 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians, all sorts of varieties of activities and topics we have on here. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, both our live show here on Wednesday mornings and our archive recordings. We do the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us here, that's fine. On Wednesday mornings, you can always go to our website. We've got all our recordings of all of our previous shows available there. We do a mixture of things, presentations, mini-training sessions, interviews, book reviews, which is what we're doing today. We do bring in guest speakers, but we also have commission staff. And today we have our whole slew of commission people here. We've got Beth Govel, Debra Dregos, and Lisa Kelly, if I'm not in the same order as I have them here. We're here from the Library Commission, Nebraska Library Commission, where we offer book club kits to libraries across the state. And we're going to talk a little bit about that and share some of the new titles that we have or some interesting titles that we have available. So I will just hand it over to you guys. Here's the mouse. Thanks. Welcome. My name is Lisa Kelly, and I have been in a book club for 20 years. And as Debra and Beth introduced themselves, they'll tell you about the book clubs that they're in. But it's been an important part of my life, and I'm grateful to be in a book club. So today we're going to talk about titles we've discussed, discussion topics, how it went, did it go well, maybe it didn't go well. So these are going to be titles, 15 titles we hope to get through that are actually available from our book club kit. And I want to call attention to our new book club kit page. It has been redesigned and was mounted December 1st. You've probably already discovered this, but you can now search by various methods here. You could search by grade level, keyword, genre. Maybe you absolutely have to have 20 copies. Maybe you absolutely need to have a large print or an audio. And something that we've just recently added are movie tie-ins. So if you wanted to absolutely make sure you can only choose one of these per search, but you could limit it to 20 copies, and I need at least one large print in that. So please be aware that that's an option. If you want to browse the entire collection, which is almost up to 800 titles, you could do so here. Anything that's written by a Nebraska author, nonfiction, I think that's all pretty self-explanatory. So remember to page down for browsing options. This is available for Nebraska librarians and media specialists. So when you select a title, the form will appear. It used to be a separate form, but I think a number of you have already found that. So I would type, but I don't have a keyboard here right now. So what I'm going to do is browse the entire collection and we'll find our books as we can here. Deborah, you want to introduce yourself and Beth, introduce yourself, and then we'll do Around Robin. Okay. And I'm Deborah Gregos, and I've been in, I'm currently in two different book discussion groups. Beth is composed of coworkers here at the Library Commission, and that's been going on for over 10 years. Beth can probably give you maybe a better, well, you've been in it for that long. Beth's been in it for longer. We also have a children's book discussion group, and I've been in that for just 10 years. And Beth, how many book clubs are you in? Hi, I'm Beth Goble, and I am in two groups as well, not only three, but the Library Commission book group that Deborah just mentioned, I think it's been going since, for about 20 years. There was a line. We took a hiatus for a while, and then we reformed. So reformed, anyway. It's been going since about the 1990s. We have one gentleman in the group, the rest of us are female. I've recently joined another group back in October that's not affiliated with the Library Commission, so I've been in that one since October of 2013. Excellent. So what we're going to do today is just focus on books that are actually available from us in quantities and talk about what we think would make them good for a book club discussion. So I'm going to kick off with The Help by Katherine Stockett. You can see we've got 15 copies. If you have anyone in your book club that needs to use a talking book, they can. This book is also available in your Overdrive collection, and I recommend it because it's read by four women, one of which is Octavia Spencer, who then became a part of the movie. So food for thought, if this is something you want to take on. And the cautionary note here is I picked this for my group when it was a hot title. So if you missed it then, this is a great time. And picking a group, picking a book when it's really popular, I don't recommend. Hard to get copies, people are frustrated, and that is what happened in my book group. So as a cautionary note, this is a great book. Better to wait, better to wait until the hot titles are over. But what I loved about this was it's a cast of women who are strong women. They're flaws, they're friendships. It's about domestic servants in the south, racism, civil rights, the poor, the really poor expectations of women in that time, ostracizing people. I mean, really ostracizing people. And is it okay for a woman to have a career? And I loved it. I've listened to it twice. I think I can't get enough of this book. But my book club had a great discussion. As I mentioned, it was too popular. And then I served many as pie. And for those of you who've read this book, that will mean something to you. So that is the help. We've got 15 copies. And to request anything, all you do is click this, and the form will automatically fill out. Thank you to our IT staff. So that's selection number one. Deborah? Okay. And my first selection is Comrats, Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals by Stephen Ambrose. It's a nonfiction book. And it is one of his shorter books. If you're not familiar with Stephen Ambrose, he writes, he has written a number of historical books about Lewis and Clark, about World War II, and just a variety of books. But in this particular book, he actually takes a lot of the research that he did for those other books. And he pulls together stories of men who were friends and how he bonds not only with your brothers and your father, but with other people that you meet through college or through events like fighting in the war together and how you can come up with unlikely friendships, too. I thought it would be a very good book for discussion. If you do have men in your book club, because sometimes they don't like to read fluff, as we have found in other book discussions, things that you could talk about is just how do men bond? How do they form friendships? What are those things that make them work together and be able to reach out to each other even years and years after they first meet? And, of course, being Stephen Ambrose, he has to throw in the history, too. So you get a bit of history as well as just the idea of male friendship. And it's short. Sometimes we have people asking for short books because they've just conquered something large. How many pages in that? It has 139 pages. Excellent. Food for thought, if you're trying to keep your... Maybe you've just tackled a big book and you want to do a short one. Beth? The first book I'm going to talk about is Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. At least a chance to find it. Pretty close. You can see we've got a goodly number of copies, 22. We've got a link to some discussion questions, which would be very helpful for a group. This one was a debut novel by Mary Lawson, who's a Canadian writer who lives in England now, but this book is set in Northern Ontario. And it's about a young woman, a zoologist, who has had a pretty interesting family background. She and her brothers and one sister are orphaned at a young age. And the story switches back and forth between what happens to this young family trying to stay together without their parents. And Kate, the protagonist, in the present day kind of dealing with having become rather estranged from that family. So I think why this would be good for a book group discussion. It's not really long for starters. My new book group says you can't read anything longer than 300 pages, which is a bit of a affair. That's what my love says too. 294 pages, so it gets in under the wire. It got very positive reviews when it first came out. And I think that the themes would be very interesting for a good discussion. Themes of loss, grief, how you cope in a situation like that, misunderstandings that develop. It's definitely a family story. There's actually some humor in it. There's a little sister. The little sister, Nick named Bo, is just a terror. And some of the things that she does are really quite funny. So you get the humor mixed in with the tragedy. One of the things that appealed to me was there's a lot about the natural world in here, science. Kate becomes a biologist in her career. One of her brothers, she got started with it because one of her brothers introduced her to pond life, where they would just go and lie down and watch the little critters in the water. And that really related to me. I have a son who's a biologist, and that's exactly what he does, is examine little critters under a microscope. There's also some Canadian references about taking examinations in high school to find out whether you're worthy to go to university. That's the way they do it there, not with the SATs. And I remember that terror being in grade 12 and having to take all these exams. So I think the major theme to me is the family misunderstandings and how you deal with those. And also the value of an education. Is that the key to your success and happiness in life or not? So without squaring the story, I think it would make a good discussion group for probably for mainly women, but men might like it too. I'd love to hope. We sometimes have people calling in asking us for humor. And this is a book I'm afraid I've recommended probably too many times, but In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson. Bill Bryson, as you know, is from Des Moines, Iowa. For the audio readers amongst you, he reads the book and he's an author who has some business reading his own book. Some authors really don't. But he has a very interesting voice because he's lived all over the world, I think spent some time in London. And that's made a difference in his accent, which is kind of a tweak to your ear. So again, this is available in Overdrive and I would recommend listening to this if that's your cup of tea. Forgive me, we'll get there. I think we have multiple copies of this too. There we go. Fourteen copies of this book. The UK's most borrowed book of the decade. I tried to put some honors there, while I think that might be helpful for you to pick. My sisters and I discuss this book. My sisters and I get together twice a year. In one year, we each chose a book that we all had to read. So we discussed three books when we got together and my sister Linda gave this to me because I said, I might like to go to Australia to visit shows. She said, well, then you should definitely read this. Discussion topics of travel hazards. I think if you've never been to Australia, this is a great armchair visit. Beth has lived there, I'm not sure. Yes, and there are so many creatures that can kill you. Yes, every poisonous creature that lives and walks and swims and flies lives in Australia. The top, the outback, the tropics, the aborigines, local sayings, wildlife. This is a laugh out loud book to me. And sometimes I hesitate saying that because then someone else reads it and they don't. But I can remember when I was listening to this as I was walking in the morning on the campus and I would just be laughing. And once I just sat down and it was great. So my sisters and I had a great discussion about it. Just recounting our favorite stories and talking about the things that we liked best. And it's a great nonfiction. Perhaps sometimes you feel like you might need to take a break from fiction for a bit. And so this is one that I have recommended many times. Unfortunately, I wouldn't call this a... Well, it is. Excellent. He has a big appendix in here. So it's a right around the 300 page mark. And just really, really well done. And so if you're looking for humor, this might be an option. We read it for our book group. You did too and we all loved it. I was hilarious. It certainly brought back memories for me. Oh, good. Being in the Outback. And if you needed to take a rest break and you were driving in the middle of the Outback, there were no trees or anything. You got out and you took off on your shoes and you wapped the ground. I was told to make sure... So all the poisonous critters would flee before you... Did your business. Did your business. Right. Well, so two resounding endorsements. I don't have a good tip anywhere. Yes. From anywhere you are, you need to do that. If you're the bear in the woods, you know what I'm saying. Right. From two book groups, resounding praise. Okay. All right. Okay. The next book that I'm going to talk about is by Barbara King-Solver. It's called The Bean Treaties. And we did read this in our book, Adult Book Group. And I think everybody really fairly enjoyed this. I think this was Barbara King-Solver's first book. I'm not sure about what that group has read it twice. Oh, could be. Yes. I know. Because we liked it so much. Oh, okay. I read it twice. I remember it twice. You made bean soup. Indeed. Okay. Well, Marietta Greer sets out from Kentucky to find something better down the road. She wants to avoid the barefoot and pregnant syndrome from her hometown. So she sits out in this old car. And when it runs out of gas in Taylorville, Illinois, she decides she's going to change her name. Maybe that'll change her whole, I don't know, change her outlook or something on life. So she adopts the first name of Taylor. She continues on down the road and in Oklahoma, a Cherokee woman just hands her a baby. She puts in her car and says, please take her. So she travels on down the road with this little girl who's many about two years old and doesn't talk. It's beginning of the book anyway. And she finally winds up in Tucson, Arizona with two flat tires in a broken down car and gets a job at a tire shop. The book then just, you get a lot of flavor of, okay, it's a very different culture. There are many, there's a wide variety of cultures that she runs into in Tucson as opposed to Kentucky. She winds up living with a young divorced mother who has a son. And, you know, she meets other people and she starts making friends. She has a whole different, she comes to have a totally different outlook on life. I think our group talked a lot, and Beth can throw time in too. We talked about, okay, risk taking, picking up and traveling all the way across the country. Barbara Kingsolver talks a lot, includes a lot of different social issues, poverty, divorce, political refugees, just hopelessness on the one hand, but on the other hand, making friends, broadening your social network, just, there is something to look forward to down the road. So, there's a lot to discuss. I think it's a great introduction to Barbara Kingsolver's books. She's gone on to write many. Many with us, there's always a strong social, environmental theme to her writing. I think she's a very gifted writer. She's one of my favorites. This would be a great introduction. And we have several of her books in our book club kits. So, if you fall in love with Kingsolver, your club can take on other titles from her that are both fiction and nonfiction. I didn't realize she did nonfiction. Or at least we're working on some nonfiction. Oh, okay. At any rate, yes. Beth. Okay, switching to nonfiction. This is another book about World War II written by Tom Brokaw, the greatest generation. So, down to the Gs. Forgive us if you get dizzy. So, you may, we're probably all familiar with Tom Brokaw as a journalist and television personality. In 1984, that was the 40th anniversary of D-Day. He went to Normandy in France and talked with many, many Americans who had been soldiers and had participated in D-Day. And he was really taken by the men who were then in their 60s and 70s and he listened to their stories. Ten years there, he went back for the 50th anniversary. And I think by that time, people were probably no longer with us. And he realized how important it was to come in and just tell, give short vignettes of what he called the greatest generation. So, he says that it is the greatest generation that any society has ever produced. So, what I liked it was most of these people were unassuming ordinary people who did what had to be done. Some of them came, later became famous, George Bush being one of them. There were some famous people listed in the book. I have a personal reason because my father also served in World War II in the Canadian Army. He went over to Europe after D-Day. He wasn't participating in that. But he did suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome. I never get those letters right. So, I think this would be a great book and Deborah said the same thing about Ambrose's book for a mixed group including both men and women and also mixed ages. I think this would be great because you may have people in the group who are old enough to remember World War II and what it was like either on the home front or being away in the war. And also younger people who probably don't know a lot about it unless they've been students of history. They may not know a lot about World War II and what it was like. I like the way that the book is organized. He does it thematically. I broke my rule. It is over 400 pages. We do have 14 copies and two large print which might be an important thing if you've got older members who want to participate in this. But I don't think you'd necessarily have to read the entire book because it's all little vignettes and they're arranged thematically. You could even have different people read different sections. And then each talk about the parts that they read. So, if 400 pages is a bit much for some of your group members I think you could get around that by doing that. So, the themes of course are about bravery, sacrifice, doing your duty, doing what must be done. Just the things that people had to face here at home. Yes, I should mention there are some home print stories in here as well. Women. There's also a section called Shame about people of other cultures, other races, other colors and what happened to them or how they were not honored. You may have heard in the news that some of those people are being honored this week by President Obama because they were overlooked when they should have gotten these honors earlier. So, I would recommend this to any book group that's interested in nonfiction. Okay, now we're really going to take a turn. I wanted to give another cautionary note for a book that I love too much, Pride and Prejudice, which I know one person who reads it every year. I think we're all three Austin readers amongst us. But I had to come to her and I needed to come to her. I think it wasn't something that someone could have pushed me into. In fact, I was in an early book group. We were asked to read Emma and I didn't want to read it then. So, now I've come to it because Masterpiece Theatre did all the Austin movies one winter and that brought me into the fold. So, I asked my sisters and my mother and my niece to read it for my mother's birthday and we always read a book together. And boy, did it go poorly. They were not ready. They really weren't ready. And so, I mentioned this to say if you really have your heart set on something in a book, it may not go well. It really may not go well. And so, to keep that in mind when you're selecting a book for your book group, if you really invested in this, and this is the first time this has happened to me, you think I'd learn. And I also want to mention if your book club is really ready for this, please do it and please tell me. I would love to know that it went well. I think this was one of our early romance novels. So, if you have a lot of romance readers in your book club and they always feel like they're having to take a break from reading romance to read their book club book, this might be one to try. The text is certainly going to take a while to get used to. You also may want to listen to it and it is available in Overdrive, so there's my push for your audio book if that's something that works well for you. I love that it's all about marrying well and how to, the whole socialization of marriage and is it for financial reasons or romantic reasons or for social regulations and would you tell a friend if they were making a bad match, would you do that? And Austin brings up themes that are very contemporary in my opinion. And I think I've read by prejudice three times. How many times have you all read it? Oh, probably seven or eight. I'm way behind. I know I've read it at least once. And I've of course watched all the movies. And that is an excellent segue into we have the Pride and Prejudice movie in our collection and not just any Pride and Prejudice, but the Pride and Prejudice with Colin Furrier. One with Colin Furrier. So I want to just make a quick plug for our motion picture licensing agreement. If you want to borrow any of the DVDs that we have and have an additional segue for your book group, you do need to check to make sure, if you want to show this in the library, you would need to check to make sure this is included in the motion picture licensing agreement. If it's not, make arrangements to watch it elsewhere, but not in your library. I think that would be the correct thing to say. So this is my own copy because I had to upgrade to Blu-ray and here it is, I recommend it to you. And Colin Furrier got me into Jane Austin and if you do, we also have Emma and the movie in our book club kit too. So I'd love to hear if it went well in your book group because it sure didn't in mine. Okay. Okay. Well, my book next is Because of Wind Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. And actually, this is one of the children's books. I believe we, and now I can't remember right off the top of my head if we did read this for our book group, but I know I've read it before. It's a wonderful book. It was a Newberry Honor book. It's basically for the fourth, sixth grade level. The story is about 10-year-old India Opal Bologna. What a name. She goes by Opal, okay. Opal and her father have recently moved to Naomi, Florida where her father has been called to preach. She misses her friends from the last town where they lived. She misses her mother who could take being a preacher's wife and left them when Opal was about three years old. And she's in this town. It's the first summer. School hasn't started. She hasn't met anybody. The kids at church, she doesn't think she'll like and she's just stuck. What is she going to do? She's, you know, unhappy. She goes to the Wind Dixie. Her father sends her for some groceries and she meets an ugly stray dog in the produce department who's causing havoc. And she claims the dog is her own to avoid having him sent to the pound. And she said, you know, it's struck by the idea of saying his name is Wind Dixie. She claims that he truly is hers and his name is Wind Dixie so that the store manager's, oh, okay. You know if you've named him after the store, well, you know. So anyway, the dog has a lot of personality and charms, everybody. And through the dog, she makes, starts making friends. She makes friends with adults, including the local librarian with the pet store manager with an older lady who lives out on the edge town that the other kids claim is a witch and she starts making friends with the kids. So overall, it's a fairly entertaining book. It's a very gentle book. It's not too long either. And there are a lot of topics to discuss with kids, you know, abandonment, loneliness, how do you make friends, pets, you know, what do you do when you, you know, you find a dog and how to convince your parents to take the dog in, you know. And claiming he's a less fortunate sometimes helps, especially if your father's preacher. We do have the movie that was made from this book. Also as part of the book club kit. It is really pretty well done. It uses a lot of the dialogue and internal thoughts straight from the book. But they did move some of the events around and they added some characters and some scenes. So, you know, it doesn't match the book exactly. There's more. But sometimes people love to do both read the book and watch the movie. They get a different take. They see somebody else's view of, okay, how does, you know, this scene really work out? How do these people interact? So I would highly recommend it for kids. I would recommend it for adults as well. Again, sometimes you're looking for a short book and maybe you need to take a break in December because everybody's really busy. That might be a great one for December or January. It only takes maybe a couple hours max to read. So I would never limit that, although I've tried to recommend those for adults and not always does that go over well. So, okay, and that again. Okay, I broke my rule again. It's back down to the Gs. I just realized I'm picking all these things that start with a G. It's The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. And it's 347 pages, at least the paperback copy that we have. This one, the paperback copies that we have, do have reading discussion questions in the back of the book, which would be kind of handy if you borrowed our kit. And those questions are available online and we have a link to them, I think. The questions? Yes. Yes, the discussion questions. As you can see, it did win the Pulitzer Prize. It came out in 1932. Written by Pearl Buck, who was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, and she lived in China with them. And I'm sure saw a lot of the things that she describes in the book. It's a story of a poor farmer named Wang Lung and his bond with the land. And I think it's really pretty relevant even today, perhaps in Nebraska, especially because we are still quite a rural economy and the importance of the land. And for Wang Lung, it becomes everything. That's the most important thing in his life. Acquiring more land. And acquiring more land. Yes, I should mention that quite recently, our NLC library commission, I'm sorry, I shouldn't use the acronym, our library commission adult book group did read this. And I think we all enjoyed it. We got a good discussion out of it. There's definitely some cultural issues, particularly the way women were treated back then. Well, there's the whole social injustice. And I do believe Pearl Buck wrote this book in order to talk about some of that social injustice. These incredibly poor people. At one point, his family has to leave their land and travel to a city because there was a famine. And of course, no one's going to help you in 1932 in China. They were starving. And the way they had to live in cardboard structures and beg in the city, it's really a very revealing book. The themes, the bond to the land and how it became so important to him that it overrode everything else. And at the end of the book, he has, he comes to realize that his children may not have the same ideas about that as he has, his sons in particular. I think it would be a good discussion for people of all ages. It is definitely a classic. There was a movie made of it back in the 30s. It was definitely the Hollywood version that you can imagine. The principal actors were all Caucasian, playing Chinese peasants. I did watch it. I don't know whether I would recommend it 21, but if you're a Netflix fan, you could probably get it through Netflix. So it generated a discussion in our group about what is a classic to. I consider this a classic. It may not show up in all of those 100 best books of the world, but I would definitely consider this classic modern if you can count now 232 as modern. So worth reading after 80 years. All of our Pulitzer Prize winners are, I hope, marked. So if you ever wanted to search by that, you could do so. And that's a worthy way. I think one of my book groups did that once. Just chose, let's read a Pulitzer Prize. My co-ed book group, I have a couple of voraciously reading men. And one of the men in my book group chose My Own Country by Abraham Burgays. I'm pretty sure that's how you say his name. He also wrote the One Book, One Lincoln book, Cutting for Stone, which is fiction, but this is non-fiction. It's about his own career and his, I can't do both of you. As he did his internship in Tennessee, I believe in 1985, in the early days of just discovering AIDS. And my goodness, I cannot go on about how we so wanted to meet him. My book group has had an opportunity once to have an actual author at our book club. But we just gushed about him. He went to the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. So not only does he share his experiences, but he's just a brilliant writer. So the stereotypes against gay men, families who were dealing with young sons who were dying of AIDS, and in this particular book, it is a lot of men, but there are certainly women who are suffering from AIDS. As a medical professional, he's dealing with his colleagues who are afraid to work with patients because there's many unknown things about AIDS still, which brings up just how far we've come in that particular illness. His own particular marriage takes a huge strain as he really sees it as his call to work through the diagnosis and what's causing AIDS and get to the bottom of some issues that they just cannot clarify. Like I said, we just gushed about this person. I included a TED video so you can actually see him discussing how doctors should practice. So you'll see that here. I recommend watching that. It's very short, but it gives you a 3D sense of this author and how you would very much want to have him for your doctor. He's just brilliant. It left us in a point where several of us wanted to know what happened to him after, so being librarians, a bunch of us researched that. So if you have read Cutting for Stone, they really go together quite nicely. I've recommended this is a nonfiction book to some people and it's gone well in their book club discussions. An excellent writer, an excellent storyteller, and a story that perhaps we may have forgotten and are not too far distant past. So a nonfiction selection called My Own Country. Well, I've got another nonfiction book. This is one that we did read in our group here. It's called The Devil in the White City, Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Eric Larson. I'll tell you a little bit about it first. It does cover. It's a narrative of the events prior to leading up to the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. All the preparation work for it, you know, building the site and everything that went on there, and it also covers The Devil, who was a mass murderer named Herman Webster Mudget, who was going by the name at the time of the fair, of Dr. Henry H. Holmes. Okay, I have to say, I'll throw in my one personal comment. I left the book overall, but I think he went just a little bit too far in throwing in details that he couldn't really know about, you know, the smells and certain things. He went just a little bit too far. But I have to say the one man in our group just absolutely thoroughly loved this book. He really was taken by all of the detail that the author provided through his research about the architects who designed the place and, you know, with the one gentleman who was the mastermind, Daniel Burnham, and just everything that goes on. And it's so applicable to things today. You know, you look at the Olympic venues, the political infighting, the greed, the corruption, everything that goes on around an event like this. And then, of course, when 1893 actually came, you know, they started the building before that, but when 1893 actually came, there was a recession. There, you know, things took a downturn. So they were doing all these other things to pull people in. Okay, no matter what, you know, the economy's like, come to the fair, all these wonderful things are there, see the sights. But on the other hand, at the same time, you had all these people coming into town and these young women started disappearing. This Henry Holmes built an apartment complex with some stores in it, and it had a room where basically there was no escape and Holmes trapped his victims there. Then he takes off across the country and you get the police then eventually trying to track them. And you learn about the police methods of that time. So there's a lot to talk about there, you know, all of the things that just went on during that time period. I got to be on the committee that helped select that for one book, one Lincoln. And one person's argument was, you can't go wrong with true crime. Yeah. So, you know, maybe you've read too many Ushigushi girlie books and you need to get out of your zone. But it is fascinating and there's connections to Nebraska in that book as well, which you will, you may or may not remember. So go to crime. Yes. Okay, and now for something completely frivolous. That word up. The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise by Julia Stewart. I guess I would just start off by saying it won't be too taxing. It's not too long. It's less than 300 pages. And it would be a good book group choice if your group is just looking for a quick kind of fun read. That's quirky. It's full of odd things. And it's very British. If you like British humor, I think you would like this. And if you like Monty Python, you'd probably like this. It was a national bestseller when it first came out in 2010. We've got lots of copies, 24 copies, and there is a discussion group guide available online. I think I said it was a one book one link in 2012 finalist. I'm not surprised they didn't choose it just because it is kind of lightweight, but it is funny. It takes place in modern day England and it follows the lives of a beef eater named Balthazar Jones and his wife Hebe. So great names right there. Why do you do that? They actually live in the Tower of London because that's where the beef eaters live. And their pet is the oldest tortoise whose name is Mrs. Cook. And she is over 100 years old. There's another cast of characters that live in the Tower, a barmaid at the Rack and Ruin bar, and the Raven master who's kind of a sinister figure who's trying to seek revenge for what he thinks is the murder of one of the Ravens. There's some sadness involved because Balthazar and his wife are dealing with the death of their son, and that's causing some problems in their marriage. But there's just so much quirky Britishness about this. Hebe actually works in the lost and found of the London tube system, the Underground. And having been on that myself, I mean, you just have to roar at some of the things that are still sitting in the lost and found like an urn with someone's ashes in it. You know, that would be dark humor that the Brits just love. I'm not sure if there was a false leg, was one of them too. An entire canoe. And one of the reviewers I read said, how would you ever get a canoe on the tube? And I can't imagine how I've ridden on it. There's just no way. I've seen the Tower of London. I've seen the place where Anne Boleyn was beheaded. So it had a lot of joy for me just because I've seen the place. So I would say if you're looking for something quirky, heartwarming, funny, English humor, some people might find it a little bit too wordy. Just if you read any Terry Pratchett or some of the other humorous British writers, there's a lot of verbiage that goes on. It's been called sweet and enchanting and I enjoyed it very much. Now I'm going to turn this over to Lisa and Debra. I think both read it and neither one of you liked it. I didn't enjoy it, no. So tell us why. It's been a while. I had trouble following it in a linear fashion. I think when it jumped about, I think I had difficulty navigating the story. I would concur with that because I actually listened. I read it with my ears, not my eyes. And I had to keep backing up. Okay, who are you with now? Because it does jump back and forth with the various characters. And what was your criticism? Yeah, along those lines. Actually, I have to admit, I didn't get past the second chapter. It didn't catch me and maybe it was just the time period that I tried reading it. Sometimes I'll start a book and oh, I don't like that and then come back to it a couple of years later and hey, this is a good book. Well, one of the funniest parts that I completely left out is why the word zoo is in the title is, Balthazar is made the caretaker for all these animals. This is true. This really happens. People give animals to the queen and they had, especially Green Victoria. But even in the modern day, you're meant to think that there was this whole collection of animals that they didn't know what to do with. So they decided to move them to the Tower of London. It's about giraffes and elephants and all sorts of things. And poor Balthazar somehow gets made in charge of this zoo that's now at the Tower. Lots of funny stuff going on with that. It's a cautionary tale about what someone finds funny and what other people are not. I think that might be why we gravitate more towards the pathos books. Maybe that's more universally felt and humor is maybe more specific. I'm long trying to figure that out. But Beth found it really funny and Deborah and I did it. And so there you go. There's a branch of British humor that I never got. And it was Monty Python. I love Monty Python. Do you remember the part where somebody is getting their body parts all sliced off? I was absolutely horrified. Other people screamed about it. Yes, I think you have to. You either get it or you don't. There's no slicing off of arms and legs in this. I do think somebody leaves their prosthetic leg in them. Okay, so we have many copies of that. And it is available in Overdrive because Beth and I both listen. So, Deborah, you're next one. Oh, you're not going to be yours? Oh, me, yes, next. Sorry. I can't believe I'm recommending this. The reader by Bernard Schlink was chosen by another male member of my group. And I want to make sure that you know that this is a parable. Because there is. This is a book about post-war Germany, how Germans are dealing with it, how the first generation of kids are dealing with finding out about what has happened, or knowing what had happened in Germany during World War II. I usually just run far away from a Holocaust novel. And I don't want to read them. And I've been to a camp and I've been to the museum in Washington, D.C. and I've seen enough movies, so I feel like enough is enough. But this presents an angle that I think we haven't heard and haven't dealt with yet. So, again, I'm going to emphasize it's a parable. There's a young woman named Hannah who's 36 and a 15-year-old named Michael who began a relationship in the first part of the book. It's clear that she likes being read to and that leads to a particular element in her life. Part two deals with the trial where we learn that Hannah was a guard for the camps. And then part three is an adult where Michael has grown up and become a lawyer. So there's a court scene. The author of this book is a lawyer. So it's short. There you go. It's 215 pages. And we had a great discussion about it. There was certainly lots to talk about the relationship. It's inappropriateness, appropriateness, how that changed him, how that changed her. And this is the perfect time then to talk about the segue. My whole book group then went to the movie, which I just rewatched again last night to remind myself. Certainly isn't adult content, but again, I remind you it's a parable and it causes issues to come up in a discussion that we haven't yet talked about. And the secrets and how one woman, Hannah, Hannah's life was really destroyed by a secret that she kept her entire life. And so we had a great discussion. Then we all went to the movie together. I don't recommend that all the time, but it could be interesting if you're wanting to shake things up in your book group and compare and contrast to book and movie. It can be a great conversation about characters they added, characters they took away. The favorite scene you were waiting to see and it was not in there. So I'm not promoting this, but want you to know that these are options for your book groups. If you need to spice things up a little bit. Now we've got the movies. So The Reader by Bernard Schlink is my last review. Okay. And excuse me, my last one is The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. We have not discussed this in any of my book groups, but I would say it would be good if again you're trying to entice men or you're trying to even get teenagers, teenage boys into a reading discussion. This is your real science fiction thriller, Heavy on the Science. It was Michael Crichton's first book. He is a doctor and you can really tell it in this book. There's a lot of medical stuff. The basis of the story is that a government satellite crashes several miles outside of a remote town and shortly after all but two of the inhabitants have dropped dead. This satellite brought some type of biological life back with it and the scientists have to race to discover how to combat this life form now known as Andromeda. It really goes into, you really see how scientists work, how they're trying to solve a problem. And they have a deadline. The story takes place over five days. But then it also gets into the secret government agencies and government cover-ups and the conspiracy theorists and secret labs and personal heroism. The possibility of biohazards and bio-weapon attacks, which today are real. But what happens if we're attacked with some bio-weapon and our scientists don't have a vaccine or a cure or whatever for that at the beginning, do we have somebody there who could fix, who could solve that and save it from spreading across, spreading farther? So just lots of good things to talk about. And it's, to me, even though it's science, it was white. I don't know if you ever saw the movie. The original movie made from this book was made back in 1971 with Arthur Hill and David Wayne. I had to look it up. And then they did actually a TV mini-series in 2008 that I did see recently when I found out you were going to be reviewing this. I have not read the book, but my husband said that was quite different from the book. I did not watch the mini-series. I saw the movie, which was very close to the book. I did not see the mini-series. I think Michael Crichton is always a fast read kind of guy. Yeah. Potato chip reading. Yeah. I would call that. Okay. Should we have our last one? We're at 11.58. Beth has one more. Okay. Real fast. I'm going to get Deborah to talk about this with me because I didn't make a lot of notes. The Mortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This was a finalist for the one book, one link, and also in 2011. And it's nonfiction. It's the story of a reporter named Rebecca Skloot. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right. Who became fascinated with a family back in the 60s, I think it was, who a family member named Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were taken from her body, cancer cells, she had a particularly virulent type of cancer, which she died from shortly thereafter, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. And in those days, they would just take cell samples from people without their permission or even their knowledge. And at that point, scientists were desperately searching for a way to reproduce cells in a petri dish. And for some reason, Henrietta's cells worked. And from that, we have many, many of the cures, drugs, things like that to this very day. So the immortal life is because they keep reproducing these original cancer cells so that in some way she's still alive today. And what the reporter did was go back and find the remaining members of her family and talk to them about this. So it's a story about, in some ways, injustice. This was a very poor black family who never were told that this had happened. Billions and billions of dollars have been made by drug companies and many careers launched by scientists ever since this happened. They've never received any kind of remuneration for it. And our book group did discuss this, did we not? Yes, recently. No, it's been a little long. November 2012. I did actually write it down. Do you have any comments, Deborah? I think you get the main topics. And she did go into a lot of detail of the life of the family, too. It felt to me like she got very personally involved with him almost more than you would expect a reporter. I wondered about her objectivity toward the end just because she became so attached to this family. Right. But she did do a really good job, I think, of tracking down all the different, all these arms, webs that reached out. So the cells went to this person and then went to that person and just the spread through the whole scientific community of just from this one set of cells. And they were called healers. In fact, if you could be looking at the book that I'm looking at, on the cover, they'd actually, the H and the E from Henrietta and the LA from her last name, Blacks, are bolded. And that's what they're called, healer cells. I think summing up, we're all reading books that we wouldn't normally read, which is what we hope a book group does in these medical books are things I would have never, never read in my own country. That is, that is the great thing. Maybe you would have read it, but I'm a, as a fine arts person, I wouldn't have been drawn to those. And we've read a lot of medical books in my book group and how I've always been grateful to have encountered them. So get out of your zone, pick a Jane Austen, pick a True Crime, and pick a non-fiction. We hope we've helped you pick something that maybe wouldn't have come to your list and something we can provide through our book club kit collection. So give us a holler or email, call. Any questions? Nothing came in during this while you're talking. Okay. If anyone does have any questions or comments or thoughts on any of the books, feel free to type them in. We are a little after 11 o'clock, but that's okay, we started a little late because we're working on things here. And if you have suggestions for titles, maybe, should I say, if you have leftover books from, you know, we have a couple of lovely librarians, and you know who you are, and sometimes your book club finishes a book and you've all purchased it. If you want to, and certainly if it's something you would like to do, people have dropped them off and we've added them to our collection. And we're grateful for that. A lot of our book club kit collection is gifts. And we've all weeded our own collections and brought some books in. One question. I think this might be a slightly different question. And how large is the normal book club group? Or maybe the question would be how large should it be? Book club kit or a group? Group. How big a group should be? Vicki and I did an Encompass Live a couple of years ago. Vicki likes for groups bigger. I like my groups smaller. I don't know. I was in the county library and Bassett has a group of 20-ish when I spoke with Evelyn Oost there. I couldn't believe it. I think that's really big and difficult to corral a conversation. I like my living room where we can all just sit and try to keep one conversation going. That seems tantamount to me. See your thoughts? Yeah. I think it depends on the individual people who are part of the group. If you get too big, some people might not talk based on their personality. I know even in our group which never goes over 10 sometimes we have to say, you haven't talked. Everybody else has been yacking. You speak up. You have to sometimes draw out if it gets a little too big or if some people have to dominate. So it varies. This new group I've joined is not the NLC group. There are about 20 people on the list. Several people like myself signed up recently. The group had reached the point where they decided to kick out us newcomers and have us form a second group which we have done. After we got over the hurt feelings they don't want us. We've been meeting now several times and there are nine of us. We have a group because then everybody gets a chance to talk. The other group, they like to meet around a very long table in someone's house. There was a dinner bell there where there was a conversation starting to happen at both ends of the table. Someone would ring that bell so everyone would stop talking. I thought, well, that's a little odd. I've kind of gotten over it now. I'm really enjoying being the group of nine. We've already decided that we won't kick people out of our group if it gets too big. When it reaches the size of 12 we're going to sponsor another group. A third group if it's needed. My sister's group vets very carefully who's invited into the group because they are close friends and they have very intimate discussions. It's important in her book group to keep things very... They very much discuss inviting someone in a different way. It can be pretty hardcore if you need to really keep it tight or if you just want to have more casual discussions. The nature of a book group can be very intimate. You may not want to discuss certain things with folks. I'm not in this group but I have friends who are in a couples group where the discussion has gotten so heated a couple of times where one of the men has walked out and I think with a bigger group if you just open it to the public and you don't have a set name list of people who come that you do need to definitely have a leader then with some set of questions to keep discussion moving. In answer it's important what you want. Do you want it to be intimate? Do you care if it's a larger conversation if multiple conversations start? Depends what the group wants out of it. One other question that came in I think you said one of the books you had was your children's group Do we have any young adult books that we do? We have several. You can search by grade level. From Harry Potter to the C.S. Lewis we have several Jerry Spinelli novels. I'm not familiar with him but Jerry Pratchett is that considered a children's author? He's a young adult. Yes we do. We're getting more. If you're talking really young adults there are adult books that they can definitely read. My Stephen Ambrose book Comrades I think would be great for high school boys. The answer is yes. Definitely. Sally Snyder our staff member here has helped choose several for our book club kit so you might want to ask her if you want some consultation. We may not be the best but Sally could help you. That looks like that's it that came in while you were chatting. Just a few thanks coming through. Thank you all. So that will wrap it up for this week's Encumbered Slide. We have links to the book club kits and the motion picture video license on and we'll be in the show notes with this so you have links to that and everything is being recorded as well. Thank you guys very much. I always end up with books that I want to read after anybody does one of these kind of book review sessions. So many books so little time. And some I already have which is good to know and I'm going to strain in the devil in the white city. I'm glad I've already done those. So that wrap it up for today. Let's see if I can get us to our there we go. So that wraps up for this morning. We'll get started and put on the website where we keep all of our archive recordings here. I hope you join us next week then when our it's our monthly tech talk once a month Michael Sowers comes on the show and does a more techy oriented type session. And this month he's got what does he have? Oh, Marcia Dori Baker. She's from our law library, University of Nebraska College of Law talking about your online presence, how you should deal with that online. So hopefully you'll join us for that sign up there. Also we are on Facebook. You can go ahead and like us on Facebook. We post notices of when sessions are available and recordings are going to be available when a new show is just starting up so you can pop in on the fly. So definitely do like us on Facebook if you want to. Other than that, thank you very much for attending this week and we'll see you next time. Happy reading.