The Rory Gilmore Book Club discussion

The January book is Old School by Tobias Wolff.

I'm trying to get my hands on it, but it's probably not gonna be until next week !

POWER READING UNTIL THE END OF THE MONTH.

It's at my library. I'm hoping to swing by today.

Anybody had time to buy/start reading the book?

I found it at my library the other day. I really enjoy it so far!

I've exams at the moment but I got it from the library today so I'll try to read it before deadline. Not sure I'll make it.

I had to call a neighboring towns library, but I'm picking it up tonight. I actually used the library button on the books page, never tried it before but it works great.

ahah! I'm tracking my package, shoud be at my house today!

I finished it on Wednesday. It is a fast read.

I'm actually rereading it, but I've forgotten the most of it, so it's basically a first read :D love it though!

I have to say, congrats to the mods, great pick after Hemingway:

p.5 - Dean Makepeace had been a friend of Hemingway during World War I and was said to have served as the model for Jake's fishing buddy Bill in The Sun Also Rises.

Made me smile

I finished the book a day or so ago and I have to say I was surprised by how much I loved this book. The ode to writers of past and how the subjects story/life changed with his relationship with their works.

I have to say I would love a school so focused on English as this prep school seems to be.

I can't wait for everyone to finish reading it to discuss how beautiful it was!

"And why would Caeser fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry."

It was a very fast read, and I, too, was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. A unique perspective to take with fiction, taking the view of now deceased authors, and giving their perspective on things. Wolff did it well, representing those authors. Won't say who the authors were in case people haven't finished reading yet.

What do you think the main subject of this book was? Literature? Forgery?

Most of the book talk about make-believe, and being so ashamed of yourself that you pretend to be someone else.

I liked to twist in the story, when the main character decide to come out and admit all that is unspeakable about him. The others react in disgust to the fact the he used somebody else's work as his own, not from what he actually hid from them.

By reading a bit more about him, I learned that his father, Arthur, was an aeronautical engineer but also a pathological liar and supreme con artist. It puts the epigraph at the beginning, in perspective (Mark Strand, Elegy for My Father.

Marie-pier wrote: "What do you think the main subject of this book was? Literature? Forgery?

Most of the book talk about make-believe, and being so ashamed of yourself that you pretend to be someone else.

I liked ..."

I'm a bit confused about your third paragraph. When did the main character admit all that is unspeakable about him? And what was he actually hiding from them aside from the plagiarism?

I didn't notice the epigraph, thank you for pointing that out.

I like that the ending is forgiving. I can only imagine how terrible the main character must have felt after he was kicked out of the school- so to be able to speak to one of the members of the faculty without being judged, and to discover that someone in an important position was caught in a lie as well, must have been a relief.

I think the main subject of the book is human error. The forgiving ending shows that it is not the end of the world after you make one mistake, and that as long as you learn from it, you can move on with your life.

"And as for that, had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity- its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering in condemnation and violence against others and oneself. For years Arch had traced this vision of the evil done through intolerance of the flawed and ambiguous, but he had not taken the lesson to heart. He had given up the good in his life because a fault ran through it. He was no better than Aylmer, murdering his beautiful wife to rid her of a birthmark."

It kind of brings to mind this article from an online magazine that I love: http://rookiemag.com/2013/01/marked-f...

Jasmine wrote: "Marie-pier wrote: "What do you think the main subject of this book was? Literature? Forgery?

Most of the book talk about make-believe, and being so ashamed of yourself that you pretend to be someo..."

I felt that the main character found the story so close to his personal life that he chose to add his name to it. At multiple occasions the author mention that this text is a expression of things unsaid to his fellow students (Jewish ancestry (Levine as a last name), his modest background etc), and he is taking this text as a way of "coming out of the closet" one would say.

The twist here, is that the story used to tell the truth is in itself false, being the stolen property of someone else.