Book Nook Cafe discussion

Here is the thread for you to post in to find a Book Buddy for short stories, plays, and essays. The purpose of a Buddy Read is to help you connect with others who may want to read and discuss the same book as you.

When you find a Book Buddy, I will set up a thread so you can discuss it on the board.

It is best to suggest a book that you are planning to read in 2-4 weeks hence. This will give the other person time to get the book.

Give it a try. It's a lot of fun to read and discuss a book with another person. :)

Our next short story for the group will be in December.

We picked a short story because December can be a hectic month.

We selected:

Christmas Day in the Morning~~Pearl S. Buck

It's a simply one page story that can be found online.

I'll put up the thread closer to December.

Thanks for the heads up, Alias. I still entertain hopes of reading "The Necklace", so haven't read the posts there yet. I'll be better prepared by December. Or so i imagine.

I'm happy to see a book by Pearl Buck! Look forward to reading it.

A collection of the best essays of the year compiled by Longreads. The only one that I read was the one by George Saunders, "My Writing Education: A Time Line," which was published in the New Yorker. I really enjoyed it.

http://blog.longreads.com/2015/12/15/...

Has anyone come across a book written by Pearl Buck, entitled The Child Who Never Grew.

Carol wrote: "Has anyone come across a book written by Pearl Buck, entitled The Child Who Never Grew. "

Yes. I have it on my Kindle. My elderly neighbor loves Pearl Buck and recommended the book to me. When Amazon had a bunch of Buck's books on sale for the Kindle, I purchased it.

good to know . . .

Larry, those essays look enticing and thought provoking, as well as being a very mixed bag. I immediately read the one about the American Girl series, Addy. The phenomenon of those stores have never set well with me & Addy's story is why.

Thanks for the link.

An essay on digital reading vs. reading on paper. The writer likes digital reading a lot ... I don't have a strong position on this .. .I just like ... reading.

"There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips."

http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/the-d...

An article from the Atlantic web site on why the British tell (or write) better children's stories.

"The small island of Great Britain is an undisputed powerhouse of children’s bestsellers: The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, The Hobbit, James and the Giant Peach, Harry Potter, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Significantly, all are fantasies. Meanwhile, the United States, also a major player in the field of children’s classics, deals much less in magic. Stories like Little House in the Big Woods, The Call of the Wild, Charlotte’s Web, The Yearling, Little Women, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are more notable for their realistic portraits of day-to-day life in the towns and farmlands on the growing frontier. If British children gathered in the glow of the kitchen hearth to hear stories about magic swords and talking bears, American children sat at their mother’s knee listening to tales larded with moral messages about a world where life was hard, obedience emphasized, and Christian morality valued. Each style has its virtues, but the British approach undoubtedly yields the kinds of stories that appeal to the furthest reaches of children’s imagination."

www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/arc...

I've adjusted to reading with my iPad over the last 2+ years. At this point more of my reading is digital than not, due to traveling. I still prefer paper, particularly if i own the book. However, i find myself less & less picky. If i had easy access to my own books this might not have happened.

I was not raised with any children's stories or fairy tales, mother's knee or hearth. We read daily to our children but were careful to make sure there was time for questions and expression of fears, just in case. I wish I could declare they appeared more or less imaginative but cannot. One writes (nf) for a living, the other is a volunteer deejay who earns his paycheck as a security guard.

Either way, it's a good topic.

Madrano wrote: "I've adjusted to reading with my iPad over the last 2+ years. At this point more of my reading is digital than not, due to traveling. I still prefer paper, particularly if i own the book. However, ..."

Madrano, there are some books that I will almost always prefer as paper books. Two examples. There is the fairly new edition of Walt Whitman's Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself. This is the Amazon.com blurb for that edition: "Whitman's most beloved poem, "Song of Myself," illustrated, illuminated, and presented like never before.
Walt Whitman’s iconic collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, has earned a reputation as a sacred American text. Whitman himself made such comparisons, going so far as to use biblical verse as a model for his own. So it’s only appropriate that artist and illustrator Allen Crawford has chosen to illuminate―like medieval monks with their own holy scriptures―Whitman’s masterpiece and the core of his poetic vision, “Song of Myself.” Crawford has turned the original sixty-page poem from Whitman’s 1855 edition into a sprawling 234-page work of art. The handwritten text and illustrations intermingle in a way that’s both surprising and wholly in tune with the spirit of the poem―they’re exuberant, rough, and wild. Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself is a sensational reading experience, an artifact in its own right, and a masterful tribute to the Good Gray Poet."

And then there are the 170 or so various Library of America books that we own. I'm amazed that they got everything right when they designed the books and first started publishing them in 1982. (Here's the wiki entry on the series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library... .) We stopped subscribing about five years ago after having subscribed for over 25 years ... but I still buy some individual volumes out of the six or seven that LoA publishes each year. It doesn't upset me that LoA has started putting some of these out as ebooks, but I'll stick with the paper books for these.

I sometimes post approximately the same thing on Facebook as I do on Goodreads. Here's a great response from my Facebook friend, the sf writer, Cory Panshin, to the above posting about children's stories in the U.S. and the UK:

"I'm not convinced -- in part because the American titles it cites are mainly from 100 or 150 years ago. It's certainly true there is a difference -- and it applies not just to children's stories but also to adult fantasy and even to comic book writers. However, the difference isn't one of pagan and imaginative vs. practical and moralistic. It seems to be more about what sort of universe you imagine.

Partly it's a matter of frontiers. When my kids were little, I was struck by the fact that British picture books typically involved going to the park and then coming home again. Or at most going through a hole into the neighbor's garden -- or into a story-book world -- and then coming home again. American picture books were far more likely to be about going off on adventures and keeping on going.

It's also a matter of futures. In the 1950s, Tolkien and Lewis were writing classic fantasy stories, but British science fiction writers were still stuck on dystopias, disasters, and alien invasions. They weren't able to imagine zooming through the stars in a galaxy far, far away.

And the American universe of the imagination is not only larger but generally emptier. It has room to go where no one has gone before, to explore and blaze a trail through the wilderness and lay claim to whatever you find. The British universe is far more permeated by a sense of those who have gone before -- and in the case of fantasy, who are probably still around.

I've loved the British style of fantasy since I was 9 or 10, when my local children's library had a fantasy section that included books I've since concluded only existed in British editions. But I would be very reluctant to say it was objectively "better," or to treat it as a kind of vitamin that American children are deficient in."

Larry, i've seen those Library of America books in my brother-in-law's library. Lovely. I can see why you would hold onto them, even if they weren't good inside, too.

There are other books i wouldn't appreciate on my e-reader, as well. Any which feature photos with little text, "coffee table" books, for example, would disappoint in other forms. And there a number of high quality paper printed books, by that i mean the paper itself is high quality. In my life those have usually been gifts.

Of course pop up books and books I've acquired through inheriting would fall under this too, but I don't think anyone would disagree with that. And, let's face it, I like home
I arrives, so i wouldn't even try to get rid of most of the paper books i now own. I've winnowed all I intend to do. Let my kids grapple with that when i'm dead.

Larry, I like reading what Cory Panshin wrote on the children's book topic. As I noted upthread, any imaginative reading of children's books by me came as an adult. I find the ones from the UK good but some are cloying. I like the observations but am not sure i know enough &/or read enough to contribute well on this.

Larry wrote: "An essay on digital reading vs. reading on paper. The writer likes digital reading a lot ... I don't have a strong position on this .. .I just like ... reading.

"There’s no question that digital t..."

Super cool article. I love reading about stuff like this.

:) Glad you enjoyed it, Victor.

Welcome to Book Nook Cafe ! :)

I read the short stories by Tom Hanks (yes, THAT Tom Hanks) and was impressed by his style and storytelling prowess. Is there nothing this man cannot do? If you're a fan of short stories, his book, Uncommon Type, is well worth a read.

Thanks for that information, Bill. I didn't realize Hanks wrote stories.

Bill wrote: "I read the short stories by Tom Hanks (yes, THAT Tom Hanks) and was impressed by his style and storytelling prowess. Is there nothing this man cannot do? If you're a fan of short stories, his book,..."

Welcome to Book Nook Cafe, Bill !

My friend loved the way he narrated The Dutch House

The book Hanks wrote is Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks

Bill wrote: "I read the short stories by Tom Hanks (yes, THAT Tom Hanks) and was impressed by his style and storytelling prowess. Is there nothing this man cannot do? If you're a fan of short stories, his book,..."

Uncommon Type has well-written, imaginative stories. Hanks really is multitalented. 🙂

He's a bundle of creativity, it appears. I'm pleased to learn about this.

I'm rereading my way through A. R. Gurney's plays. He is most famous for Love Letters , but I have yet to read any of them that I don't like. I think is wonderful, and by way of being an homage to Thornton Wilder's

I'm not familiar with Gurney. I enjoy reading plays. Thanks for the title.

I hope you enjoy him!

I see he was a "FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA"

I feel bad that I am not familiar with his work. I've put him on my TBR list.

I like reading plays but haven’t read A R Gurney either.

I started a play last night by an author I haven't read although I'm certainly familiar with his work: The Audience Peter Morgan -- the play imagines the meetings between Her Majesty and her various prime ministers over the years, and given the big cast change between the two productions about which he provides details, I suspect it was a work in progress for some time.

He's the screenwriter of the film "The Queen" - the one about Diana's death starring Helen Mirren, and he is also heavily involved in the creation of the Netflix series "The Crown." Both of those are marvelous in my opinion so I expect to like this play. (He also wrote Frost/Nixon, which I saw on stage in DC and really liked as well.)

With the popularity of The Crown and the recent passing of the Queen, I am sure this will be a timely play to read.

Sounds good, Jennifer. I hope you’ll share your thoughts with us when you finish.

I finished it last night. A small amount of the verbiage was familiar to me as virtually the same interchange takes place in an episode of the Crown. The play was WONDERFUL! Touching, funny, more emotional than you would think, a great final moment as well. Highly recommend!

Sounds like it would be a wonderful play to see performed.

Thanks, Jennifer, for the report.