- 12:00AM
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, 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, weather, sunlight, and pandemic permitting. When the weather is good and the mosquitos are less active, the group will meet outside in appropriate places in the gloriously, beautiful grounds of the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. At other times the group will meet in the Arboretum Library with social distancing and masking if desired. The group leader will decide each month whether the meeting will be in-person (in the Arboretum Library or outside on the Arboretum grounds) 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 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 explore the books from previous years.
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.
November 29, 2023, 7:00 p.m.
The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, New York: Random House, 1986.
ISBN: 0394549740
“… Written in seemingly effortless light verse, a sequence of sonnets, Seth tells the story of John and Janet, two California twentysomethings in quest of love, personal gratification and the meaning of life. Set in the affluence and sunshine of Silicon Valley in the years immediately before the dot.com boom, The Golden Gate manages to be at once romantic, pleasantly sentimental and yet deeply satirical about the spaced-out hedonism of California’s beautiful yuppies. When it was published, [it] was singled out as a remarkable tour de force and praised for its light comic touch, its parodic elegance and its speedy way with narrative. Now, … generation[s] later, it reads like a strangely elegiac portrait of a lost world of innocence before the corruptions of the Nineties boom and the psychological devastation of 11 September. — The Guardian
“At once a bittersweet love story, a wickedly funny novel of manners and an unsentimental meditation on mortality and the nuclear abyss. Always witty–and still profound–the book paints a truthful picture of our dreadful, comic times.” —Vanity Fair “A splendid achievement, equally convincing in its exhilaration and its sadness.” —The New York Times “The great California novel has been written in verse (and why not?):The Golden Gate gives great joy.” –Gore Vidal From the Trade Paperback edition.
December 27, 2023, 7:00 p.m. ON ZOOM
A Calm & Normal Heart: Stories by Chelsea T. Hicks Los Angeles: The Unnamed Press, 2022.
ISBN: 9781951213541
“In [this] striking debut collection of stories, … characters from the Osage diaspora travel the continent looking for home. In prose that’s sharp and funny by turns, Hicks depicts families fractured by American colonialism, patriarchy, and racism. [She] has written a beautiful book, especially valuable for offering Osage readers their world in print. Osages will try to identify situations, and they’ll compare details with the histories that were passed down in their own families. Spiders and their webs are a recurring motif, the ancient woman’s symbol, calling us all home. A Calm & Normal Heart is a gift for Osages and readers of all kinds.”— Ruby Hansen Murray, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Chelsea T. Hicks’ deadpan dexterous wit can make you laugh and cry in the space of a heartbeat. A Calm and Normal Heart is the book I’ve been waiting for–;audacious, tender, and fiercely committed.”;–Louise Erdrich, author of The Sentence
“A Calm & Normal Heart is sharp, sexy, and endlessly surprising. An electric blend of playfulness and intensity in Hicks’s prose ignites her characters’ desires. Their stories dazzle and are to be savored. This is a gorgeous collection!”–Deesha Philyaw; National Book Award finalist and author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
“The stories in Chelsea Hicks’s A Calm & Normal Heart are full of quiet truths and wry, soulful secrets. It is a book that doesn’t at all feel like a debut story collection, but rather written with startling beauty and the flawless precision of a master storyteller. It is a genuine page-turner full of sentences so beautiful they demand re-reading.”–Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of; The Removed From Oklahoma to California. The heroes of A Calm & Normal Heart are modern-day adventurers–seeking out new places to call their own inside a nation to which they do not entirely belong. A member of the Osage tribe, author Chelsea T. Hicks’ stories are compelled by an overlooked diaspora happening inside America itself: that of young Native people. In stories like “Superdrunk,” “Tsexope,” and “Wets’a,” iPhone lifestyles co-mingle with ancestral connection, strengthening relationships or pushing people apart, while generational trauma haunts individual paths. Broken partnerships and polyamorous desire signal a fraught era of modern love, even as old ways continue to influence how people assess compatibility. And in “By Alcatraz,” a Native student finds herself alone on campus over Thanksgiving break, seeking out new friendships during a national holiday she does not recognize. Leaping back in time, “A Fresh Start Ruined” inhabits the life of Florence, an Osage woman attempting to hide her origins while social climbing in midcentury Oklahoma. And in “House of RGB” a young professional settles into a new home, intent on claiming her independence after a break-up, even if her ancestors can’t seem to get out of her way; Whether in between college semesters or jobs, on the road to tribal dances or escaping troubled homes, the characters of A Calm & Normal Heart occupy a complicated and often unreliable terrain. Chelsea T. Hicks brings sharp humor, sprawling imagination, and a profound connection to Native experience in a collection that will subvert long-held assumptions for many readers, and inspire hope along the way.
January 24, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Renaissance Man of Cannery Row by Edward F. Ricketts; introduction and edited by Katharine A. Rodger. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
ISBN: 9780817311728
“[…] Ricketts. […] whose […l]aboratories in Monterey was often the center for philosophical musing & lengthy discussion by a bohemian group of liberals during the 1930s […including John] Steinbeck. […The letters] suggest […] a great impact not only on Steinbeck but also on other important figures of the time. […Rodger] wisely uses her editorial voice sparingly[…and] lets [the] letters reveal his multifaceted interests that range from Oriental philosophy to music, art, literature, psychology, and philosophy. […They] are convincing proof that, […] he was an individual whose influence on others is just beginning to be known and whose life is deserving of far more attention.” — Michael J. Meyer, Western American Literature
This portrait of one of John Steinbeck’s closest friends illuminates the life and work of a figure central to the development of scientific and literary thought in the 20th century. Marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts is perhaps best known as the inspiration for John Steinbeck’s most empathic literary characters Doc in Cannery Row, Slim in Of Mice and Men, Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, and Lee in East of Eden. The correspondence of this accomplished scientist, writer, and philosopher reveals the influential exchange of ideas he shared with such prominent thinkers and artists as Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Ellwood Graham, and James Fitzgerald, in addition to Steinbeck, all of whom were drawn to Ricketts’s Monterey Bay laboratory, a haven of intellectual discourse and Bohemian culture in the 1930s and 1940s. The 125 previously unpublished letters of this collection, housed at the Stanford University Library, document the broad range of Ricketts’s interests and accomplishments during the last 12 and most productive years of his life. His handbook on Pacific marine life, Between Pacific Tides, is still in print, now in its fifth edition. The biologist’s devotion to ecological conservation and his evolving philosophy of science as a cross-disciplinary, holistic pursuit led to the publication of . Many of Ricketts’s letters discuss his studies of the Pacific littoral and his theories of “phalanx” and transcendence. Epistles to family members, often tender and humorous, add dimension and depth to Steinbeck’s mythologized depictions of Ricketts. Katharine A. Rodger has enriched the correspondence with an introductory biographical essay and a list of works cited.
February 28, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
The Last Friend by
ISBN: 9781595580085
The Last Friend, the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Tahar Ben Jelloun, winner of the 2004 International Dublin/IMPAC award, is a Rashamon-like tale of friendship and betrayal set in twentieth century Tangier. Written in Ben Jelloun’s inimitable and powerfully direct style, the novel explores the twists and turns of an intense thirty-year friendship between two young men struggling to find their identities and sexual fulfillment in Morocco in the late 1950s, a complex and contradictory society both modern and archaic. From their carefree university days through their brutal imprisonment and ultimate release, the two rely on each other for physical and psychological survival, forging bonds not easily broken. Each narrator tells his version of the story, painting a vivid portrait of life lived within and in opposition to the moral strictures of North Africa. Set against a backdrop of repression and disillusionment, The Last Friend is a tale of loss of innocence and a nation’s coming of age.
March 28, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by
ISBN: 9781770462892
A New York Times Notable book! One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2022! Winner of Canada Reads 2023! “An exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival.”–Carmen Maria Machado. Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark! A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beaton, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush–part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed. Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
April 24, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Francisco by
ISBN: 9780811232395
Alison Mills Newman’s innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A “fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English,” as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, Francisco is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood. Her wildly original and vivid voice chronicles a free-spirited life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, as well as her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts Movement. Love and friendship, long, meaningful conversations, parties and dancing–Francisco celebrates, as she improvises in the book, “the workings of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth … the gift of art for the survival of the human heart.”
May 22, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
The Liars’ Club by
ISBN: 9780670850532
“The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange – a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They’re the Liars’ Club. And to the girl whose father is the club’s undisputed champion mythmaker, they exude a fatal glamour – one that lifts her from ordinary life.” But there are other lies. Darker, more hidden. Her mother’s unimaginable past threatens the family’s very sanity. Mary Karr looks back through younger eyes to exorcise those demons: a mad, puritanical grandmother; a vast inheritance squandered in one year flat; endless emptied bottles; and the darknesses inflicted on an eight-year-old girl. This voice explodes with antic, wit, stripped of self-pity. Miraculously, it makes a journey into joy. Here is a “terrific family of liars redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth.””–Book jacket.
June 26, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through by
ISBN: 9780393356809
United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into one momentous volume. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from the massive libraries of oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Dinéh poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. In When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, Harjo offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature.
