Welcome back! We are so pleased you are joining us for our podcast book group: Reading with Libraries!
In our book group we have fun talking about books, and provide useful information for library people doing Reader’s Advisory work. There are so many books out there that it’s tough to be an expert on all of them. So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre!
Our book group is very inclusive; there are no “right” or “wrong” books here! We just like to read and chat about books, and want you to share what you are reading too! All of us will take away at least a title or two that we want to read at the end of our time together.
Who is joining us this week? We are pleased to welcome returning Guest Host Leah Larson from State Library Services!
Beverages:
Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages, and we each came prepared with our own drink to enjoy while we talk about our books. You are an important part of this book group, so if you don’t have a beverage go ahead and get one now. Each of our beverages will have a recipe or a link on our episode page, so you can try them yourself!
Ingredients:
- 1 part Liqueur, raspberry (Chambord)
- 1 part cranberry juice
- 1 part orange juice
- 1 Maraschino cherry
- 1 twist (of peel) orange
Instructions:
‘Mix juices and Chambord with ice, strain. Garnish with an orange twist wrapped around a cherry with a sword-pick through it. Serve in a hurricane glass.’
As Oscar Wilde famously intoned, speaking of his time drinking at the Cafe Royal, “The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things.”
Madeleine L’Engle’s works call for a traditional margarita—2 ounces tequila, 1 ounce Cointreau, and some lime juice. If you want that Wrinkle In Time effect, drink several of these fast.
Notorious, the Long Island Iced Tea (when made correctly) is incredibly potent, but tastes and looks like nonalcoholic tea. It’s perfect for discreet drinking, which Carson McCullers indulged in often. But be warned, invented in the Hamptons by bartender Robert Butt, the Long Island Iced Tea will knock you out cold if you’re not careful.
- 1⁄2 oz. gin
- 1⁄2 oz. vodka
- 1⁄2 oz. tequila
- 1⁄2 oz. light rum
- 1⁄2 oz. Cointreau
- 3⁄4 oz. lemon juice
- Top with cola
- Lemon wedge
- Top with cola
- Lemon wedge
Pour all ingredients except cola and garnish into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake, and then strain into a Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Add cola until color of tea. Garnish with lemon wedge. Serve with two straws.
Genre Discussion:
Literary mysteries combine the excitement of a mystery, with all its twists and turns and puzzles to solve, with the careful thought given to word choices and ideas. One article said a snarky way to describe it would be “a book people have heard of, but haven’t read.” Umberto Eco is the example here: many people have heard of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum – but many of those people have never made it to the end of the books.
But literary fiction can be very broad, and encompasses many of the best-selling mysteries people are definitely reading right now. Words and characters matter, and subverting the reader’s expectations is part of the fun. You know a literary fiction story when you read it; you can tell that you are enjoying the way the story is put together as much as you are enjoying following the clues.
Let’s dive into some book examples so you can get all kinds of ideas and suggestions!
Suggested Reading Resources:
- 12 of the Best Literary Mystery Books Featuring Complex Plots | Book Riot
- Books About Books: 8 Unputdownable Literary Mysteries – Off the Shelf
- Elizabeth Kostova’s top 10 books for winter nights – The Guardian (mostly lit mysteries!)
- Top 25 Best Literary Mystery Books | BestMysteryBooks.com
- Christine Z. Mason: 8 Favorite Literary Mysteries
- Literary mysteries: The 20 rules for writing a detective novel | MPR News (only 10 given here; but you can track down the rest through the link)
- 58 Best literary mystery books 2018 – Softonic
- 12 Mystery Novels for Fans of Literary Fiction
- Top Five Literary Mystery Novels – Criminal Element5 Literary Mysteries That Have Never Been Solved But Are Seriously Fascinating (this one isn’t about fiction – but still pretty interesting!)
Our Book Discussion
Now we are a little more familiar with this week’s genre, and we have enjoyed some of our special beverages, let’s get to the book discussion!
“”Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again.”
With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten—a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the great house’s current occupants. With an eerie presentiment of evil tightening her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter walked in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and shattering truths about Maxim’s first wife—the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca”
(Note: Bag of Bones, by Stephen King is the book I was trying to remember that used Rebecca as a plot element!)
“Faith Sunderly leads a double life. To most people, she is reliable, dull, trustworthy—a proper young lady who knows her place as inferior to men—but inside, Faith is full of questions and curiosity, and she cannot resist a mystery: an unattended envelope, an unlocked door. She also knows secrets no one suspects her of knowing. For one, she knows that her family moved to the close-knit island of Vane because her famous scientist father was fleeing a reputation-destroying scandal. And when her father is discovered dead shortly thereafter, she knows that he was murdered.
In pursuit of justice and revenge, Faith hunts through her father’s possessions and discovers a strange tree. The tree bears fruit only when she whispers a lie to it, and when that fruit is eaten, it delivers a hidden truth. But while the tree might hold the key to her father’s murder, it could also lure his murderer directly to Faith.”
“Sixteen-year-old Sadie Rose hasn’t said a word in eleven years—ever since the day she was found lying in a snowbank during a howling storm. Like her voice, her memories of her mother and what happened that night were frozen.
Set during the roaring 1920s in the beautiful, wild area on Rainy Lake where Minnesota meets Canada, Frozen tells the intriguing story of Sadie Rose, whose mother died under strange circumstances the same night that Sadie Rose was found, unable to speak, in a snowbank. Sadie Rose doesn’t know her last name and has only fleeting memories of her mother—and the conflicting knowledge that her mother had worked in a brothel. Taken in as a foster child by a corrupt senator, Sadie Rose spends every summer along the shores of Rainy Lake, where her silence is both a prison and a sanctuary.
One day, Sadie Rose stumbles on a half-dozen faded, scandalous photographs—pictures, she realizes, of her mother. They release a flood of puzzling memories, and these wisps of the past send her at last into the heart of her own life’s great mystery: who was her mother, and how did she die? Why did her mother work in a brothel—did she have a choice? What really happened that night when a five-year-old girl was found shivering in a snowbank, her voice and identity abruptly shattered?
Sadie Rose’s search for her personal truth is laid against a swirling historical drama—a time of prohibition and women winning the right to vote, political corruption, and a fevered fight over the area’s wilderness between a charismatic, unyielding, powerful industrialist and a quiet man battling to save the wide, wild forests and waters of northernmost Minnesota. Frozen is a suspenseful, moving testimonial to the haves and the have-nots, to the power of family and memory, and to the extraordinary strength of a young woman who has lost her voice in nearly every way—but is utterly determined to find it again.”
“To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history….Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to “My dear and unfortunate successor,” and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of-a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known-and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself-to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive.
What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed-and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler’s dark reign-and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.Parsing obscure signs and hidden texts, reading codes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic traditions-and evading the unknown adversaries who will go to any lengths to conceal and protect Vlad’s ancient powers-one woman comes ever closer to the secret of her own past and a confrontation with the very definition of evil. Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel is an adventure of monumental proportions, a relentless tale that blends fact and fantasy, history and the present, with an assurance that is almost unbearably suspenseful-and utterly unforgettable.”
“Research scientist Dr. Marina Singh is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have disappeared in the Amazon while working on an extremely valuable new drug. The last person who was sent to find her died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding answers to the questions about her friend’s death, her company’s future, and her own past.
Once found, Dr. Swenson is as imperious and uncompromising as ever. But while she is as threatening as anything the jungle has to offer, the greatest sacrifices to be made are the ones Dr. Swenson asks of herself, and will ultimately ask of Marina.
State of Wonder is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss. It is a tale that leads the listener into the very heart of darkness, and then shows us what lies on the other side.”
“As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.
Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.
Richly atmospheric and stunning in its complexity, In the Woods is utterly convincing and surprising to the end.”
Conclusion:
Thank you so much for joining us for this discussion with our Reading with Libraries podcast book group! A special thank you to our Guest Host Leah !
Join us next Thursday with another genre, more guest hosts for our book group, and more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries – which is always interesting! – subscribe to our podcast Linking Our Libraries.
Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!