1. What did you enjoy about this book?
2. Were the characters believable or realistic? If not, was the author trying to make them realistic, and why did he or she fail? Who was your favorite character? Who did you sympathize with the most?
3. What was more important, the characters or the plot? Was the plot moved forward by decisions of the characters, or were the characters at the mercy of the plot? Was the action believable? What events in the story stand out for you as memorable?
4. Location was very important to this story. Would you have enjoyed it more if you lived in Hendricks County or Inianapolis, Indiana?
5. Were the characters believable for the time period that this story takes place in? How did this affect your appreciation of the book?
6. Did you enjoy the language the author used? Was it appropriate to the story? Was it more poetic or vernacular? Did it stand in the way of your appreciation of the story, or enhance your enjoyment of the book? Was there a rhythm to the authors style, or anything else that might be considered unique about it?
7. Do you think this book is appropriately titled? While none of the events that took place could have occurred without the death of the librarian, is she really a crucial factor in the story or just a plot device?
8. Would you recommend this book to someone else? Why or why not?

Richard Peck was born in Decatur, Illinois in 1934. and currently lives in New York City. He has been a prolific writer of young adult books since the early 1970’s. Though most of his early works would probably be classified as thrillers or suspense novels, many of his recent books will take readers back with him to his childhood growing up in the heart of the midwest.

In his own words from the Scholastic web site,

I was born and brought up in Decatur, Illinois, the real Illinois a long way from Chicago. Back then, a boy knew when his adolescence was over. A notice to that effect came through the mail, from the draft board. And so I was a soldier in Germany, ghost-writing sermons for chaplains — my first writing job. I’d been a student in England too, and so I came of age in other countries.

I live in one now, a third-world sort of island called Manhattan that knows very little about the real America, let alone the real Illinois.

Here in this exile I have reached the age of nostalgia. My four most recent novels have settings that celebrate the world I first saw. Strays Like Us is a very contemporary story about a girl being fostered in one of those small, old-fashioned towns where it’s hard to be a stranger. A Long Way From Chicago and A Year Down Yonder, two books that have changed my life, are set in the farm town where my father grew up. Grandma Dowdel’s house is the house where my grandmother lived: a tall jigsaw gothic with lighting rods. My newest novel is Fair Weather in which three farm kids see the future unfolding before them at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

I caught my first glimpses of the world and the future in books. Here in some other century I hope young readers still do.

All Booked Up!, the Fort Madison Public Library book discussion group will be meeting on Thursady, July 3 at 6:00 p.m. to discuss Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck. Come and join us to talk about this very interesting book. If you can’t make it on the 3rd, try to catch the encore discussion on July 24.

As part of the Great River Reads series, Burlington Public Library will host a discussion of “Here Lies the Librarian” by Richard Peck on Saturday, July 26th at 10:00 a.m. in the Library’s Meeting Room B.  Copies of the book are available at the Customer Service Desk.  The discussion is free and open to the public. 

Discussion questions from the All Iowa Reads Committee.

1.    The book’s title has a least two interpretations.  What are they and how do they reflect Tyler’s central concerns?

2.    How does Tyler’s use of humor illuminate the novel for the reader?

3.    How does the shifting point-of-view allow the reader numerous opportunities to understand several of the central characters, adults and children?

4.    Maryam contends that “Americans are larger than life…” and are always “…expanding and edging you out.”  How is this    claim relevant to the events of the novel?

5.    How important is the role food plays in the world Tyler presents?

6.    What does Maryam mean when she refers to the “immigration tango”?

7.    How does the idea of “outsiderness” influence the actions of Maryam and other characters?

8.    How would the knowledge of Iranian politics in, say, the third quarter of the 20th century help a reader understand the attitudes of the Iranian families featured in the novel?

9.    Does the novel celebrate diversity or does it suggest (with G. K. Chesterton) that “being good is wearing nose rings where nose rings are worn”?

Anne Tyler was Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Tyler grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, graduated at age nineteen from Duke University, and completed graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University in New York City. She worked as a librarian and bibliographer before moving to Maryland. In 1963, Tyler married Iranian psychiatrist and novelist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi, with whom she had two daughters, Tezh and Mitra. Modarressi died in 1997. Tyler resides in Baltimore, Maryland, where most of her novels are set, often crossing decades in a family’s life.

Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. The Accidental Tourist was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. Tyler’s ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which she considers her best work, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1983.

Family Stories by authors like Anne Tyler:

The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty

Practical magic by Alice Hoffman

A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons

The World According to Garp by John Irving

My sister’s keeper by Jodi Picoult

Inventing the abbots by Sue MIller

Talk before sleep by Elizabeth Berg

Novels about international adoption:

The lucky gourd shop by Joanna Scott

China run by David Ball

Love in the driest season: a family memoir by Neely Tucker

The genius of affection by Marilyn Sides

Novels about immigrant families:

Happy family by Lee

The namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The pickup by Nadine Gordimer

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Breathing Lessons

Saint Maybe

Ladder of Years

A Patchwork Planet

Back When We Were Grownups

The Amateur Marriage

The Accidental Tourist

Searching for Caleb

Celestial Navigation

Morgan’s Passing

Earthly Possessions

The Clock Winder

A Slipping-down Life

The Tin Can Tree

If Morning Ever Comes

1.    Smiley has chosen a setting familiar to the Iowa reader.  The story blends rural life and the business of agriculture with fundamental questions about land and proprietorship.  How is the book an Iowa novel?  An environmental novel?

2.    At one point in the novel, Ginny speculates about what it must be like to be a man in the farm community (pp. 113-114).  How is gender a factor in the farm community of Zebulon County?

3.    This is a story about a family and its secrets, but it is also a story played out in a very public arena.  In what ways are the private lives of Larry, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline formed by their rural community?

4.    Parent-child relationships abound in “A Thousand Acres.”  What are the ingredients of these relationships?  What is the role of the absent mothers?

5.    Issues of inheritance cloud the relationships between Larry and his daughters and Harold and his sons.  How does inheritance drive the plot? 

6.    Smiley notes that neither Rose nor Ginny would define themselves as feminists.  They are not feminists, but in a sense their burden is to live out a critique of a very patriarchal society.  How do you understand Ginny and Rose’s recognition of their position as women?

7.    In “King Lear,” the daughters are not at the center of the action.  But in Smiley’s novel, the women are central, in large part because Ginny narrates events from her point of view.  As she says to her father, “I don’t think you ever think about anything from our point of view.” (p.175). What is her point of view?  Why isn’t it seen?  How do you see Ginny grow in the course of events she narrates?

8.     The relationship between Ginny and Rose is arguably at the center of the novel.  How would you describe the connection between the two women?

9.    Smiley’s ending to her novel is her most radical departure from “King Lear.”  She offers a female community, in a rented apartment, in an urban environment, a far cry from the male-controlled, landed, rural community of Zebulon County.  What do you make of Ginny’s decision to move to Minneapolis?  Could she have stayed in Iowa?  Is this choice a good one for her?  A necessary one?

10.                 While Shakespeare’s King Lear is a tragedy, Smiley contends that she didn’t want “A Thousand Acres” to be a tragedy.  So she extended her narrative beyond Shakespeare’s to write Book Six where characters revisit what’s happened and then go on with lives.  How did you feel about that final segment?

“Barn Blind”  1980

“At Paradise Gate”  1981

“Duplicate Keys”  1984

“The Greenlanders”  1988

“Ordinary Loves & Goodwill”  1989

“Moo”  1995

“The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton”  1998

“Horse Heaven”  2000

“Good Faith”  2003

“A Year at the Races”  2004

“Ten Days in the Hills”  2007