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I am not a fan of horror stories. The first horror film I saw was Rosemary's Baby and it scared the pants off me. I tried to watch Aliens because I was fascinated by Sigourney Weaver's tough Ellen Ripley, but ended up climbing over the back of my chair and cowering behind it, even with Ripley doing battle for me. Not sure why I'm such a wimp about horror; maybe because I jump into stories with both feet. Given half a chance I'll immerse myself in their world and not surface until I'm forcibly dragged back up.

So I thought I knew what to avoid. But this book caught me off guard and scared me more than any horror story. Lethal Remedy is part of Mabry's Prescription for Trouble Series, which he's labeled “Medical Suspense with Heart”. We follow a handful of doctors who are involved in a study of a new antibiotic that is supposedly 100% effective against Staph luciferus, a particularly virulent form of staph infection that is resistant to existing antibiotics.

Dr. Sara Miles works on the front line, seeing patients, making the hard decisions about appropriate care. Some of her patients have been enrolled in the study which is run by her arrogant former husband, Dr. Jack Ingersoll, who discovered the drug. Sara's former medical classmate, Rip Pearson, is Jack's assistant and dogsbody, doing the on-the-ground work while Jack is flown off to conferences courtesy of Jandra Pharmaceuticals, the drug company subsidizing the trial.

Sara and Rip become concerned when one of Sara's patients, a teenager named Chelsea, seems to show dangerous side-effects from the drug. They are joined by Sara's close friend and colleague, Lillian Gordon, and by Dr. John Ramsey, who has just come out of retirement to work at the clinic. Ingersoll and Jandra maintain that there are no dangerous side-effects to the drug.

We also meet some of the characters from Jandra, a company that is close to bankruptcy and relying on the new medicine to not only save the company but make their fortunes. They will stop at nothing to ensure not only that the FDA approves their drug, but that they approve it before a competing company can get their product out.

You can see why I would be scared! I come from a family of doctors and nurses, and believe that most of them are motivated by the desire to help others. As Mabry points out in his Author's Note, this is fiction and he has never encountered this situation in his 36 years of medical practice. However, “Given enough power, money and selfcentered [sic] greed, I have no doubt that men and corporations could act in this way. We are fortunate that they do not.” Well, sometimes they do. We know about drugs rushed to market with disastrous results, drugs like Thalidomide and DES, and the generic drug scandal in 1989.

Even though I suspect I'll have nightmares for a while, the book is a good read. Mabry handles the multiple characters deftly. He keeps up the suspense with twists and red herrings and numerous subplots. The “Heart” part is, I assume, the Christian aspect of the story. Several of the characters consult the Bible and avoid worrying about problems by telling themselves that God is in control. Luckily these moments are rare enough that they do not intrude upon the story and do not change the outcome.

There are many people ranting about downsizing the U.S. Government and doing away with agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration. But the FDA is our only protection against those who are so greedy they do not care who suffers or dies as long as they make money. The FDA and the few brave whistleblowers who don't look the other way are the only things standing between me and my nightmares.

What books have given you nightmares?

One person in my book club thought this book boring because the main character never amounted to much, but the rest of us loved it and partly for that reason. This slim novel tells the story of one life, one ordinary and astonishing life. Marie is seven when we first meet her, sitting on the stoop waiting for her father to come home, a not particularly attractive child, burdened with thick glasses. There is nothing so clumsy as a year to tell us the time period. Instead, an accumulation of finely observed details clues us in: boys playing stickball in the street; a girl wearing a spring coat, feathered hat, gloves, and a run in her stocking. As another book club member said, McDermott involves us in the story by making us think a little bit and put things together ourselves.

Marie's story is roughly chronological with the interpolation of scenes from other time periods. As yet another friend from book club said, these interpolations feel like a natural association of ideas. For example, that first scene on the stoop when Pegeen, the girl with the run in her stocking, tells Marie about falling and how there is always someone there to help her up is followed by a scene where Marie, now grown and pregnant, falls “and I remembered Pegeen then: there's always someone nice.” The flow mimics the way our minds work, our memories, bringing together two incidents to shed new light on both. And these are memories. They are Marie's reminiscences from late in life. We are signaled that partly by the tone, but also by these sentences at the end of the first scene:

I shivered and waited, little Marie. Sole survivor, now, of that street scene. Waited for the first sighting of my father, coming up from the subway in his hat and coat, most beloved among all those ghosts.

One of the things I like best about this story is the way we seem to be headed for a big dramatic scene, a blowup of some sort, only to find pleasant and helpful people: “there's always someone nice.” For example, the owner of the local funeral home is named Fagin, leading me to expect some cruel bully, but he turns out to be perfectly kind and determined to change the public's perception of his name. Occasionally the teasing gets carried too far or someone's difficulties are not fully understood, but no one is evil. There are no monsters here. The emotional progression in these scenes is subtle and sure. McDermott proves that you don't need a car chase or a train wreck to create suspense and hold a reader's interest.

Most of all I loved the sense of community: several of us envied Marie's neighborhood. There's always someone there to help you up. There is a place for everyone: clumsy Pegeen, Walter Hartnett who wears a built-up shoe, blind Bill Corrigan who had been gassed in the war. Much later when Marie meets Walter after a difficult parting and the passing of many years, they fall into easy reminiscences: “It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past.”

Marie is strong-minded and a bit rebellious, but she has reasons for her assertions, even if she may not understand them until later in life. For example, she refuses to apply for a job downtown because she's heard that it's dangerous there. But when her mother tells her that Fagin is looking for someone to help out in the funeral home, she complies. And that job, unlikely as it may seem, is exactly what she needs. We see her grow into a competent and sensitive woman. She learns when it is best to remove her glasses and when she needs to see more clearly. She realizes what a key role the funeral home plays in the community, in those times when death was more common, before so many childhood and other diseases were tamed. It is an agora for the neighborhood, a commons, a place where everyone gathers. The only equivalent in this predominantly Irish neighborhood is the church.

The telling of even an ordinary person's life can take up volumes. McDermott has selected the ideal scenes and presented them in nuanced perfection to give us Marie's life: her childhood with her beloved father, strong mother, and golden boy of an older brother; her teens with her first grief and first love; marriage and children with all the pain and fear and comfort that they bring; all the way to old age when her defective sight begins to fail entirely. I loved the use of sight as a motif throughout, not just Marie, but Bill Corrigan, the neighbor who was blinded in the war. It is a sweet story, strong like honey in the comb.

Some people in my book club thought the title too minimalist, that it didn't convey the richness and depth of the story inside, but others of us thought it perfect: like Marie's life, so ordinary from the outside, so dazzling within.

What books have you come across that have the perfect title or, conversely, a title that is all wrong?

When I first read this novel forty years ago, I found the structure fascinating but the story itself disappointing. I had understood the book, first published in 1962, to be a story of free women, the title of the frame story that begins each section and ends the book. I eagerly looked forward to reading about the lives created by women who had freed themselves of society's constraints on women's roles. However, as Lessing herself points out in her 1971 introduction, this book is not about women's changing roles; it is the story of an artist whose creativity is blocked and who eventually cracks up.

Anna Wulf and her older friend Molly are free in the sense that they are not married anymore and have careers, Molly as an actress and Anna with a communist press. They each have a child: Molly's son Tommy is a difficult twenty-year-old and Anna's daughter Janet a young schoolgirl. While the two women have much in common, their friendship is complex, full of shifting alliances and attacks, envy and admiration. The emotional honesty of Anna's story eventually won me over.

And I was fascinated by the structure of the book: each section also contains portions of Anna's four notebooks in which she writes about different facets of her life: a black notebook about her life as a writer, a red notebook about politics, a yellow notebook where she writes stories based on her experiences, and a blue notebook which is more of a diary. Thus we see events and entanglements through a variety of lenses, their meaning shifting. Eventually Anna abandons these notebooks for a single golden notebook.

What made this novel valuable to the Women's Movement of the 1970s is that the artist in question is a woman, so the ways in which she is blocked and fragmented are those of a woman. What disappointed me then and startles me today is that she is a woman steeped in the culture of the times, the late 1950s and early 1960s, when women were supposed to be happy homemakers, vacuuming in their pearls and high heels and ever-ready to serve their men.

At the same time, whipped up by books written by men, women as mothers and lovers were blamed for all of men's problems. In fact, later that year I actually tore up a Philip Roth book—the only book I have ever destroyed—in my fury at his insistence that women were only put on earth to serve the male protagonist's needs and that he was entitled to destroy any woman who dared to ask for something from him. As Anna says, “‘None of you ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.'”

Anna's reactions to the men with whom she becomes entangled reflect her times and her struggle to change, thus contributing to the perception that the book is about, as Lessing says, the war between men and women. To me, it is more the war within a woman, and in that first reading despaired at what seemed to me Anna's weakness.

On this reading, however, I have a better appreciation for the difficulty of change and treasure Anna's small victories. It is not easy to create for yourself a new kind of life, one for which there are no role models. I value the honesty of this book, where Anna truly weighs and expresses her commitment to one social structure after another. For example, she is forthright about her shifting attitude toward communism: the danger of conformism—when two people meet they speak honestly about politics, but add a third and they revert to the party line—and the way one's will is sapped by the belief that someday the world will be a worker's paradise. Yet she values “the company of people who have spent their lives in a certain kind of atmosphere, where it is taken for granted that their lives must be related to a central philosophy.” It is only through this honesty that Anna is able to win through to a new understanding.

So I was surprised by this novel a second time and impressed by how well it holds together despite its fragmented structure and deeply troubled protagonist. In some ways it is an artifact of its time, but its refreshing truthfulness and candor make it a book for all time.

Have you reread a book years later and changed your opinion of it?

One night last week I went to a reading by Andrew Motion, thrilled at the opportunity to hear one of my favorite poets, and so close to home! I heard Motion, Poet Laureate of England from 1999 to 2009, read once before, in Toronto, at the International Festival of Authors. I was profoundly moved and changed by that experience, partly of course by the poems themselves with their richly evocative detail, their deeply felt experience, and my own sudden shock of recognition, but also partly by the way he read, the way he presented them.

At many of the readings I attend, the authors give the briefest of introductions to their poems or story excerpts, if indeed any at all, and then read in a monotone. When this happens, I have trouble paying attention and find myself thinking If you are so bored with your work, how do you expect me to be interested?

When I heard him in Toronto, I felt Motion hit just the right balance of talking about each poem, giving it some context, before reading it. He was engaged with the audience, a huge one, filling the large auditorium. Slipping in some dry wit here and there to keep us alert, he at one point provoked a spurt of laughter from someone in the back, causing him to smile wryly and say, “Exactly!” And, although the poem he then read, one that is in this book and that he read again last week, is enough to break your heart, the laughter was not out of place. The world can be confusing and chaotic; by focusing in on one moment in time, going into it fully, we find ourselves grounded again.

Hearing him last week, his introductions to the poems somewhat different for an audience that was almost entirely students, writers themselves, I understood suddenly that when I first started reading my poems, when my initial collection came out, I had unconsciously based my reading style on his. The introductions, yes, but also the way he read the poems themselves which, while not flamboyant in any way, gave each line the attention it deserved, honoring the emotions it encapsulated and evoking them in us.

This collection from 2002 contains his first poems as Poet Laureate. I picked it up at a used tool and book sale in a market town in England, because it was by him, of course, but also because I was curious as to how so private a poet would write for state occasions. The answer takes me deeply into what it means to be a writer, one whose work is out in the world.

I wrote poetry for many years just for myself; it was my way of making sense of the world. When my first book came out, I honestly didn't expect anyone to read it. I didn't feel that my privacy was violated in any way, but I just didn't think anyone would care about these poems that were so personal to me. And yet some people do, as I was reminded just today by my friend Laura.

Some of the poems in this book come out of Motion's childhood experiences. While I never went to boarding school or fly fishing with my mother, I recognise the reactions and emotions he conjures. What is private to him nonetheless touches a shared experience. Similarly, his poems about England in the section The Stormcloud of the Nineteenth Century and his other poems commissioned in his role as Laureate are clearly written out of a deeply private feeling but capture something that we hold in common. His short poem on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, for example, moves me to tears no matter how often I read it because it so perfectly sums up the beauty and tragedy of her life and her own struggles with the boundary between what is private and what is public.

Motion's investigation into that boundary in this collection touches on what I value most in this work I have taken on: reading and writing enable us to experience the world through someone else's eyes. As a result, our own gaze becomes more empathic. We are reminded that while we may each be our own private spinning world, there is much that we hold in common and a shared aspect to our lives.

This is a good thing. However, finding the right balance between what is private and what may be made public becomes more challenging every day, with the proliferation of technology that can track our every move and changing social mores that seem to make reticence a thing of the past.

What challenges have you encountered in balancing your privacy with what is shared publicly?

A friend loaned me this first volume of Lessing's two-volume autobiography. The Nobel Prize winner passed away November 2013 at the age of 94, and reading the articles about her reminded me that I hadn't read any of her books for a long time. Back in the 1970s I gobbled up books like The Golden Notebook and the Children of Violence series. They were a huge influence on my emerging understanding of myself as a person and of women's roles in society. The Golden Notebook also influenced me as a writer, one who was just beginning to appreciate experiments in form.

I decided to reread these books and also catch some of the books I'd missed. Then, much to my delight, this autobiography fell into my hands. Now I almost wish it hadn't, or at least not until I'd reread the books.

Don't get me wrong: it's beautifully written. I raced through it, intrigued by her early life in Persia and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), thoroughly enjoying the beautifully detailed descriptions of life in the bush, such as this when she hears a rustling at night:

It is as if the thatch is whispering. All at once, as I understand, my ears fill with the sound of the frogs and toads down in the vlei. It is raining. The sound is the dry thatch filling with water, swelling, and the frogs are exulting with the rain.

I was also captivated by her later involvement in politics. Lately I've found myself more and more interested in the communist and socialist movements of the 1930s and 1940s, so I was fascinated by her description of a now-lost (“killed by television”) culture of working men's colleges, political study classes and lectures. I paid close attention to the workings of the groups and shifting attitudes she describes, so familiar to me from my activist days, yet tempered by her looking back from old age (77 when this book came out).

. . . why do we expect so much? Why are we so bitterly surprised when we—our country—the world—lurches into yet another muddle or catastrophe? Who promised us better? When were we promised better? Why is it that so many people in our time have felt all the emotions of betrayed children?

Her description of how things changed with the advent of the Cold War is chilling: “From one week to the next, we became pariahs.” What makes this especially harsh is the thought that (as I now believe) the Cold War was cynically manufactured by those in power not only to sell more guns and missiles, but also to create a false sense of emergency to use as a weapon against labor organizers and others attempting to help the working class.

Lessing's parents are richly presented, their courage and limitations, their dreams and the harsh reality. They met during WWI when he was in hospital recovering from having his leg amputated, and she was his nurse. I marveled continuously at his wrestling a farm out of the bush with his wooden leg, and sympathised with her making the best of a rough isolation after her gay social life in London. I look forward to reading Alfred and Emily, Lessing's novel based on them.

Why do I wish I'd waited? In the autobiography Lessing is quite open about using her own life and friends as material for her novels. Now that I've plunged into The Golden Notebook, I find it hard to distance myself from the so-similar autobiographical details and encounter the story ingenuously. Of course, as a writer, I find interest in what she's done with real life to create fiction. But as a reader, I miss the immersion experience I had expected. Still, I look forward to reading the second volume, which begins as she leaves Africa for London.

Does knowing about the life of an author change your perception of his or her novels?

I enjoy mysteries. I like the puzzle-solving aspect, the attention to characterisation, the recognition of the world's chaos and the restoration of order. I don't like detailed descriptions of brutality—some writers seem to compete to gross our the reader—but a good writer can overcome my reluctance. Dennis Lehane is one of those writers. He captured me with his first book, A Drink Before the War, and continues to engross me with his artistry.

I also like Boston. I lived nearby for some time and always meant to return. Perhaps I still will. So the combination made this book the perfect holiday gift for me. The stories are set in and around Boston, including Cambridge, North Quincy, and Watertown. Some of my favorite authors are represented: Stewart O'Nan, John Dufresne, and Brendan Du Bois. Some are new to me: Dana Cameron, Don Lee, and Lynne Heitman, among others.

The part I liked best was Lehane's introduction. He portrays Boston and her people in ways that I immediately recognized—the knucklehead humor, the war of gentrification. And he gives a succinct take on what constitutes noir. He suggests it can be characterised as a “working-class tragedy”, its heroes not going out in a blaze of Aristotelian glory, but rather “clutching fences or crumpled in trunks”. His terse and brilliant summation is that “Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times, so the changing times instead roll over them.”

It's hard to pick a favorite story from this collection, but it might be “Dark Waters” by Patricia Powell. It's about a woman who answers the door one night when the lights have gone out. “Her name was Perle, she was forty-seven, and just six months ago she got up one morning and decided she was leaving her marriage.” The subtle changes Perle and the person at her door undergo in these few pages left me breathless with admiration, sadness, and sympathy.

This book is part of a series, each set in a different location with an editor associated with that place. I find them an interesting way to visit or revisit cities here and abroad.

Have you read a book recently that is set in a place that is meaningful to you?

A few weeks ago I mentioned that memoirs about the lives of celebrities seem to find a ready market. McMurtry is a celebrity within the world of writers, thanks to the success of books such as Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment, and the phenomenal success of movies made from them. This third memoir from him is about his interactions with Hollywood, his screenwriting career, which began almost by accident before he was famous, and his later efforts to have his books made into movies.

One expects that memoirs supposedly written by famous people are actually ghost-written, but in this case we can be confident that McMurtry wrote it himself. It is a casual recounting, jumping here and there, with chapters ranging from one to three pages. A ghost writer would certainly have added some organization and filled out the brief text. We do get some brief mentions of actors, producers and directors with whom he's worked, and more substantial descriptions of a few people such as Peter Bogdanovich and his agent, Irving Lazar.

Reading this slight and rambling book is a bit like listening to a favorite uncle run through his store of anecdotes: they are sometimes mildly interesting or amusing, but there is not much substance to them. He occasionally repeats himself, but you let that pass because of the affection you have for him.

Do I care that he once sat at a table at an Oscar party with George Burns and James Stewart, both of whom—quite elderly—sat silently throughout? Or that he met Stephen Spielberg once but their conversation was interrupted almost immediately? Even celebrities with whom he claims friendship, such as Susan Sontag, Diane Keaton, and Barbra Streisand, are only mentioned briefly because, as he says, he does not kiss and tell.

I did enjoy descriptions of two not-famous people who influenced his stories, a former Texas Ranger named Joaquin Jackson and a tragic Wyoming lawman, Ed Cantrell. I also enjoyed his descriptions of scouting locations for Hud and The Last Picture Show in his native Texas. As a writer I was amused by his descriptions of staying in the penthouse at the Beverly Hilton and flying first class, though he would really prefer a private jet. No writer I know enjoys such luxuries, but this is movie-money talking, not book-money.

He does mention that after his heart attack in 1991 he no longer has the attention span to write screenplays. He says several times that fiction comes easily to him but scripts do not. After his heart attack he confined himself to fiction, “which doesn't really require a clear mind”, until he was able to persuade Diana Ossana to become his screenwriting partner. It was Diana's idea to offer Annie Proulx an option for “Brokeback Mountain” after reading the short story in The New Yorker.

One interesting insight I gleaned from this book is his take on the difference between fiction and screenwriting:

How different? Well, for one thing, movies are sort of talked into marketability, if they have any, the talk being mainly between writer and producer, or writer and director, or both. Actors will occasional ally offer an opinion, but these opinions are rarely heeded . . . The line producers who are responsible for the daily money flow rarely get into the aesthetics of the project either.

Another helpful insight comes when he maintains that his success at having his books optioned for movies is due to his ability to write characters whom famous actors want to play. Until an actor who is thought to be a success at the box office is attached to a project, it won't generate interest or the necessary funding. For instance, Terms of Endearment might not have been made if Jack Nicholson hadn't decided at the last minute to join the cast. That makes sense, though I hadn't thought about it in those terms before. Certainly McMurtry excels at creating characters with the depth and/or quirks to make them interesting.

All in all, this is a pleasant and undemanding read. There is rarely any continuity between the short chapters, so you can pick it up and read for only a few minutes. Like many readers, I tend to read several books at once, some light and some weighty, picking them up to match my mood and attention span.

Do you read multiple books at once or focus on one at a time? What movies made from books have you liked?

I enjoy short stories, especially at times like these when my attention is a bit fractured. Just now about all I can handle is a powerful short story that can pull me in, tumble me about and let me go, as changed as the person in the story.

This is the first I've read Robinson's work, which was recommended to me by my local indie bookstore. Unsure what to expect, I steeled myself for pranks and allusions and metafictional games. But no. These stories stand four-square, solid and traditional. With great deliberation they capture my attention.

Most of the stories start with a single, declarative sentence: “That summer we rented a house in France, with friends.” No tricks, no mischief, just a simple statement of fact, yet plunging me into the story. Then it continues to draw me in, enticing me with evocative description:

. . . it was a long farmhouse of golden stone, with a faded orange tile roof. In front of it was a flat stretch of pale gravel, shaded by wide trees. The swimming pool was shimmering turquoise, surrounded by high green hedges; along the garden paths were cypress trees—cool, dark sentinels against a light-filled landscape.

These two quotes are from “Assez”, perhaps my favorite story in the book. The situation is not unusual: a woman hoping to use a summer away to regain her husband's interest, sharing a house with a couple who are their closest friends, Nina and John. What makes it stand out is the way Robinson makes me care so deeply, so immediately about these four people as they do ordinary holiday things: touring Roman ruins, shopping in the village, going out to dinner.

She does it with the detail, the bit of dialogue or description that is fresh and startling, like Steven returning from shopping and proudly stating that he has become “‘a man known to the locals.'” He explains that when he was leaving the vegetable shop and thanked the woman at the counter, as he always did, she not only thanked him back, but added:

“‘à demain.'” Steven looked at us all. “‘Until tomorrow'! She expects me!”
“‘Now that is a real accomplishment,” Nina said generously.

and she offers him one of the olives he's just brought home. A small thing, but the exchange delightfully suggests the friendship between the couples, the trust that can allow a playful boast and equally lighthearted praise. Yet the darkness is there, and Robinson masterfully manages the pace of the story to keep us shifting between the dark and the light.

I have read and reread these stories, at first just enjoying them, and then studying them. I admire the pieces—the pacing, the description, the dialogue, the characterization—but admire even more the way they are put together, the balance perhaps a little different from one story to the next, one a little heavier on action, another on reflection. I also like the different narrative voices: some protagonists are male, some female, a child, a teen, a middle-aged suburbanite.

Although they used to be popular, today's market wisdom is that people don't like to read short stories any more. Do you agree?

This autobiography by the well-known British poet was completed in 1950, when he was 41. He meets the objection that he was too young to sum up his life by explaining that “events both public and private tended to make my pre-war life seem complete in itself”, the public event being the end of WWII. John Bayley, in his introduction calls the book “the best autobiography in English written in the twentieth century.”

I have not read widely enough to assess that claim, but it is certainly very fine. I like autobiographies and memoirs because I am always curious about other people's solutions to the problems of living. Admittedly I read these books, not just to learn something, but because they are written in a fascinating voice, such as Angela's Ashes, or tell a compelling story, such as The Glass Castle. However, judging by the books published and the best-seller lists, we also read to learn about the lives of celebrities or about historical events or famous people. Meeting those criteria as well, Spender knew literary celebrities like Auden and Virginia Woolf, earned fame himself as a poet and describes major historical events such as the Spanish Civil War and WWII.

However, the appeal of this book lies in his openness. Spender gives us simultaneously the story of his emotional, intellectual, political and poetic journeys during the years 1928-1939. He brings out the inner conflicts of his time, when Freud opened new ways of understanding ourselves while the Puritanical British society denied them. “As a child, even, I wanted to know someone who saw himself continually in relation to the immensity of time and the universe: who admitted to himself the isolation of his spiritual search and the wholeness of his physical nature.”

Spender pursues his goals first of trying to discover his real self and then to find a right relation to the world. He says: “My difficulty was to connect my interior world with any outward activity. At what point did my inner drama enter into relation with the life which surrounded me?” He is concerned with the relationship between our inner and outer lives, “the conflict between personal life and public causes”.

As a corollary, he addresses the issue of whether poets should avoid politics in their writing, as his friend Auden maintained, or if events of the time were of a magnitude that they could not be ignored. There are many wonderfully insightful critical assessments of the writers of his time, most of whom were his friends, along with anecdotes about them which illuminate them wonderfully, such as an account of one of Virginia Woolf's dinner parties. I most enjoyed reading about Berlin in the early 1930s, when he lived there with Isherwood and other friends.

I should explain that the book in is five parts. The first is a short section about childhood, intended to lay the groundwork for the rest of the book. The second part is about his time at Oxford where he became friends with Auden, Louis MacNeice and Isaiah Berlin, among others, and began his vocation as a poet. The third section is an account of his time in Weimar Germany after leaving Oxford, beautifully describing the sense of freedom, ferocious life, and creativity before moving into the darker forces which would result in Nazism. This section also includes his life in London when he became intimate with the Bloomsbury Group. The Spanish Civil War dominates the fourth section, and the final section is about London during WWII before tying the whole back to the themes discovered in childhood.

I've described these sections by outer events, but Spender presents them with his own emotional and creative responses and the cultural currents that run alongside and mesh with the political ones.

Then there are the short, vivid descriptions written out of his poetic sensibility. Serving as a fire fighter in London during the war, he describes standing in the middle of a fire, training his hose on the flames, as peaceful, “as though . . . standing in the centre of the pine forest at Sellin with a sound of crepitating pine needles and oozing gum, more finely etched than silence itself upon the burning copper wall of the day.” Or this description of visits to country houses of Bloomsbury friends such as Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Harold Nicolson and Victoria Sackville-West:

In my mind these houses in the south and south-west of England, belonging to people who knew one another and who maintained approximately the same standards of living well, talking well, and believing passionately in their own kind of individualism, were connected by drives along roads which often went between hedges. At night the head-lamps would project a hundred yards in front of us an image of what looked like a luminous grotto made of crystal leaves, coloured agate or jade. This moved always in front of us on the leaves and branches. Delight in a vision familiar yet mysterious of this kind was the object of much of their painting, writing and conversation, so that when we drove in the country at night, and I watched that moving brilliant core of light, I felt often that I was looking into the eyes of their sensibility.

I love this partly because it reminds me of my own drives through English hedge-bound roads, but also because of its insightful summary of the group of people who became my first models of what an ideal life would look like.

What memoirs or autobiographies have you loved?

Since we enjoyed Kavalier and Klay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union so much, my book club selected Telegraph Avenue for this month's read. Chabon's 2012 novel has gathered a lot of critical praise, but we struggled with it. Only one person besides me finished it, and most of the others couldn't make it past the first 50 pages.

Old friends Archy and Nat run a used record store—yes, records as in vinyl—called Brokeland Records on the title's street in North Oakland. Their struggle to keep the store going is dealt a serious blow when a former football star plans to open a megastore just down the street, with a large used record section. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, work together as midwives. Eight months pregnant herself, Gwen has trouble keeping her temper as she wrangles doctors and babies and Archy and her own cumbersome body.

Julius, whom everyone calls Julie, is Nat and Aviva's 14-year-old son who has become friends with Titus, a boy his age who has arrived from Texas to stay with a distant relative. Further complicating matters is the appearance of Archy's father, Luther, a former star of blaxploitation films. He deserted his family long ago and has struggled with drugs and stints in jail, but now he's been clean for over a year and looking for a relationship with Archy.

I wish I'd had that summary before I started reading. We all found the beginning confusing and overwhelming. Even I was put off, and I'm a big fan of Chabon's writing. I thought too many characters were introduced without enough information to keep them straight or perhaps they were just not clearly presented. I didn't understand who they were or what their relationship to each other was; it took me forever to figure out that Luther was Archy's father. We spend a lot of time with one character who then disappears except for a single brief reference near the end. It was also unclear at the beginning who the main character is. Presumably it's Archy since the book starts with him, after a gorgeous brief paragraph about the (as yet unnamed) boys, Julie and Titus, but then Archy's gone before we have a chance to care about him.

I think the heart of the story is what it is to be a man. Archy stumbles through each of his roles: friend, business partner, husband, potential and unexpected father, community member, son. His failures mount as he seems unable to assert himself, to make a plan and carry it through. This section moved me: Gwen has not slept well, troubled “By thoughts of Archy and his furtive approach to grief. Holding his sadness close, as if it were a secret, the man always moving from one thing he couldn't talk about to the next, sneaking across the field of his emotions from foxhole to foxhole, head down.”

What I haven't captured is the immense exuberance of the text. Each sentence explodes with references and allusions and sneaky bits of fun. I enjoyed the verbal fireworks, but found the prose so demanding that I was not able to read more than a few pages at a time. By then, I felt pummeled and drained. Some members of my book club thought Chabon was just showing off and felt manipulated, but I can see how the style supports the story. I think the prose is a brilliant capture of today's environment with its rapid-fire demands on our attention, but it sure is exhausting. Section III, though? Even I thought that was just showing off. Quite remarkable, but unnecessary.

Chabon's references and allusions are great if you get them. I found myself snickering and laughing out loud as I read. One person started looking them up but soon quit. Several people felt that the ebullient prose distracted and distanced them, keeping them from delving into the story and caring about the characters. The character who interested me was Julie, so smart and self-possessed, so willing to give of himself.

Many of these references and allusions are embedded in the imagery—metaphors and similes—which pack every sentence. Some are brilliant. Others you just have to go with and not try to analyse. I found that I was kind of surfing, letting myself be carried along; that was the best way to handle the confusion, chaos, and conflicting demands of the text.

And by doing that, I was responding exactly the same way Archy responds to the chaos of his life. Brilliant!

I'm glad I stuck with this book, but I don't think my book club is likely to read another Chabon novel. That's a shame because he's such an amazing writer.

What is your book club reading?