JCPLA Reader's Advisory Roundtable: February 2015

We'll meet next at the Homewood Library in April, but a conflict with the Alabama Library Association Convention in Point Clear makes it necessary to change the date to Wednesday, April 15th at 9am, still at the Homewood Library. See you there!

Today we met at the Five Points West Library and I would like to add my profuse thanks and appreciation for the warm hospitality and delicious nibbles! We discussed travel writing and what a journey it was! Near, far, fictional and real life adventures were all represented.

In attendance:

Holley, Emmet O'Neal
Mary Anne, BPL Southern History
Michelle, Irondale
Cristi, Fultondale
Grace, Fultondale
Samuel, Five Points West
Mondretta, Leeds
Richard, Central Fiction
Maura, Trussville

The Iron Road: An Illustrated History of the Railroad by Christian Wolmar
(powells) Written by Christian Wolmar, author of the critically acclaimed The Great Railroad Revolution, The Iron Road is a richly illustrated account of the rise of the rails across the world.

From the historic moment in September 1830 when the first train ran between Liverpool and Manchester, to the high speed trains bulleting across Asia and Europe, The Iron Road: An Illustrated History of the Railroad looks at how railroads have changed the world.

Photographs, maps, paintings, and illustrations bring events and locations to life, adding a unique visual quality to the stories of great invention, feats of mind-boggling engineering, groundbreaking changes in trade and commerce, and tales of adventurers, visionaries, and rogues. The Iron Road is the third title in DK's successful illustrated histories format, which combines text-rich narratives with beautiful visual design.
Mondretta, Leeds

GENERAL DISCUSSION: Images from a 19th century transcontinental railroad travel guide expounding the virtues of train travel to the west!

GENERAL DISCUSSION: A participant mentioned a great, recently published map book on order for the library system, Great Maps: TheWorld’s Masterpieces Explored and Explained by Jerry Brotton
(amazon) From Ptolemy's world map to the Hereford's Mappa Mundi, through Mercator's map of the world to the latest maps of the Moon and Google Earth, Great Maps provides a fascinating overview of cartography through the ages. Revealing the stories behind 55 historical maps by analyzing graphic close-ups, Great Maps also profiles key cartographers and explorers to look why each map was commissioned, who it was for and how they influenced navigation, propaganda, power, art, and politics.

Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America by John Waters
John Waters decides to hitchhike from his home in Baltimore, MD to his home in San Francisco, CA. Alone. Thus begins the Pope of Trash’s epic, hilarious, irreverent, mocking, definitely not for the faint-of-heart trip across America via the thumb. Those expecting to jump right in to the absurdity will not be disappointed, but nor will they get the real story. Waters begins his book with several short stories detailing the best possible scenarios he could imagine, followed by the worst humanity has to offer. And trust me, Waters KNOWS how to imagine the worst. After that, you come to the real journey, which was quite a bit more heartwarming than I would have imagined possible. The good, the bad, and the ugly (real and imagined) of our country are all on display here and only the foolhardy would imagine there’s no truth to any of it. If it were a movie, it would be Rated R for graphic nudity, graphic language, graphic sexuality, graphic violence, outrageously rude humor, copious drug references…hmmm, maybe a few other things I can’t recall right now. But for those up to the challenge, it’s also Rated F for FUN!
Holley, Emmet O’Neal

GENERAL DISCUSSION: Richard has also reviewed Carsick on the Birmingham Public Library’s blog at http://bplolinenews.blogspot.com/2014/10/book-review-carsick.html.

Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs MostAmericans Won’t Do by Gabriel Thompson
This story is not a travelogue detailing exotic locales or award-winning food. It’s not technically a travelogue at all but it does detail a journey that I found both sobering and fascinating. Award-winning journalist Gabriel Thompson spends one year working alongside America’s invisible poor (American citizens and immigrants alike) to get a real picture of what their lives may be like. It’s an eye-opening cross-section of the country, from the blazing lettuce fields of Arizona to the industrial chicken slaughterhouses of rural Alabama to the hazards of bicycle deliveries on the frantic streets of Manhattan. Thompson does provide a glimpse into the shadowed recesses of forgotten America, but he also shines a light into the role that setting plays for these hardworking people.
Holley, Emmet O’Neal

The Road to Canterbury: A Modern Pilgrimage by Shirley du Boulay
(amazon) This work is a personal account of Shirley du Boulay's journey along the Pilgrim's Way, which runs from Winchester to Canterbury. She walked the 120 miles in ten days, and a chapter is devoted to each of the days. A further four chapters introduce the theme of pilgrimage, the route itself, the object of this particular route (the shrine of Thomas Becket) and its history, and the preparation. Shirley draws many parallels between inner and outer journeys, and contrasts the modern "home counties" with the countryside of the middle ages.
Mary Anne, BPL Southern History

Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins
(powells) A bibliophile's pilgrimage to where book lovers go when they die: Hay-on-Wye.

Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside-to move, in fact, to the little cobblestone village of Hay-on-Wye, the 'Town of Books' that boasts fifteen hundred inhabitants-and forty bookstores. Antiquarian bookstores, no less.

Hay's newest citizens accordingly take up residence in a sixteenth-century apartment over a bookstore, meeting the village's large population of misfits and bibliomaniacs by working for world-class eccentric Richard Booth-the self-declared King of Hay, owner of the local castle, and proprietor of the world's largest and most chaotic used book warren. A useless clerk, Paul delights in shifting dusty stacks of books around and sifting them for ancient gems like Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable, Confessions of an Author's Wife, and I Was Hitler's Maid. He also duly fulfills his new duty as a citizen by simultaneously applying to be a Peer in the House of Lords and attempting to buy Sixpence House, a beautiful and neglected old tumbledown pub for sale in the town's center.

Taking readers into a secluded sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through the creation of his own book, Sixpence House becomes a meditation on what books means to us, and how their meaning can still resonate long after they have been abandoned by their public. Even as he's writing, the knowledge of where his work will eventually end up-rubbing bindings with the rest of the books that time forgot-is a curious kind of comfort.
Mary Anne, BPL Southern History

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
(powells) National Bestseller • Longlisted For the Man Booker Prize • Named One of the Best Books of the Year By The Washington Post

Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning a letter arrives, addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl, from a woman he hasn’t heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and is writing to say goodbye. But before Harold mails off a quick reply, a chance encounter convinces him that he absolutely must deliver his message to Queenie in person. In his yachting shoes and light coat, Harold Fry embarks on an urgent quest. Determined to walk six hundred miles to the hospice, Harold believes that as long as he walks, Queenie will live. A novel of charm, humor, and profound insight into the thoughts and feelings we all bury deep within our hearts, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry introduces Rachel Joyce as a wise — and utterly irresistible — storyteller.
Michelle, Irondale

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy
(powells) Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is a voracious reader. Starting as a childhood passion that bloomed into a life-long companion, reading has been Conroy’s portal to the world, both to the farthest corners of the globe and to the deepest chambers of the human soul. His interests range widely, from Milton to Tolkien, Philip Roth to Thucydides, encompassing poetry, history, philosophy, and any mesmerizing tale of his native South. He has for years kept notebooks in which he records words and expressions, over time creating a vast reservoir of playful turns of phrase, dazzling flashes of description, and snippets of delightful sound, all just for his love of language. But for Conroy reading is not simply a pleasure to be enjoyed in off-hours or a source of inspiration for his own writing. It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that reading has saved his life, and if not his life then surely his sanity.

In My Reading Life, Conroy revisits a life of reading through an array of wonderful and often surprising anecdotes: sharing the pleasures of the local library’s vast cache with his mother when he was a boy, recounting his decades-long relationship with the English teacher who pointed him onto the path of letters, and describing a profoundly influential period he spent in Paris, as well as reflecting on other pivotal people, places, and experiences. His story is a moving and personal one, guided by wisdom and an undeniable honesty. Anyone who not only enjoys the pleasures of reading but also believes in the power of books to shape a life will find here the greatest defense of that credo.
Michelle, Irondale

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (DVD)
(rottentomatoes) The usually menacing British actor Terence Stamp does a complete turnaround as Bernadette, an aging transsexual who tours the backwaters of Australia with her stage partners, Mitzi (Hugo Weaving) and Adam/Felicia (Guy Pearce). Their act, well-known in Sydney, involves wearing lots of makeup and gowns and lip-synching to records, but Bernadette is getting a bit tired of it all and is also haunted by the bizarre death of an old loved one. Nevertheless, when Mitzi and Felicia get an offer to perform in the remote town of Alice Springs at a casino, Bernadette decides to tag along.

The threesome ventures into the outback with Priscilla, a lavender-colored school bus that doubles as dressing room and home on the road. Along the way, the act encounters any number of strange characters, as well as incidents of homophobia, while Bernadette becomes increasingly concerned about the path her life has taken. ~ Don Kaye, Rovi
Samuel, Five Points West

Sean & David’s Long Drive by Sean Condon
(powells) Sean Condon is young, urban and connoisseur of wax. He can't drive, and he doesn't really travel well. So when Sean and his friend David set out to explore Australia in a duck-egg blue 1966 Ford Falcon, the result is a decidedly offbeat look at life on the road. Over 14,000 death-defying kilometers, our heroes check out the re-runs on TV, get fabulously drunk, listen to Neil Young and wonder why they ever left home. Sean and David's Long Drive mixes sharp insight with deadpan humor and outright lies. Crank it up and read it out loud.
Samuel, Five Points West

My ‘Dam Life: Three Years in Holland by Sean Condon
(powells) In Sean & David's Long Drive he careered around Australia with his laconic pal David in a retro Ford Falcon. In Drive Thru America he and David cruised the States in a very uncool Chrysler Neon.

Now Australian humorist Sean Condon is married and living in Amsterdam - jobless, homeless, careless and Dave-less. In My 'Dam Life he casts a witty, watchful and wonderfully self-deprecating eye over his expat experience of laziness and leisure, dreams and destiny in the Venice of the North.

With his uncanny ability to seek out the absurd in everyday life, Sean finds plenty of targets in a city of hemp and high culture, canals and bicycles, idiosyncratic plumbing and internationally unrenowned cuisine. My 'Dam Life strikes a hilarious chord with anyone who has followed their dream of starting a new life abroad.
Samuel, Five Points West

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, narrated by Rob Inglis (audiobook)
(amazon) The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien's three-volume epic, is set in the imaginary world of Middle-earth - home to many strange beings, and most notably hobbits, a peace-loving "little people," cheerful and shy. Since its original British publication in 1954-55, the saga has entranced readers of all ages. It is at once a classic myth and a modern fairy tale. Critic Michael Straight has hailed it as one of the "very few works of genius in recent literature." Middle-earth is a world receptive to poets, scholars, children, and all other people of good will. Donald Barr has described it as "a scrubbed morning world, and a ringing nightmare world...especially sunlit, and shadowed by perils very fundamental, of a peculiarly uncompounded darkness." The story of ths world is one of high and heroic adventure. Barr compared it to Beowulf, C.S. Lewis to Orlando Furioso, W.H. Auden to The Thirty-nine Steps. In fact the saga is sui generis - a triumph of imagination which springs to life within its own framework and on its own terms. (recordedbooks) Rob Inglis has appeared with the Royal Shakespeare and Royal Court Theatre companies. He has played such roles as the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet and Mr. Bumble in Oliver. He regularly tours Europe and the U.S. with his repertoire of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Dickens, Orwell, and Stevenson dramatizations. AudioFile praises his narrations: “His rich sound and grave manner would make a grocery list sound like a collection of rare treasure.
Samuel, Five Points West

Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir by Eddie Huang
(powells) Eddie Huang is the thirty-year-old proprietor of Baohaus — the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night — and one of the food world’s brightest and most controversial young stars. But before he created the perfect home for himself in a small patch of downtown New York, Eddie wandered the American wilderness looking for a place to call his own.

Eddie grew up in theme-park America, on a could-be-anywhere cul-de-sac in suburban Orlando, raised by a wild family of FOB (“fresh off the boat”) hustlers and hysterics from Taiwan. While his father improbably launched a series of successful seafood and steak restaurants, Eddie burned his way through American culture, defying every “model minority” stereotype along the way. He obsessed over football, fought the all-American boys who called him a chink, partied like a gremlin, sold drugs with his crew, and idolized Tupac. His anchor through it all was food — from making Southern ribs with the Haitian cooks in his dad’s restaurant to preparing traditional meals in his mother’s kitchen to haunting the midnight markets of Taipei when he was shipped off to the homeland. After misadventures as an unlikely lawyer, street fashion renegade, and stand-up comic, Eddie finally threw everything he loved -- past and present, family and food--into his own restaurant, bringing together a legacy stretching back to China and the shards of global culture he’d melded into his own identity.

Funny, raw, and moving, and told in an irrepressibly alive and original voice, Fresh Off the Boat recasts the immigrant’s story for the twenty-first century. It’s a story of food, family, and the forging of a new notion of what it means to be American.
Samuel, Five Points West

American Interior by Gruff Rhys
American Interior is a multimedia travelogue, presented in book, movie, music, and app formats. One review describes it as "blurring boundaries between songwriting, literature, film making, and computer entertainment."

In 2012, Gruff Rhys of the Welsh pop-rock band Super Furry Animals set out to retrace the journey of his distant ancestor, John Evans. Evans came to America from Wales in 1792 on a quest to find a legendary Welsh-speaking Indian tribe, rumored to be living in the Great Plains. During his travels, Evans mapped the Missouri River (his work later utilized by Lewis & Clark); defected to the Spanish for a time, changing his name to Don Juan Evans; contracted malaria, causing him to suffer hallucinations; and was captured by the French, who thought he was a spy. He was also involved in political and trade concerns between the Spanish and British.

Accompanied by a puppet version of his ancestor, Gruff Rhys embarked on an "investigative concert tour" beginning in Baltimore and continuing through Philadelphia, Pittsburg, St. Louis, North Dakota, and down the Mississippi River basin to New Orleans. This fascinating project explores history, myth, cultural identity, adventure, and the American landscape.
Maura, Trussville

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron

Soon after the new millennium began, the grand old man of British travel writing traveled the Silk Road from China to Lebanon. The road, which has been called the medieval Internet, linked East and West for hundreds of years, transforming both in myriad ways. Thubron demonstrates how, and more importantly, why that plays out today (or doesn’t). He has the vocabulary of a poet and a healthy skepticism, providing a wealth of insight and startling detail. Notions of East is East and West is West get exploded time and again. This book will make you less parochial, no matter how much you may think you know.

Richard, Central Fiction

Heirs to the Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into theDisappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell
Richard reviewed this book in full on the Birmingham Public Library’s blog at http://bplolinenews.blogspot.com/2015/02/book-review-heirs-to-forgotten-kingdoms.html

Don't Look Behind You: A Safari Guide's Encounters with Ravenous Lions, Stampeding Elephants, and Lovesick Rhinos by Peter Allison
While not the first book I'd hand to a patron who was planning a safari trip, it's an entertaining look at what a safari guide is really thinking when the tourists think everything is so safe and controlled. It details his 10 year career as a safari guide, occasional camp manager, and perennially bad driver. The author's self-deprecating style doesn't instill confidence in the safari industry, but he does have some great stories to relate about his interesting life.
Kelly, Springville Road

Where have YOU armchair traveled?

JCPLA Reader's Advisory Roundtable

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Date changed for April meeting

Travel Writing

Monday, February 2, 2015

RART meeting next week

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