A Reader's Place We read to know we are not alone.
~ C. S. Lewis~
A Reader's Place
We read to know we are not alone.
~ C. S. Lewis~
~~Evening Book Discussions Emma S. Clark Memorial Library~~ Except for November and December, we meet the fourth Wednesday, September through June. We share leading the discussions and participants suggest the titles. Emma Clark members may pick up “Pool Books” either at the preceding discussion or later, at the Reference Desk. Interlibrary loan and “ Book Club Books” will be held at the Circulation Desk. Books are presented by members of the group. Background materials |
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~~2010-2011~~ Wednesday Sept. 22 Zelda by Nancy Milford Zelda Sayre began as a Southern beauty, became an international wonder, and died by fire in a madhouse. With her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, she moved in a golden aura of excitement, romance, and promise. The epitome of the Jazz Age, together they rode the crest of the era: to its collapse and their own. From years of exhaustive research, Nancy Milford brings alive the tormented, elusive personality of Zelda and clarifies as never before her relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. *Pick up Aug. 25 at Reference Desk Wednesday October 27 Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann Pool Book The famous 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers is a central motif in this paean to the adopted city of Dublin-born McCann. Told by a succession of narrators representing diverse social strata, McCann's take on the grittier, 1970s city is deadly earnest. On the day that "the tightrope walker" (never named, but obviously modeled on Philippe Petit) strolls between the Twin Towers, other New Yorkers are performing quieter acts of courage. *Wednesday Nov. 17 Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin Pool Book Semiautobiographical novel by James Baldwin, published in 1953. Based on the author's experiences as a teenage preacher in a small revivalist church, the novel describes two days and a long night in the life of the Grimes family, particularly the 14-year-old John and his stepfather Gabriel. It is a classic of contemporary African-American literature. Baldwin's description of John's descent into the depths of his young soul was hailed as brilliant, as was his exploration of Gabriel's complex sorrows. **Meeting in the Board Room Wednesday Dec. 15 Brooklyn by Colm Toibin Pool Book Tóibín has revived the Brooklyn of an Irish-Catholic parish in the '50s, a setting appropriate to the narrow life of Eilis Lacey. Before Eilis ships out for a decent job in America, her village life in Ireland is sketched in detail. The shops, pub, the hoity-toity and plainspoken people of Enniscorthy have such appeal on the page, it does seem a shame to leave. But how will we share the girl's longing for home, if home is not a gabby presence in her émigré tale? ** Meeting in the Board Room Wednesday January 26 A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick Pool Book It's a frigid mid-October night in 1907 and Ralph Truitt, a wealthy industrialist living near the Canadian border, is meeting the train. It carries Catherine Land, his mail-order bride, who answered his newspaper ad for a "reliable wife." As happens in all small towns, Truitt's private business has become public. Waiting on the railroad platform, he's surrounded by curious neighbors, most of whom his mills or mines employ. With the arrival of the train, both Truitt and Catherine Land are in for a surprise. Wednesday February 23 The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar Pool Book Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay, leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend to another woman's house. In Sera Dubash's home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in which she remains an outsider. She cleans furniture she is not permitted to sit on. She washes glasses from which she is not allowed to drink. Yet despite being separated from each other by blood and class, she and Sera find themselves bound by gender and shared life experiences. Wednesday March 23 The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell Pool In the middle of tending to the everyday business at her vintage clothing shop and sidestepping her married boyfriend's attempts at commitment, Iris Lockhart receives a stunning phone call: Her great-aunt Esme, whom she never knew existed, is being released from Cauldstone Hospital—where she has been locked away for over sixty years. Iris’s grandmother Kitty always claimed to be an only child. To her surprise, Iris is now responsible for Esme, having been appointed power of attorney by her Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother. Wednesday April 27 The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Pool Book Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. Wednesday May 25 The Zookeeper’s Wife: a war story by Diane Ackerman Ackerman tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina, who, with courage and coolheaded ingenuity, sheltered 300 Jews as well as Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds. Using Antonina's diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, Ackerman takes us into the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 Jewish uprising and also describes the Poles' revolt against the Nazi occupiers in 1944. Interlibrary loan: pick up at Circulation Desk Wednesday June 22 Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout At some point, we've all had an Olive Kitteridge in our lives. Some of us might even be Olive Kitteridge, though our vanity prevents us from seeing it. It's that kind of familiarity with the Olives of the world which makes Elizabeth Strout's work of fiction such a rich, absorbing reading experience. In Olive Kitteridge, we often bump into pieces of ourselves or people we've known. Just as she did in her previous two novels, Amy and Isabelle and Abide with Me, Strout distills universal human behavior down to the miniature scale of one particular town and its residents. Interlibrary loan: pick up at Circulation Desk
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~~2009-2010~~ Wednesday, September 23 The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu 228 p. After 17 years, an Ethiopian immigrant wonders to what extent he has become an American. Every Tuesday evening, three friends meet in the back room of Sepha Stephanos's bedraggled Logan Circle convenience store to drink, give advice and wax philosophical about Africa, their mother continent. The trio met as young hotel clerks when they first arrived in Washington, D.C., but since then, they have taken different paths. Mengestu skirts immigrant-literature clich é s and paints a beautiful portrait of a complex, conflicted man struggling with questions of love and loyalty. A nuanced slice of immigrant life. Kirkus Reviews *Pick up at Circulation Desk after August 25 Wednesday, October 28 Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje 341 p. Pool In this lush yet acerbic novel by Ondaatje, set in his native Sri Lanka, Anil returns home after 15 years. Hers is not a sentimental journey, however. Anil is a forensic specialist who has recently been unearthing mass graves in Guatemala, and her mission in Sri Lanka is to conduct a human rights investigation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, government, antigovernment, and separatist forces clashed to produce countless deaths. Anil is teamed with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena in an intimate yet uneasy alliance. They unearth a skeleton and several past lives. Library Journal Wednesday, November 18* Run by Ann Patchett 296 p. Pool Doyle, an Irish Catholic and former Boston mayor, has done his best to keep his two sons interested in politics, from the day he and his now deceased wife became their parents, through their childhoods, and now in their lives as college students. Though the two boys are African-American, the bonds of the family's love have never been tested. But as the snow begins to falls, an accident triggers into motion a series of events that will forever change their lives. This is at its very center, a novel about what truly defines family and the lengths we will go to protect our children. As she did in her bestselling novel Bel Canto, Patchett beautifully weaves together seemingly disparate lives to show how intimately humans can connect. From the publisher. Wed. December 16* Waiting for Snow by Carlos Eire 387 p. Pool At the start of the nineteen-sixties, an operation called Pedro Pan flew more than fourteen thousand Cuban children out of the country, without their parents, and deposited them in Miami. Eire, now a professor of history and religion at Yale, was one of them. His deeply moving memoir describes his life before Castro, among the aristocracy of old Cuba -- his father, a judge, believed himself to be the reincarnation of Louis XVI -- and, later, in America, where he turned from a child of privilege into a Lost Boy. The New Yorker Wednesday, January 27 Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt 303 p. Interlibrary Loan Reflecting on a period from the late 1950s through the 1990s, Blunt recounts her life as she grew up on an isolated ranch an hour's drive south of Malta, Montana. Her family—she was one of five children—was not dysfunctional, but from an early age she struggled against the expectation that she would marry, have children, and become another ranch wife. While she loved her mother and admired her capabilities as a homemaker and horsewoman, she didn't want to become like her. She missed doing so by a hairbreadth. While Blunt escaped ranching through divorce and built for herself the life she craved, her life on the range of Montana inexorably shaped her. Kliatt Wednesday, February 24 Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo 527 p. Pool After a lifetime lived in the same small upstate New York town, Lou C. Lynch, a deeply cautious and conventional man, is headed for a vacation in Italy. It's an improbable leap for this most improbable hero of Bridge of Sighs. The Italy trip is Sarah's idea, and though Lou is outwardly willing, he also chooses this time to start writing a memoir. It's here that we meet him, in the pages of his own book, in which he seeks to make sense of his life. There's nothing about his fussy, formal, and sometimes florid voice that can prepare us for the explosive mysteries his recollections expose. Barnes&Noble Wednesday, March 24 Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama 442p. Pool Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature-with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father. From the publisher Wednesday, April 28 At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott 213 p. Pool Set in the '60s, the story of an extended Irish-American family observed primarily through the eyes of the children, a son and two daughters. Time circles backwards and forwards around a variety of family rituals: holiday meals, vacations at the shore, the wedding of a favorite aunt. As they listen to oft-repeated stories about poverty, disease, and early deaths, the children are solemn witnesses to the Irish immigrant experience in America. Library Journal Wednesday, May 26 Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer 277 p. Pool Prompted by her book club to write a novel of her own, this was the result. Told entirely through a series of letters, the novel skillfully renders the characters and concerns of Juliet, Sidney, and the other residents of Guernsey who have just emerged from the horrors and hardships of the Second World War. Barnes & Noble Wednesday, June 23 Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali 353 p. Pool The circuitous, violence-filled path that led Ms. Hirsi Ali from Somalia to the Netherlands is the subject of her brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir. Narrated in clear, vigorous prose, it traces the author’s geographical journey from Mogadishu to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and her desperate flight to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage. The New York Times
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