We’ll be joining the Gustavus community in reading Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario. This is the true story of a teenager who made the dangerous journey from Honduras through Mexico and across the border to find his mother, who had gone to the U.S. to find work to support her family. It is a gripping story that illuminates the human costs of desperation born of extreme poverty and the emotional toll on families separated by economic hardship.
Sonia Nazario is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the L.A. Times. She will be speaking about Enrique’s Journey at Gustavus on September 28th at 7pm in Alumni Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
St. Peter welcomed William Kent Krueger on February 10th – and he generously spent a lot of time with us. After visiting a high school class, he stopped by the college, where he spoke to a nice crowd and read a part of his new book, Red Knife. After that, on to the public library to sign books for fans and then a light supper with Bob and Kay Moline and a number of St. Peter Reads friends. Finally, he gave a great talk to a great turnout at Trinity Lutheran church about his writing process, how he got kicked out of Stanford (though he never quite got around to the details) and how his itch to write is all Hemingway’s fault. The importance of story in our lives was a theme throughout his talk.
After signing more books and chatting with readers, we finally let him head for his home in St. Paul. If you haven’t read his books yet . . . it’s not too late. There are still some wintery nights left to curl up with a good book. And then you can talk it over with others who have joined in as St. Peter Reads.
This February, William Kent Krueger will be visiting St. Peter to discuss his Cork O’Connor mystery series. Beginning with Iron Lake (1998), Kruger introduced an Irish-Anishinaabe former sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota, who gets involved in a stormy case just as a blizzard is bearing down on his rural community. The eighth book in the series, Red Knife, has just been released. Read an excerpt.
William Kent Krueger’s work has received a number of awards including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, and the Friends of American Writers Prize. He composes his books at the St. Clair Broiler in St. Paul.
Kent will visit St. Peter on February 10th. He will meet with students at Gustavus Adolphus College at the Couryard Cafe at 2:30 p.m. From 4:30 to 5:30 he will be signing books at the St. Peter Library. At 7:30 p.m. he wil speak at Trinity Lutheran Church. All events are free and open to the public.
Students at Gustavus have been conducting a book drive to benefit schools in Uganda. They’ve been amazingly successful so far – and it has got three weeks yet to go!
This effort will benefit children in Uganda through the Invisible Children organization. You can learn more through this video.
London news sources are reporting that the home of a Dutch publisher who will be releasing a novel about Aisha, Mohammed’s wife, was the target of a firebombing. Police arrested three men in the attack.
The novel, Jewel of Medina, by American author Sherry Jones was nearing publication in the US with Random House when the reaction of an early reader led the publisher to cancel its publication. Some criticized Random House for the decision.
Banned Books Week “emphasizes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them.” David Ulin, Books Editor for the L.A. Times, has an interesting essay on this “thorny issue.”
What happens when our ideals require us to defend a piece of writing that is reprehensible, that stands against everything we stand for?
It’s easy to condemn those who would remove “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from a library, but what about “The Turner Diaries” or “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”? Or for that matter, “Tintin in the Congo,” which Little, Brown dropped from its “Tintin” reissue series last fall after controversy arose about the book’s racist overtones?
These are not just academic questions; they are the heart of the matter, regardless of where you stand on the ideological divide. How do we defend one book without defending all? Such a notion can’t help but make us uneasy, but then, that’s one of the most essential things books can do. . . . Yet we forget the world is complicated, that it is full of opposing viewpoints and beliefs that, in many cases, we can’t accommodate, at our own peril. What to do, then? Sweep them under the rug? Or face them and consider what we’re up against?
This is the conversation we ought to be having during Banned Books Week, a conversation that encompasses not just a love of reading and a disdain for those who would restrict it but also the implications of the free flow of ideas. Even the most horrific things have something to teach us, something about human darkness, our capacity to go wrong. . . . if books don’t make us uncomfortable, they’re not doing their job.
To call that a mixed blessing is an understatement in a world where a work like “Mein Kampf” can continue to exert its awful pull. And yet to suggest otherwise is to declare that writing is unessential, which is even worse.
This year, St. Peter Reads has a bumper crop of events tied to our community reading. Those marked * require registration through St. Peter Community Education starting on August 20th.
August 21, 6-7:30 pm – Learn to make traditional egg rolls at the Co-op*
September 4, 6-7:30 pm – Long Life Chinese Noodles at the Co-op*
September 15, 10 -11 am. – book discussion with author John Pomfret, Riverrock Coffee
September 15, 7pm – John Pomfret will give a public lecture at Christ Chapel, Gustavus Adolphus College
September 16, 10:30 -11:30 am – book discussion of Chinese Lessons, Waldo’s Coffee Company
September 22, 7-9 pm – Babies and Toddlers from Abroad: Experiences of International Adoptions – by a panel of local adoptive families – Community Center, room 217*
November 15, 9:30 am – 3:30 pm & November 16, 1-4 pm – beginning Asian brush painting with Dee Teller at the Arts Center of St. Peter*
In addition to these events, the St. Peter Library has added a large selection of new Chinese-themed children’s books, thanks to support from the Friends of the Library.
And for even more lectures, films, theatre performances, and concerts, check out the Gustavus Global Insight Program, focused on China.
So you’ve read the St. Peter reads book and now you’re wondering what to read next. The Librarian in Black has some tools for you – a wealth of links to sites that help you find the next great book.
Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”
What is this prize? It’s sort of like the Ig Nobel awards, but for literature, a celebration of truly bad writing. You can get a full literary critique by the winner in this Washington Post article.
This fall, St. Peter is reading John Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons. Copies of the book are available around town, either for sale or simply to borrow. The Washington Post calls it “compulsively readable.” In the book, reporter Pomfret recounts the stories of five classmates who he met at the University of Nanjing when he was one of the first American students to study in China in 1981. Since then, Pomfret became a Washington Post reporter, the head of their Beijing bureau in the 1990s, and after serving as a foreign correspondant in Bosnia, the Congo, and Afghanistan, has been appointed editor of their Outlook section. You can learn more at his Website for the book, or listen to his commentary on China’s economy, Chinese nationalism, or illegal immigration. You can also read an interview with him from Frontline, or read his account of one of his fellow students and his change from Red Guard member to entrepreneur – a fellow known as “Book Idiot Zhou.”
You may be too busy reading good books to read this blog. But we wanted a place on the Web where you can keep up with the St. Peter Reads program. So here it is.
Incidentally, the header image at the top of the page was adapted from a photo by gadl of a bookstore in France. Merci bien, M. gadl.
We’ll be joining the Gustavus community in reading Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario. This is the true story of a teenager who made the dangerous journey from Honduras through Mexico and across the border to find his mother, who had gone to the U.S. to find work to support her family. It is a gripping story that illuminates the human costs of desperation born of extreme poverty and the emotional toll on families separated by economic hardship.
