Discontinued Book Clubs – Page 11 – Algonquin Library Adult Services

Enjoying the Classics (09/16/2020): The Shadow of the Wind

August 20, 2020 Enjoying the Classics

Barcelona, 1945—just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.
As with all astounding novels, The Shadow of the Wind sends the mind groping for comparisons—The Crimson Petal and the White? The novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte? Of Victor Hugo? Love in the Time of Cholera?—but in the end, as with all astounding novels, no comparison can suffice. As one leading Spanish reviewer wrote, “The originality of Ruiz Zafón’s voice is bombproof and displays a diabolical talent. The Shadow of the Wind announces a phenomenon in Spanish literature.” An uncannily absorbing historical mystery, a heart-piercing romance, and a moving homage to the mystical power of books, The Shadow of the Wind is a triumph of the storyteller’s art. […]

Book Clubbers (09/03/2020): Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

August 7, 2020 Book Clubbers

Nikki lives in West London, where she tends bar at the local pub. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she’s spent most of her twenty-odd years distancing herself from the traditional Sikh community, preferring a more independent life. When her father’s death leaves the family financially strapped, Nikki, a law school dropout, impulsively takes a job teaching a ‘creative writing’ course at the community center in the beating heart of London’s close-knit Punjabi community. Because of a miscommunication, the proper Sikh widows who show up are expecting to learn basic English literacy, not the art of short-story writing. When one of the widows finds a book of sexy stories in English and shares it with the class, Nikki realizes that beneath their white dupattas, her students have a wealth of fantasies and memories. Eager to liberate these modest women, she teaches them how to express their untold stories, unleashing creativity of the most unexpected, and exciting, kind. […]

Cozy Corner (09/02/2020): Dame of Death

August 6, 2020 Cozy Corner

Mystery fans, this club is for you!

Our theme this month is the Dame of Death! Read a cozy of your choice written by Agatha Christie and share it with the group. If you would like to attend, please register! After registering, you will be sent a link to join the meeting. […]

Nite Readers (08/20/2020): Widows of Malabar Hill

July 17, 2020 Nite Readers

“Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father’s law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a law degree from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes her especially devoted to championing and protecting women’s legal rights. Mistry Law has been appointed to execute the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen is going through the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity. What will they live on if they forfeit what their husband left them? The Farid widows live in full purdah–in strict seclusion, never leaving the women’s quarters or speaking to any men. Are they being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous guardian? Perveen tries to investigate, and realizes her instincts about the will were correct when tensions escalate to murder.”– Provided by publisher. […]

Enjoying the Classics (08/19/2020): Man with the Golden Arm

July 16, 2020 Enjoying the Classics

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems. The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm “Algren’s defense of the individual,” while Carl Sandburg wrote of its “strange midnight dignity.” A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope. […]

Book Clubbers (08/06/2020): Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy

July 3, 2020 Book Clubbers

The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters

Since its publication on September 30, 1868, Little Women has been one of America’s favorite stories. While we now think of it as a girls’ book, it was initially read by both boys and girls, men and women of all ages. Professor Anne Boyd Rioux, who read it in her twenties, tells us how Louisa May Alcott came to write the book and drew inspiration for her story from her own life. Its Civil War-era tale of family and community ties resonated through later wars, the Depression, and times of changing opportunities for women, even into the twenty-first century. Rioux sees the novel’s beating heart in its honest look at adolescence and its inspiring vision of young women’s resilience and hope. In gauging its reception today, she shows why it remains a book with such power that people carry its characters and spirit throughout their lives. […]

Cozy Corner (08/05/2020): School Sleuths

July 2, 2020 Cozy Corner

Our theme this month is School Sleuths! Read a cozy of your choice with an academic theme and share it with the group.

If you would like to attend, please register! After registering, you will be sent a link to join the meeting. […]

Nite Readers (07/16/2020): Mistress of the Ritz

June 19, 2020 Nite Readers

June 1940. The German Army sweeps into Paris and sets up headquarters at The Hotel Ritz. In order to survive– and to strike a blow against their Nazi ‘guests’ the hotel’s director, Claude Auzello, and his beautiful American actress wife, Blanche throw themselves into spinning a web of deceit working for the French Resistance. But one secret threatens to imperil both their lives– and to bring down the legendary Ritz itself. — adapted from jacket […]

Enjoying the Classics (07/15/2020): Under the Volcano

June 18, 2020 Enjoying the Classics

“Lowry’s masterpiece” about a fateful Day of the Dead in a small Mexican town and one man’s struggle against the forces threatening to destroy him ( Los Angeles Times). In what the New York Times calls “one of the towering novels of [the twentieth] century,” former British consul Geoffrey Firmin lives alone with his demons in the shadow of two active volcanoes in South Central Mexico. Gripped by alcoholism, Geoffrey makes one last effort to salvage his crumbling life on the day that his ex-wife, Yvonne, arrives in town. It’s the Day of the Dead, 1938. The couple wants to revive their marriage and undo the wrongs of their past, but they soon realize that they’ve stumbled into the wrong place and time, where not only Geoffrey and Yvonne, but the world itself is on the edge of Armageddon. Hailed by the Modern Library as one of the one hundred best English novels of the twentieth century, Under the Volcano stands as an iconic and richly drawn example of the modern novel at its most lyrical. […]

Book Clubbers (07/02/2020): The Weight of a Piano

June 5, 2020 Book Clubbers

In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life: a Blüthner piano, on which she discovers an enrichening passion for music. Yet after she marries, her husband insists the family emigrate to America—and loses her piano in the process.
In 2012, in Bakersfield, California, twenty-six-year-old Clara Lundy is burdened by the last gift her father gave her before he and her mother died in a terrible house fire: a Blüthner upright she has never learned to play. Now a talented and independent auto mechanic, Clara’s career is put on hold when she breaks her hand trying to move the piano, and in sudden frustration she decides to sell it. Only in discovering the identity of the buyer—and the secret history of her piano—will Clara be set free to live the life of her choosing. […]