Hello! At Book Club we decided to expand our horizons with a poetry selection for August. I suggested a book I read about a year ago and really loved (as a poet I have a low tolerance for bad or deliberately inaccessible poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets aside…). Thankfully everyone else was game and agreed to read it!

Breakfast with Thom Gunn by local poet Randall Mann.

We have one copy of this book here at Gleeson and it’s currently checked out. You can request it through Link+, but there’s only a couple copies in that system. The other alternative is to request it through San Francisco Public Library, who has a handful of copies spread throughout the branch libraries in the city. Otherwise you can support a local book store and purchase it there, or you can buy an ebook version for your Kindle/iPad/whathaveyou.

We hope to meet in the Community Garden if the weather is nice. In case it is foggy/chilly, we will be in our back-up location: the seminar room of Gleeson Library (#209). Look for an email reminder on the morning of the 18th regarding our location. To sign up for the email list, contact Kelci at kbaughmanmcdowell@usfca.edu.

“With audacious wit and formal prowess equal to the master to whom he pays homage, Randall Mann has written a book both poignant and humorous, where one minute ‘we stand above it all’ and the next minute we are reading ‘the notes of the drowned.’ Mann invites us a into a ghastly metropolis, its emptiness and ruin nonetheless populated with remarkable sites of grace. If this were only the evacuated city, ‘the nothingness behind us/the nothingness ahead,’ the permanent red of Ilium scattered with fallen bodies, the feral world of nonchalant disease, rent boys and assassins, it would simply be another note of irretrievable loss in the parade of human history. But with purling fountains and lush gardens, Mann reveals the transitory but beguiling beauty that holds despair in abeyance, that reminds us of why desire propels us forward. ‘Soon we will be underground,’ he says, but for now we enjoy the cherries that dangle tantalizingly before us.”—D. A. Powell

Hello everyone! From what I hear, Isabel Allende is an amazing writer so it’s high time Book Club read one of her books. Island Beneath the Sea is her newest and it is an historical novel that largely takes place in Haiti, so it is appropriate to the times.

Opening in Saint Domingue a few years before the Haitian revolution would tear it apart, the story has at its center Zarité, a mulatto whose extraordinary life takes her from that blood-soaked island to dangerous and freewheeling New Orleans; from rural slave life to urban Creole life and a different kind of cruelty and adventure. Yet even in the new city, Zarité can’t quite free herself from the island, and the people alive and dead that have followed her. Zarité’s passages are striking. More than merely lyrical, they map around rhythms and spirits, making her as much conduit as storyteller. ~Publishers Weekly

We’ve just ordered a couple copies for Gleeson, so you can put a hold on one by clicking here, you can order it through Link+ by clicking here, or you can put a hold on it at the San Francisco Public Library. You can also browse the book at the Harpers Collins website (see little nifty badge below):

Browse Inside this book Get this for your site

Join us in the USF Community Garden on July 21, 2010 from 12 noon – 1 pm. Bring your lunch and tell your friends!

Also you can check us out online, at our wiki!

Thanks to the recommendation of one of my MFA classmates, I started reading The Archivist by Martha Cooley a few weeks ago. She was right to recommend it to me — it brings together my two worlds: poetry and libraries. Most of the novel centers around the letters between TS Eliot and his American confidante Emily Hale, which have been donated to the University for which the main character, Matt, works as the library archivist. With poetic mind and interspersing of poetic text, the novel illuminates Matt’s past and current relationships — romantic and familial — while also examining how religious faith affects each character’s world view. I’m looking forward to discussing it at book club!

We will meet in the USF Community Garden on Wednesday June 23, 2010, from 12 noon – 1 pm. If the weather is bad we will instead meet in the library.

To get the book through the library’s free service Link+, follow this link and request it using your University ID number.

We welcome all members of the USF Community, so take a break, soak up some rays, and join us for a fun discussion.

You can check out the book club online by visiting our wiki!

Hello!

The USF Book Club continues our theme of less traumatizing novels by selecting Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey for our May pick. It’s a classic… and I’m ashamed to admit that I have never finished a book by Jane Austen even though I was an English major and I have an MFA in Writing. 2010 is a year of change for me!

We’ll meet on Wednesday May 19, 2010 from 12 – 1 in the USF Community Garden, which is just West of the Education Building on Turk Blvd.

How do I get a copy?

As of this writing, we still have one copy here in the library — click here to request it. We also have three E-book versions of it — click here to go to the record & access it. You can also request it through Link+, which is a service that delivers books from libraries all over California and Nevada to you here at Gleeson.

“Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen’s earliest novels, it was not published until after her death–well after she’d established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Of all her novels, this one is the most explicitly literary in that it is primarily concerned with books and with readers.”
-Amazon.com

Hope to see you there!

p.s. Did you know book club has a wiki? Check us out! Or you can email Kelci Baughman McDowell for details or to sign up on the mailing list.

Hello book lovers! The USF Book Club is reading Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr and will meet on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 to discuss. We’ll be in the seminar room (#209) of Gleeson Library from 12-1 pm. Bring your lunch and your friends!

Personally I am especially excited about this book — Mohr is an USF MFA alumnus and he was a TA for my senior seminar class I took at USF in undergrad. One of my friends read Some Things in 1 day, and my boyfriend read it in a couple days.

The book has been crazy successful considering it’s Mohr’s debut and a small press put it out. He’s been profiled in The San Francisco Chronicle (although the article writer made that common–if not irritating–error of referring to USF as UCSF), Poets & Writers, and Oprah even named Some Things as a recommended book of 2009.

How to get the book: You can try requesting it through Link+ (the book will come to Gleeson in about 4 business days) or you can try to get it through SF Public Library (click the link and you can place a hold if you have a SFPL library card). Otherwise, Gleeson has 1 copy and it’s checked out with a hold on it already. You could consider purchasing the book, too, since it’ll support a local writer, a small press, and it’s in paperback!

From Publishers Weekly:

“Mohr’s first novel is biting and heartbreaking, a piercing look at the indelible scars a violent past has left on a young man named Rhonda. In the mental hospital where Rhonda spent his teenage years, a doctor he refers to as Angel-Hair diagnoses him with depersonalization, a disorder he uses to reconfigure the traumatic events of his life and render them in vividly surreal terms. To withstand the frequent absences of his alcoholic mother and her boyfriend’s abuse, Rhonda imagines his childhood home in Arizona as a living thing, where rooms stretch and move, and desert wildlife wanders the halls. The disturbing narrative engine–Rhonda’s renaming and reimagining of the world around him to fit into his damaged logic–keeps the story creepily moving as it touches on homebrew prison wine and Rhonda’s friendship with his childhood self, little-Rhonda. Mohr uses punchy, tightly wound prose to pull readers into a nightmarish landscape, but he never loses the heart of his story; it’s as touching as it is shocking, even if the ending’s a smidge sappy.”