Welcome to the first meeting of the new Carol Stream PL online book club. Every month we will be featuring a new title picked by the one of the Adult Services staff. We are also open to book suggestions from our book club members to use in future discussions. To join in the discussion just click on the “comments” or "post a comment" tab at the bottom of the blog post, then click on "sign up here", and create your own Google/Blogger account to get started in discussing the featured title for the month.
The featured title for this month is The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke. The Carol Stream PL has several copies of this book available to check out or it can be obtained through interlibrary loan. It is also available for audio download through NetLibrary, which can be accessed via the Carol Stream PL web page. This book can also be purchased through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.
Feel free to post a review of the book, respond to specific questions posted here, or just post a general comment on what you thought of the book.
The featured title for this month is The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke. The Carol Stream PL has several copies of this book available to check out or it can be obtained through interlibrary loan. It is also available for audio download through NetLibrary, which can be accessed via the Carol Stream PL web page. This book can also be purchased through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.
Feel free to post a review of the book, respond to specific questions posted here, or just post a general comment on what you thought of the book.
2 comments:
It took a couple of tries for me to get into this book, even with Burke's heartfelt descriptions of New Orleans and southern Louisiana. When I worked at the N.O. Public Library many years ago, I rode to work on the green-painted, lumbering iron St. Charles streetcars, that he calls "the grandest ride in America", and I bought lunchtime poor-boy sandwiches at the Pearl. Burke says that every artist and writer who visited New Orleans fell in love with it, and I'll add that the occasional librarian did too. Mr. Burke has certainly revived the outrage I felt three summers ago, watching TV news coverage of Katrina's aftermath.
The dark events and brutal language of Tin Roof Blowdown put me off initially -- it's not a style of writing that generally appeals to me. I didn't like any of the characters at first, and didn't much care what happened to them. But the moral ambiguity eventually drew me in. The horrific backgrounds of Andre Rochon and the Melancon brothers doesn't begin to justify their rape of Thelma. But...
Dave Robicheaux, pondering the differences between Sidney Kovick and Clete Purcel, both born in privation and exposed to rejection and cruelty, wonders "Why does one man turn out to be a gangster and the other a beer-soaked, blue-collar knight errant? I didn't know the answer."
I can see why readers return for more Dave Robicheaux stories -- he doesn't know the answers, but he's still working on 'em. As he says, "I didn't like Bertrand Melancon or, better said, I didn't like the world he represented. But as I have to remind myself daily, many of the people I deal with did not get to choose the world in which they were born. Some try to escape it, some embrace it, most are overcome and buried by it. After his brother was shot, I think Bertrand tried to become the person he could have been if he'd had a better shake when he was a kid. But who knows?"
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