Category Archives: Round House (The)

CCR Book Group October, November, December

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Since my first CCR Book Group post, the group has read and discussed a superb book, an extremely good book, and a good book.

October:  The superb book was The Round House, by Louise Erdrich.  I probably wouldn’t have read this novel if the book group hadn’t chosen it.  The book is about the isolation of Native Americans on a reservation: from opportunity, respect, and justice for crimes committed against them with impunity.  When Joe Coutts is 13, his mother is raped and beaten, and a young woman is murdered, in the Round House, an abandoned building that had once been used by the reservation’s residents for Native American spiritual ceremonies.  As Joe and his father Basil desperately try to bring Geraldine Coutts back from her deep anguish and shame after the attack, Joe watches as law enforcement focuses on determining which police agency has jurisdiction over the case, instead of investigating the crimes with the vigor necessary to find the rapist/killer.  Joe and his three friends, showing more initiative and dedication to justice than the police, find clues to both the crime that devastated Joe’s family, and the greed and corruption behind the crime.  The members of Joe’s close-knit extended family and Joe’s relationship with his closest friend Cappy come to luminous life as Joe remembers the tragedy and its aftermath many years later.  This is a great and important book: the themes of historic injustice and betrayal of America’s native peoples are more clearly expressed in this universal story of friendship and family loyalty than anything I have ever read.  I was eager and excited to discuss the book with other readers, and the group’s discussion exceeded my expectations, making the experience of reading the book even better.

November:  The extremely good book was And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini.  Like Louise Erdrich, Hosseini is a celebrated and successful novelist whose books I had never read.  I loved the way the book’s multiple points of view and narrative styles humanized its Afghan characters against the sad history of their country, instead of making them one-dimensional victims.  Themes of secrecy, betrayal and regret could have happened anywhere at anytime (universality), but the settings in Afghanistan, Paris and the United States grounded the themes and made them come to life through the characters and their stories.  The theme of deracination, being torn from, driven from or running from your home and culture tied all the stories together.  The courageous, competent devotion of the European doctor and nurse who voluntarily came to Afghanistan makes an effective counterpoint to the triumphs and tragedies as the stories of those who left and stayed in Afghan villages and towns diverge then come together as the novel ends.  This novel inspired one of the most spirited and enlightening discussions ever in the book group.  (Note to self: It’s not good to wait too long to write about books, I can’t remember any of the characters’ names.)

December:  The good book was Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd.  The first sections of the book were stale and didactic pointers on style and grammar.  Since I have no ambition to write articles or books, this advice didn’t resonate with me.  The book came to life when Tracy Kidder, a celebrated and successful nonfiction writer whose books I had never read, and his long-time editor Richard Todd started writing about their long and fruitful collaboration.  The details about choosing, abandoning and Eureka! finding topics for Kidder’s books were especially compelling.  And my vague intuitions about the importance of editing made Kidder’s specific description of how a good editor makes all the difference to an author a welcome and useful revelation.  So that’s how great books happen!  The highlight of the group discussion came when a former journalist talked about her own experiences in choosing topics for magazine and newspaper features.  Maybe this book will ultimately be the inspiration to read Tracy Kidder’s famous books about a teacher and her students, and the dawn of the computer age.

Looking forward, the next books to read are:

  • January:  The Girls of Atomic City.  I feared this one would be a long, dry book, but I’ve started it and the language is lively and engaging.
  • February:  Those Angry Days.  I am so interested in the topic of the fight between the isolationists and the FDR administration, I volunteered to lead the discussion on this book.
  • March:  Half the Sky.  Co-author (with his wife) Nicholas Kristof is a fellow Oregonian, and an expert on women’s issues in the developing world.  His columns about these and other topics in the NYT are passionate and authoritative.
  • April: The Burgess Boys.  I am excited about reading another novel after a string of four nonfiction books.  The description of this book looks exciting.

CCR Book group

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I have been participating in the Center for Creative Retirement’s (CCR) book group, and it has introduced me to some very interesting reading.  After Caleb’s Crossing, the next book was called Deerhunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, by Joe Bageant.  After many years, Joe Bageant returned to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, and found that old friends and neighbors were falling farther and farther behind in the American quest for the good life.  Joe got pretty upset about the economic and political forces that were making mincemeat out of the decent, hardworking, goodhearted people of Winchester, so he wrote this interesting but uneven polemical book.  For me, the most fascinating part was the chapter on the mortgage racket that has trapped so many people in terrible debt – fascinating because the book was published in 2007, before the sub-prime mortgage induced crash hit.  So many people knew about systemic mortgage abuses, and tried so hard to get the word out, well before the whole stinking pile came crashing down in 2008 and could no longer be ignored.  OK, I am clearly with Joe in being angry with the sleazebags ripping off working America.  But the chapter on guns was convolutedly weird.

Since I was reading about the class war, I decided to go ahead and get a couple of books that had been on my list for a while:  The Great Divergence, by Timothy Noah, and Coming Apart, by Charles Murray.  I had read and appreciated Timothy Noah’s series of articles, also called The Great Divergence, on Slate.com, and thought it was worth having the expanded version in book form.  Noah’s writing about growing inequality is more analytical and less anecdotal than Bageant’s, but the book’s impact is even more powerful.  I read a little at a time, because it is really depressing.

Coming Apart is subtitled ’The State of White America, 1960-2010′.  Charles Murray is the controversial but very erudite libertarian author of The Bell Curve, for which he was much critcized by people whose opinions Charles Murray doesn’t care about.  Basically, in this new book I think Murray is saying that the white working class is in trouble because they’re shiftless, with weakened morals and no ambition, but Charles Murray doesn’t care what I think either.  While I don’t agree with Murray, his work is not mean-spirited and his careful research raises interesting and important points about income inequality, whether Murray believes in such a thing or not.

I joined the book club too late to discuss Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson, but it has been on my reading list for a long time, and I decided if it was interesting enough for the book group, I’d might as well read it.  I enjoyed the story of the culture clash that surrounds the endearing friendship between the retired British major and the widowed Pakistani shopkeeper.  The very British family feud about a pair of heirloom shotguns and the generational problems in the Pakistani family struggling with assimilation were realistic and the resolution of the two plots was satisfying.

Although I read Madonnas of Leningrad, I didn’t make it to the book group’s discussion, which I heard was very good.  The heroine’s memories of her experiences sheltering in the Hermitage Museum during the Nazi siege of Leningrad are vivid and detailed, much more real to her than her present day life as an old woman suffering from dementia in the U.S.  The madonnas of the title are the subjects of some of the Hermitage’s most beautiful and precious paintings, present only in the memories of the museum employees during the siege since the paintings had been sent away for safekeeping as the Germans advanced on Leningrad.  The tenuous relationship between memory and reality is deftly presented through the story, with an ending that I found intriguingly ambiguous.

The most recent book group selection was Mornings on Horseback, by David McCullough.  Although McCullough is an exceptional author and I have enjoyed his books, I had no particular interest in the subject of this book:  Teddy Roosevelt’s life until he was 27.  Without the book group, I would not have read it, and I would have missed out on something fascinating.  I thought I knew everything I would ever need to know about TR’s sickly childhood, wealthy family, and cowboy doings in the West, but I was wrong.  The quirks, accomplishments, travel and tragedies of the Roosevelt family were unexpectedly enthralling, but I did find the dude experiences of Teddy and his dude friends in the Badlands oddly superficial.  For me, the best and most memorable part of the book was TR’s early political career, in what I had hitherto thought of as the very boring “Presidents with Beards” period of the late 19th century.  Wow, those politicians dealt with some momentous political issues, and their wheeling and dealing was blatant and effective.  The big eye-opener was that TR’s ultimately successful foray into politics was completely unprecedented for a wealthy young New York City gentleman.  He barged in where he was unexpected and not especially welcome, and made a place for himself.  Also, I loved all the details about his sumptuous wardrobe, the man was a snappy dresser.  The buckskin suit is to die for.

The next book is The Round House, by Louise Erdrich.  I think I’ll read it on my Kindle, and experiment with the highlighting feature.