Posts Tagged “book club”

Last week, we took Book Club to a new level with a guest appearance by the author – Belmont’s own Toby Lester – of our chosen book, The Fourth Part of the World.  I had worried that such an august presence would impede the club’s traditional focus on wine, gossip and whingeing about our jobs, but we had plenty of time for all four parts.

Lester’s book is a vivd and polymathematical ramble across a few centuries of history leading up to the European “age of discovery” largely seen through the prism of mapmakers, especially a certain Waldseemüller, who in 1507 first printed “America” on a map of the hemisphere from which I am now writing.  We got a fresh look at some familiar figures like Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus and some wonderfully-told new (to most of us) stories.  Have you heard of Prester John?

The Fourth Part of the World reminds us that Columbus was nowhere near the first to conceive of the world as round, and it tells the story of many approximations close and not so close of the actual size of the globe, and the gradual discovery by Europeans of the true arrangement of the continents and their contents.  Looking at the beautiful plates I was reminded that while today’s schoolchildren are pretty clear on the roundness of the earth, they might not be as clear on the arrangement or content of the lands upon it.

Perhaps you remember last Fall’s grumbling about non-educational globes for sale at Target?  Well, a quick scan of DonorsChoose shows over 100 classrooms in the US in need of globes and maps.  So, as if you haven’t been harangued enough on this blog to do some good in the world, I urge you to consider giving some of your holiday charity budget to one of these worthy projects – our children need the best understanding of the shape of the world and its different people that they can get.

I’m a big proponent of the rights of authors to profit from the sale of their work, but I’m also a fan of the first-sale doctrine that lets me give away, lend or sell my copy of that work once I legally acquire it.  So, while I am mindful that when I buy a used book (or borrow one) I’m not contributing to author royalties, I support used bookstores for several reasons:

• they make more books available to more people who are price-sensitive
• they are the only way to get books that are out of print
• sometimes, you find something interesting in a used book that you would never find in a new one: an inscription or notes, or a bookmark or some other ephemera

That last one, by the way, is something that future generations of digital book buyers will probably never know they’re missing.  See my recent posts on Kindle-related stuff for more on ebooks and intellectual property.  But it’s also worth noting that Google books, by scanning books, sometimes preserves this old stuff.  Check out page 8 of Google’s scan of a 1905 edition of Wuthering Heights for a taste.

Anyway… I popped in to my local used book emporium, Rodney’s Bookstore, this week seeking a copy of Wuthering Heights for book club. (My desire to contribute to author royalties and publisher revenues diminishes with the deadness of the author.)  I found three paperback copies in totally different editions and varying conditions, priced from $1.90 to $4.80.

One was a standard-issue trade paperback, part of some classic series.  It was in very good condition and the most expensive of the lot.

Next up, a Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classic edition, billed on the Harlequin Romance inspired cover as “The Classic Novel with 763 SAT Vocabulary Words Identified and Defined!” The definitions were on the facing page to the text, swelling this edition to over 600 pages.  The bold SAT words might be a little distracting, but this one was well-proportioned and a relative bargain at $3.80.

Finally, the highbrow edition.  A St. Martin’s Press press trade paperback with a heavy paper cover, boasting the 1847 text and essays from “five contemporary critical perspectives” namely, psychoanalytic, feminist, deconstruction, Marxist, and cultural criticism.  Wow.  The downside, marked in pencil on the flyleaf, “$1.90 AS IS ROUGH” It was beat up, but appeared complete and had no highlighting or underlining, which are generally deal-breakers for me when buying a book.

Each edition certainly had its merits, but until I got my purchase home, I didn’t know the extent.  Here’s something you probably won’t ever see in your Kindle.

PS I also bought the Kaplan edition, just for laughs, and just in case I need to look up a word.  What does “Wuthering” mean anyway?

People like to beat up on CEOs.  I figure it’s part of the job, but recently in a short span of time, I came across one article saying that CEOs don’t matter that much at all, and another suggesting that they should be boring.

The Atlantic trotted out some research about the actual impact of charismatic CEOs on the performance of their companies.  I was particularly amused that the URL names Steve Jobs without anything about CEOs in general.  Then, I saw David Brooks’ essay in the New York Times in which he opens with “Should CEOs read more novels?” and goes on to say the answer is no because they don’t actually need to have the depth of thought that novel-reading seems to engender.

I was offended on behalf of literature more than on behalf of the CEOs.  They can take it, I figure.  But I do firmly believe that everybody who can should make time in their lives for fiction.  I don’t mean it has to be novels, or even writing.  I mean people should make room for imaginative thought and storytelling, which could come from many kinds of media.

Brooks goes on to explain why he thinks that the skills and personality traits that make successful businesspeople, politicians and academics are fundamentally different.  I can’t completely disagree, but I think all of those groups could benefit from a little dabbling in the materials and traits of the others.  I’m a gourmand that way, I guess.

I’ve been on a high-fiber non-fiction diet lately, with Harvard Business Review, The Worst Hard Time, Uncharitable and now Thinking in Pictures occupying my queue.  And I don’t regret those choices at all – all good stuff that’s expanding my thinking.

But I saw the film, The Limits of Control last week and while some reviews have been mixed, I can safely say it was thought-provoking in an entirely different way.  Not just because it was a film – I’ve read books that were similarly jarring and fascinating at the same time. I can’t tell you that this movie will make me better at doing my job in any identifiable way, but I consider it a valuable mental workout to think differently on a regular basis, exercising both hemispheres equally if possible.

In business school, a place where the purely intellectual and artistic are often sidelined in favor of the practical (and I think I went to a more egg-headed b-school than most), I resolutely stuck with novel-reading and told everybody who would listen that they should do the same.

And now I’m in a book club half populated with business school classmates.  None of us are CEOs yet, and none of us are boring. Go figure.

In book club this month: Man Booker prize winner The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.  Halfway through, enjoying it.  Also see Adiga’s piece in the New Yorker and the discussion of White Tiger over at the Mutiny.

Picked up at the Central Square Theater: Alan Lightman’s latest, Ghost.  None of Lightman’s later work has spoken to me as powerfully as Einstein’s Dreams, but this one is interesting.  We’ll see how it goes.

Sitting on my desk at work because I’m too busy doing business to read books about doing business: Marty Neumeier’s The Designful Company.  Yes, I’m aware of the perilous nature of that working/reading situation.

On my headphones at work: Art Farmer Radio via Last.fm.  Serious hard bop with Art Farmer and artists that Last.fm thinks are similar or related.  So far, they do a very good job of programming with no commercials and high reliability.

In the blog reader: Apaertment Therapy’s family of blogs, but mostly the main feed.  Great for decorating inspiration, DIY ideas, IKEA hacks, color ideas, and generalized design porn.  Almost too much to keep up with now that they stopped recycling old posts in best-of bits.

On the blog radar: Adam Marcinek’s blog.  You may remember my random run-in with Adam last year. He’s got a new blog that promises an image a day from this up and comer.  So far he’s 2 for 2, and I’m looking forward to more.

I’m a member of the best book club ever. The first rule of our book club is, don’t talk about book club, so don’t tell anybody I told you. The second rule of our book club is, bring wine. There are many other rules of book club, but the best part of it is that we are spectacularly lax about them, except perhaps #2.

This month we’re reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. It’s a good book so far, but it is long. In fact, I’d say it’s bigger and possibly heavier than my new mini notebook computer on which I’m blogging this at Caffe Luna. So as sometimes happens, book clubbers gradually fessed up to being not quite finished with it. Alert member C suggested that we just meet up for dinner and not discuss the book – after all, another rule of book club is no discussing of the book before the meeting.

After some wrangling of schedules, we met up at Cuchi Cuchi in Cambridge. Just now I got a real jolt of pleasure typing “Cuchi Cuchi Cambridge” into google, not least because it actually brought up the restaurant’s website as the first result. It was flapper night. Actually, it’s always flapper night there. Or something close to it.  Apologies for the photo quality, it was atmospheric in there to say the least, and I really really hate to use a flash in such settings.

We started off with a round of drinks selected from Cuchi Cuchi’s categories of “Cuchi cocktails” and “Vintage cocktails” — Kir Royale, Mint Julep, Thai Martini, Cosmopolitan and my pick, the Caipiroshka, subtitled “Caipirinha’s dirty little sister”  I’m not sure what’s so dirty about it, since it just substitutes vodka for the usual cachaça among the lime and sugar, making it a bit like a sugary gimlet.  But I digress.  It should be enough to say that with that drink, I not very officially observed the autumnal switch from gin to vodka.

Cuchi Cuchi serves only small plates, recommending two or three per person.  We enjoyed the grilled eggplant napoleon, warm baby beets & sheep cheese salad, sizzling garlic shrimp, fried artichoke hearts, grilled Indian lamb with pickled beet salad, and blini with mushroom filling and salmon roe.  Two more dishes (before dessert) deserve a little more description.

First, Caspian Heaven: Roasted Fingerling potatoes, crispy oysters, creme fraiche, salmon roe & champagne sauce.  Super decadent yet accessible.  The oysters, although cooked (and some would call that a crime), retained their delicacy with the salmon roe contributing back some of the brininess.  The potatoes provided some good slavic grounding.

Next, Cuchi Cuchi’s “Signature Dish with a nod to Thomas Keller, The French Laundry,” Savory Cornets w/Tuna Tartare & Avocado Mousse. These beauties come three or five to an order, slotted into a japanese hand roll rack with fried lotus root on top. These were a big hit, and deservedly so.  And there’s nothing too shabby about getting a bit of French Laundry on the East coast.

For dessert, we had the Cornucopia (a pizzelle cone filled with fresh fruit, fruit kissel, whipped cream) and chocolate cake that I can’t find on the online menu but would describe as warm chocolate cake with sour cherries, crème anglaise and feullitine (the crunchy bits visible floating in the creme) with a big hollow chocolate ball on top.  We gave the chcolate ball to L because she was the winner of the “when will C finally show up” pool.  The cake was incredible, reminding me that I had the same thing and in fact sat in the same seat last time I was here, in the summer, with E.

Full and happy, we adjourned without a word about Wroblewski.  Exiting into the cool autumn air on Main street we were greeted by the most peculiar smell.  What is that?  It’s chocolately.  It’s not coming from Cuchi Cuchi.  Certainly not from the Indian or Italian restaurants flanking it.  A block later, a sign on a small parking lot explained it all.  Across the street is Cambridge Brands.  Don’t recognize that name?  Perhaps you’ve heard of the Tootsie Roll or the  Junior Mint? (scroll to the very bottom of this page for the payoff)  That’s right, there’s at least one still-functioning candy factory right in Cambridge, filling the night air with the sweet smell of chocolate like a Chicago bridge.

Now, back to my reading…