Hello book lovers! The USF Book Club is reading Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr and will meet on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 to discuss. We’ll be in the seminar room (#209) of Gleeson Library from 12-1 pm. Bring your lunch and your friends!
Personally I am especially excited about this book — Mohr is an USF MFA alumnus and he was a TA for my senior seminar class I took at USF in undergrad. One of my friends read Some Things in 1 day, and my boyfriend read it in a couple days.
The book has been crazy successful considering it’s Mohr’s debut and a small press put it out. He’s been profiled in The San Francisco Chronicle (although the article writer made that common–if not irritating–error of referring to USF as UCSF), Poets & Writers, and Oprah even named Some Things as a recommended book of 2009.
How to get the book: You can try requesting it through Link+ (the book will come to Gleeson in about 4 business days) or you can try to get it through SF Public Library (click the link and you can place a hold if you have a SFPL library card). Otherwise, Gleeson has 1 copy and it’s checked out with a hold on it already. You could consider purchasing the book, too, since it’ll support a local writer, a small press, and it’s in paperback!
From Publishers Weekly:
“Mohr’s first novel is biting and heartbreaking, a piercing look at the indelible scars a violent past has left on a young man named Rhonda. In the mental hospital where Rhonda spent his teenage years, a doctor he refers to as Angel-Hair diagnoses him with depersonalization, a disorder he uses to reconfigure the traumatic events of his life and render them in vividly surreal terms. To withstand the frequent absences of his alcoholic mother and her boyfriend’s abuse, Rhonda imagines his childhood home in Arizona as a living thing, where rooms stretch and move, and desert wildlife wanders the halls. The disturbing narrative engine–Rhonda’s renaming and reimagining of the world around him to fit into his damaged logic–keeps the story creepily moving as it touches on homebrew prison wine and Rhonda’s friendship with his childhood self, little-Rhonda. Mohr uses punchy, tightly wound prose to pull readers into a nightmarish landscape, but he never loses the heart of his story; it’s as touching as it is shocking, even if the ending’s a smidge sappy.”
Once you have read this book, you can write your own review. Here’s how. Look up the record in Ignacio
http://ignacio.usfca.edu/record=b1881180~S0
Click on add a review–on the right hand side of the screen. You will be prompted to log in to your library record using your name and usf id. Once you do that you can add a review. Reviews don’t show up instantly because they are moderated, but monitoring is done at least once a day.
Give it a try.