Wednesday, February 22; 7:00PM - 8:00PM
Reading the Western Landscape Community Book Discussion
About the Community Book Discussion
The Arboretum Library’s book group explores the portrayal of western North American landscape in fiction, non-fiction, drama, and poetry, letters, graphic novels, etc. The group generally, but not always, meets the last Wednesday of the month in the Arboretum Library or out on the Arboretum grounds, pandemic, weather and sunlight permitting. When the weather is good and disease rates are low, the group will meet outside in appropriate places in the gloriously, beautiful grounds of the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden with appropriate social distancing and masking. The group leader will decide each month whether the meeting will be in-person or on Zoom.
The group uses a modified version of the Shared Inquiry™ method developed by the Great Books Foundation. The discussion is greatly enhanced if the chosen book of the month is read, although we welcome those who just want to listen. Let the host know you only want to listen. New participants are always welcome!
Click here to see the questions already asked for this year’s past books and check out the history of the book club by hovering on the tab and see all the previous years and books to explore.
For more information and to be added to the e-mail reminder list about the Community Book Discussion Group, please contact, Arboretum Librarian Emeritus, Susan Eubank, at Susan.Eubank@Arboretum.org. You must RSVP to Susan for the discussions you would like to attend.
December 28, 2022 ON ZOOM
Always Coming Home by Úrsula K. Le Guin; Margaret Chodos (Illustrator); Todd Barton (Composed by); George K. Hersh (Contribution by). New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
ISBN: 9780060155452
“…Le Guin is among the … most respected American writers who regularly set their narrative in the future to force a dialogue with the here and now… [The book] is a slow, rich read, …a liberal utopian vision, rendered far more complex … by a sense of human suffering. …The novel is about an imaginary people living in a far distant future on the Pacific coast. As a native of Berkeley, Calif., who lives in Portland, Ore., Mrs. Le Guin obviously knows her fictional territory. Moreover, if anyone is the world’s greatest authority on the Kesh, it’s the author, since she invented them. .”—Samuel R. Delany, New York Times
January 25, 2023, 7:00 p.m.
Always Crashing in the Same Car by Matthew Specktor, Portland, Ore.: Tin House Books, 2021.
ISBN: 9781951142629
“…[T]he book is both a personal memoir and a cultural study, written with poetic charm. …Specktor reflects on the mythos of Hollywood and the storied elements and landmarks of its built environment. …[He] is particularly dedicated to failure here, as he traces stories of writers, actors, musicians, and directors whose careers were sidelined for a variety of reasons…As each chapter is a slice of biography from a particular perspective…the stories feel somewhat incomplete. Specktor would not be wrong in hoping that those narrative gaps create curiosity. To draw the reader in, then inspire the reader to search online, to watch the films, to listen to the albums, indicates a quality book.” — Linda Levitt, PopMatters.com
In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor’s first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother’s cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or “cracking up,” he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of “success” and “failure” that haunt the artist’s life and the American imagination. Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It’s a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists–Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others–and the author’s own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives. At once deeply personal and broadly erudite, it is a story of an art form (the movies), a city (Los Angeles), and one person’s attempt to create meaning out of both. Above all, Specktor creates a moving search for optimism alongside the inevitability of failure and reveals the still-resonant power of art to help us navigate the beautiful ruins that await us all.
February 22, 2023, 7:00 p.m.
Nobody’s Son by Luis Alberto Urrea, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1998.
ISBN: 0816518653
“A bruising, powerful memoir… He cuts through the thicket of language and cultural contradictions, offering up both humorous looks at his life and troubling memories. …Urrea’s honest personal account will trigger anyone’s memories of growing up where culture, ethnic identity and language clash. In today’s America, that’s nearly everyone.” — San Diego Union Tribune
“With his blended background and his borrowed, adapted, stolen language, ‘America is home. It’s the only home I have. Both Americas. All three Americas, from the Arctic circle to Tierra del Fuego.’ Borders criss-cross his experience, yet Urrea remains fluid, refusing to succumb to ‘a nightmare of silence’. He shares his love of words openly, freely, hopefully.” — BookDragon
Here’s a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the ‘hood, hoping for the American Dream. . . . I’m not saying it’s our story. I’m not saying it isn’t. It might be yours. “How do you tell a story that cannot be told?” writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining. Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son’s ethnicity. “You are not a Mexican!” his mother once screamed at him. “Why can’t you be called Louis instead of Luis?” He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love. “I am nobody’s son. I am everybody’s brother,” writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged war–both in the political arena and in their own homes–to claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody’s Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.
March 22, 2023
The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes; Afterword by Walter Mosley, New York: New York Review of Books, 2012, originally published 1963.
ISBN: 9781590174951
“The beauty of the Southwestern American desert is a deceptive cover for the violence — born of fear and hatred — that lies beneath it in a tawdry, seedy underbelly familiar to noir…. We can expect no easy answers, because the answer is not the point. Hugh Densmore’s search … is prompted by the apparently selfish desire to save his reputation. Yet Hugh Densmore is not a selfish man; he is, by any reckoning, a good man, who loves his family and wishes to save them from the grief of hearing him branded an abortionist and murderer. His is not the superhuman intellect of Holmes or Poirot; Hugh Densmore is only human. That, in fact, is the truth that hides within noir: it is the stories of the only human, tawdry and stained and yet somehow golden for all of that.”— Eleanor Gold, Full-Stop.net
“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.
April 26, 2023
Harlem of the West by
ISBN: 9781597144926
“A handsome new edition… — page upon page of well-dressed people having a good time framed by a blunt and lucid history of postwar San Francisco as a viciously segregated city. There are almost no white faces here, a testament to how fully people cast into a ghetto created their own world. One striking note among many: five people gathered in front of Rhythm Records on Sutter Street in 1947, behind them a poster advertising Andrew Tibbs’s smooth, after-hours 78 “Bilbo Is Dead” — a number about the infamous Mississippi racist so slick you can’t even hear the sarcasm as Tibbs runs through the “One Meat Ball” melody to tell you how he’s not sure he’ll ever get over the death of his “best friend.” — Greil Marcus, Los Angeles Review of Books
In the 1940s and 50s, a jazz aficionado could find paradise in the nightclubs of San Francisco’s Fillmore District: Billie Holiday sang at the Champagne Supper Club; Chet Baker and Dexter Gordon jammed with the house band at Bop City; and T-Bone Walker rubbed shoulders with the locals at the bar of Texas Playhouse. The Fillmore was one of the few neighborhoods in the Bay Area where people of color could go for entertainment, and so many legendary African American musicians performed there for friends and family that the neighborhood was known as the Harlem of the West. Over a dozen clubs dotted the twenty-block radius. Filling out the streets were restaurants, pool halls, theaters, and stores, many of them owned and run by African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino Americans. The entire neighborhood was a giant multicultural party pulsing with excitement and music. In 220 lovingly restored images and oral accounts from residents and musicians, Harlem of the West captures a joyful, exciting time in San Francisco, taking readers through an all-but-forgotten multicultural neighborhood and revealing a momentous part of the country’s African American musical heritage
May 24, 2023
Spell Heaven by Toni Mirosevich, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, CA, 2022.
ISBN: 9781640095168
“What happens when a lesbian couple—a college professor and a nurse—decide to forsake the expensive city and move a few miles south to Seaview, a foggy coastal town in Northern California where homes are affordable but some neighbors far from welcoming?…In lyrical, often shimmering, language, Mirosevich finds meaning and memory in the lives lived by the “confused” sea, the name, she explains, given to the sea when waves go back and forth on a windy day. “Confused but still beautiful,” the narrator insists. These stories both comfort and surprise. You will want to read them over and over again, like waves going back and forth, revealing something new each time.”— Elaine Elinson, New York Journal of Books
A collection of linked stories that celebrate those who relish human connection in an increasingly isolated world. Stories include the tale of an undocumented boy’s drowning when a wave pulls him out to sea, an ex-FBI agent’s surveillance of a man who leaves chocolate bars at a tree in a weekly ritual, a mother on meth who teaches a lesson on mercy, and Kite Man, who flies kites from a fishing pole and sells drugs on the side. His motto: When the kites fly, you can buy.
June 28, 2023
Selected Verse: A Bilingual Edition, revised. by Federico Garcia Lorca; Edited by Christopher Mauer, Translated by Catherine Brown, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c2004.
ISBN: 9780374528553
The entire poetic spectrum of Spain’s greatest modern poet and dramatist is showcased in this new bilingual anthology. Lorca (1898-1937) drew upon his country’s rich and sonorous musical tradition for inspiration, and his early poems are spellbindingly beautiful, animated with the sweet breath of the Andalusian land he loved so much and lit with images and metaphors as bright and quick as birds. … [Lorca] scholar Maurer has chosen well from all 10 of Lorca’s published poetry collections as well as from a selection of previously uncollected works, and the translations are superb.— Donna Seaman, Booklist
Selected verse from the poet who “expanded the scope of lyric poetry” (Rafael Campo, The Washington Post). The work of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s greatest modernist poet, has long been admired for its emotional intensity and metaphorical brilliance. The revised Selected Verse, which incorporates changes made to García Lorca’s Collected Poems, is an essential addition to any poetry lover’s bookshelf. In this bilingual edition, García Lorca’s poetic range comes clearly into view, from the playful Suites and stylized evocations of Andalusia to the utter gravity and mystery of the final elegies, confirming his stature as one of the twentieth century’s finest poets.
