"Old School" by Tobias Wolff

This book crossed my desk to return to another library. I wonder if our book clubs come close to helping people think very far beyond...

"How did they command such deference - english teachers? Compared to the men who taught physics or biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew exactly what was most worth knowing. Unlike our math and science teachers, who modestly stuck to their subjects, they tended to be polymaths. Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or a novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They'd stitch it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion, and even, on occasion, science. without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.

Say you've just read Faulkner's "barn burning". Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable; left alone, you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a man who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood. You've nver had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as it's happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world-emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty- will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father as the boy in the story does, but forsake him without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and and you blink it away and look up to look at your teacher...

Book Club - 11-15-07 white oleander

I've just started reading White Oleander. A young girl lives in awe and fear of her beautiful swedish mother who reads poetry in her spare time. She works editing copy, and takes her daughter to work with her.

When this girl is alone, she often visits her alcoholic neighbor.

Her mother has rules about men, but breaks them for a man who she enjoys being with, but soon he goes on to other women. Her mother seeks revenge, leaving white oleander blossoms as a symbol that she has been to visit.