Reading Envy 008: Gone Rogue

In this episode, Jenny goes rogue and interviews some of her colleagues at Furman University about what they have been reading lately. You will witness how lucky she is to have these people around to talk about books on a daily basis!

Steve Richardson, who has been a librarian at Furman for twenty-eight years, talked about one man's journey from Holland to Constantinople. 



A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor


Steve also mentioned:
Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Arts & Letters Daily
Furman University Libraries

Jenny also mentioned:
"That book Fermor wrote about the Caribbean"-
The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands
George Orwell Diaries (also discussed at length on Episode 007)

Guest number two is Libby Young.  Libby is also a librarian at Furman, who likes to read fiction of all varieties.  We share lists from our respective book clubs to keep up with what everyone in town is reading.



The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Libby also mentioned:
Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, NC
Room by Emma Donoghue
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Minstry
City of Thieves by David Banioff
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Jenny also mentioned:
97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman

The last guest for this episode is Mike Winiski. Mike works in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the same university, and also works in the same library building as Jenny, Steve, and Libby.  His love for non-fiction and recent forays into science fiction have influenced his reading lately.



Red Rising (Red Rising Trilogy #1) by Pierce Brown

Mike also mentioned:
The Martian by Andy Weir
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
Mawson's Will by Leonard Bickel
Philip K. Dick
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Devil & Sherlock Holmes by David Grann
Wired for Story by Lisa Cron
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Jenny also mentioned:
The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall

Download or listen via this link: Episode 008

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Arcadia by Lauren Groff

 

State: New York (Upstate) - 3 of 52
Baked good: Raw citrus cheesecake

Arcadia by Lauren Groff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Why I read it: I've had this on my to-read list for a while, but the fact that it was listed on the Tournament of Books pushed me into moving it up on the list.

As a librarian, one of the worst sins to encounter in writing is using someone else's work without crediting it. Groff has some very poetic language in parts of this book, an element of the novel that many reviewers keep mentioning as one of the good parts. Too bad it isn't always hers. She must have used the "center cannot hold" at least twice, it may have been three times. A nice concept. I think Yeats thought so too, when he wrote it. There are multiple moments like this that took me out of the story in annoyance, not just Yeats.

That said, I'm a sucker for a commune story. I went through a phase of reading novels, memoirs, and studies of communal societies, and have visited several in the United States - New Harmony, IN; Amana, IA; the Shaker Village in Pleasantburg, KY.... it is something that will always be interesting to me. The novel focuses on four stages of Bit, a child born to wandering hippies just as approach property inherited by one of their members in upstate New York. First his young childhood, then his early teen years as the commune predictably falls apart, then his life as a new father in Manhattan, right after the towers fall, and then with his aging parents.

I enjoyed the details of Arcadia - the floury air from baking their own bread, the soy-everything diet, the unwashed bodies, the failed attempts at democracy. It was easy to picture, and I was grateful for the lack of religious undertones for once. I feel like the author took the easy way out in having a central male leader figure, but perhaps some things are stereotypes because they are true. In that case, she is forgiven for the pot as well.

The last section of the four, trying to portray a world facing down pending disaster of spreading disease, was her least believable story. The irony is that it gives a weight to the importance of living off the land, while having shown how difficult it is to make an alternate society work in the long-term.

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