Taking a Break

Book club is on hiatus for awhile, so enjoy reading the book of your choice in the meantime! If you are interested in helping run book club, please email Emily.

March Book Selection: Possession by AS Byatt

"Literary critics make natural detectives," says Maud Bailey, heroine of a mystery where the clues lurk in university libraries, old letters, and dusty journals. Together with Roland Michell, a fellow academic and accidental sleuth, Maud discovers a love affair between the two Victorian writers the pair has dedicated their lives to studying: Randolph Ash, a literary great long assumed to be a devoted and faithful husband, and Christabel La Motte, a lesser-known "fairy poetess" and chaste spinster. At first, Roland and Maud's discovery threatens only to alter the direction of their research, but as they unearth the truth about the long-forgotten romance, their involvement becomes increasingly urgent and personal. Desperately concealing their purpose from competing researchers, they embark on a journey that pulls each of them from solitude and loneliness, challenges the most basic assumptions they hold about themselves, and uncovers their unique entitlement to the secret of Ash and La Motte's passion.

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize--the U.K.'s highest literary award--Possession is a gripping and compulsively readable novel. A.S. Byatt exquisitely renders a setting rich in detail and texture. Her lush imagery weaves together the dual worlds that appear throughout the novel--the worlds of the mind and the senses, of male and female, of darkness and light, of truth and imagination--into an enchanted and unforgettable tale of love and intrigue. --Lisa Whipple

February 2011 Book Selection

If you are looking for a quick, enjoyable read, don't miss out on February's book selection, Listening is an Act of Love by Dave Isay. (Locate a library copy here.)From Publishers Weekly:

This book is a collection of the most compelling excerpts from more than 10,000 interviews recorded, compiled by StoryCorps founder Isay (Flophouse), a radio documentary producer and MacArthur fellow... To gather the stories, StoryCorps provides a facility, recording equipment and a facilitator, then waits for people to invite loved ones, friends, grandparents to sit down for a 40-minute session. A copy of the tape is filed in the Library of Congress, and parts have aired on NPR. As Isay says, I realized how many people among us feel completely invisible, believe their lives don't matter, and fear they'll someday be forgotten.

We'll meet at 8pm on Thursday, February 17th at the Hincheys'. Hope you can join us!

January 2011 Book Club Meeting (with more details!)

We'll meet Thursday, Jan. 20th @ 8:00 pm (please note the time change) @ Marian's house (address will be sent out via email) to discuss Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. Hope to see you there!

2011 Books

Book club attendance has been waning lately, and we're quickly approaching the end of the list of books we voted on but few have had the chance to do the reading. So we are going to try one book a month for a bit and see if that's less intimidating to everyone. Plus, this way we won't have to vote for new books as frequently.

For now, then, here is the plan for 2011:

January: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
February: Listening is an Act of Love by Dave Isay
March: Possession by AS Byatt
April: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
May: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Thanks to those who made it to book club tonight! Our next meeting will be Thursday, January 20th @ 7:30 at a location TBD.

Merry Christmas!

December Book Club Meeting

For December we won't have a selected book. Come join us on Dec. 9th @ 7:30 pm at the Hincheys' for a book exchange and treats.

Click here to see Amazon's Best Christmas Books of All Time list.

A brief reminder...

Book club is Thursday, Nov. 18th at 7:30pm at the Gramercy. We'll be discussing Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Book Thief. Hope you can make it!