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Lowcountry Book Club Celebrates 100 Years Of Page-turners

Categories: book clubs Tags: , ,
By HulaMonkey on April 14, 2013

Reprinted excerpt TheIslandPacket by David Lauderdale 04/13/13

The book was closed Wednesday on a remarkable chapter of Lowcountry lore.

The Estill Book Club ended its 100th year with a sprightly discussion of books, notable quotes and current events, with brunch served on china, silver and linen.

World wars and boll weevils haven’t come between a succession of 12 ladies at a time and their beloved gatherings. What started as the Wednesday Afternoon Book Club has not missed a single meeting — 12 a year for 100 years. Minutes from 1913 to 2006, handwritten in an old-fashioned “Records” book, are now held for posterity by the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina.

Lib Usher Laffitte has been in the club since 1950. Laurie Wiggins Hanna is a fourth-generation member. President Lawton Clarke O’Cain said, “It’s like when Kennedy was shot and 9/11, everybody knows what they were doing when they got invited to join Book Club.”

Similar clubs endure throughout the state. The Clover Club, a women’s literary and social group, was established in Beaufort in 1891. The oldest known book club in the state is the Up-To-Date Book Club in Chester, dating to 1896.

Estill, population 2,000, with its railroad tracks, water tower and single stoplight an hour north of Hardeeville on U.S. 321, is known more for being on the poor side of the swamp in Hampton County than a place of letters.

On Wednesday, the women turned their attention to books that opened avenues of the mind, like “The Iquana Tree,” “Rules of Civility,” “A Good Man,” “The Witness” and “Killing Lincoln.”

And, of course, they gave full attention to hostess Anne McLaurin Lawton’s famous cheese biscuits with brown sugar and pecans.

Read more CLICK HERE

Book Clubs Still A Novel Pursuit For Readers

Categories: book clubs Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
By HulaMonkey on February 25, 2013

Reprinted The Gazette by Mary Sharp 02/24/13

 

Paul Ingram, the book buyer at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, picks the books for Paul’s Book Club.

“My club, my books,” he says with a smile.

Business consultant Ron Moore of Cedar Rapids and the other men in his Awakenings book club suggest titles, “argue and advocate,” and then vote on what they’ll read.

The members of the Book Lovers Club, who have been meeting at the Cedar Rapids Public Library for almost three years, check what titles are available at the library and then vote on what to read.

Those are just three of the burgeoning number of book clubs in the Corridor, as varied in topic and scope as people’s interests and passions.

It’s estimated at least 5 million Americans are in book clubs, without counting those who find their niche in an online book club.

“Literary ladies” began book clubs in the United States in the 1860s. By the 1920s, book clubs had become “aspirational” — an alternative for people interested in learning but who didn’t have access to higher education, according to a Slate article by Nathan Heller.

Today, he writes, book clubs have evolved into mini-communities, “our bid to stay on the same page across the blur of modern life.”

That impulse propelled Moore of Cedar Rapids and a friend to start the Awakenings book group in 2004. The group meets once a month for 90 minutes, before work, to informally discuss a book chosen by the group, which runs between nine and 12 members.

“We vote on the titles, which is probably the reason the interest has been retained,” Moore says. The members also “enjoy each other because each member is a personal friend of at least one other member.”

Two-thirds of the picks are non-fiction, Moore says, with at least half of those concerning current issues.

Ingram says he picks books — always novels — “that have literary merit, ones that people probably haven’t read” for his Paul’s Book Club.

A recent selection included Sebastian Barry’s “The Secret Scripture,” “Rich in Love” by Josephine Humphreys and “Observatory Mansions” by Edward Carey.

The discussion of Barry’s book ranged from the nature of memory and grief to the impact of growing up in “terrible times” and the “secret history” in the plot.

The novel, Ingram said, “doesn’t make harsh judgments. It’s not really about forgiveness but the understanding of life.”

“The beauty of the language” in Barry’s book appealed to Marcia Wegman, an Iowa City artist, who said she particularly enjoys the mix of ages and of men and women she finds in Paul’s Book Club, now in its third year.

The History Book Club is a new group formed by Denise Roberts of the Marion Public Library and Kathy Wilson, historian and director of the Granger House in Marion.

The club just finished a two-meeting discussion of “Team of Rivals,” a history book that reads like a novel, as author Doris Kearns Goodwin examines the life and character of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln was “like steel,” Pringle Smith of Marion said, adding she was struck by the description of the 16th president as “a humanitarian as wide as the world.”

On the lighter side, the Book Lovers Club that meets at the Cedar Rapids Public Library is now reading “The Hunger Games” trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

Synona Culbertson started the club, with the help of library staffers, almost three years ago. She was new to Cedar Rapids, and the club, she says, has proved a great way to meet people and to read a variety of fiction and non-fiction.

“We didn’t want to just read classics or mysteries,” she says.

To read more CLICK HERE

The Atlas Shrugged Book Club Begins, Polarized but Polite

Categories: book clubs Tags: , ,
By HulaMonkey on February 20, 2013

Reprinted The Atlantic by – Conor Friedersdorf, Garance Franke-Ruta, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Jerome Copulsky

 

In this inaugural edition, one reader is inspired to quit Catholicism; another yearns for a book burning and inquisition; and a third is shocked to discover that the novel was published in the late 1950s.

 

From: Conor Friedersdorf
To: Michael Brendan Dougherty, Jerome Copulsky, Garance Franke-Ruta
Subject: Part I, Chapters 1 through 5

Michael, Jerome, Garance:

As a kid, I read Atlas Shrugged three or four times, starting in sixth or seventh grade, all while attending Catholic schools in Orange County, California. It was one of my favorite books, and although it moved steadily down my all-time list as I discovered Tolstoy, Hemingway, Nabokov, Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, and many others, I retain a fondness for it. In fact, I’d recommend reading it once to anyone. Like the Bible, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, Atlas Shrugged offers a radically different way of looking at the world that’s worth grappling with at least once. For many, the extremity of its vision is off-putting. Ayn Rand herself always insisted that her work wasn’t amenable to partial concurrences. Either embrace it wholeheartedly, she said, or reject it outright.

What I’ll never understand is why sycophants and critics alike so often comply. That isn’t an approach that I ever took. I like to think that if you read Atlas Shrugged and attend Catholic school, taking the best insights from both, you emerge at the end with a healthy relationship toward guilt.

I’ve always been surprised by how polarizing the book’s early chapters are. Readers meet Dagny Taggart, her unsavory brother, James, her childhood friend, Eddie Willers, and Francisco D’Anconia, my favorite character. The most controversial ideas in the novel all come later. I’ve nevertheless known people who love this section more than any other, and as many who stop reading after 80 pages, incredulous as to how anyone could press on. It’s hard to know how I’d react to Part I, Chapters 1 through 5, if I’d read them at age 33 for the first time. Re-reading, I enjoyed them. And I remember why certain passages appealed to me as a younger man.

Eddie Willers’s innocent idealism appealed to me: “It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren’t. He knew that they weren’t.”

His confidence in his convictions did too.

When I first read the book, I was being pressured to get confirmed into the Catholic Church, which I refused to do. I remember speaking at length with a youth minister who hoped to change my mind. He seemed like a phony. There’s a passage where Eddie describes a conversation with Jim Taggart, president of Transcontinental Railroad. “He spoke for an hour and a half and did not give me a straight answer,” Eddie observed. I remember thinking to myself, “That’s the affect my campus minister has!” I didn’t need a novel to intuit that he was dodging my questions. But I’d never encountered that sort of manipulation, even on TV or in literature, until chapter one of Atlas Shrugged. Reading it reassured me, as all my peers were preparing to be confirmed, that I wasn’t alone in perceiving a certain kind of evasiveness that I was right to mistrust. As I read on in the book, I was somehow reassured that I shouldn’t feel guilty about refusing to affirm things I didn’t believe, even if it would upset a family member or a priest.

Perhaps reading any radical dissent from prevailing social norms at that age would’ve broadened my notion of what was possible in the world. But I read Atlas Shrugged. And what I took from it wasn’t Rand’s philosophy so much as a feeling of empowerment to formulate my own.

There’s so much to discuss in the first five chapters:

To read the entire article and also to follow, or maybe even join the book club  CLICK HERE

 

She Magazine: Book Clubs Bring Passionate Readers Together

Categories: book clubs Tags: , , , ,
By HulaMonkey on February 10, 2013

Reprinted SHE Magazine ArgusLeader.com byLori Walsh 02/09/13

So much of our reading lives are spent alone with the page. Millions of people might have read the same book, might even be reading the same book at roughly the same time, but reading remains, for the most part, an act of solitude. We read alone, yet we are surrounded by clouds of characters who take up their own space in the room.

Winter is a sacred time for book lovers. We have a built-in excuse to stay inside and read. It’s not as if we don’t anticipate the blossoming of spring. It’s just that we have plenty to hold our interest in the meantime.

Librarian Jane Taylor understands readers. She understands that even though readers might spend hours alone, many of them also long to gather in community and share what they’ve read.

“Each book club has its own personality,” Taylor says. “A lot of book clubs are private and meet at people’s houses.”

Which means that if you happen to be new in town or are just looking around for a group to join, you might encounter some closed doors. Taylor facilitates an Eclectic Book Group through the Siouxland Libraries that is currently full.

“If you let the group get too big, not everyone gets to share their opinion,” Taylor explains. “Ten to 12 is a good number. If you grow too much, you start having too many sidebar conversations.”

A smaller group deepens relationships over the years and becomes more intimate, more willing to add their voice to the mix. It can be intimidating to tell others that you loathed a book the rest of the world seemed to love … or that another book has grown so close to your heart that you can’t bear to hear it criticized.

To read the entire article CLICK HERE

Former Hipster CEO Unveils The Little Book Club,

Categories: book clubs, childrens-books Tags: , , ,
By HulaMonkey on January 30, 2013

Reprinted The Next Web  By on 29 Jan ’13

Former Hipster founder and CEO Doug Ludlow and his wife Sara have two children and found that there was something magical about their family’s nightly storytime. As years go by, finding time to spend together can be increasingly difficult and having the right book to support their child’s development wasn’t always in supply. The Ludlows decided to change this: today, it is announcing the launch of The Little Book Club, a children’s book subscription service that grows as your offspring does.

With The Little Book Club, subscribers will receive at least three books in the mail each month: a hardcover book, paperback, and an activity book. Some months may vary and contain a different combination of books, and every month will follow a different theme, such as “Dinosaur Month”, “Colors Month”, etc.

Ludlow says that the company’s goal is to “change the world, one kid at a time.”

Books sent to each child are well-suited for them based on their development level. Before getting started, the company compiled a list of the best books for children from various child education expert organizations like the National Education Association, the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, the New York Times, and Caldecott Medal awarded books.

All book titles are sorted by age group to ensure that a one year old will not receive a book written for a five year old. This criteria is determined by both the publisher’s recommendation and The Little Book Club’s editorial team.

Ludlow says that at launch, children up to age six are the focus of its business and it currently has about 100 subscribers, although he says the company is “growing at a good pace.”

 

To read more CLICK HERE

Readers Cook Up Themed Meals For Book Club

Categories: book clubs Tags: , ,
By HulaMonkey on January 27, 2013

reprinted Philly.com by BY BETH D’ADDONO For the Daily News

SOME BOOK CLUBS are serious affairs, intent on intellectual discourse and literary delving.

The one I belong to is not of that ilk.

Not that the friends and neighbors in my Belmont Hills club aren’t smarty-pants material. It’s just that our club is as much about feeding our souls and our bellies as it is about feeding our intellects. We’re not really sure how it started, but most months, our meeting is a potluck inspired by something we are reading. Our discussion flows along with wine and herbal tea. Roasted vegetables and lovingly prepared comfort foods fuel our musings.

Tofu, green beans andaSan Francisco beer accompanied the reading of Mr. Penumbras… (STEVENM. FALK / Staff Photographer )

“Reading feeds the mind the same way food feeds the body in a delicious and enriching way,” said Johanna Dunn, an avid reader with a fondness for vampires and the band Jane’s Addiction. “Food also connects us to our history, creates new history and tightens friendships.”

The dozen or so members of the group, women ranging in age from thirty-something to close to 70, all love to cook. One, artist Laura Cohn, is in another book club at which food takes a back seat to discussion. “My other club is more serious, and the women are all high-powered professionals,” she said. “We just have snacks – fancy cheeses, olives, fruit and a few crackers.”

While our food-centered focus isn’t unique to book groups, we knew each other before the club started for the most part, so friendship is as much on the table as the roasted turkey with dressing that Sophie Socha made a few months back.

STEVEN M. FALK / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER The January menu reflected the book’s San… (STEVEN M. FALK / Staff Photographer )

“Primarily, I think we all love each other a lot, and it’s a rare treat to sit at a table and have an adult conversation,” said Cohn. “It can be hard for busy moms to enjoy their meals when they are trying to get dinner on the table for their family.”

To read more CLICK HERE

 

BookTrib is curious if your book club has matched a meal to a book you read. If so, which book and what did your book club cook?

Let us know by replying below.

Laugh, and The Book Club Laughs With You

Categories: book clubs Tags: ,
By HulaMonkey on January 8, 2013

by Marcy Campbell reprinted TheMillions.com

At Book Club, I’m a spy. I’m the only writer in this group of a dozen women. The others are scientists, doctors, social workers, winemakers. I’ve enjoyed the company of these smart, opinionated women immensely for nearly ten years, but I’d be lying if I said the camaraderie (and the pinot and the cheese) were the only reasons I participate. You see, my membership in the group gives me a real window into the reading habits of the very audience I’m trying to capture with my own fiction, a way to conduct a living room focus group, if you will, without anyone being the wiser. I can report that, over a decade, the tastes of the group have changed dramatically, in a way that doesn’t necessarily bode well for my own emerging career.

At Book Club, I’m also the secretary. One of my annual jobs is to compile a list of recommendations for the coming year. Every member offers a couple suggestions — title, author, and a one paragraph description typically cut and pasted from Amazon. Before sending out the list, I read through it closely, excited about all the interesting possibilities. And yet, my mind gets stuck on particular phrases in the descriptions that I know, from years of experience, will likely push the book out of contention.

I’m in the heads of these ladies, imagining the silent demerits they will offer to words like “heartbreaking,” (too sad), “epic” (too long), “thought-provoking” (meh, could go either way). Any book that features the loss of a child is out, no debate. Spousal abuse, cruelty to animals, anything hinting at a conservative world-view (unless it’s written by someone who abandoned that world-view), nope, nope, and nope.

coverIt wasn’t always this way. Ten years ago, most of us were just reaching our thirties. We’d yet to have children. We were career-focused, new transplants to our little town (brought here through our or our spouses’ jobs at the local college), and we were eager for friendship and mind-stimulation. We used to read at least a dozen books a year for the club. We read literary best-sellers by Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith. We read classics, such as the collected stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We read topical nonfiction, such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. We had a night solely devoted to poems we loved. We read cookbooks. Once, just after Obama won his first election, we kicked off a meeting with a reading of Goodnight Bush, a parody of the classic Goodnight Moon we’d all soon enough be reading to our own children.

coverI vividly remember a meeting, about six years ago. . .

To read the entire article CLICK HERE

Rowling Starts Harry Potter Book Club for Young Readers

Categories: book clubs, Children's literature Tags: , ,
By savvybookworm on July 31, 2012

Reprinted from Reuters.com, by Patricia Reaney, July 31, 2012

Author J.K. Rowling launched an online book club for young readers on Tuesday and will appear in a live global webcast in October from Edinburgh, Scotland, to speak with her fans about the magical world of Harry Potter. Rowling’s U.S. publisher, Scholastic, which developed the Harry Potter Reading Club website, said it will be a destination for fans of the British boy wizard and a tool for parents and teachers who want to set up book clubs to introduce children to the joys of reading. “Scholastic has been in conversation with educators, librarians and other book lovers about ideas for bringing the Harry Potter books to new readers in exciting and different ways,” Ellie Berger, president of Scholastic Trade, said in a statement announcing the club. “The Harry Potter Reading Club is a direct response to that feedback and provides an entry point through which the thrill of these books can be shared with new generations of Harry Potter fans both within and beyond the classroom.” The live webcast with Rowling from her hometown will be presented by the club at noon EDT (0500 GMT) on October 11 at www.scholastic.com/hpreadingclub. Scholastic, which described the webcast as a “live virtual author visit to classrooms,” said it will be Rowling’s first opportunity since 2007 to interact with young readers and to discuss Pottermore, www.pottermore.com, a website launched in April to help fans navigate through the tales of wizardry and witchcraft. The Harry Potter Reading Club will include a guide for everything about the boy wizard, an overview of the series of Harry Potter books that have sold an estimated 450 million copies worldwide and were transformed into eight hit movies, and information about Rowling, the world’s first author billionaire. Scholastic said it will add activities on the site every month.

A less than conventional book/movie review

Categories: book clubs Tags: , , , ,
By HulaMonkey on February 15, 2012

JUPITER — Book clubs inspire members to become familiar with books written by authors that they might ordinarily not include among their reading list.

This is my book report.

If you don’t know what a Cluck in a Bucket is, you haven’t gotten hooked on author Janet Evanovich’s quirky heroine, Stephanie Plum.

You don’t know what your life is missing.

Back in 1994, I took time out from my spy thrillers by Tom Clancy, Daniel Silva, Jack Higgins and Harlan Coben and picked up a copy of One For The Money by Janet Evanovich. I was hooked.

My addiction didn’t end there. I kept passing the book around to my daughter, Donnie Quigley, a middle school teacher and to my younger daughter, Kathy Greene, WJTW radio’s Gal on the Go.

Kathy proceeded to introduce Jennifer Sardone-Shiner, marketing director for the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, and a fan club of addicted readers was created.

I even got my crossword/Sudoku loving husband, Paul, chuckling over the antics of the Evanovich characters while listening to book number seven, “Seven Up” while on a road trip.

Who can resist getting to know the dysfunctional Plum family living in a section of Trenton, New Jersey called the burg.

Stephanie’s mother just wants her daughter to settle down and get married. Her father ‘s goal is to stay uninvolved and possibly send his mother in law, Grandma Mazur, to an old age home. The wacky, over the top Grandma Mazur life revolves around calling hours at the local funeral home. Unfortunately, she usually manages to create a bit of havoc.

Stephanie has her own pad complete with her pet hamster, Rex. She’d like to stay independent of the family; however, she keeps getting fired. In desperation, she takes a job as a bounty hunter at her sleazy cousin Vinny’s , storefront bail bonds office.

From selling lingerie to touting a gun, pepper spray and handcuffs, life will never be the same for sassy Stephanie.

One for the Money has just been released as a movie.

The book was the first in a series that now numbers 18. Both the book and the movie introduce the main characters and how their lives become entwined. For theater-goers, consider it the first act. Hopefully, the series will continue on the big screen.

I would imagine it’s considered a low budget film. The biggest high ticket item would be the demolition of cars. Throughout the complete series, Stephanie goes through cars as fast as Lula goes through donuts and fried chicken from Cluck in a Bucket.

Stephanie’s first bounty hunt is for Joe Morelli a former school mate who managed to de-flower most of the high school girls in the burg, including Stephanie. Although Morelli is a cop, he’s wanted for an unlawful killing and the chase is on.

Since this is Stephanie’s first bounty hunting job, the office manager, Connie Roselli, provides her with help from an experienced hunter; the hunky man of few words and lots of action, Ranger. Evanovich’s description of Ranger is “His features are Anglo, his eyes are Latino, his skin is the color of a mocha latte, and his body is as good as a body can get.”

The introduction of Ranger sets the stage in future books for a competition between Morelli and Ranger for Stephanie’s affection.

One for the Money also introduces Lula, a retired hooker who sometimes rides shotgun for Stephanie. The colorful Lula loves bright colored spandex pants, high heels and solving any and all problems with a a shopping spree, a bag of donuts or some other completely fat saturated treat.

Evanovich’s talent lies in her ability to create a wonderful world of characters that are so descriptive you can visualize each and every one of them. The fast paced action and constant introduction of zany new oddballs keeps the readers engrossed from start to finish.

The Jupiter chapter of our Evanovich fan club met at Corners Restaurant for Lobster and wine then proceeded to the movie theater to enjoy being introduced to the larger than life Stephanie Plum menagerie.

It took me a while to get use to the casting as I already had the characters cast in my mind. Starting with Stephanie, portrayed by the exquisite Katherine Heigl, I always envisioned Sandra Bullock. Grandma Mazur played by Debbie Reynolds didn’t fit my Estelle Getty image. Cousin Vinnie I saw as Danny DeVito. Both Morelli, played by hunky Jason O’Mara and Ranger, (Daniel Sunjata) fit the image ; however, Lula should have been comedian/actress Niecy Nash. Sherry Shepherd who is in the movie, has the full blown image necessary but lacks Niecy Nash’s spectacular attitude.

However, it didn’t take me long to re adjust my brain and totally adopt my new friends.

The movie reviews for One for the Money, were not good. It’s not going to be nominated for any awards. It doesn’t send you home with a message; however, it certainly has you leaving the theater laughing and communicating with other audience members as they exit. Obviously, all are fans of life in “the burg.”

If you love mayhem and raucous humor and character driven books and movies, introduce yourself to One for the Money.

Bet you can’t read just one Evanovich book.

This story is contributed by a member of the Treasure Coast community and is neither endorsed nor affiliated with TCPalm.com

reprinted: TC Palm Feb.14, 2012 by Jan Davisson

Slider Photo:

The Jupiter Chapter of the Janet Evanovich Book Club gathered at Corners Restaurant in Jupiter before previewing the first movie on the big screen, One for the Money. l-r front row: Jan Davisson, Donnie Quigley, back row: Kathy Greene, Jennifer Sardone Shiner

Book Clubs

Categories: book clubs Tags: ,
By on August 2, 2011

by Nathan Heller (Slate)

A casual observer of the book-club scene could be fooled into thinking that this summer was a hard one for the nation’s leisure readers. Late in spring, Oprah’s club shuttered, stranding publishers in what promises to be a long shoal of short print runs and offering the rest of us one literary arbiter fewer to love or hate. Borders, which ran a sort of book group of its own, shut down stores, too, after creditors refused a buyout offer from a book-club mega-company. Could reading groups be losing their sway in our culture? On one hand, this is a reasonable question; on the other, it’s like asking whether the United States should worry about being out-powered by Belgium. More than 5 million adults are thought to be in reading groups, not counting online clubs, and a number of those adults have a noticeable missionary bent: If Oprah didn’t get you onboard, there’s a good chance that your neighbor with a Thursday group will have you marking up Love in the Time of Cholera before summer is through.

To point out that a good part of this country attends book clubs is not necessarily to establish that America is crazy about books. Like scheduling a business lunch or following a date upstairs for coffee, book-clubbing is fraught with ulterior motives. For one thing, there is usually dessert. The Book Club Cookbook recommends discussing Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel in the company of three good-sized cocoa-cinnamon babkas. Some clubs look like offerings to the gods of hyperglycemia, their altars laden with warm brownies, sweet zucchini bread, homemade cupcakes, and—just as inevitably—a gross of Oreos dumped on a paper plate by someone who has long since fled the scene. (This packaged-food stealth bomber is the Boo Radley of book clubs, cropping up when all eyes are averted to deposit curious wares: Once, at a club I visited, someone had planted a large, gaping carton of KFC in the middle of a food spread, where it stood untouched through the discussion like some occult talisman.) Alcohol tends to be on offer, which is another way of saying that book-clubbing is not something to undergo with people you find deeply boorish. Or, also, people you like too much: Parents of small children have been known to linger long after the coffee goes cold, running up their sitters’ clocks to chase an extra, guilty hour of unencumbered social time. For a pursuit decked out in the stiff raiment of virtue, clubbing is extraordinarily enabling of vice.

It’s also—and if I were a certain kind of book-clubber, I might here take out my highlighter to flag this “major theme” of the pastime—marked by a strange ambivalence on what to read. Where one might expect club-goers to be fire-in-the-belly champions of a literary agenda, people who harbor strong feelings about Djuna Barnes and Henri Barbusse and who keep at least one crumbling, grease-stained copy of The Rise of the Novel in range of their nightstands, many book-clubbers (most book-clubbers?) seem not to care too much what passes through their literary gullets. One New York club’s reading list includes Infinite Jest, the Hunger Games series, the first Dexter novel, and Don Quixote. The lineup of another in Washington state includes a novel by Tracy Chevalier, a memoir by Ruth Reichl, and a biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Tossing darts across a Barnes & Noble could hardly produce a more scattershot list.

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