This one's the big one! This year's Caroline Reads headline event is a lecture from Lily Anne Yumi Welty Tamai. She is the history curator at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. She'll be coming to speak to us THIS SATURDAY on the topic of Japanese American internment. This will be an excellent event, hosted at the Community Services Center in Bowling Green. Check out more information about our speaker and the event on our This Year's Events page or by clicking the button below. We hope to see you there!
First, thanks to everyone that came out to the author talk with Ann McClellan last Saturday. It had to be moved into the meeting room of the Library, but that meant there was even better discussion. If you missed it, don't worry - our next event is coming up THIS SATURDAY! Dr. Todd Munson from Randolph-Macon will be at the Ladysmith Branch to discuss When the Emperor Was Divine. There will be refreshments and origami too, so don't miss it!
To get us ready for the discussion on Saturday, I'm going to post a couple discussion questions from the Random House website. Leave your thoughts in the comments below! If you haven't read the book, head out to your nearest branch and grab a copy! 1. When the Emperor Was Divine gives readers an intimate view of the fate of Japanese Americans during World War II. In what ways does the novel deepen our existing knowledge of this historical period? What does it give readers that a straightforward historical investigation cannot? 2. Why does Otsuka choose to reveal the family’s reason for moving—and the father’s arrest—so indirectly and so gradually? What is the effect when the reason becomes apparent? 3. Otsuka skillfully places subtle but significant details in her narrative. When the mother goes to Lundy’s hardware store, she notices a “dark stain” on the register “that would not go away” [p. 5]. The dog she has to kill is called “White Dog” [see pp. 9–12]. Her daughter’s favorite song on the radio is “Don’t Fence Me In.” How do these details, and others like them, point to larger meanings in the novel? 4. Why does Otsuka refer to her characters as “the woman,” “the girl,” “the boy,” and “the father,” rather than giving them names? How does this lack of specific identities affect the reader’s relationship to the characters? 5. When they arrive at the camp in the Utah desert—“a city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain”—the boy thinks he sees his father everywhere: “wherever the boy looked he saw him: Daddy, Papa, Father, Oto-san” [p. 49]. Why is the father’s absence such a powerful presence in the novel? How do the mother and daughter think of him? How would their story have been different had the family remained together? This Saturday, author Ann McClellan will be visiting the Library to talk about her books and the Cherry Blossom Festival. Please check out our This Year's Events page for more information about the event and about Ann too. It's going to be a great talk and we hope to see you there!
Although many cities hold cherry blossom festivals, The National Cherry Blossom Festival is held in Washington D.C. It celebrates the 3,000 trees given to the city as a gift and sign of friendship from the mayor of Tokyo. Since then, the festival has grown bigger and better every year. This year's festival will be held from March 20th through April 12th, and it includes movie screenings, art exhibits, live concerts, a kite festival, and so much more. Check out their website for more information on these events, as well as the history of the festival. My favorite part is the Bloom Watch. You can see when the peak blooming is supposed to occur and check out their Blossom Cam to actually see the blossoms if you can't make it up to D.C. It's finally March and that means it's finally time for Caroline Reads! There's so much going on this month and the events have already started. Please check out the Get Crafty and Branch Events tabs above to see all the great programs we've got going on. The branches will have flyers, displays and tons of books for you to check out too.
Don't think that just because we've got lots going on in the branches that we'll be abandoning the blog. On the contrary, I'll be posting more information, even more frequently in the next several weeks. I'll be including discussion questions, polls, and other content for you all month long! Vote in our poll below and let us know what you're most looking forward to during Caroline Reads. I hope that everyone is staying nice and warm after all this snow we've gotten. Even the Library had a snow day! It was a perfect opportunity to read When the Emperor was Divine. Don't worry - if you haven't read it yet, there's still plenty of time to read it before our big discussion on March 21st.
To tide everyone over until then, I've posted here a Q&A with the author - Julie Otsuka - from Random House. Also, you might want to check out her site as well. A Conversation with Julie Otsuka, author of When the Emperor was Divine Q: What was your inspiration for setting the novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, in the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. during World War II? A: Quite truthfully, I never set out to write a novel about the internment camps. I started out writing—or trying to write—comedy, in fact, and never thought of myself as a “serious” writer. But images of the war kept surfacing in my work, so for reasons I didn’t quite understand, the war was something I needed to write about. The obvious inspiration for the novel is my own family’s history. My grandfather was arrested by the FBI the day after Pearl Harbor and incarcerated in various camps administered by the Department of Justice for “dangerous enemy aliens.” My mother, my uncle and my grandmother were interned for three and a half years in Topaz, Utah. My grandfather died when I was quite young, so I don’t remember much about him, but one day, several years ago, we found a box in my grandmother’s house. Inside the box were letters and postcards my grandfather had written to his wife and children during the war. My mother read them first and I remember her telling me afterwards, “It’s like reading a story,” and it was, but a rather one-sided story (I don't know what happened to my grandmother’s side of the correspondence), a story with many gaps and holes. Also, the letters were censored, so I knew that there was a lot that wasn’t being said. |