Pleasant Hills Library Book Discussion Group for September 15, 2008

Read one of the books listed below, reader’s choice. Ask at the Library’s front desk if you need help finding a copy; Pleasant Hills Library does not own all of them. For those readers interested, a “field trip” and tour are being planned for Fall 2008 to visit the art exhibit at the Carnegie Museum. The Museum is leading discussion at the MainCarnegie for all these books throughout the exhibit in 2008.

Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International Book Club Book List

Nicholson, Baker: The Mezzanine

From Publishers Weekly: Baker's irresistibly readable short novel presents the quirky and often hilarious inner life of a thoroughly modern office worker. With high wit and in precisely articulated prose, the unnamed narrator examines, in minute and comically digressive detail, the little things in life that illustrate how one addresses a problem or a new idea…Through the elegant manipulation of time, and sharp, defining memories of childhood, the narrator dissects each item of apparent cultural flotsam with the thoroughness of a prosaic, though wacky, technical manual. The rambling "footnotes" alone are worth the price of this cheerfully original novel.

Murakami, Haruki: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

A clerk in a Tokyo of the near future works in an organization that controls the flow of information to society--employing electronic brainwashing and other insidious techniques--a job that contributes to his increasing sense of dehumanization.

Quinn, Daniel: Ishmael

A man and a great ape conduct a series of philosophical conversations in a work that presents a new vision of evolution and humankind and asks the question: does the Earth belong to humans, or do humans belong to the Earth? -- Novelist.

Saint Exupéry, Antoine de: The Little Prince

An aviator whose plane is forced down in the Sahara Desert encounters a little prince from a small planet who relates his adventures in seeking the secret of what is important in life.

Nabokov, Vladimir: Pale Fire

An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance.

Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot

From Wiki: Waiting for Godot is a play in which the characters wait for Godot, who never arrives. Voted "the most significant English language play of the 20th century", Godot is Beckett’s translation of his own original French version, En attendant Godot written between 1948 and 1949. Throughout the work one can find religious, philosophical, classical, psychoanalytical and biographical--especially wartime--references, there are ritualistic aspects and elements literally lifted from vaudeville. Godot also illustrates an attitude toward man's experience on earth--the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience. If Godot is God, then mankind's faith in God is not only subject to doubt, but may also have almost entirely disappeared. Yet the illusion of faith--that deeply embedded hope that Godot might come--still flickers in the minds of the main characters. It is almost as if the faith of these two men has been tested to such extremes that they can perfectly well see the logic of renouncing it--but they cannot completely.