News of the World by Paulette Jiles

News of the World by Paulette Jiles

It is 1870, North Texas, rainy and cold. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels from town to town giving readings from the latest newspapers, bringing the news of the world to isolated towns on the Texas frontier. In Wichita Falls, he is asked to return a captive girl to her relatives near San Antonio, 400 miles to the south. The old man and the ten-year-old start out on a hazardous journey, no less risky because the girl considers herself now a Kiowa and does not have the slightest desire to return. Bandits and Comanche raids and violent weather make as many difficulties as the ten-year old girl who can’t speak English, eats with her hands and knows how to use a revolver. In the end, he finds he must return her to relatives who don’t want her, even though he and the girl have become trusting friends. A story of courage and honor and the truth that these two things are often the possession of even the unlikeliest people. 

Note: The author does not use quotation marks in the book.
!n an interview with the Sacramento Bee, the author was asked about the lack of quotation marks. Her response was, "Using quote marks is like surrounding human speech with barbed wire. I figured if I was careful enough about how I placed sentences, readers would be able to do without quote marks and I would be freed up. It’s an aesthetic thing, I guess, but I like the effect."
-According to a reviewer on Goodreads.com
Discussion Questions

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its midcentury idealism and became a more polarized society.

The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.

These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, The Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.

New York Times Review

The Lady in Gold By Anne-Marie O'Connor

The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

The true story that inspired the movie Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.
Contributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O’Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece—the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government.

When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, its decision had profound ramifications in the art world. Expertly researched, masterfully told, The Lady in Gold is at once a stunning depiction of fin-de siècle Vienna, a riveting tale of Nazi war crimes, and a fascinating glimpse into the high-stakes workings of the contemporary art world.

Washington Post Review 

Disscussion Questions - Figgeart museum

Neue Galerie NYC

A Gentalman in Moscow by Amor Towles

A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

Readers Guide

NY Times Reveiw 

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

Be Frank With Me

Reclusive literary legend M. M. “Mimi” Banning has been holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie Madoff-style ponzi scheme, she’s flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for the first time in decades, and to ensure the timely delivery of her manuscript, her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. The prickly Mimi reluctantly complies—with a few stipulations: No Ivy-Leaguers or English majors. Must drive, cook, tidy. Computer whiz. Good with kids. Quiet, discreet, sane.

When Alice Whitley arrives at the Banning mansion, she’s put to work right away—as a full-time companion to Frank, the writer’s eccentric nine-year-old, a boy with the wit of Noel Coward, the wardrobe of a 1930s movie star, and very little in common with his fellow fourth-graders.

As she slowly gets to know Frank, Alice becomes consumed with finding out who Frank’s father is, how his gorgeous “piano teacher and itinerant male role model” Xander fits into the Banning family equation—and whether Mimi will ever finish that book.

Readers Guide -Harper Collins

The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing Mira Jacob

The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing 

When brain surgeon Thomas Eapen decides to cut short a visit to his mother’s home in India, he sets into motion a series of events that will forever haunt him and his wife, Kamala, their intellectually furious son, Akhil, and their watchful daughter, Amina. Now, twenty years later, in the heat of a New Mexican summer, Thomas seems to be derailing, and it’s up to Amina—a photographer in the midst of her own career crisis—to figure out what is really going on. But getting to the truth is far harder than it seems. From Thomas’ unwillingness to talk, to Kamala’s Born Again convictions, to run-ins with hospital staff that seem to know much more than they let on, Amina finds herself at the center of a mystery so tangled that to make any headway, she has to unravel her family’s painful past.

KAMALA’S CHAI 

From mirajacob.com

3 cups water
1 cup milk (see note below if lactose intolerant)*
8 tsp loose black Red Label tea leaves
1 tsp grated ginger
5 whole cardamom cloves, cracked a bit
5 regular clove-cloves
1 inch cinnamon bark, broken into a few pieces (see note below if you don’t have)**
Sugar to taste

Directions:Heat water and milk with all spices. Right as it boils, turn off the heat. Make sure to do this on time or it will taste like old socks! Let steep for 2 minutes. Pour into cup through sieve to strain out all spices. Add sugar.

*Shut up! Milk is good for you.

**Use a little ground cinnamon, but it won’t taste as good. Not my fault.

The Mirror Thief

The Mirror Thief

The core story is set in Venice in the sixteenth century, when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world’s most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful fascination—was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing?—the Venetian mirrors were state of the art technology, and subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. But for any of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable by death. One man, however—a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose—has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city’s terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten . . .

Meanwhile, in two other Venices—Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today—two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret . . .

All three stories will weave together into a spell-binding tour-de-force that is impossible to put down—an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice . . . and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of art.

The Guardian Review 

Out of the Easy Ruta Sepetys

Out of the Easy Ruta Sepetys

It’s 1950 and the French Quarter of New Orleans simmers with secrets. Seventeen-year-old Josie Moraine wants more out of life than the Big Easy has to offer. She devises a plan get out, but a mysterious death in the Quarter leaves Josie tangled in an investigation that will challenge her her conscience, her loyalties, and her darkest fears. Caught between the dream of an elite college and a clandestine underworld, Josie must choose—between who she is now and who she longs to become, between when to hold on and how to let go.

With characters and atmosphere reminiscent of the great Southern novels, Ruta Sepetys creates a rich story of secrets, lies, and the haunting reminder that our decisions shape our destiny. - rutasepetys.com

Ruta Sepetys video about what inspired the book


Discussion Guide (PDF)

NY Times Review