November Book Club Update

Sutton

by

J.R. Moehringer

Tuesday 

November 13

7 pm

Sutton Summary

Born in the squalid Irish slums of Brooklyn, in the first year of the twentieth century, Willie Sutton came of age at a time when banks were out of control. If they weren't taking brazen risks, causing millions to lose their jobs and homes, they were shamelessly seeking bailouts. Trapped in a cycle of bank panics, depressions and soaring unemployment, Sutton saw only one way out, only one way to win the girl of his dreams.

So began the career of America's most successful bank robber. Over three decades Sutton became so good at breaking into banks, and such a master at breaking out of prisons, police called him one of the most dangerous men in New York, and the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List.

September Selection......Early selection info!

September 18  Book Club Selection

Carry the One


SPECIAL GUEST APPEARANCE BY AUTHOR!

Tuesday, Sept 18
7pm

Summary:

Carry the One begins in the hours following Carmen’s wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidentally hits and kills a girl on a dark country road. For the next twenty-five years, those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, craft their lives in response to this single tragic moment   

Summer Activities: WHAT TO READ NOW

The Book Club is on Summer Vacation

So everyone needs some beach reads!

Check out:

1. Gone Girl     Gillian Flynn........Everyone's reading it, or has.
2. In the Garden of Beasts     Erik Larson
3. Heading out to Wonderful     Robert Goolrick
4. Tell the Wolves I'm Home     Carol Brunt
5. The Age of Miracles     Karen Thompson
6. Tiny Beautiful Things     Cheryl Strayed
7.  Gold Chris Cleave
8. Canada     Richard Ford
9. The Song of Achilles     Madeline Miller
10. Beautiful Ruins     Jess Walter
11. I Am Forbidden     Anouk Markovits
12. American Gods     Neil Gaiman
13. Wild:  From Lost     Cheryl Strayed
14. History of a Pleasure Seeker     Richard Mason
15. Fifty Shades of Grey     E L James
16. A Hologram for the King     Dave Eggers
17. Behind the Beautiful Forevers     Katherine Boo
18. Buddha in the Attic     Julie Otsuka

****  19.  Carry the One     Carol Anshaw (PLEASE SEE BELOW)

Please note!!

The September selection, Carry the One has been chosen early because author Carol Anshaw will be attending our book club.  Please mark your calendars!  We need a good turn out.  I will bring wine and (better) appetizers.
Thanks.

May Club Updates

May 7

Chad Harbaugh, Author of May Selection comes to Chicago:

Printers Row Live:

Chad Harbach, May 7

 

On the bestseller list since it was published "The Art of Fielding." by Chad Harbach is considered by many to be the next great baseball novel, on a shelf with Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural.” Even for those lacking interest in the national pastime, “The Art of Fielding” is a book to inspire conversation about relationships – friendship, love, rivalry – and a world in which characters have books as their touchstones.

Chad Harbach will join Elizabeth Taylor and Rick Kogan on May 7 at a Printers Row Live program at the Latin School of Chicago, 59 W. North Ave. Harbach will meet Printers Row members at a special reception at 6:30 p.m. The program begins at 7.

Tickets for this program are $15

Ticket Link

http://chadharbach.eventbrite.com/

May 8 Book Club Selection:

Tuesday May 8 Book Club Selection

Book Summary:

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.

Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and

American Dervish Author Field Trip

Ayad Akhtar talks about American Dervish with Gay, Rose and Mariam. 

We then gave him ideas for his next book and play.

(Ok, just wanted to see if anyone reads this blog)

Gay and Rose talk to Ayad

Rose McGowan, Mariam Pahl and Gay Weber

April Book Club Selection

April Book Club Selection

American Dervish 

Tuesday April 10

Summary:

Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes.

March Book Club Activities

            March 13 "Field Trip"

 Ayad Akhtar, author of American Dervish

6:30pm Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre, Chicago

Printers Row Live

Chicago Tribune "Trib Nation" Program

This acclaimed debut novel is set in 1980's Wisconsin, where its author, a young filmmaker and playwright, grew up.  It is a look inside the interplay of religion and the powerful forces at work on young men and women growing up Muslim in America.

Tickets:  ayadakhtar.eventbrite.com

****  This will be our April selection for Book Club.

March 20 Book Club 7pm

Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize
By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.

This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.

February Book Club: Monday Feb 20 (President's Day)

February Selection

Black History Month

 Isabel Wilkerson, who spent most of her career as a national correspondent and bureau chief at The New York Times, is the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in the history of American journalism and the first black American to win for individual reporting. Inspired by her own parents' migration, she devoted 15 years to the research and writing of "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" (Random House), which won the National Book Critics Award for nonfiction. The Wall Street Journal called it "a brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration."

Mary Cavalier's "Great Books" Reading Guide

Our own Mary Cavalier put together this great Oldie But Goodie list.  Anybody who has read one of these  will agree that it is truly a Great Book.

Cowboys are My Weakness

Pam Houston

Strong, shrewd, and sometimes funny stories of women who are looking for the love of a good man.

Leaving Cheyenne

Larry McMurtry

Triangular love story that takes place in a small Teas town, ever so good.

Middle Passage

Charles Johnson

A freed slave in 1830 signs on as a seaman aboard a slave ship...Natn'l Book Award winner

January Reading Selection for Jan 10

January Book Club will be on TUESDAY JAN 10 due to holiday conflicts.  See you Tuesday.