The Atlantis Book Club discussing The Piano Teacher by Janice Lee. March’s book is The Outlander by Gil Adamson. In April, they’ll discuss City of Refuge by Tom Piazza. See Nan’s last blog posting on the book club.

First I will confess…..I have not started this book. I am very soon though!! The problem is that we can’t seem to keep it in stock!! As soon as we get some in, they fly off the front counter. I DO know that my mother loved it and my mother-in-law is reading it and it is becoming somewhat of a phenomenon. It’s cracking the best sellers lists and is a book that is hot all over the country.

An intriguing part of this story is the author herself. Leila Meacham, a retired teacher from San Antonio.

Publishers Weekly interviewed Meacham:

“The epic novel Roses isn’t the first outing for author Leila Meacham. In the mid-1980s, Meacham wrote and published a handful of romance novels. But it wasn’t a process she enjoyed much. At the time, she was teaching English, and the solitary process of writing took her away from preparing lesson plans, learning about new techniques and enjoying hobbies like gardening. After retiring, Meacham ran through her list of retirement goals. She and her husband traveled. Thirteen years into retirement, at age 65, she was left with a question: Now what?”

“The answer was Roses.”

“One day I was in bed, drinking my cup of coffee, and I just thought to myself, ‘I’ve got so much to offer somebody somewhere or something. I just don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,’” Meacham recalls. “I will defend this to my dying day: A voice in my head said, ‘You will get down Roses and you will finish Roses.’ I like to believe that’s a divine inspiration.”

“Meacham had begun the novel in 1985, when a bad case of pneumonia forced her to temporarily resign from teaching. As years passed, the typewritten pages of the novel were stored in a box in a closet, almost abandoned as Meacham and her husband moved from one house to another.” Six years ago, his suspicions proved accurate as Meacham pulled the box off the shelf and resumed writing.”

“The novel traces nearly 70 years in the history of the Toliver family, owners of a cotton plantation in a fictional Texas town. When patriarch Vernon Toliver dies, he entrusts the land to his daughter, Mary, because he knows she will love and care for it. His wife and son are outraged.”

“That decision and the stubborn love that motivated it determine the course of Mary Toliver’s life. She’s unwilling to compromise anything that would negatively affect her beloved Somerset plantation, whether it means sacrificing her fair complexion to work in the field or the man she loves because he won’t settle for second place in her heart. The decisions Mary makes, and the lies that accompany them, alter the history of the Toliver clan and its relationships with the town’s other founding families, the department store-owning DuMonts and timber magnates the Warwicks.”

“It’s only appropriate that this 600-page epic took Meacham five years to write. The narrative sprawls across geography as much as time, stretching from the fictional Texas burg of Howbutker to Lubbock, Dallas and points between.” (‘The two together—cotton and timber—you don’t find that in the same state’ anywhere but Texas, Meacham says.)

“Now the 71-year-old Meacham is not only anticipating book signings to support the book, she’s also hard at work on another epic novel, this time with a more modern focus. So what happened to the woman who so disliked the solitary nature of writing?”

“I didn’t like the confinement, the frustration of trying to get your thoughts on paper,” Meacham recalls. “Oddly enough, I’m happiest when I’m writing now. And I’m all by myself and anything in the world can come out on the page.”

“What this has done for me has made me aware that I can write. Now, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me. But I feel that I can write. I can tell a story.”

Pretty cool, huh?  It’s next in my stack, so y’all start it, too, and let’s talk about it!

Malcolm Jones will be at Lemuria to sign and read from his memoir, Little Boy Blues, tomorrow night (Tuesday the 2nd) starting at 5pm.

Jones’s childhood in North Carolina wasn’t idyllic; he didn’t see much of his father, who was drunk much of the time he was around, and, while his mother was a bigger presence in Jones’s life, she was more often than not nitpicking her son or railing about one relative or another.  His book, however, doesn’t read like many of the “poor young me” memoirs that have been pervasive the past few years.  I enjoyed reading about Jones’s childhood so much because the stories he tells are not meant to shock the reader or reprove his relatives; rather, they are glimpses into a little boy’s joys and tribulations.

There’s a chapter devoted to Jones’s childhood affinity for marionettes, where the shouting matches between Jones’s parents fall into the background while he struggles to deal with his simultaneous feelings of excitement and shame because so many peers and respected adults think he may be “funny” for “playing with dolls.”  And there’s a wonderful passage about the summer he was best friends with the cinema owner’s son — a summer he wiled away the sweltering days in the cool of a movie theatre and learned “the esthetics of pleasure, of savoring something for its own sake.”  Through racial and religious bigotry, dysfunction and instability, there’s discovery and wonderment and the delights of being young.

Read the LA Times review by Susan Salter Reynolds

I got this book for Christmas, a gift from someone who’d also never read it, and somehow I’d never heard much about it – just heard OF it and that it won the Pulitzer a couple of years ago – and so it was one of those nice experiences where I didn’t know what I was getting into.  But!  good news.  I loved this book.  Crazy about it, sort of.

I guess the nicest thing at first was the fact that I’d never read anything even close to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It’s this epic story full of footnotes and Lord of the Rings references and history – recent history – of the Dominican Republic, specifically during the ‘Trujillo Era’, when the country was ruled by one of the bloodiest most awful tyrants of the 20th century (about whom I don’t know enough, I need to admit).

The Oscar in the title is this horribly overweight nerd, a Dominican growing up in New Jersey who wants to fall in love and be a great sci-fi writer and all the rest of it but unfortunately he just really can’t help himself from being the loser that he is – a real bind, since Dominican men are typically very successful with women.  This is in stark contrast to the narrator, who at points in the novel is the boyfriend of Oscar’s sister.  He tells the story without waiting for you to catch up – using slang, drifting into Spanish, etc.  He tells the reader about Oscar’s mother growing up in the DR and his grandfather, who is rumored to have spoken against Trujillo one day, therefore incurring a curse that’s haunted Oscar’s family ever since.  Hence Oscar’s disastrous luck – maybe?  Maybe?  We also read about Oscar’s sister and her strained relationship with her mother.  It’s so GOOD.  It’s hilarious and fascinating and then so sweet and sad and tragic that it’s sort of a kick in the teeth.

Diaz also has a short story collection out called Drown.  I’ve never read it.  Can’t wait to.  anyway!

Susie

J. D. Salinger passed away today. read the ap story here.