We met on June 1, 2024 at Dick’s. Most of us preferred Tinkers, Harding’s debut novel. Eden was far from Carolyn’s favorite. She found the author’s use of language to be almost a barrier to the story. He seemed to idealize and glorify the island residents who suffered from intellectual and/or physical limitations, which seemed…
On March 22, 2024 we met at the Larkes. Renee suggested this book. I remember Grace and I trying to force an alternative – the fictionalized account about the midwife in Maine. We did not prevail. This saga portrays a worldly/saintly/mythic Amazonian woman, Marie, based on an historical abbess, as being in direct contact with…
The group selected Grace’s recommendation for Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and we met at Carolyn’s to discuss it on Friday, October 27, 2023. Members who had read some of Ann Patchett’s other books considered this a minor work. Some of us raised credibility issues with the number of coincidences in the storyline and/or with…
We convened at Dick Malmquist’s house on Saturday, July 8, 2023. Renee proposed this book by Toni Morrison. It’s the second Toni Morrison book we’ve read as a group (the other: A Mercy). Renee is an unabashed Toni fan. Many of us found the book riveting and lyrical. It’s long for us: 318 pages. We…
Bill Levin suggested this book of poetry by Seamus Heaney. It’s rare that we read poetry as a book club and Bill had the insight and knowledge of the author to pull it off. Each of us nine members selected one poem from this collection to read aloud and discuss. We gathered around the outdoor…
As far as I recall, this book was proposed by Carolyn Housman, when the club met at her home in Rockland, but what matter is that, 14 months later? We read it, we liked it (which, I suppose is true of most of our selections but never guaranteed). In any event, we met on Saturday,…
Book recommended by Renee at our September 24, 2022 meeting at her parents’ house in Pembroke. Scheduled for November 5, 2022. Here is the synopsis from goodreads.com: A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret. Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat…
Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe’s critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s,…
Discussed April 22, 2022 Tommy Orange’s wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind….
Book club date February 5, 2022 Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes…
