PETALUMANS LOVE TO READ. And we love to read together. In book groups. There must be twenty or thirty book groups in town. Maybe more.* A few are public. Most are private. It’s next to impossible to get into a private book group. They’re more selective about new members than a blind bride picking out a wedding dress. That may be the reason some have survived for decades.

THIS MONTH four book groups in Petaluma are reading books on religion. It ain’t that old time religion. You can see from the following book descriptions that the author’s perspectives are as varied as a convention of caffeinated contrarians. Five other book groups are reading in the genres of adventure, classics, cooking, mystery and romance. It’s good to know that Petalumans have a broad taste in books. To paraphrase Paul Simon, we’re “still learning after all these years.”

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor (New York: HarperOne, 2009). The author shares how she learned to encounter God beyond the walls of any church. From simple practices such as walking, working, and getting lost to deep meditations on topics like prayer and pronouncing blessings, Taylor reveals concrete ways to discover the sacred in the small things we do and see. Under Taylor’s expert guidance, we come to question conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular, learning that no physical act is too earthbound or too humble to become a path to the divine. As we incorporate these practices into our daily lives, we begin to discover altars everywhere we go, in nearly everything we do. (HarperOne) 

Vicki Haddock and Stephanie Simon from Elim Lutheran Church are leading this book discussion on Wednesday, March 31^st at 7:00 pm. For more information, call Doris at 762-4081.

Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street and Your Street by Jim Wallis (New York: Howard Books, 2010). Rather than joining the throngs who are asking, When will this economic crisis be over? Jim Wallis says the right question to ask is How will this crisis change us? The worst thing we can do now, Wallis tells us, is to go back to normal. Normal is what got us into this situation. We need a new normal, and this economic crisis is an invitation to discover what that means.  (Amazon)

Rev. Blythe Sawyer at UCC Petaluma Church is leading a book discussion that is open to the public. She said, “I thought this would be an interesting book for people since economic issues are on everyone’s mind today. I led a class on personal finances last year. This class deals with finances at the societal level. All of us have fears around money and it helps to lessen our fears when we talk about them.”

The group will meet every Monday during February at 7:00 pm at UCC Petaluma Church (825 Middlefield Dr.). For more information, call Teresa at 763-2454.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (New York: Mariner Books, 2008). Richard Dawkins tells of his exasperation with colleagues who try to play both sides of the street: looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implications – the existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, “to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously.” Such an entity, he argues, would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates – through spiritons! and where it resides. Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a bully, but he is only putting theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand. No one who has witnessed the merciless dissection of a new paper in physics would describe the atmosphere as overly polite. (Scientific American)

Another long-running Petaluma book group – this one for men only – began its fifteenth year last month with this book on an atheist’s view of religion.

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong (New York: Knopf, 2009). Karen Armstrong, a former nun turned prolific popular historian, wants to rescue the idea of God from its cultured despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike. To that end, she doesn’t just argue that her preferred approach to religion – which emphasizes the pursuit of an unknowable Deity, rather than the quest for theological correctness – is compatible with a liberal, scientific, technologically advanced society. She argues that it’s actually truer to the ancient traditions of Judaism, Islam and (especially) Christianity than is much of what currently passes for “conservative” religion. And the neglect of these traditions, she suggests, is “one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so troublesome today.” (New York Times) 

A unique local book group has a particular focus on spirituality. This month they are reading one of Armstrong’s great books on religious traditions. 

Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr. (New York: Signet Classics, 2009). In 1834, Richard Henry Dana went from Harvard student to common seaman, sailing from California to Cape Horn. This journal survives as one of the most vivid accounts of the relationship between man and sea—and still rings true as a portrayal of man’s endurance. (Amazon.com review)

The “Brown Bag Book Discussion” group will meet on Thursday, February 25^th at 12:00 pm at the Petaluma Library (100 Fairgrounds Drive). For more information, call 763-9801.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus–three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up. (Amazon.com)

The “Booklovers’ Forum” will meet on Wednesday, February 10^th at 6:30 pm at Copperfields Books (140 Kentucky St.). For more information, call 762-0563 or visit http://copperfieldsbooks.com/book-clubs.

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009). Powell became an Internet celebrity with her 2004 blog chronicling her yearlong odyssey of cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. A frustrated secretary in New York City, Powell embarked on “the Julie/Julia project” to find a sense of direction, and both the cooking and the writing quickly became all-consuming. (Publishers Weekly)

“Read and Feed,” one of the oldest book groups in Petaluma (they’ve been around for more than fifty years – probably because of good cooking!) will be discussing Powell’s homage to Julia Child on Friday, February 12^th at 1:30 pm. For more information, call Virginia Breedlove at 762-9592.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsen (New York: Vintage, 2009). At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden’s dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption – at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman. (Publishers Weekly)

A local women’s book group, which has been meeting for over sixteen years, has imported this bestseller from Sweden.

Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine (New York: Touchstone, 1998). The first of Makine’s four novels to appear in English, this autobiographical novel won the 1995 Prix Medicis for Best Foreign Fiction as well as France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt, never before awarded to a non-Frenchman. Its coming-of-age story describes young Andrei’s summers with his French grandmother Charlotte in the remote Russian village of Saranza. She came to Russia as a Red Cross nurse during World War I and fell in love with a Russian lawyer who went off to the front and later died a premature death from his war wounds. Charlotte and Andrei spend many summer evenings sharing her memories of turn-of-the-century Paris. As the adolescent Andrei struggles with his identity (is he Russian or French?) he discovers that it was possible for Charlotte to live in such a foreign land and retain her “Frenchness” because of her love for her husband. Andrei finally reconciles these contrasting facets of his identity and eventually emigrates to France. Makine has fashioned a deeply felt, lyrically told tale. (Library Journal) 

Book Readers Ink, a local book group that’s been together for 16 years, apparently trusts that the French have good taste in something other than food.  

* DO YOU BELONG TO A LOCAL BOOK GROUP? I would love to hear about your group and the books you’re reading. Contact me at timnonn@att.net.