2nd Wednesday Book Club

Our current book is The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Bryan — Wed, 08 May 2013 21:15:16 +0000

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Come discuss The Marriage Plot June 12th, 2013. We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our current book is Live By Night by Dennis Lehane

Bryan — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:00:03 +0000

Boston, 1926. The ’20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world. Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city’s most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one–neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover–can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.

Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rum runners and sultry femme fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream.

Come discuss Live By Night on May 8th, 2013. We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our current book is Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Bryan — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 20:11:23 +0000

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—-and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—-and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.

Come discuss Wild on April 10th, 2013. We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our current book is Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Bryan — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:00:02 +0000

After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and beloved works of fiction in recent years. Universally acclaimed upon publication, Life of Pi is a modern classic. It is also the next Nashville Reads selection.

Come discuss Life of Pi on March 13th, 2013. We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our current book is Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

Bryan — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:00:42 +0000

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland. An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we’ve been waiting for.

Come discuss Telegraph Avenue on February 13th, 2013. We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our current book is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Bryan — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:13:35 +0000

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilization—the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

Come discuss Cloud Atlas on January 9th, 2013. We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our current book is The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

Bryan — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 18:00:10 +0000

When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?

What no wizards?

Come discuss The Casual Vacancy on December 12th. We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our current book is The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron

Bryan — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:00:30 +0000

The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax’s novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert -the name of the devil in one of Carax’s novels. As he grows up, Daniel’s fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a “porcelain gaze,” Clara Barceló; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best friend’s sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. It’s big, chock-full of unusual characters, and strong in its sense of place. And the setting–Spain under Franco–injects an air of sobriety into some plot elements that might otherwise seem soap operatic. Part detective story, part boy’s adventure, part romance, fantasy, and gothic horror, the intricate plot is urged on by extravagant foreshadowing and nail-nibbling tension. This is rich, lavish storytelling

Come discuss The Shadow of the Wind on November 14th. We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our current book is The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Bryan — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 18:00:39 +0000

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining fertility, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now… Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

Come discuss The Handmaid’s Tale on October 10th. We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our current book is That Woman: the Life of Wallis Simpson by Anne Sebba

Bryan — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 18:00:50 +0000

One of Britain’s most distinguished biographers turns her focus on one of the most vilified woman of the last century. Historian Anne Sebba has written the first full biography of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, by a woman which attempts to understand this fascinating and enigmatic American divorcee who nearly became Queen of England. ‘That woman’, as she was referred to by the Queen Mother, became a hate figure for allegedly ensnaring a British king. Born in 1895 in Baltimore, Bessiewallis Warfield endured an impoverished and comparatively obscure childhood which inflamed a burning desire to rise above her circumstances. Based on new archives and material recently made available, this scrupulously researched biography re evaluates the role of politicians in the 1930s, sheds new light on the character and motivations of this powerful, charismatic and complex woman, and questions was this really the romantic love story of the century?

Come discuss That Woman on September 12th. (That was a fun sentence to write.) We meet at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.