The Bookseller of Kabul

A penpal friend of mine wrote this after I told him I was reading this book.
Something to add to the discussion on Tuesday?
The ethics of jounalists. I'll be thinking about trust as I'm reading this book. I haven't picked up the book from the library yet but I will this weekend.


begin forward:
I think this book illustrates an interesting phenomenon. The amount of misuse of people´s trust that journalists think is ok. Seierstad, a norwegian woman journalist, used a family in Kabul, Afghanistan, to further her own career. The bookseller got very angry, he wrote a counter-book. He even travelled to Norway to show that Seierstad is a moral swine. What, to me, is interesting is the following: how much is it ok for an emancipated women, a really good woman (in her own eyes), to consciously misuse other people? In the interest of your own career? She sold out everyone in the family who let her live with them. That was her way of paying back for the generosity she had used. She looks herself in the mirror each morning and she feels no shame. She consciously misused the family. Reflect on what gave her that moral right. She is not stupid in terms of brain power. She is a journalist. She did not care about what consequences her book had on the family whose basic human friendlieness she had misused. It is interesting to watch how people like her functions, journalists. (We have lots of the same kind of journalists in Sweden, it is no special norwegian desease.) It is something about being a journalist. They do this again and again. One might wonder why?

Another month, another book

The February meeting will be at Coffee Roasters on San Jose Boulevard. It'll be the third Tuesday again; that translates to the nineteenth. If everyone likes that venue, maybe we could make it a default spot with freedom to move around when we like. It's independent, and I've heard good reports about its being a pleasant atmosphere for groups to meet, as well as about the coffee.

Next month's selection will be The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad. This is a journalistic account of a female Norwegian war correspondent's time sharing the household of an Afghan family. It's had a bit of controversy, which you can read about at this site maintained by the American Booksellers' Association It's out in trade paperback and the Jacksonville library owns lots of copies. It's out on audio CD, and new and used copies are widely available.

I'd like to make March a dedicated fiction month, since there have been several suggestions for novels. If you want to recommend a novel or short story collection, please do post your idea! If you want to be able to create a post, please send me the email address where you want me to send authorization. Anybody can comment, with or without signing in, no need for authorization.

I will try to get March and April selection polls up over the next couple of weeks, so that we can vote two months ahead in February, and try to stay that way. I know that especially with some of the longer books and busy busy schedules, advance planing can make the difference between getting around to the book or not!

FInally, if you read American Bloomsbury but weren't able to get to the meeting, please do post a comment or better yet contact me for authorization and start posting to this blog!

meeting place

Anne,
Last night you mentioned that our next meeting might be at the Coffee Roasters on the corner of Crown Point and San Jose. I was wondering if you're considering that as our permanent meetup spot. It's certainly convenient for me. So I'd vote for it to be our permanent spot IF they like us there and have a good decaf latte. It's right next door to The Loop in case people need to come right after work and therefore need a bite to eat before the meetup.

I liked The Grape also. I'm OK with switching from month to month also. The thing that I didn't like about Borders was that I thought we were disturbing people there that were studying and reading. It seemed to me that we were the only ones in Borders that were talking. The thing that I didn't like about The Grotto was that the music was too loud. The Grape was comfortable and would have been even more comfortable if that big group hadn't been there.

I actually wish we'd meet at restaurants for dinner. And the meeting would be from 6 to 7:30 or so. That's what the last book group (that I was in) did. That works well for people pushed for time. We have to eat. So combining dinner with the meeting saves time. BUT if other people don't want to do that, that's fine. Just a thought.
Susan

American Bloomsbury

I really enjoyed the book, especially the way the author very economically shed light on the genesis of The Scarlet Letter, and on the struggles of Louisa Mae Alcott. One thing that puzzled me was the impression conveyed to me at least that Margaret Fuller was the only public feminist in the world. The Seneca Falls conference was in 1848 and was energized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and (I think) Lucreita Mott and Susan B. Anthony. For that matter, The Vindication of the Rights of Women had been published in 1792. With that caveat, though, I thought the book packed a lot of history, personalities and ideas into a short space.

Many great suggestions, thanks!

Thanks to all who responded with suggestions! The ones that were posted on the blog are in the comments to the book threads. Please do keep them coming!

Your book suggestions, please!

Susan made the point that it's good to have books picked two months in advance. I totally agree, and hope we can pick two months' worth at the January meeting.


Please try to post all of your future reading suggestions before January 8; I'll put them together into a list so that everyone can look at them easily well before the meeting.

American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever

My thoughts on American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever:

Would it be grand to be a student of Henry David Thoreau? The imagery of going out in the woods with a teacher feels very appealing. All students should be so lucky.


This book has spurred various thoughts. Unfortunately I am not a literary scholar. I look forward to our discussion on Tuesday. Perhaps other members will bring insight from their readings of Emerson and Thoreau and Alcott and Margaret Fuller and Hawthorne. Cheever makes the claim on page 128 that few of the people (that quote the book) have actually read Walden.


It seems to me that Cheever portrays these authors as a bunch of misfits barely paying their bills. And the sexual mores come into question. And her accusation that one good choice for women was to just stay in bed in order to avoid bad marriage is a sad sad thought. [Page 93-quote below.] And what about her accusation that opium was over prescribed? Similar to xanax today? And at one point she makes the accusation that the Salem witch trials was a way for some power grabbers to grab the land of others. [page 43-quote below] Those witch trials shaped the politics of many? Government gone awry, eh?


Cheever talks about the civil war on pages 132 and 133. And here I think maybe I love these characters the most. I am perplexed by the civil war. Cheever offers some insight on these pages. Here is a quote from the book "....For the Alcotts, Thoreau, and Emerson, slavery was not some far off, economically questionable institution, it was the scared faces of the men and women and sometimes children they had fed and harbored and helped."

Then Cheever goes on to apparently reprimand the group of authors (except Hawthorne) for considering Capt John Brown a hero. Cheever seems to feel that they should have condemned his violence. The end doesn't justify the means. And I agree with Cheever.

Hawthorne seemed to see John Brown more clearly calling him a "blood-stained fanatic"

The thing that I didn't like about this book was that Cheever interjects some personal accounts and descriptions of what the houses and surroundings look like now. I found that made the book hard to read. Disjointed. And her interjection rarely added anything worth while. imo (of course). Except when she talked about what the book Little Women meant to her when she read it at age 10.

quotes:



page 93: "Their choices often came down to being pathetic spinsters, marrying men they hated, or staying in bed being waited on."



page 43: "Another theory, and this is the one which Hawthorne fleshed out in his House of the Seven Gables, is that the trials were a land grab targeting those whose property was coveted by the judges or whose land just seemed to cry out for transfer no matter what the cost."





page 128: "...When someone says that they love the book, many times they mean that they might want a simpler life if they ever got tired of making money or going to parties....They remember a few of the aphorisms.......They haven't read the book itself and perhaps that's just as well. Thoreau is not kind to the rich or even the middle class."