October 2014 book: Help the Poor Struggler

Cindy has selected our October 2014 book: "Help the Poor Struggler" by Martha Grimes. "These are a series but I have read most of them out of order," said Cindy. "We have done this with other books that group had a problem with, but will see how it goes. I love this author and Richard Jury character."

ABOUT THE BOOK
Around bleak Dartmoor, where the Hound of the Baskervilles once bayed, three children have been brutally murdered. Now Richard Jury of Scotland Yard joins forces with a hot-tempered local constable named Brian Macalvie to track down the killer. The trail begins at a desolate pub, Help the Poor Struggler. It leads straight to the estate of Lady Jessica, a ten-year-old orphaned heiress who lives with her mysterious uncle and ever-changing series of governesses. And as suspense spreads across the forbidding landscape, an old injustice returns to haunt Macalvie…with clues that link a murder in the distant past with a killing yet to come.

"A superior writer." --The New York Times Book Review

"A star in the mystery genre...An elegant writer and inventor of dazzling plots." --Publishers Weekly

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martha Grimes is the bestselling author of twenty-one Richard Jury novels, as well as the novels Dakota and Foul Matter, among others. Her previous two Jury books, The Old Wine Shades and Dust, both appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.

Meet the author

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, the author of "Hannah, Delivered" graced our September meeting to talk with us about her book and the 12-year process it took to get it published. We had a lovely time!!

September 2014 book: 'Hannah, Delivered'

I'm picking a book written by a local author for us to read in September:

"Hannah, Delivered" by Elizabeth Jarret Andrew.

The author lives in my neighborhood, and teaches writing classes at The Loft. She has written several other books, including a spiritual memoir.

Hannah, Delivered: A Novel

Late one night in a busy St. Paul hospital, a nurse midwife drags Hannah Larson out from behind her reception desk to assist with a birth.  When Hannah witnesses that baby tumble into the world, her secure, conventional life gets upended by a fierce desire to deliver babies.  So begins Hannah’s journey away from her comfort zone. In a midwifery apprenticeship in New Mexico, she befriends a male midwife, defends a teenage mom, and learns to trust women’s bodies, then moves back to Minnesota to start her own illicit birth practice.  Hannah’s need to stay safe proves both an asset and a liability: homebirth isn’t legal in Minnesota in the 1990’s; to deliver healthy babies, Hannah risks jail time, her community’s respect, and her career.  The key to unlocking her fear rests in one birth—her own.

Hannah, Delivered tells the story of how inexplicable passion, buried strength, and professional skill deliver one woman from fear into a rich and risk-filled life.

New book for August 2014: Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

Cass previewed the book she thought she wanted us to read as a book club, and then changed her mind. And so, for August 2014 we're reading "Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened" by Allie Brosh.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Every time Allie Brosh posts something new on her hugely popular blog Hyperbole and a Half the internet rejoices.

Touching, absurd, and darkly comic, Allie Brosh’s highly anticipated book Hyperbole and a Half showcases her unique voice, leaping wit, and her ability to capture complex emotions with deceptively simple illustrations.

This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two,” which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written.

Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to.

FROM THE AUTHOR:
This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative—like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it—but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book:

Pictures
Words
Stories about things that happened to me
Stories about things that happened to other people because of me
Eight billion dollars*
Stories about dogs
The secret to eternal happiness*

*These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!

NPR interview with Valerie Plame

Click here to view interview.
http://www.npr.org/2013/09/28/226529040/i-spy-valerie-plame-makes-her-fiction-debut-in-cia-thriller

Vanessa Pierson, the heroine of Valerie Plame's first novel, is — ahem — "blonde, lithe, and nicely sexy." She is also a CIA agent, determined to lasso a nuclear arms dealer named Bhoot before he arrives at an underground nuclear facility in Iran.
But just as her informant is about to tell her where Bhoot will be, he's shot by a sniper who misses Vanessa — or does he simply overlook her? How will Vanessa Pierson halt the terrorists, protect the world and, by the way, also keep the secret of her forbidden romance with David, a fellow CIA ops officer with green-flecked hazel eyes?
Blowback moves through assorted picturesque world capitals, including Vienna, Paris, London and Prague, with occasional glimpses of the comparatively mundane suburbs around Washington D.C. The authors are Sarah Lovett, a career suspense novelist, and Valerie Plame, who may be the most famous former CIA covert operations officer who was ever portrayed by Naomi Watts in a major motion picture.
As a spy thriller, the book contains its fair share of shootouts and high-speed chases, but Plame tells NPR's Scott Simon that she and Lovett wanted the novel to paint a "realistic portrait" of a female operations officer. Someone, she says, "who is genuine and isn't just using sex and guns — although they're great, too — to collect intelligence."

---

Interview Highlights

On the similarities between herself and Pierson
The great thing about fiction is you can fix things and make things better. I think Vanessa is a smarter version of where I was. And it's definitely informed by my experiences in the CIA.
It is fiction, but of course I was able to draw on my experience. I developed my expertise in the agency in nuclear counterproliferation. And that's why that's the main theme of this first book, hopefully in a long series. But it's sort of ripped from the headlines.

More on Valerie Plame

On why Pierson blames herself after her asset is shot
There is definitely a sense that when you, as a CIA ops officer ... are handling assets, they are delivering to you their trust and their well-being. And you feel very protective of them, even if they're not very nice people.
On the isolation of having a job you can't discuss
It's lonely. That's why, in many ways, the CIA is the world's biggest dating agency, I think. I imagine it's much like two actors that get married because they understand that universe. You know, I'm pretty sure the agency's divorce rate is rather high.
On the glamour of spy thrillers versus the reality of CIA operations
I would say ... there's a lot of downtime. You spend a lot of time waiting. You're waiting in a bar, or in a restaurant, or at a corner to make your meeting. You're doing a lot of surveillance detection routes to make sure that no one is on your tail. You can't put that in a book before the reader puts it down really quickly. However, both Sarah and I felt very strongly [that] we wanted to make it a realistic portrait, particularly of a female operations officer in the CIA. For the most part, to my mind ... how they're portrayed in popular culture is paper dolls — really props more than anything else. And I wanted a strong but realistic character.
On the recent NSA leaks, and being surprised and outraged by what they revealed
I find it absolutely astounding. The revelations about the extent and the breadth of the NSA is nothing short of breathtaking. This goes to the very essence of the Fourth Amendment and, broader, what we want as a democracy and that very perilous tension and dynamic between security and privacy. And we really do need to have a national dialogue on this, on how much we are willing to give up to be kept safe.
On reclaiming her life after the 2003 leak
I love my career. I thought if I was lucky I would retire as a senior intelligence officer, still working on the issues of counterproliferation. But that didn't happen, so — new chapter. We moved away from Washington and have settled into a new community and, you know, rebuilt our lives.

'What Alice Forgot' book discussion questions

From http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/what_alice_forgot.html

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Did you like the younger Alice best? Or did you relate more to the older Alice?


2. What would your younger self of ten years ago think of the person you are today?


3. What would surprise your younger self most about the life you're currently leading? What would disappoint you?


4. What would you think of your children? Are they how you imagined they would be? Are you the parent you envisioned? Why or why not?


5. Alice is shocked by many transformations—her gym-toned body, her clothes, her house. Are you more or less polished than you were a decade ago? And do you think there's any deeper significance to such change?


6. Do you think it was realistic that Alice ended up back with Nick? Were you happy with that ending? Do you think they would have ended up together if she hadn't lost her memory?


7. In order for Nick to be successful at his job, was it inevitable that he would spend less time with his family and thereby grow apart from Alice?


8. How did you feel about the sections written from the perspectives of Elisabeth and Frannie? Did they add to your enjoyment of the book, or would you have preferred to have it written entirely from Alice's point of view?


9. Do you think it was unavoidable that Elisabeth and Alice had grown apart, because of the tension caused by Elisabeth's infertility versus Alice's growing family? Or do you think their rift had more to do with the kind of people both of them had become?


10. It's not only Alice who changed over the last decade. Elisabeth changed, too. Do you think she would have been so accepting of the new Alice at the end if she herself didn't get pregnant?


11. Out of all the characters in the book, who do you think had changed the most over the past decade and why?


12. The film rights to the book have been sold to Fox 2000—who do you think would be good in the lead roles?


13. If you were to write a letter to your future self to be opened in ten years, what would you say?

Meet Liane Moriarty

From http://www.lianemoriarty.com/

Liane was born on a beautiful November day in 1966 in Sydney. A few hours after she was born, she smiled directly at her father through the nursery glass window, which is remarkable, seeing as most babies can’t even focus their eyes at that age.

Her first word was ‘glug’. This was faithfully recorded in the baby book kept by her mother. (As the eldest of six children, Liane was the only one to get a baby book so she likes to refer to it often.)
As a child, she loved to read, so much so that school friends would cruelly hide their books when she came to play. She still doesn’t know how to go to sleep at night without first reading a novel for a very long time in a very hot bath.

She can’t remember the first story she ever wrote, but she does remember her first publishing deal. Her father ‘commissioned’ her to write a novel for him and paid her an advance of $1.00. She wrote a three volume epic called, ‘The Mystery of Dead Man’s Island’

After leaving school, Liane began a career in advertising and marketing. She became quite corporate for a while and wore suits and worried a lot about the size of her office. She eventually left her position as marketing manager of a legal publishing company to run her own (not especially successful) business called The Little Ad Agency. After that she worked as (a more successful, thankfully) freelance advertising copywriter, writing everything from websites and TV commercials to the back of the Sultana Bran box.

She also wrote short stories and many first chapters of novels that didn’t go any further. The problem was that she didn’t actually believe that real people had novels published. Then one day she found out that they did, when her younger sister Jaclyn Moriarty called to say that her (brilliant, hilarious, award-winning) novel, Feeling Sorry for Celia was about to be published.

In a fever of sibling rivalry, Liane rushed to the computer and wrote a children’s book called The Animal Olympics, which went on to be enthusiastically rejected by every publisher in Australia.

Liane and sister Jaci

Liane (right) and sister Jaci today

She calmed down and enrolled in a Masters degree at Macquarie University in Sydney. As part of that degree, she wrote her first novel, Three Wishes. It was accepted by the lovely people at Pan Macmillan and went on to be published around the world. (Her latest books are published by the equally lovely people at Amy Einhorn Books in the US and Penguin in the UK)

Since then she has written four more novels for adults, as well as a series of books for children.
In August 2013 Liane’s fifth novel The Husband’s Secret was released in the US and within two weeks had climbed the charts to become a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Much champagne was drunk.

Liane's youngest sister Nicola Moriarty has also released 2 novels, a wonderful, gripping story called Free-falling and her brilliant follow up novel, Paper Chains published by Random House.
Liane is now a full-time author. She lives in Sydney with her husband and two small children who like to climb all over her while she tries to write helpfully smashing their fists against the keyboard and suggesting she might like to watch the Wiggles instead.

Once upon a time she went heli-skiing and skydiving* and scuba diving. These days she goes to the park and ‘Gymbaroo’ and sings ‘I’m a Little Cuckoo Clock’ at swimming lessons. She has discovered that the adrenaline burst you experience from jumping out of a plane is remarkably similar to the one you get when your toddler makes a run for it in a busy car park

*She should disclose that she only ever went skydiving once and has no intention of ever doing it again. She just likes to give the impression that she once led an incredibly active, athletic life to make up for all the hours she now spends lying around reading novels and eating Turkish Delight.