Join a Book Club!

Expand your reading horizons this year by joining one of our four book discussion groups. Book discussion groups are a great way for book-lovers to enjoy reading and the pleasure of each other's company. They can be a useful discipline for encouraging you to read more, to read outside the genres you normally read, or simply as a way to make new friends and meet like-minded readers.

The current book discussion groups cover a wide range of topics and cross between fiction and non-fiction books. The groups are geared towards different lifestyles and therefore meet at various times and locations. Working individuals can attend our Evening Contemporaries book discussion group on the second Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m. at Village Inn.  Our new group, Unshelved, meets on the second Wednesday of each month at 1:30 PM, and is taking book discussions to new horizons with their selected titles.  If you have free time during the day you can participate in the Bookies daytime group, which meets at 1:30 p.m. on the first Wednesday of the month.  Or, join the Literary Angles book discussion group; this group meets at 1:30 p.m. on the third Tuesday of the month and often has a film presentation following the discussion. 

Call 223-1309 ext. 502 to sign up for an Adult Book Discussion Group or ext. 220 for a Children's or Teen book discussion group.

What we're reading...
 

Unshelved

Meetings are held the second Wednesday of each month in the Friends of the Library Conference Room.

May 14, 1:30 PM--Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy," says eleven-year-old Ellen. Thus the young narrator begins her story, painting an extraordinary self-portrait: Ellen is a child whose courage and humor win her a place in literature alongside Holden Caulfield. Ellen's first eleven years are a fight for survival. Her abused mother commits suicide, leaving Ellen to the mercies of her daddy, a brute who ignores her or makes sexual threats. Ellen is able to provide for herself, but her attempts to create an environment of order within the home are foiled by her father. After his death, a judge awards Ellen's custody to her mother's mother, a bitter woman who hated her son-in-law and who hates Ellen for her resemblance to him.

Ellen never gives up her belief that there is a place for her, a home which will satisfy her longing for love, acceptance, and order. Her success in finding that home and claiming it is a testimony to her unshakable faith in the possibility of good. She never loses faith, and she never loses her sense of humor. Ellen Foster is ultimately a serious fable of personal and collective responsibility.

June 11, 1:30 PM--March by Geraldine Brooks

As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.

From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, who has gone off to war, leaving his wife and daughters to make do in mean times. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's father --- a friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In her telling, March emerges as an idealistic chaplain in the little known backwaters of a war that will test his faith in himself and in the Union cause as he learns that his side, too, is capable of acts of barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near mortal illness, he must reassemble his shattered mind and body and find a way to reconnect with a wife and daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through.

Spanning the vibrant intellectual world of Concord and the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott's optimistic children's tale to portray the moral complexity of war, and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism --- and by a dangerous and illicit attraction. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks's place as an internationally renowned author of historical fiction.

Literary Angles

Meetings are held the third Tuesday of each month in the Friends of the Library Conference Room. 

May 20, 1:30 PM--The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

Known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters, the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took 70 years to complete, drew from thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within its creation is a fascinating story of a friendship -- two remarkable men whose strange relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray, a former schoolmaster, was the brilliant editor of the OED project. Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired American surgeon, was one of the contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. Not only was he remarkably prolific, sending in as many as ten thousand definitions, but he was also a murderer, clinically insane, and locked up in Broadmoor, England's asylum for criminal lunatics.

The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness and genius and the incredible obsessions of two men at the heart of the Oxford English Dictionary and literary history. With riveting insight and detail, Simon Winchester crafts a glimpse into one man's tortured mind and another man's magnificent dictionary.

June 17, 1:30 PM--Let Me Go by Helga Schneider

Let Me Go is the story of a daughter’s final visit to the mother who abandoned her to join the Nazi SS. It is a memoir that investigates personal history, family history, and the darkest political history of the twentieth century.

When she receives a letter informing her that her mother is dying, Helga Schneider makes a final, painful visit that shatters the calm she had achieved during the years since she had last seen her mother. Helga’s mother is confused, deceitful, needy, proud of her past, and deliberately hurtful. As Helga questions her about the abandonment, the answers wound her again. Her mother justifies her actions with the defense Eichmann used at Nuremberg: she was following orders and had to obey. But she also insists the orders were just and that she believed in the “final solution.”

Helga’s mother also shows tenderness; she is a lonely, bitter woman who cannot bear to see her daughter leave. Unflinchingly, Helga records their conversations and the convulsions they create—panic, revulsion, and bonds from which she cannot break free.

Weaving past and present, Helga Schneider shows us the tenuous balance between bonds that hold families together and forces that tear them apart. 

Evening Contemporaries

Meetings are held the second Tuesday of each month at Village Inn, 200 N. 36th St., Quincy, Illinois.  Occassional meetings held at other locations will be announced in advance. 

May 13, 7:00 PM--The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

In an epic of fantasy storytelling, Philip Pullman invites readers into a world as thoroughly realized as Narnia, Earthsea, or Redwall.

Here lives an orphaned ward named Lyra Belacqua, whose life among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College is shattered by the arrival of two powerful visitors. Her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, appears with evidence of mystery and danger in the far North, including photographs of a celestial phenomenon called Dust and the dim outline of a city suspended in the Aurora Borealis that he suspects is part of an alternate universe. He leaves Lyra in the care of Mrs. Coulter, an enigmatic scholar and explorer who offers to give Lyra the attention her uncle has long refused her. In this multilayered narrative, however, nothing is as it seems.

Lyra sets out for the top of the world in search of her kidnapped playmate, Roger, bearing a rare truth-telling instrument, the compass of the title. All around her children are disappearing--victims of "Gobblers”-- and being used as subjects in experiments that separate humans from their daemons, creatures that reflect a person's inner being. And somehow, both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are involved. 

June 10, 7:00 PM--Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire savings account to charity and hitch-hiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. 

Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter.  His diary, letters, and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate efforts to survive after he was stranded by an injury and facing starvation.  The writings also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Virginia, who adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and returned to nature.  Krakauer retraces McCandless' ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, and aerospace engineer; he also draws parallels to his own youthful exploit of climbing Devil's Thumb on the Alaska-British Columbia border as an act of rebellion against his own autocratic father. 

In this moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless' death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and accidental poisoning from toxic seed pods.  Jon Krakauer brings Chris McCandless' pilgrimage out of the shadows and illuminates it with meaning in this mesmerizing and heartbreaking work. 

Bookies

Meetings are held on the first Wednesday of each month in the Library Meeting Room. 

May 7, 1:30 PM--Lilla's Feast by Frances Osborne

Frances Osborne’s great-grandmother Lilla was always elegant–lace and sparkling diamonds. To her great-grandchildren, Lilla was an ally and a wonder. Her bedroom was filled with treasures from the world’s corners. But she rarely mentioned the Japanese camps where she spent much of World War II, or the cookbook she wrote to survive.

Beneath its polished surface, Lilla’s life had been anything but effortless. Born in 1882 in the North China port city of Chefoo, Lilla was an identical twin. Growing up, she knew privilege and deprivation, love and its absence. But the constant was an appreciation for the power of food and place. From the noodles of Shanghai to the chutney of India, Lilla believed that good food and sensuous surroundings could carry one toward happiness. Her story is the stuff of good fiction: distant locales, an improvident marriage, an evil mother-in-law, a dramatic suicide, and two world wars.

Lilla’s remarkable cookbook, composed on the brink of starvation, makes no mention of rations, rotten vegetables and donkey meat. In this magical food journal, housed in the Imperial War Museum in London, everyone is warm and safe; the pages are filled with cream puffs, butterscotch, and comforting soup. In her cookbook, Lilla transformed the darkest moments into scrumptious escape. 

June 4, 1:30 PM--The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Benyon Rees

All it takes is one good man — a detective, of course — to humanize events that confound understanding. In The Collaborator of Bethlehem, the first novel by Matt Beynon Rees (former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine), that honorable man is Omar Yussef. 

Omar is a middle-aged history teacher at a United Nations-run school for Palestinian children outside Bethlehem. When a Christian friend is unjustly accused of collaborating in the Israeli assassination of a local resistance fighter, this mild-mannered schoolteacher finds the courage to stand up to a militia outfit, the Martyrs Brigades, while conducting his own clandestine search for the real killer.

Setting a mystery in the epicenter of a war zone challenges the genre conventions, but it doesn't change the rules. In fact, it clarifies the role of the detective as the voice of reason, crying to be heard above the cacophony of gun-barrel politics. Watching friends die and neighbors turn on one another, Omar Yussef decides that "it's time for me to scream." In a world where civilization has broken down into "ignorant, simple-minded, violent politics," this decent man commits the ultimate act of heroism — keeping an open mind.