March book

It's time for a classic!  We'll be reading Thomas Hardy's fourth book Far From the Madding Crowd originally published in 1874. We'll also set a date and time to watch one of the three versions of the film - two were theatrical releases (1967 and 2015) and one was a 1998 television film adaptation.
Copies of the book are available to check out at the library.  The meeting will be Wednesday March 23rd at 1pm by the fireplace.

Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy's Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, whose wayward nature leads her to both tragedy and true love. It tells of the dashing Sergeant Troy whose rakish philosophy of life was '...the past was yesterday; never, the day after'. And lastly, of the introverted and reclusive gentleman farmer, Mr Boldwood, whose love fills him with '...a fearful sense of exposure', when he first sets eyes on Bathsheba. The background of this tale is the Wessex countryside in all its moods.  ...Amazon.com

January Book

 Join us on Wednesday January 21 at 1pm for a discussion of Plainsong by Kent Haruf, who died on November 30, 2014.

A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.

From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.

Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.

"Ambitious, but never seeming so, Kent Haruf reveals a whole community as he interweaves the stories of a pregnant high school girl, a lonely teacher, a pair of boys abandoned by their mother, and a couple of crusty bachelor farmers. From simple elements, Haruf achieves a novel of wisdom and grace—a narrative that builds in strength and feeling until, as in a choral chant, the voices in the book surround, transport, and lift the reader off the ground."
-FROM THE CITATION FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

May Title

Join us Wednesday May 16th at 1pm for a discussion of Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. Copies are available to check out at the library.  The group meets by the library fireplace.

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten-year old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families in the middle of the night. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard - their secret hiding place - and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released.
Sixty Years Later: Sarah's story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. IN her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own romantic future.

---©St. Martin's Griffin

April Book

Jhumpa Lahiri's poignant first novel, The Namesake, builds on the themes of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies.  In The Namesake, the Ganguli family emigrates from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs at the end of the 1960s, shortly after an arranged marriage.  An MIT engineering student, Ashoke is progressive and ready to enter American culture, while his tradition-bound wife, Ashima, desperately misses her Indian home and resists the new world.  When their first child, a boy, is born, they give him the pet name of Gogol, after the Russian writer, whose writings Ashoke believes were instrumental in saving his life.  This tale of three generations sensitively explores the profound conflicts between cultures and generations, the child's search for cultural identity, and the power of acceptance.  ©Random House

Book discussion on Wednesday April 20th at 1pm by the fireplace.  Film showing to be announced!