Pellicano Articles
When I think “book club”, my mind immediately goes to classics like Jane Eyre or the new David Sedaris, but it’s always firmly rooted in the realms of literary or social commentary. But sometimes, people just aren’t interested in reading “A Tale of Two Cities” – so you shouldn’t be surprised to find that book clubs span a ton of other categories besides the usual mystery/thriller, historical romance, and memoir. Be creative and try introducing one of these categories to your book club – just think of the fun you could have coming up with book club questions!
Cookbooks
Why not? Cookbooks, whether providing advice on how to eat cheaply, or exploring another culture’s cuisine, can be very personal. An added benefit to trying to figure out the chef author’s life, personal history, and so forth, is that you get to try out the recipes. Yum!Sample questions: How did food impact the cook’s childhood/adulthood? Did you find these recipes frustrating? Did you try improvising ingredients?
Graphic novels
Why not? A lot of graphic novels are very deep stories, only enhanced by stunning visuals.Sample questions: How do splash pages and irregular panels express broad concepts like intense emotion and the shifting of time? Does the style allow you to better accept outlandish settings like space or futuristic dystopias? How do the writer and artists work together to express characterization and plot development? Did any parts take you by surprise? Were you able to detect patterns in either storytelling or art?
Erotica
Why not? If everyone is comfortable enough to talk about sex and what turns you on (this is the kind of thing I’d see more in a college dorm than a room of mothers), then you could have some truly illuminating discussions about culture, sexuality, and even identity. Also, these are usually short story collections, so you can interact only as much as you’re comfortable with.
Sample questions: Which lover (male, female, or in a same-sex story, clarify which character) did you find yourself identifying with? Why does the author decide to set the story in a bedroom/office/airplane bathroom? Were there elements to a story that unnerved/disgusted you, and why? Is there artistic merit to erotica?
Photo collections
Why not? A picture is worth a thousand words. Think you can come up with more than that in a discussion?
Sample questions: (Steer away from technicalities – unless you’re all photo buffs! – and stick with personal reactions.) Why did the artist decide to use color/black-and-white? Is this a candid or a posed photo, and how does that affect your reaction? What is the message that the artist is trying to transmit?
Audiobooks
Why not? This isn’t so much a theme as a different style of experiencing the content, so perhaps this will dip into the Sedaris and Patterson categories. But introducing the audiobook option could ensure that more members get to actually read the book before the next meeting, due to the ability to have it in the car or on a morning jog. Plus, it can be a more personal experience to have a book read to you by someone, especially if it’s narrated by the author him/herself.
Sample questions: Were you surprised at how good/bad the narrator was? Did the story have one or more narrators, and which works better? Did you find yourself focusing more or getting more distracted listening to the book? (Plus other questions based on the specific category you choose.)
Learn more about book clubs and the questions you can ask at this really neat digital book club, which is currently covering The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Tags: book, book club questions, digital book club, Literature, lovely bones
Posted in Literature · December 20th, 2009 · Comments (0)
As usual, Clive Cussler stays right on top of current world events in his latest Dirk Pitt novel, Arctic Drift. This time, not surprisingly, the book set in the year 2011 revolves around the financial crisis and global warming.
The bad guy of the story, Mitchell Goyette, is a Canadian energy tycoon with a public facade of green technology and renewable resource businesses. However, his dark underbelly conceals heavy involvement in oil and natural gas.
The United States faces a financial meltdown, aggravated by the threat of an international boycott if the country does not decrease its carbon dioxide emissions from coal fired power plants. Canada holds the key to America’s salvation in the form or an enormous wealth of natural gas reserves.
The American president in 2011, when the story takes place, plans to use natural gas from Canada to replace both coal and automobile gasoline, thereby killing two birds with one stone. The nation would make huge savings by cutting down on expensive oil imports, and simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions by burning a cleaner fuel.
This desperate American play gets exploited by the industrialist Goyette to the fullest. Officially, he is the hero of the green movement because of his heavy investments in wind power and carbon dioxide sequestering. Unofficially, he holds a major interest in the Athabasca oil sands of Alberta, as well as the entire Melville natural gas field in the Canadian Arctic.
Promising the U.S. government a nearly unlimited supply of the Melville natural gas to help solve the American energy crisis, and consequently also the financial crisis brought on by soaring oil prices, Goyette underhandedly signs a secret deal with the Chinese to instead sell them the gas at 10% above market value, with no intention of keeping his word to the U.S.
(In reality, it seems a little farfetched that the American government would not have had an iron-clad, legally binding, written contract in place for a deal of this magnitude and importance. But it makes for a good story.)
Even so, the backstabbing of the United States as a business-partner is the least of Mitchell Goyette’s shenanigans. He also bribes high ranking Canadian officials, creates toxic waste that kills wildlife and people, pays to have property stolen or vandalized, and for his opposition to be assassinated.
Of course, what Goyette fails to take into consideration is Dirk Pitt, the hero of twenty novels by Clive Cussler, including this most recent installment. In the end, Pitt manages to wreak havoc with all of Goyette’s ill-willed plans.
Arctic Drift is an excellent and seamless co-authorship between Clive Cussler and his son, Dirk Cussler. It is hard to tell the penmanship of one apart from the other throughout the book. Whatever sections Dirk Cussler wrote, he did an excellent job of adopting Clive’s inimitable style. (That’s an intentional oxymoron.)
All in all, Arctic Drift is an excellent action thriller. It’s does not have the cover-to-cover non-stop action of some of the older Dirk Pitt novels by Cussler, but it does have quite enough action, plus the story line is brilliant and intriguing and keeps you wanting to read more. And as always in Dirk Pitt’s world, the villains are as clever as they are evil, and the heroes as pure as Arctic snow.
Britt Hellman resides in Western North Carolina with her spouse and three children. She runs her own copywriting business from home. Clive Cussler has been one of her favorite writers since reading his Trojan Odyssey, a Dirk Pitt Novel, in 2003. She writes reviews like this one on Arctic Drift for the fun of sharing that excitement.
Tags: action, book, Entertainment, Literature, story
Posted in Literature · November 15th, 2009 · Comments (0)