Meeting: April 16, 2015

Julie Howard provided delicious, theme-related food for our April meeting. With The Orchardist as her inspiration, she provided a number of apricot and apple food choices. No pressure on anyone to follow suit! Those in attendance were Ellen Bowes, Kathy Day-Carey, Nancy French, Julie Howard, Annie Larkin, and Jo Smith.

View from Julie's dining room

For the most part, we all liked The Orchardist, but it fell short of our loving it. It is a book that could only be recommended to someone who can enjoy vividly described landscapes and compelling, plainspoken characters. Some of us never got comfortable with Coplin's lack of quotation marks which resulted in having to re-read at times.

Annie read some poignant excerpts that give us insight into Talmadge's mother and Caroline Middey. 

Where some women wanted mere privacy, she yearned for complete solitude that verged on the violent; solitude that forced you constantly back upon yourself; even when you did not want it anymore. But she wanted it nonetheless. From the time she was a small girl, she wanted to be alone. The sound of other people's voices grated on her; to travel to town, to interact with others who were not Talmadge, or Talmadge's father or sister, was torture to her; it subtracted days from her life. And so they walked; to find a place that would absorb and annihilate her, a place to be her home, and the home for her children. A place to show her children, you belong to the earth, and the earth is hard. 

And:

And that was the point of children, thought Caroline Middey: to bind us to the earth and to the present, to distract us from death. A distraction dressed as a blessing: but dressed so well, and so truly, that it became a blessing. Or maybe it was the other way around: a blessing first, before a distraction. ... But she did not think any more about it because at her back, suddenly, the child woike from her nap, and she rose at once to go to her.

Ellen talked about the despair that Della felt and Annie followed that up with an excerpt that backed up Ellen's comments.

What was recognized as success — the applause, the exclamations, the job well done; she was already off the horse, pumping people's hands in congratulations— did not fill her. Did not even begin to fill her. What she wanted was the despair, or something else that was found there. Something that lived with despair. But the moment she was inside it, she failed to find what it was she wanted so badly. And so she would ride again.

We were taken by how Talmadge reflected on how train travel bothered his sensibility.

He had moved slowly all of his life. He was used to seeing things drawn out of themselves by temperature and light, not by harsh action. But this was something different. This was how people lived, now.

Talmadge was a good person. He was a gentle soul who cared so much but had trouble expressing it. So much was left unsaid.

After getting to know the characters so intimately and the slow pace of knowing day-to-day life, Jo felt it was very jarring when Angelene sold the orchard and moved away.  Her whole life was the orchard; it was all she knew.  Jo felt the reader deserved a window into what kind of life she chose when she left the orchard.

May meeting: 

Book: The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

Location: Linda Jenkins

Date: May 14, 2015

Time: 6:30 pm

June book: The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom


Books we've read so far:

January 2014 - Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott
February 2014 - The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
March 2014 - Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
April 2014 - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie
May 2014 - The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
June 2014 - Breaking Free by Marilyn Sewell
July 2014 - The Orphan Train by Kristina Baker Kline
August 2014 - The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
September 2014 - Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
October 2014 - The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
November 2014 - The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
December 2014 - No book.  Holiday gathering.
January 2015 - No book.  Watched The Book Thief
February 2015 - The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton
March 2015 - Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

April 2015 - The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin