Culture Club.

I'm not in any book clubs; Lady Di is in one, though, and I get to feed on the crumbs under their table. She buys the books from Walterboro's Downtown Books, reads 'em (mostly), and discusses them over coffee or wine. When she's done with the selections, I get my grubby little mitts on 'em. Lately they've been on a curious cultures kick: Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larson; The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, and Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian are all good glances into different ways of life.

I didn't want to read "Three Cups of Tea". Pakistan and Afghanistan are really a long way away, and they're filled with Muslims, for cryin' out loud! But the book is really good. American Greg Mortenson started out as a mountain climber, but his failed mission to scale the second tallest mountain in the world, K2, in Western Himalayan range in Northern Pakistan changed his life. The book, well told by David Oliver Relin, is part biography, part adventure story, part sociology treatise, and part travelogue, seasoned with a pinch of philosophy and great deal of human compassion. It turns out that girls, even Muslim girls, are treasures, and deserve a basic education. It turns out that a lot of villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan don't have even basic buildings for schools and no money to pay teachers. Mortenson makes a compelling case that private, moderate, people (whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or whatever) had better build and support schools, or folks with more extremist views will. It also turns out that Mortenson is a pretty amazing guy.


The plots in Stieg Larson's "Girl" series, feature lots of suspense and action, and conspiracies and subplots galore. Kind of like a Swedish John Grisham, but with less smart-ass dialogue. It makes the "different cultures" list because the sensibility in many of the Swedish relationships in those novels just feel different from American ones: John McEnroe's American hot-tempered tennis star versus the cool resolve of Bjorn Borg.


Sherman Alexie's "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" (with art by Ellen Forney) was an insightful, personal, and very readable novel about Arnold "Junior" Spirit. Arnold is a kid raised in a loving, but highly dysfunctional, home on Wellpinit, an Indian Reservation in Washington state. He struggles in that community, and in Reardan, the nearby white community where he ultimately attends school, but that the struggle is what molds us. As Arnold observes:

"(My friend Gordy) tutored me and challenged me, but he made me realize that hard work- that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task- is joyous.

In Wellpinit, I was a freak because I loved books.

In Reardan, I was a joyous freak."

It's a novel, but it feels true. Was it Chief Seattle who said, "I don't know if it happened or not, but I know it's true"?


When Lady Di suggested I read "The Help", I'd categorized it as "chick-lit", and only reluctantly cracked the cover. Author Kathryn Stockett presents the stories from the viewpoints of several different protagonists in pre-Civil Rights Act Mississippi: Aibileen and Minnie are African-American maids- "The Help"- to aspiring writer, "Miss Skeeter", and mean-spirited Hilly, and Skeeter's other white bridge-club friends. I was just born the year this novel is set. The schools my brother and I attended in Florida were segregated until about sixth grade (fifth grade for my brother), though our pee-wee football teams were not. I remember Rosa, my grandmother's maid, and Kathleen, my mom's maid, as people that cared about me and my brother. It never occurred to me to wonder what their lives were like. In spite of myself, I came to care about the characters in "The Help", and felt a modicum of satisfaction at the emotional payoff at the end of the book.