Wednesday, January 28; 7:00PM - 8:00PM
Reading the Western Landscape Community Book Discussion
About the Community Book Discussion
The Arboretum Library’s book group explores the portrayal of western North American landscape in fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry, letters, graphic novels, etc. The group generally, but not always, meets the 4th Wednesday of the month in the Arboretum Library. When the weather is good and the mosquitos are less active, the group will meet outside in appropriate places in the gloriously, beautiful grounds of the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. At other times the group will meet in the Arboretum Library with social distancing and masking if desired. The group leader will decide each month whether the meeting will be in-person (in the Arboretum Library or outside on the Arboretum grounds) or on Zoom.
The group uses a modified version of the Shared Inquiry™ method developed by the Great Books Foundation. The discussion is greatly enhanced if the chosen book of the month is read, although we welcome those who just want to listen. Let the host know you want to listen. New participants are always welcome!
Click here to see the questions already asked for this year’s past books and check out the history of the book club by hovering on the tab and explore the books from previous years.
For more information and to be added to the e-mail reminder list about the Community Book Discussion Group, please contact, Arboretum Librarian Emeritus, Susan Eubank, at Susan.Eubank@Arboretum.org. You must RSVP to Susan for the discussions you would like to attend.
February 25, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
Six California Kitchens by
“[The book] proves you can write a powerful memoir one recipe at a time. [T]here is a not-so-secret feminist core to this book, as Schmitt argues against the sad sexist trope[s] one unfussy but brilliant plate at a time.[…] Schmitt is also very much a mother […]. Her solution was simple—have the whole family work for you. […] Beyond specific dishes, Schmitt provides lots more general teaching […]. [U]ltimately this book is a celebration of food, farm, and family. […S]he clearly was overjoyed to note that four generations were living on the Apple Farm.”— George Yatchisin, California Review of Books
Winner of a 2023 IACP Cookbook Award and the Golden Poppy Book Award in the Glenn Goldman Cooking category Six California Kitchens is the quintessential California cookbook, with farm-to-table recipes and stories from Sally Schmitt, the pioneering female chef and original founder of the French Laundry. “Schmitt, […] reflects on the food that defined her life, in this sumptuous collection of recipes and tales from the kitchens that inspired them. […] Fans of Alice Waters won’t want to miss this delectable page-turner.”–Publishers Weekly Sally Schmitt opened The French Laundry in Yountville in 1978 and designed her menus around local, seasonal ingredients–a novel concept at the time. In this soon-to-be-classic cookbook, Sally Schmitt takes us through the six kitchens where she learned to cook, honed her skills, and spent her working life. Six California Kitchens weaves her remarkable story with 115 recipes that distill the ethos of Northern California cooking into simple, delicious dishes, plus evocative imagery, historic ephemera, and cooking wisdom. With gorgeous food and sense-of-place photography, this is a masterful, story-rich cookbook for home and aspiring chefs who cook locally and seasonally, food historians, fans of wine country, and anyone who wants to bring the spirit of Northern California home with them. This book celebrates a respected, reputable chef and shares a collection of her best recipes from a lifetime of cooking. From a native Californian chef, who founded one of the most well-known and revered restaurants in California (and in the world), this book was written, photographed, and designed by members of Sally’s family. This book is full of evocative images of Napa Valley, rustic kitchens, and the rugged California coastline. With lifestyle photography that offers a peek into the history of Northern California and its food revolution, this book will appeal to readers with its lovely design and package–but they’ll stay for the inspiring story and approachable recipes. This book is perfect for: Home cooks who cook locally and seasonally or enjoy California cuisine, foodies who collect regional cookbooks rich with history and visuals.
March 25, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
Ladies of the Canyons by
Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.
April 29, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul by
Two brothers bury a statue of Saint Jude for their grieving nana. A Griffith Park astronomer makes his own discovery at an East L.A. wedding. A young man springs his Cherokee-obsessed grandfather from the confines of senility. The common thread? Each is weaving their way through the challenging field of play that is living and loving in Los Angeles. In Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul, Bryan Allen Fierro brings to life the people and places that form the fragile heart of the East Los Angeles community. In the title story, a father’s love of Dodger baseball is matched only by the disconnect he must bridge with his young son. In another story, a young widower remembers his wedding day with his father-in-law. The boys and men in this collection challenge masculine stereotypes, while the girls and women defy gender roles. Hope and faith in their own community defines the characters, and propels them toward an awareness of their own personal responsibility to themselves and to their families, even as they eschew those closest to them in pursuit of a different future. Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul is a tour de force–the first collection of an authentic new voice examining community with humor, hope, and brutal honesty.
May 27, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
The Conservationist by
A novel[…] — less like storytelling than a conceptual painting. Visualize a symbolic black corpse posted at either end like the pillars of hell, and in between an expanse of bleached grasses and baked, repetitive hills — the terrain of a white South African’s consciousness. Mehring is a successful Johannesburger who has acquired a farm. […] Mehring’s cynicism allows him to be an honest conservative but precludes all human attachment. The political status quo, the veld, himself are locked into a single system of inertias which Gordimer prophecies shall suffer under one law, […] . . . Instead of direct narrative and interpretation, there is a density of implication which makes for resistant reading […] once again and beyond question, Gordimer’s art.—Kirkus Reviews
“This is a novel of enormous power’ New Statesman. ‘Gordimer is a great writer … It is Turgenev that she most brings to mind’ — New York Review of Books… The Booker Prize winning political novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer… Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.
June 24, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
Small Memories by
José Saramago was eighteen months old when he moved from the village of Azinhaga with his father and mother to live in Lisbon. But he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence to stay with his maternal grandparents, illiterate peasants in the eyes of the outside world, but a fount of knowledge, affection, and authority to young José. Shifting back and forth between childhood and his teenage years, between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this is a mosaic of memories, a simply told, affecting look back into the author’s boyhood: the tragic death of his older brother at the age of four; his mother pawning the family’s blankets every spring and buying them back in time for winter; his beloved grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed on cold nights; and Saramago’s early encounters with literature, from teaching himself to read by deciphering articles in the daily newspaper, to poring over an entertaining dialogue in a Portuguese-French conversation guide, not realizing that he was in fact reading a play by Molière. Written with Saramago’s characteristic wit and honesty, Small Memories traces the formation of an artist fascinated by words and stories from an early age and who emerged, against all odds, as one of the world’s most respected writers
