Breathing Lessons Question #7

What are some parts that you don't quite understand?

Scroll down the blog for more discussion questions.

Request: When you reference something in the book, please let us know where it is so we can all read along. Include the chapter number, page number, and the paragraph number. Like this: (C3, P245, G3) Thanks!

Breathing Lessons Question #8

What are some characters or scenes you identified with?

Scroll down the blog for more discussion questions.

Request: When you reference something in the book, please let us know where it is so we can all read along. Include the chapter number, page number, and the paragraph number. Like this: (C3, P245, G3) Thanks!

Breathing Lessons Question #9

What is something in the book that you disagreed with

or something you embraced?

Scroll down the blog for more discussion questions.

Breathing Lessons Final Questions

1. Were you satisfied with the book's ending?
2. Who was your favorite character and why?
3. Would you read this book again? Why or why not?
4. Do you have any final thoughts on this book?
5. And, most importantly, are you up for movie night at the end of the month to have fun and watch the movie version of Breathing Lessons?


Request: When you reference something in the book, please let us know where it is so we can all read along. Include the chapter number, page number, and the paragraph number. Like this: (C3, P245, G3) Thanks!

2009 Reading Selections

January
Genre: Pulitzer Prize Winner
Title: BREATHING LESSONS
Author: Anne Tyler
Price: $7.99
Pages: 388
Description: Maggie Moran's mission is to connect and unite people, whether they want to be united or not. Maggie is a meddler and as she and her husband, Ira, drive 90 miles to the funeral of an old friend, Ira contemplates his wasted life and the traffic, while Maggie hatches a plan to reunite her son Jesse with his long-estranged wife and baby. As Ira explains, "She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them." Though everyone criticizes her for being "ordinary," Maggie's ability to see the beauty and potential in others ultimately proves that she is the only one fighting the resignation they all fear.

February
Genre: Current (Best-Seller List or Movie)
Title: REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Author: Richard Yates
Price: $10.17
Pages: 368
Description: April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.

March
Genre: Educational (Self-Help/Philosophy/Spiritual Growth)
Title: THE PRACTICE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD
Author: Brother Lawrence
Price: $5.95
Pages: 64
Description: The Practice of the Presence of God is one of the most enduring spiritual classics of all time. It is a collection of letters from and conversations with Brother Lawrence, a humble layman who served as a cook at a monastic community in 17th century France. Although he never advanced beyond being the cook at the community, he developed the unique gift of being able to pray incessantly with God throughout the entire day, even during his work.

April
Genre: Fun
Title: MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY
Author: Winifred Watson
Price: $12.15
Pages: 256
Description: A major film released in 2008, Miss Pettigrew Lives for Day is a delightful, funny, lighthearted novel. Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew encounters a kind of glamour that she had only met before at the movies. Over the course of a single day, both women are changed forever.

May
Genre: General Fiction
Title: THE TEN-YEAR NAP
Author: Meg Wolitzer
Price: $6.99
Pages: 351
Description: In her latest novel, Wolitzer takes a close look at the opt out generation: her cast of primary characters have all abandoned promising careers (in art, law, and academia) in favor of full-time motherhood. When their children were babies, that decision was defensible to themselves and others; 10 years on, all of these women, whose interconnected stories merge during their regular breakfasts at a Manhattan restaurant, harbor hidden doubts. Do their mundane daily routines and ever-more tenuous connections to increasingly independent children compensate for all that lost promise? Wolitzer centers her narrative on comparisons between her smart but bored modern-day New York and suburban mommies and the women of the generation preceding them, who fought for women's liberation and equality. Contemporary chapters, most of which focus on a single character in this small circle of friends, alternate with vignettes from earlier eras, placing her characters' crises in the context of the women, famous and anonymous, who came before. Wolitzer's novel offers a hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, vision of women's (and men's) capacity for reinvention and the discovery of new purpose.

June
Genre: Mystery
Title: DEATH IN THE GARDEN
Author: Elizabeth Ironside
Price: $10.17
Pages: 240
Description: In 1925 beautiful, bohemian Diana Pollexfen was celebrating her 30th birthday. The celebrations soured when her husband died, poisoned by a cocktail that had been liberally laced with some of Diana’s photographic chemicals. Sixty years later, Diana’s grand-niece, Helena, is also turning 30, but with rather less fanfare. An overworked attorney in London, Helena’s primary social outlet is an obsessive love affair. By way of distraction, Helena starts looking through her great-aunt’s papers and soon develops another obsession: Determining just who did kill George Pollexfen in that lovely, sunlit garden between the wars.

July
Genre: General Non-Fiction
Title: A GRIEF OBSERVED
Author: C. S. Lewis
Price: $9.59
Pages: 112
Description: Lewis, the Oxford don whose Christian apologetics make it seem like he's got an answer for everything, experienced crushing doubt for the first time after his wife's tragic death. A Grief Observed contains his epigrammatic reflections on that period: "Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high," Lewis writes. "Nothing will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This book is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.

August
Genre: Great Books
Title: DAISY MILLER
Author: Henry James
Price: $4.95
Pages: 80
Description: "Daisy Miller" is Henry James's classic story of a young American woman who while traveling in Europe is courted by Frederick Winterbourne. Originally published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1878, "Daisy Miller" is a novel that plays upon the contrast between American and European society that is common to James' work. The title character's youthful innocence is sharply contrasted with the sophistication of European society in this fatefully tragic tale.

September
Genre: Foreign (Author or Subject)
Title: THREE CUPS OF TEA
Author: Greg Mortenson
Price: $8.51
Pages: 358
Description: Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way.

October
Genre: Miscellany (Poetry, Compilations, Plays, etc.)
Title: N/A
Author: Robert Frost
Price: N/A (You can look these up online.)
Info: Read 6 poems by Frost--3 group poems and 3 of your choice
Group Assigned Poems:
1. The Road Not Taken
2. Fire and Ice
3. Birches

November
Genre: Biography/Autobiography
Title: WAR AS I KNEW IT
Author: General George S. Patton Jr.
Price: $12.24
Pages: 448
Description: Adored by many, loathed by some, General George S. Patton, Jr., was one of the most brilliant military strategists in history. This book is the personal and candid account of his celebrated, relentless crusade across western Europe during World War II. First published in 1947, this absorbing narrative draws on Patton's vivid memories of battle and his detailed diaries, from the moment the Third Army exploded onto the Brittany Peninsula to the final Allied casualty report. The result is not only a grueling, human account of daily combat and heroic feats--including a riveting look at the Battle of the Bulge--but a valuable chronicle of the strategies and fiery personality of a legendary warrior. Patton's letters from earlier military campaigns in North Africa and Sicily, complemented by a powerful retrospective of his guiding philosophies, further reveal a man of uncompromising will and uncommon character, which made "Georgie" a household name in mid-century America.

December
Genre: Historical (Fiction or Non-Fiction)
Title: SECRET LIVES OF FIRST LADIES
Author: Cormac O'Brien
Price: $15.25
Pages: 296
Description: The book features outrageous and uncensored profiles of all the presidents' wives. You'll discover that Dolley Madison loved to chew tobacco. Mary Todd Lincoln was committed to an asylum, and Mamie Eisenhower never missed an episode of As the World Turns. You'll also learn why Hillary Clinton went to work for Wal-Mart (long before she started campaigning for a higher minimum wage). Complete with biographies of every first lady, Secret Lives of First Ladies tackles rough questions that other history books are afraid to ask: How many of these women owned slaves? Which ones were cheating on their husbands? And why did Eleanor Roosevelt serve hot dogs to the Kings and Queens of England? American history was never this much fun!

Future Genres

Here's what I'm thinking for selections for 2009. What do you think? (This isn't in any particular order. A little later, I'll post the titles for each genre.)

1. Pulitzer Prize Winner
2. General Non-Fiction Selection
3. General Fiction Selection
4. Educational (Self-Help/Philosophy/Spiritual Growth)
5. Biography or Autobiography
6. Historical (fiction or non-fiction)
7. Fun (Comedy or Fluff)
8. Mystery (Spy Thriller/Espionage type or Holmes/Christie type)
9. Current (Best-Seller List or Movie)
10. Foreign (Author or Subject)
11. Miscellany (Poetry, Quotes, Plays, etc.)
12. Great Books (http://books.mirror.org/gb.titles.html)

Advance Notice: February Book

UPDATE: Due to the timing of a movie release, and our suggested practice of reading the book before seeing the movie, we've postponed the reading of Ironside's book (mentioned below) to a later month. Instead, we will be reading Richard Yates' book REVOLUTIONARY ROAD for February.

Our book for the month of February will be DEATH IN THE GARDEN by Elizabeth Ironside. (Click the red link to order from Amazon.com for $10.17.)

Here is a blip about it:

In 1925 beautiful, bohemian Diana Pollexfen was celebrating her 30th birthday. The celebrations soured when her husband died, poisoned by a cocktail that had been liberally laced with some of Diana’s photographic chemicals. Sixty years later, Diana’s grand-niece, Helena, is also turning 30, but with rather less fanfare. An overworked attorney in London, Helena’s primary social outlet is an obsessive love affair. By way of distraction, Helena starts looking through her great-aunt’s papers and soon develops another obsession: Determining just who did kill George Pollexfen in that lovely, sunlit garden between the wars.

“Elizabeth Ironside” is the pseudonym of Lady Catherine Manning, wife of the British Ambassador to the U.S. Her first novel won Britain’s John Creasey Award for Best First Mystery of 1985, and Death in the Garden was nominated for Britain’s CWA Gold Dagger for Best Mystery of 1995.

January: BREATHING LESSONS

Today's question on AM Baltimore was: "What Makes and Ideal Marriage?" A woman was phoning in to say it was common interests. "Like if you both watch the same kind of programs on TV," she explained. Maggie couldn't care less what made an ideal marriage. (She'd been married twenty-eight years.) She rolled down her window and called, "Bye now!" and the manager glanced up from his clipboard. She glided past him---a woman in charge of herself, for once, lipsticked and medium-heeled and driving an undented car.

A soft voice on the radio said, "Well, I'm about to remarry. The first time was purely for love. It was genuine, true love and it didn't work at all. Next Saturday I'm marrying for security."

Maggie looked over at the dial and said, "Fiona?"

She meant to brake, but accelerated instead and shot out of the garage and directly into the street. A Pepsi truck approaching for the left smashed into her left front fender---the only spot that had never, up till now, had the slightest thing go wrong with it.

Back when Maggie played baseball with her brothers, she used to get hurt but say she was fine, for fear they would make her quit. She'd pick herself up and run on without a limp, even if her knee were killing her. Now she was reminded of that, for then the manager rushed over, shouting, "What the . . . ?" Are you all right?" she stared straight ahead in a dignified way and told him, "Certainly. Why do you ask?" and drove on before the Pepsi driver could climb out of his truck, which was probably just as well considering the look on his face. But in fact her fender was making a very upsetting noise, something like a piece of tin dragging over gravel, so as soon as she'd turned the corner and the two men---one scratching his head, one waving his arms---had disappeared from her rearview mirror, she came to stop. Fiona was not on the radio anymore. Instead a woman with a raspy tenor was comparing her five husbands. Maggie cut the motor and got out. She could see what was causing the trouble. The fender was crumpled inward so the tire was hitting against it; she was surprised the wheel could turn, even. She squatted on the curb, grasped the rim of the fender in both hangs, and tugged. (She remembered hunkering low in the tall grass of the outfield and stealthily, wincingly peeling her jeans leg away from the patch of blood on her knee.) Flakes of gray-blue paint fell into her lap. Someone passed on the sidewalk behind her but she pretended not to notice and tugged again. This time the fender moved, not far but enough to clear the tire, and she stood up and dusted off her hands. Then she climbed back inside the car but for a minute simply sat there. "Fiona!" she said again. When she restarted the engine, the radio was advertising bank loans and she switched it off.

***

And so begins the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Anne Tyler called Breathing Lessons (Click red link to buy from Amazon.com for $7.99). Our first book club selection is a fiction novel, to be read by the end of January. Anne Tyler has a gift for taking everyday scenes (that we've undoubtedly all witnessed with our own friends and family) and turning them into hilarious life lessons. The lesson this time around: learning to breathe.

Everyone knows a couple like the Morans. Maggie, with her scatterbrained ways and her just slightly irritating---but goodhearted---attempts to make everything right for everyone... And Ira, infinitely patient, who's addicted to solitaire and who whistles out popular tunes, the only barometer of his moods. They've learned all there is to know about each other---two ordinary lives in a comfortably routine marriage. But on the road to a friend's funeral, they make some unexpected detours---and discover how extraordinary their lives really are.

If you want to laugh, cry, and discover some extraordinary about your own life, join us in the bloggy book club fun. (See the top right side bar for more information.) Please leave your name in the comment section to let us know you are going to read along! Thanks!

Yo!

We're starting a book club on the blog! It's going to be fluid and fun. And everyone's invited!

Our first book: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

Read it by: The end of January

We may post some general and specific questions at the end of the month (since we all read at different speeds), if we need discussion starters. But this blog will be the place for everyone to comment as we go.

Share your thoughts; any and all are welcome. Don't know what to say? Here are some ideas:

What made you laugh/cry/think?

Lines you loved/hated/didn't understand

Characters or scenes you identified with

Something you disagreed with/embraced

Just one request: When you reference something in the book, please let us know where it is so we can all read along. Include the chapter number, page number, and the paragraph number. Like this: (C3, P245, G3) Cool?