Oakmont Book Group Reading Selection

I want to use the blog to see if we can pick the next reading selection for the Book Group. Trying to meet during homeroom doesn't really work.

Ms. Woollacott suggests The People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks: "One of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images, the Sarajevo Haggadah survived centuries of purges and wars thanks to people of all faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, has turned the intriguing but sparely detailed history of this precious volume into an emotionally rich, thrilling fictionalization that retraces its turbulent journey. In the hands of Hanna Heath, an impassioned rare-book expert restoring the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo, it yields clues to its guardians and whereabouts: an insect wing, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair. While readers experience crucial moments in the book's history through a series of fascinating, fleshed-out short stories, Hanna pursues its secrets scientifically, and finds that some interests will still risk everything in the name of protecting this treasure. A complex love story, thrilling mystery, vivid history lesson, and celebration of the enduring power of ideas, People of the Book will surely be hailed as one of the best of 2008. --Mari Malcolm for Amazon.com

Max has suggested Monkey: Folk Novel of China by Wu Ch'eng-en and translated by Arthur Waley. Amazon.com describes this as: "Probably the most popular book in the history of the Far East, this classic sixteenth century novel is a combination of picaresque novel and folk epic that mixes satire, allegory, and history into a rollicking adventure. It is the story of the roguish Monkey and his encounters with major and minor spirits, gods, demigods, demons, ogres, monsters, and fairies. This translation, by the distinguished scholar Arthur Waley, is the first accurate English version; it makes available to the Western reader a faithful reproduction of the spirit and meaning of the original."

Max's suggestion prompted me to think of Italo Calvino, one of Italy's greatest and most powerful 20th century fiction writers. Of Calvino's books I'd suggest:

• The Baron in the Trees -- the story of an Italian boy who leaves his aristocratic childhood home in favor of the expanse of adjoining trees that cover the surrounding town and countryside and lives the remainder of his life in the world he finds there. His name is Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, and he applies his ingenious and free-thinking perspective to finding ways of continuing to learn, innovating both for the betterment of his own lifestyle and for the people who live below him, and to cultivating a one-of-a-kind, passion-filled love life. He lives at once removed from and intimately bonded with his family and fellow townspeople, and dies as creatively and note-worthily as he lived, leaving his friends and family inspired by his story, or
• Mr. Palomar -- "Here, Calvino, probably Italy's leading novelist before he died, focuses a probing eye on one man's attempt to name the parts of his universe, almost as though Mr. Palomar were trying to define and explain his own existence. Where the Palomar telescope points out into space, Mr. Palomar points in: walking the beach, visiting the zoo, strolling in his garden. Each brief chapter reads like an exploded haiku, with Mr. Palomar reading an universe into the proverbial grain of sand." or
• If on a Wnter's Night a Traveler which begins "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone...."

However, I want to hear what you would suggest. You can easily post a comment to this blog with your suggestion, accompanied by a brief description, and everyone else in the Book Group (or in the world, but I don't think this blog has a large audience) can comment on your suggestion and/or make their own. We can carry on a little discussion until a consensus develops about our choice.

So, let us all hear from you by posting your comment/suggestion. We're waiting....

The White Tiger wins the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Now that cooler weather is settling in, the sun is setting earlier (Daylight Savings Time ends November 2), and the baseball season is wrapping up with the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays playing in the World Series, perhaps you are looking for a book to settle in with by the fire and immerse yourself in a compelling tale. What to read? Book award lists are always a good source to consider when searching for a new read (and yes, there are so many books but so little time...best to focus on the best).

Each October The Man Booker Prize is announced. The Man Booker Prize, administered by the National Book League in the United Kingdom, is awarded to the best full-length novel written in English by a citizen of the UK, the Commonwealth, Eire, Pakistan or South Africa. Past winners included The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, and Midnight's Children By Salman Rushdie. On October 14th, Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger, was selected as this year's winner; Adiga is just the fourth debut novelist to win this coveted prize.

The White Tiger is and exotic tale: born in a village in heartland India, the son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. As he crushes coals and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape - of breaking away from the banks of Mother Ganga, into whose depths have seeped the remains of a hundred generations.
The White Tiger is a tale of two Indias. Balram’s journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.

Another suggestion is Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, the November selection of the Oakmont Book Group:
Duncan Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous.
Fifth Business is a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

Either of these books will be a wonderful treat. Expand your mind and your world -- read!

Summer Reading

Although the school year may have seemed to pass ever so slowly (to students at least), summer inevitably will fly by. It is time to think about summer reading. Some of us will need books for the beach, others for long plane trips, and some for just settling into a favorite spot to get lost in a page-turner.

Reading is a fundamental, even necessary part of a meaningful and rich life. All of us will always be reading (you're reading this for example), but most of what we read won't change our lives in any real way (again, this for example). However, books have the power to change lives. Undoubtedly, you can name books that have changed your life already -- just think about it for a moment.

At the very least we all have reading to do that is part of Oakmont’s School-Wide Reading Program. The hope is that the books on the various lists can be books that can be significant for you, changing the way you see or understand something, and making an impact in your life that will last beyond your efforts in completing the response questions. But even though there is a lot of choice involved in the reading program, you are also required to read two books; this is an assigned activity. What will you read on your own this summer?

“So many books, so little time” is a cliché, but it is also absolutely true. At the end of the line, there will be books left unread which would have enriched our lives if only…. How do we find and choose the books we should read, the good stuff? One way is through book reviews and recommendations. Here is an unsystematic list of some of my recommendations:

• The Sot-weed Factor, by John Barth – Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, this modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide" (Time).
• The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro – A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. A wonderful, wonderful book.
• Demian, by Hermann Hesse – “The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian...is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst." – Thomas Mann
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig – One of the most important and influential novels written in the past half-century, this is a powerful, moving, and penetrating examination of how we live . . . and a breathtaking meditation on how to live better. Here is the book that transformed a generation: an unforgettable narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father and his young son. A story of love and fear – of growth, discovery, and acceptance – that becomes a profound personal and philosophical odyssey into life's fundamental questions, this uniquely exhilarating modern classic is both touching and transcendent, resonant with the myriad confusions of existence . . . and the small, essential triumphs that propel us forward.
• The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss – Even in moments of startling peculiarity, [Krauss] touches the most common elements of the heart. For Leo, obsessed with his death but struggling to be noticed, and for Alma, ready to grow up but arrested by her mother's grief, the persistence of love drives them to an astonishing connection. In the final pages, the fractured stories of The History of Love fall together like a desperate embrace. – The Washington Post - Ron Charles
• Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies – A marvelously enigmatic novel, elegantly written and driven by irresistible narrative force.
• Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov – Awe and exhilaration – along with heartbreak and mordant wit – abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hyper civilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love – love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers – This is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.
• The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie – Trying to describe a Salman Rushdie novel is like trying to describe music to someone who has never heard it – you can fumble with a plot summary but you won't be able to convey the wonder of his dazzling prose or the imaginative complexity of his vision. At its heart, The Enchantress of Florence is about the power of story – whether it is the imagined life of a Mughal queen, or the devastating secret held by a silver-tongued Florentine. Make no mistake, it is Rushdie who is the true "enchanter" of this story, conjuring readers into his gilded fairy tale from the very first sentence: "In the day's last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold." At once bawdy, gorgeous, gory, and hilarious, The Enchantress of Florence is a study in contradiction, highlighted in its barbarian philosopher-king who detests his bloodthirsty heritage even while he carries it out. Full of rich sentences running nearly the length of a page, Rushdie's 10th novel blends fact and fable into a challenging but satisfying read. – Daphne Durham for Amazon.com

"Recommendations for reading" needs to be conversation, a dialogue. What are your suggestions?

How to Make Better Teachers

As winter winds down, many students in Massachusetts turn their attention to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests. The MCAS evaluates whether and to what degree students have mastered the basic content and skills the Department of Education has determined to be appropriate for Massachusetts students at several age/grade levels.

But of course teachers are also judged by these so called "high stakes" tests. Students' learning is facilitated and enhanced by the materials available in the classrooms and libraries, the class sizes, the design/comfort and security of the schools, the available co-curricular and athletic opportunities, and certainly also the encouragement and support provided at home. However, we all acknowledge that it is the teacher-student interaction that is paramount in the educational process. Expert teachers are fundamental; they are the most important school resources.

As a recent cover story in Time magazine observed, American public schools are struggling to attract and retain high-quality teachers. Everyone wants great teachers in our classrooms, but how do we make great teachers? Here's the article from the Feb. 25, 2008 issue of Time, and here's a related article on how teachers are trained in countries that top the international rankings in education. What do you think?