I have a weird relationship with book clubs.  I think it stems from my weird relationship with schedules.  I’m really bad at keeping time, and lists, and track….of anything.  Those are all pretty fundamental things that make up being a regular member of a book club.  My time with every bookclub I’ve been a part of has always been brief.  As much as I would love to stick around and become a regular member, something always happens that pulls me away and onto something else.  Any hope of returning is usually met with some sort of guilt that I’m imposing on this intimate conversation between people that are more dedicated and loyal to that particular book club.

The thing is, I love talking about books.  I love hearing the stories that other people tell about their own reading experiences.  The myriad of ways people reach the same, and at different times the complete opposite resolution of a particular event absolutely blows my mind.  I want to be in a bookclub, but I’d like it to be flexible.  Not just for the absolute narcissist of I, but also for every other person in the club.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about ways I think a 21st century book club can operate successfully, by examining the pitfalls that I feel the current structure of book clubs fall into:

Frequency of meet-ups: Book clubs usually meet once a month.  Thats  pretty frequent for busy individuals.  Instead how about we bring that down to a quarterly meet-up?

Book selection:  Instead of picking one book, how about we pick one topic or theme?  In the months leading up to our next meet-up, we select books that tackle a particular theme or idea to give readers more freedom.

Having nothing to add to the conversation:  We’ve all been here right?  Sometimes people will be speaking about a subject that you didn’t really relate to, or have nothing to really add to the conversation.  For me, this feels imposing and intimidating.  Lets widen the user base and record the meet-ups and release them as podcasts for everyone to experience at their leisure.  It’s also a way to allow the more shy readers to participate without feeling like they have to speak.

My idea is something that I am calling The Reader’s Arcade: a quarterly book club/podcast.  It’s a book club that can be flexible and malleable for anyone that wants to be a part of it.  If you’re interested in something like this or if you have any ideas about how I can improve on the base model please let me know.  Stop by the bookstore, find me on Twitter. (@_andtheuniverse) or email me directly (andre@lemuriabooks.com).

I’m interested to know what you all think.

Written by Andre

Written by Johnathan Odell, author of The Healing and a new rendering of his debut novel, The View from Delphi: Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League. Available on February 4, Rosa Parks’s 102nd birthday. 

When I was interviewing Mississippians for my book, an elderly black man talked about his days as a sharecropper. He summed up his experience like this, “When God handed out possessions, he must have give the black man the plow and the white man the pencil.” It was his way of saying that under Jim Crow, the black man did all the work, but no matter how big a crop you brought in, it was the figures the white man put down in his ledger that decided if there would be any money that season, or if the sharecropper would remain in economic servitude to the land owner.

I have also found that saying helpful in understanding the way the historical record is maintained as well. It’s now widely accepted that if a white man is writing the story, the role of blacks tend to get diminished as agents of their own liberation. They are often portrayed as longsuffering victims waiting to be saved by the benevolent acts of white people. Black heroes have a hard time finding themselves in print. My black friends call this “Killing the Mockingbird Syndrome”, for the way that famous book relegates blacks to pitiful, powerless dependents. As I say, though, we are becoming aware of this dynamic, thanks to a growing number of black historians.

But as I researched the Civil Rights period for “Miss Hazel in the Rosa Parks League,” I ran into another significant discrepancy in how the story is told.

To change up the saying a bit, if the white man got the pencil, and the black man got the plow, then the black woman got the harness to pull that plow through the stony fields of the Civil Rights Movement. Her acts of courageous resistance are even more overlooked by history than that of the black man.

I think there are multiple reasons for this. One is the nature of the violence during that time. Black men were constantly in the crosshairs.  Face it, most of racism in the South stems from white fear that black men want white women (and the deep insecurity that it could be reciprocal!). So the focus of white paranoia was on black men. They were the ones whites had to keep an eye on, so the risk was higher for them to overtly resist. Black women were the lowest of the low as for perceived power and threat to white superiority. They could get a lot of things done their men could not because they were more “invisible.”  They had jobs that took them into the most intimate spaces of the white life. They could come and go more freely. They could pool information, influence through personal relationship with white women. They were uniquely positioned to subvert white power, but it was from the shadows.

And of course patriarchy exists in the black community just as it does in the white community. The public spokespeople for African Americans have historically been male just as they had been for whites.  In the 1950’s and 60’s, if white male leaders were going to deal directly with anyone it would have to be black leaders who were also male. “Man to Man.” That was the culture. Newspapers, T.V, radio, all the communication channels that African Americans needed to get their message out were necessarily looking for the black male spokesperson for the real story.  The country as a whole wasn’t ready to see women of any race as leaders of a legitimate movement. The credible face on the evening news needed to be a Martin Luther King, not a Rosa Parks.

So it may have been a necessary convention, but the tragedy is that still we give those public male faces most of the credit, when it was an army of women who assumed the lion’s share of the risk and got the job done. That’s not a new story, and unfortunately, not a defunct one.

The truth is, when it came time to publically defy white authority throughout the South, it was black women who took to the streets, to the registrar’s office and to the whites-only schoolhouse. Mississippian Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the most influential figures in the Civil Rights story, male or female, put it bluntly. She said it wasn’t the male “chicken eatin’ preachers” who were the backbone of the movement, but the fieldworkers like herself, the illiterates, the mothers with nothing else to loose, the sassy “Saturday night brawlers.”

Even today, this bias for male heroes still serves to obscure the real contributions of women like Rosa Parks, who is often portrayed as a tired, longsuffering, meek woman whose feet were tired. When in actuality she was a seasoned activist, youthful and full of passion. She had been stepping out into the battlefield long before she got on that bus, and kept stepping long after.

Praise for MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE

“A terrific writer who can take his place in the distinguished pantheon of Southern fiction”

–Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini

“Here it comes—barreling down the track like a runaway train, a no-holds-barred Southern novel as tragic and complicated as the Jim Crow era it depicts…. This is a big brilliant novel whose time has come.”

–Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls and Guests on Earth

“With its deftly drawn characters, delicious dialogue, and deeply satisfying and hopeful ending, this fine novel deserves to win the hearts of readers everywhere. Book clubs, this one is definitely for you!”

— Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters

“Odell vividly brings to life a fabulous cast of characters as well as a troubling time in our not-so-distant past. You won’t want to miss this one!”

— Cassandra King, author of The Sunday Wife and Moonrise

We have an entire shelf devoted to Barry Gifford’s prolific career–poetry, novels, memoirs, plays, screenplays. You name it, he’s probably written it (and we have it). And here’s the kicker: he’s pretty much self-taught. (According to the  Paris Review, Gifford was born in a Chicago hotel room to a racketeer father and a beauty-queen mother. “They lived at times in hotels in South Florida, New Orleans, and Havana. Because they moved around so much, Gifford didn’t get much formal education. He learned from late-night noir movies and the strange characters that passed through the hotel lobbies.”)

Gifford was first haunted by the voices of Sailor and Lula in the 1970s and 80s, but the first novel in the series wasn’t published until 1990. The first Sailor and Lula novel, Wild at Heart, jumpstarted Gifford’s career. The young, star-crossed lovers became the Romeo and Juliet of the post-nucleur age–making love in motel rooms, drinking in roadside bars, and evading the law. Flurries of gun fights. Private Eyes and hit-men. Maniacal mothers.

Throughout his writing career, Gifford has returned to Sailor and Lula, tracking them from young love to the birth of their own child, Pace Roscoe Ripley. He’s followed them across the country, from one bad idea to the next. Gifford’s newest (and final) installment released this month–The Up-Down: The almost lost, last Sailor and Lula story, in which their son, Pace Roscoe Ripley, finds his way.

The Up-Down is a neo-noir thriller, packed with doomed romance and a protagonist searching for something to keep him steady. As soon as Roscoe finds somewhere to settle down, right-side up is turned upside down. He falls in and out of love with women of various repute. Bones are broken. Gunshots fired. Children rescued and cursed.

A child of the (late) 80s, I never had the privilege of seeing David Lynch’s movie adaptation of Gifford’s “Wild at Heart.” (For some reason, my parents’ didn’t think the movie was appropriate for a 2 year-old) The film is pretty true to the novel, capturing the quicksand of romantic ambition and the hard edge of an America beyond the reaches of the law.

Reading The Up-down was a whiplash ride; one we recommend so much, we chose it for our first First Editions Club pick of 2015.

Barry Gifford will be at Lemuria January 28th at 5 PM to read and sign from his book. Stop by and have a listen. If you’ve never read Gifford, now might be a great time to start.

Written by Adie 

At Lemuria, most of us that work here have a go-to book that we recommend to customers just a bit too often. This is because not only do we love the book, but also is almost guaranteed to be loved by a large audience. Not many books, no matter how well written, are palpable to many demographics.

I feel like I should get this inevitable blog out of the way. I’m like a kid full to bursting to tell you about my day at school. So as you read, imagine me telling you about this book while screaming and flailing about the room.

So The Secret History  by Donna Tartt is about this college kid, Richard, who is bored in his normal life of suburbia and goes to a fancy college in Vermont called Hampton. He then meets a mysterious group of five college students. They’re attractive, intelligent, wealthy, sophisticated, and above all, mysterious. These students stand out amongst the others at Hampton. After some digging, Richard finds that the group studies Greek classics, but there is only one teacher, and he only accepts five students a year.

How could Richard not be drawn into this beautiful circle? He convinces his way in, and then the story starts and blooms.

This book is filled with references to the Greeks and is like the Greek tragedy in and of itself.

This book is written backwards.

This book is like a modern day The Great Gatsby.

This book is creaky wooden floorboards and frosted windows.

This book is a pince-nez and a black sweater and cigarette smoke.

This book will make you love every character except the protagonist.

This book is 544 pages long, and yet not long enough.

This book is for people who want to read something very thrilling yet smart. If you want to be sucked into exciting events, yet you want to feel like you’re reading something of literary quality; this book is for you.

Written by Nicola 

The contacts come out first. Maybe I’ll put on my comically large glasses and doodle around the house for a while, or watch an episode of whatever BBC cop drama currently has me in its clutches. Eventually the weight of the day  needs to come off with a good face-washing; I could conquer the world after I’ve washed my face. Around this time, I might pour myself a glass of red wine. Things are winding down in my little apartment- my two cats and the dog have signed a momentary peace treaty so that everyone can toast in front of the gas heater in peace, and I’ve begun the nightly dialogue with myself about what to read when I crawl into bed.

Brush your teeth. Gargle. Trip over a cat, get a glass of water, check to make sure the doors are locked, ask your husband if he minds that you leave the light on for a while.

Read.

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”

― Vladimir Nabokov

Written by Hannah