portraying this moral code in a manner that is always engaging. As readers will appreciate, Mma Ramotswe solves her cases-more questions of character, really, than of criminal behavior-in good time. Traditionally built ladies living in the African heat don't tend to hurry, and, at the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, there's always time for another cup of tea.

In addition to this book, some of the others by this author were mentioned and highly recommended which were: 1) 44 Scotland Street, 2) The Isabel Dalhousie series 3) "A Deftly Rendered Trilogy" and 4) "The Girl Who Married A Lion.

2) "Founding Mothers" by Cokie Roberts.

Ann reports that although this book was not great, it was okay--something like eating vegetables.

ABC News political commentator and NPR news analyst Roberts didn't intend this as a general history of women's lives in early America-she just wanted to collect some great "stories of the women who influenced the Founding Fathers." For while we know the names of at least some of these women (Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Eliza Pinckney), we know little about their roles in the Revolutionary War, the writing of the Constitution, or the politics of our early republic. In rough chronological order, Roberts introduces a variety of women, mostly wives, sisters or mothers of key men, exploring how they used their wit, wealth or connections to influence the men who made policy. As high-profile players married into each other's families, as wives died in childbirth and husbands remarried, it seems as if early America-or at least its upper crust-was indeed a very small world. Roberts's style is delightfully intimate and confiding: on the debate over Mrs. Benedict Arnold's infamy, she proclaims, "Peggy was in it from the beginning." Roberts also has an ear for juicy quotes; she recounts Aaron Burr's mother, Esther, bemoaning that when talking to a man with "mean thoughts of women," her tongue "hangs pretty loose," so she "talked him quite silent." In addition to telling wonderful stories, Roberts also presents a very readable, serviceable account of politics-male and female-in early America. If only our standard history textbooks were written with such flair!

3) "The Book of Mormon Made Easier" by David J. Ridges

Ann uses this book to augment her study of the Book of Mormon and highly recommends it.

The following are some of the reviews from readers of this book:

"I loved this book! It is just like taking a class on the scriptures, but in the comfort of your own home and at your own pace. He brings up discussions I hadn't even thought of, and explains things so clearly. I also have the Old testament versions and loved them also, I'm sure I will get the rest of hisI love to read the Book of Mormon with the help of these wonderful books. It seems to answer all the questions I have and helps me understand what is being said. I will definitely buy all the series he has written. Thank you for your help. books. Wonderful insight into the scriptures. It has increased my knowledge of them greatly."

"I love to read the Book of Mormon with the help of these wonderful books. It seems to answer all the questions I have and helps me understand what is being said. I will definitely buy all the series he has written. Thank you for your help."

"Taught as if the reader knows nothing so it's great - especially reading it more than once. You don't have to have the scriptures with you while you read but you can if you want to transfer information you learn to your scriptures. Good teaching tool."

BETH HEDENGREN

1) "Safe Passage: The Remarkable Story of Two Sisters Who Rescused Jews from the Nazis" by Ida Cook.

Beth highly recommends this book.

Under the pseudonym Mary Burchell, UK novelist Cook (1904-1986) wrote more than 100 novels in addition to this enchanting memoir, first published in 1950 as We Followed Our Stars. This reprint of the updated 1976 version features a new foreword by scholar Anne Sebba, and the charming, harrowing tale of the Cook sisters, Ida and Louise, whose holiday from their suburban London home to the United States and Western Europe turns from a music lover's grand tour into an international mission to save Jews from the Nazis. Passionate music fans, the Cook sisters' first foray into the world brought them into contact not just with operatic luminaries but the harsh realities of a world on the brink. With ingenuity, boundless optimism and the will to risk their lives, the Cook sisters smuggle jewels to fund the release of Jews about to be shipped to concentration camps and set up networks of satellite families for displaced Jews in safe nations. Pocked with heart-stopping moments-close calls and reunited families rank high-this lovingly written true story shines a light through one of humanity's darkest chapters.

The memoir of Ida Cook, author of 120 books over five decades, was first published overseas in 1950 and is now available for the first time in the U.S. Ida and her sister, Louise, created forged documents and traveled the country to raise money. They bought a London flat for refugees to live in, sewed their own clothes, and traveled third class, working to save as many people as possible from Hitler’s death camps. Cook writes that opera shored up their belief “that there was another world to which we would be able to return one day.” She viewed the music as something that counterbalanced their unhappiness at the cruelty they were forced to witness. In the foreword, Anne Sebba writes that the real power of the book is the transformative nature of music, especially the high drama of operatic music. The two spinsters knew that in the presence of their prima donna heroines, they could assume different personae themselves. After World War II, the sisters settled back into the family home in London. In 1965 they were declared Righteous Among the Nations in recognition of their work in rescuing Jews from Germany and Austria during the Nazi regime. A testament to fortitude and courage.

GERI CHRISTENSEN

1) "The Sweetness At The Bottom of the Pie: A Flavia de Luce Mystery" by Alan Bradley

Geri loved this book and recommends it to all who love a good mystery and a good read.

It's the beginning of a lazy summer in 1950 at the sleepy English village of Bishop's Lacey. Up at the great house of Buckshaw, aspiring chemist Flavia de Luce passes the time tinkering in the laboratory she's inherited from her deceased mother and an eccentric great uncle. When Flavia discovers a murdered stranger in the cucumber patch outside her bedroom window early one morning, she decides to leave aside her flasks and Bunsen burners to solve the crime herself, much to the chagrin of the local authorities. But who can blame her? What else does an eleven-year-old science prodigy have to do when left to her own devices? With her widowed father and two older sisters far too preoccupied with their own pursuits and passions—stamp collecting, adventure novels, and boys respectively—Flavia takes off on her trusty bicycle Gladys to catch a murderer. In Alan Bradley's critically acclaimed debut mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, adult readers will be totally charmed by this fearless, funny, and unflappable kid sleuth. But don't be fooled: this carefully plotted detective novel (the first in a new series) features plenty of unexpected twists and turns and loads of tasty period detail. As the pages fly by, you'll be rooting for this curious combination of Harriet the Spy and Sherlock Holmes. Go ahead, take a bite.

2) "Lady Fortescue Steps Out" by Marion Chesney

he impecunious Lady Fortescue, widowed and alone save for two loyal, unpaid servants, has sold off almost all of the furnishings in her large Bond Street home and faces a grim future as a member of the aristocracy too proud to seek employment or charity, yet too poor to survive on the infrequent largess of wealthy relatives oblivious to her plight. Salvation arrives in the unlikely form of old Colonel Sandhurst, an equally impoverished retired military man who falls at her feet in a hunger-induced faint one afternoon in Hyde Park. The two decide to join forces: the Colonel will share Lady Fortescue's home, and they will invite others of their station and situation to live with them and pool their resources. Thus is born what eventually becomes one of London's most popular hotels, The Poor Relation, to which the nobility flocks to enjoy the novelty of being waited upon by members of their own class. Chesney, author of 24 previous Regency novels ( Yvonne Goes to York, etc.), gives her many admirers a real treat with this first entry in a projected series. She expertly sets the scene, recapturing the bawdiness and color of a long-ago time, and her characters fairly leap off the pages. The "poor relations" undergo adventures both hilarious and tragic; larceny, attempted murder, a satisfactory love affair and unlikely alliances make the hotel the liveliest spot in London.

3) "Lift" by Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan is, more than anything else, the mother of two young girls. While they're at school, Kelly writes a newspaper column, the occasional magazine article, and possible chapters of a novel. She is also the creator of CircusOfCancer.org, a website to teach people how to help a friend through breast cancer. Kelly lives outside San Francisco with her husband, Edward Lichty.

Penned as a letter to her two young daughters, the latest from author Corrigan is an attempt to illuminate their particular relationship ("I want to put down on paper how things started with us"), and an ambitious, inspirational meditation on parenthood in general. A slim volume, it perhaps suffers for its brevity but recounts engagingly events like Corrigan and her husband's decision to start a family, and baby Claire's bout with viral meningitis, "the beginning of how I came to know what a bold and dangerous thing parenthood is." She also examines the gifts all mothers hope to present their kids: "a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of a tribe, a run at happiness." Fans of Corrigan's The Middle Place, a memoir of her fight with cancer, will welcome the return of figures like Corrigan's father, Greenie, and should appreciate her wistful but down-to-earth thoughts on parenthood. Newcomers might be less inspired, but should appreciate Corrigan's charm and honesty.

SARA TRIVEDI

1) "The Walkers of Dembly: An Agatha Raisin Mystery" by MC Beaton

After six months in London, Agatha Raisin returns to her beloved Cotswold village—and her dashing neighbor, James Lacey. Well, sort of. James might not be so interested in Agatha. But soon enough, Agatha becomes consumed by her other passion: crime-solving. A woman has been found dead in a lonely field nearby. Her name is Jessica Tartinck, a hiker who infuriated wealthy landowners by insisting on her hiking club’s right to trek across their properties it’s up to Agatha, with James’s help, to launch an investigation. Together, they will follow no shortage of leads; many of Jessica’s fellow Dembley walkers seem all too willing and able to commit murder. But the trail of a killer is as easy to lose as your heart—and your life. So Agatha and James had better watch their every step. . .

2) "Big Cherry Holler: A Novel" by Adriana Trigiani

Now "Something is wrong. Something has shifted and the change was so subtle and so quiet that we hardly noticed it. We pull against each other now." Ave Mari is describing her marriage to miner Jack MacChesney after eight years. During that period they had two children: a daughter, Etta, who is now an energetic preteen, and a son, Joe, who died suddenly of leukemia. Joe's death and the sorrow and pain beneath a tranquil surface is the focus of this tale. When the mine closes, Jack loses his job and Ave suspects that he is involved with another woman. She visits her family in Italy for the summer and finds time to gather her thoughts, to question her behavior as well as Jack's. There she meets the handsome Pete Rutledge, and her own fidelity is tested. Trigiani (Big Stone Gap) reads this story convincingly, with the rural Virginia accent of the friendly and earnest Ave. Well-paced and engaging, this deeply felt story invites the listener to reflect on the nature of love.

3) "Howard's End" by E.M. Forster

Howards End is a novel for the likes of us. That is to say, for you and me: you because you have bought this particular book, and I because I am writing about it, and because I love it. You may be buying the book for a variety of reasons; you may be in a train station or an airport or browsing in a bookshop on a rainy day, hoping for many things: enlightenment, friendship, amorous adventure, cappuccino. You may want to chip away at that mountain of the canon you have not read. You may be buying it because you must, because you have been told by a teacher that Howards End is something you must read in order to pass a course. But however disparate all our motives are, whether our relationship to the book is, like mine, that of a loving old friend, or perhaps as yours may be, as a fearful or hopeful or wary stranger, Forster makes us a "we" with the novel's very first sentence: "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister." We are part of a company; it is a formal one to be sure-the impersonal pronoun "one" is used, but the "we" is implied, because we are being shown something intimate, domestic-Helen's letters to her sister. We don't know Helen's last name, or anything about her, but we are immediately included in her private life. Yet the first sentence of her letter to Meg might serve as a warning to readers who are about to become one of the Howards End "we": "'It isn't going to be what we expected.'"

Edward Morgan Forster lived a life devoted to the ideas of decency, humaneness, the civilized private life in which the disparities of the human condition might be resolved by honesty and goodwill. At the same time, he was aware of the dark goblins that Helen, and Beethoven, found in the symphony that forms a meditation in the beginning ofHowards End. Tragedy struck Forster's life early; his father died in l881, when he was only two; he was brought up by a mother and aunts, lived quietly with them until he was exiled to public school, a nightmare for him. Rescued by the University of Cambridge, he was taken up by a brilliant group of young men (among whom he was considered one of the least brilliant) who gathered around the philosopher G. E. Moore. Moore's ideas stressed the primacy of personal relations and the appreciation of beauty in a good life. The members of this group included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and a Liverpool Jew named Leonard Woolf who would marry Virginia, sister of another member, Toby Stephen. He studied the classics; traveled, particularly to Italy; sought minor employment. Between 1903 and 1910 he wrote four novels: A Room with a View, The Longest Journey, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Howards End. He finished a novel about homosexuality, Maurice, in 1913, but did not publish it in his lifetime. There was, therefore, a publication lapse of fourteen years, and then in 1924 A Passage to India. And then no novels for the rest of his long life. He was made a member of King's College, Cambridge, and died there in 1970.

How to explain the early prodigiousness, followed by the long silence. Is it that the world he knew was erased by the trauma of World War I? Virginia Woolf assures us in her essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" that in December 1910, human nature changed. Did the change paralyze him? Or was it that he felt silenced by his inability to write honestly about homosexual life? Howards End was published just before Virginia Woolf's December 1910 sell-by date, so perhaps the assurance of the voice is the assurance of the full maturity of a way of life that knows itself about to be obsolete.

4) "Passage to India" by E.M. Forster

What really happened in the Marabar caves? This is the mystery at the heart of E.M. Forster's 1924 novel, A Passage to India, the puzzle that sets in motion events highlighting an even larger question: Can an Englishman and an Indian be friends?

"It is impossible here," an Indian character tells his friend, Dr. Aziz, early in the novel.

"They come out intending to be gentlemen, and are told it will not do.... Why, I remember when Turton came out first. It was in another part of the Province. You fellows will not believe me, but I have driven with Turton in his carriage--Turton! Oh yes, we were once quite intimate. He has shown me his stamp collection.

"He would expect you to steal it now. Turton! But red-nosed boy will be far worse than Turton!

"I do not think so. They all become exactly the same, not worse, not better. I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the difference of a letter. And I give any Englishwoman six months. All are exactly alike."

Written while England was still firmly in control of India, Forster's novel follows the fortunes of three English newcomers to India--Miss Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Cyril Fielding--and the Indian, Dr. Aziz, with whom they cross destinies. The idea of true friendship between the races was a radical one in Forster's time, and he makes it abundantly clear that it was not one that either side welcomed. If Aziz's friend, Hamidullah, believed it impossible, the British representatives of the Raj were equally discouraging.

"Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die," said Mrs. Callendar.
"How if he went to heaven?" asked Mrs. Moore, with a gentle but crooked smile.
"He can go where he likes as long as he doesn't come near me. They give me the creeps."

Despite their countrymen's disapproval, Miss Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Mr. Fielding are all eager to meet Indians, and in Dr. Aziz they find a perfect companion: educated, westernized, and open-minded. Slowly, the friendships ripen, especially between Aziz and Fielding. Having created the possibility of esteem based on trust and mutual affection, Forster then subjects it to the crucible of racial hatred: during a visit to the famed Marabar caves, Miss Quested accuses Dr. Aziz of sexually assaulting her, then later recants during the frenzied trial that follows. Under such circumstances, affection proves to be a very fragile commodity indeed.

Arguably Forster's greatest novel, A Passage to India limns a troubling portrait of colonialism at its worst, and is remarkable for the complexity of its characters. Here the personal becomes the political and in the breach between Aziz and his English "friends," Forster foreshadows the eventual end of the Raj.

4) "The House at Riverton: A Novel" by Kate Norton

In her cinematic debut novel, Kate Morton immerses readers in the dramas of the Ashbury family at their crumbling English country estate in the years surrounding World War I, an age when Edwardian civility, shaken by war, unravels into the roaring Twenties. Grace came to serve in the house as a girl. She left as a young woman, after the presumed suicide of a famous young poet at the property's lake. Though she has dutifully kept the family's secrets for decades, memories flood back in the twilight of her life when a young filmmaker comes calling with questions about how the poet really died--and why the Ashbury sisters never again spoke to each other afterward. With beautifully crafted prose, Morton methodically reveals how passion and fate transpired that night at the lake, with truly shocking results. Her final revelation at the story's close packs a satisfying (and not overly sentimental) emotional punch.

This debut page-turner from Australian Morton recounts the crumbling of a prominent British family as seen through the eyes of one of its servants. At 14, Grace Reeves leaves home to work for her mother's former employers at Riverton House. She is the same age as Hannah, the headstrong middle child who visits her uncle, Lord Ashbury, at Riverton House with her siblings Emmeline and David. Fascinated, Grace observes their comings and goings and, as an invisible maid, is privy to the secrets she will spend a lifetime pretending to forget. But when a filmmaker working on a movie about the family contacts a 98-year-old Grace to fact-check particulars, the memories come swirling back. The plot largely revolves around sisters Hannah and Emmeline, who were present when a family friend, the young poet R.S. Hunter, allegedly committed suicide at Riverton. Grace hints throughout the narrative that no one knows the real story, and as she chronicles Hannah's schemes to have her own life and the curdling of younger Emmeline's jealousy, the truth about the poet's death is revealed. Morton triumphs with a riveting plot, a touching but tense love story and a haunting ending.

Our next Bookshare Meeting will be held on Wednesday, October 27th at Ann Wing's home. Please come and join us and keep reading!

Beth Hedengren will be in charge of treats.

See you next month!