Wednesday, June 24; 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.
Icarus by Deon Meyer translated by K.L. Seeger, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015
ISBN: 9780802124005
“Deon Meyer’s gritty crime novels [are] part police procedural, part political thriller . . . What makes Meyer such a national treasure – and as good as anyone in the world – is that even if you have no knowledge or interest in South Africa’s history or present, his books are compelling page-turners. Politics and race are just part of the intricately crafted superstructure bolted onto the rock-solid chassis of a top-quality crime thriller, driven by a writer with deceptive skill.” — Books Live [A] …”great discovery: classy, edgy writing, subtly plotted and beautifully balanced between fast-paced action, pungent social comment and the process of investigation.” —Weekend Australian
South Africa’s preeminent crime fiction writer, Deon Meyer is internationally acclaimed for his razor’s-edge thrillers, unforgettable characters, and nuanced portrayals of contemporary life in his native country. The fifth pulse-pounder starring Captain Benny Griessel, a lead detective in South Africa’s priority crimes unit, delves into the country’s burgeoning tech and wine industries. A week before Christmas, a young photographer discovers a plastic-wrapped corpse amidst the sand dunes north of Cape Town. The only thing found on the corpse is a dead iPhone, but it doesn’t take long for the police to identify the body as that of Ernst Richter–the tech whiz behind MyAlibi, an internet service that provides unfaithful partners with sophisticated cover stories to hide an affair. Meanwhile, Benny Griessel is called to the scene of a multiple homicide involving a former colleague, and four years of sobriety are undone on the spot. He emerges from his drunken haze determined to quit the force, but the take-no-sass Major Mbali Kaleni, now his boss, wants Griessel on the Richter case. The high-profile murder has already been the subject of fierce media speculation, with questions swirling about the potential for motive: could the perpetrator be one of the countless jilted spouses? An aggrieved client? Before the week is out, an unexpected connection to a storied family winery comes to light, and Griessel’s reputation is again on the line. Mounting towards a startling conclusion, Icarus is another exceptional novel from the “King of South African Crime.”
December 17, 2025, 7:00 p.m.
Venice by
“… [She] writes beautiful prose. This hymn to Venice, from someone who has lived there, is, as you would expect, a lyrical and haunting evocation of the beauty of one of the world’s most visited tourist destinations, and a fascinating history of a city state that was a republic and maritime empire throughout the middle ages. […I]t is also shrewd and practical and funny. […] This is a piece of the best sort of travel writing, the sort where the traveller becomes part of an alien landscape and has deep interactions with the inhabitants and begins to struggle to an understanding of what it must be like to live in such a place..”— David Appleby, Goodreads
Going Nowhere Fast by
This farcical [mystery] introduces the Loudermilk family: Big Joe, a retired police officer; his wife, Dottie […] and their […] children, whom they sell their house and buy an Airstream trailer to get away from—only to find, while they’re admiring the Grand Canyon, their sour-smelling son Bad Dog in residence, together with a corpse on their toilet. Bad Dog tells a wild story[…]. The truth, […] is even wilder.[…] How do all these zanies fit together? Not very closely at all […]. Through it all, the Loudermilks remain ineffably daffy and foolish, like long-lost African-American relatives of Stanley Hastings. Geez Looweez” — Kirkus Reviews
Gar Anthony Haywood is the author of two highly acclaimed mystery series. His series featuring South Central Los Angeles private investigator Aaron Gunner debuted with the publication of Fear of the Dark, which won the St. Martin’s Press/PWA Best Private Eye Novel Contest in 1987. The two succeeding novels in that series, Not Long For This World and You Can Die Trying, received wide praise. It’s Not a Pretty Sight (G.P. Putnam’s Sons; September 10, 1996) is the fourth book in the Gunner series. Haywood’s second series features the comic Loudermilk family and includes the novels this one and Fast and Bad News Travels Fast. Currently a writer for the FOX television series “New York Undercover,” Haywood has also written for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. He lives in Los Angeles.
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
Cost
Free event
