Book Club: Discontinued Book Clubs

These are old book clubs that have been discontinued. The posts here are for archival purposes only.

Nite Readers (07/18/2019): The Italian Party

June 20, 2019
Nite Readers (07/18/2019): The Italian Party
The Italian Party (cover)

The Italian Party by Christina Lynch

A delicious and sharply funny page-turner about “innocent” Americans abroad in 1950s Siena, Italy. Newly married, Scottie and Michael are seduced by Tuscany’s famous beauty. But the secrets they are keeping from each other force them beneath the splendid surface to a more complex view of ltaly, America and each other.

When Scottie’s Italian teacher–a teenager with secrets of his own–disappears, her search for him leads her to discover other, darker truths about herself, her husband and her country. Michael’s dedication to saving the world from communism crumbles as he begins to see that he is a pawn in a much different game. Driven apart by lies, Michael and Scottie must find their way through a maze of history, memory, hate and love to a new kind of complicated truth.

Next Meeting:
July 18th @ 7:00 PM at Harnish Library

Great Books (07/17/2019): Go Tell it to the Mountain

June 19, 2019
Great Books (07/17/2019): Go Tell it to the Mountain
Go Tell it to the Mountain (cover)

Go Tell it to the Mountain by James Baldwin

Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Next Meeting:
July 17th @ 7:00 PM at Harnish Library

Book Clubbers (07/11/2019): Dear Mrs. Bird

June 6, 2019
Book Clubbers (07/11/2019): Dear Mrs. Bird
Dear Mrs. Bird (cover)

Dear Mrs. Bird by A.J. Pearce

Emmeline Lake and her best friend Bunty are doing their bit for the war effort and trying to stay cheerful, despite the German planes making their nightly raids. Emmy dreams of becoming a Lady War Correspondent, and when she spots a job advertisement in the newspaper she seizes her chance; but after a rather unfortunate misunderstanding, she finds herself typing letters for the formidable Henrietta Bird, renowned advice columnist of Woman’s Friend magazine.

Mrs. Bird is very clear: letters containing any Unpleasantness must go straight into the bin. But as Emmy reads the desperate pleas from women who many have Gone Too Far with the wrong man, or can’t bear to let their children be evacuated, she begins to secretly write back to the readers who have poured out their troubles.

Next Meeting:
July 11th @ 7:00 PM at Harnish Library

Cozy Corner (07/03/2019): By Book or By Crook

June 5, 2019
Cozy Corner (07/03/2019): By Book or By Crook
By Book or By Crook (cover)

By Book or By Crook by Eva Gates

For ten years Lucy has enjoyed her job poring over rare tomes of literature for the Harvard Library, but she has not enjoyed the demands of her family’s social whorl or her sort-of-engagement to the staid son of her father’s law partner. But when her ten-year relationship implodes, Lucy realizes that the plot of her life is in need of a serious rewrite.

Calling on her aunt Ellen, Lucy hopes that a little fun in the Outer Banks sun—and some confections from her cousin Josie’s bakery—will help clear her head. But her retreat quickly turns into an unexpected opportunity when Aunt Ellen gets her involved in the lighthouse library tucked away on Bodie Island.

Lucy is thrilled to land a librarian job in her favorite place in the world. But when a priceless first edition Jane Austen novel is stolen and the chair of the library board is murdered, Lucy suddenly finds herself ensnared in a real-life mystery—and she’s not so sure there’s going to be a happy ending….

Next Meeting:
July 3rd @ 7:00 PM at Harnish Library

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AUDIOBOOK

Nite Readers: King Zeno

May 16, 2019
Nite Readers: King Zeno

Nite Readers: King Zeno

King Zeno

By: Nathaniel Rich

Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2019 @Harnish

Time: 7:00pm

AVAILABLE FOR IMMEDIATE CHECKOUT IN AUDIO FORMAT ON HOOPLA!

New Orleans, a century ago: a city determined to reshape its destiny and, with it, the nation’s. Downtown, a new American music is born. In Storyville, prostitution is outlawed and the police retake the streets with maximum violence. In the Ninth Ward, laborers break ground on a gigantic canal that will split the city, a work of staggering human ingenuity intended to restore New Orleans’s faded mercantile glory. The war is ending and a prosperous new age dawns. But everything is thrown into chaos by a series of murders committed by an ax-wielding maniac with a peculiar taste in music.

The ax murders scramble the fates of three people from different corners of town. Detective William Bastrop is an army veteran haunted by an act of wartime cowardice, recklessly bent on redemption. Isadore Zeno is a jazz cornetist with a dangerous side hustle. Beatrice Vizzini is the widow of a crime boss who yearns to take the family business straight. Each nurtures private dreams of worldly glory and eternal life, their ambitions carrying them into dark territories of obsession, paranoia, and madness.

In New Orleans, a city built on swamp, nothing stays buried long.

Great Books: A Town Like Alice

May 15, 2019
Great Books: A Town Like Alice

Great Books: A Town Like AliceA Town Like Alice

By: Nevil Shute

Date: Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 @Harnish

Time: 7:00pm

Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal seven-month death march with dozens of other women and children. A few years after the war, Jean is back in England, the nightmare behind her. However, an unexpected inheritance inspires her to return to Malaya to give something back to the villagers who saved her life. But it turns out that they have a gift for her as well: the news that the young Australian soldier, Joe Harmon, who had risked his life to help the women, had miraculously survived. Jean’s search for Joe leads her to a desolate Australian outpost called Willstown, where she finds a challenge that will draw on all the resourcefulness and spirit that carried her through her war-time ordeals

Book Clubbers: An American Marriage

May 2, 2019
Book Clubbers: An American Marriage

Book Clubbers: An American MarriageAn American Marriage

By: Tayari Jones

Date: Thursday, June 6th, 2019 @Harnish

Time: 7:00pm

AVAILABLE FOR IMMEDIATE CHECKOUT IN EBOOK AND AUDIO FORMATS ON HOOPLA!

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

Nite Readers: Rebecca

April 18, 2019
Nite Readers: Rebecca

Nite Readers: RebeccaRebecca

By: Daphne Du Maurier

Date: Thursday, May 16th, 2019 @Harnish

Time: 7:00pm

The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady's maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives--presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.

Great Books: Darkness at Noon

April 17, 2019
Great Books: Darkness at Noon

Great Books: Darkness at NoonDarkness at Noon

By: Arthur Koestler

Date: Wednesday, May 15th, 2019 @Harnish

Time: 7:00pm

Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.

During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the party he has devoted his life to. Under mounting pressure to confess to crimes he did not commit, Rubashov relives a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a revolutionary                                                                                                                                       dictatorship that believes it is an instrument of liberation.