Our book club meets monthly and is open to anyone who'd like to join. There is no need to reserve a spot or even buy the book from us, simply show up prepared to discuss the book on the night of the meeting.
Current meeting schedule:
JULY
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 30TH!
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: IF ONLY, by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund
[buy it here]
A passionate and groundbreaking bestseller from one of Norway's most highly-regarded and award-winning novelists, for readers of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion and Coco Mellors' Cleopatra and Frankenstein
A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14 C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.
So opens Vigids Hjorth's ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.
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8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: CONSENT: A MEMOIR, by Jill Ciment
[buy it here]
A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR - From the acclaimed novelist ("A virtuoso"--Donna Seaman, Booklist), a deft, shocking memoir that asks whether we can judge past behavior by today's moral codes, as the author reevaluates her decades-long marriage to the forty-seven-year-old man she met when she was seventeen, revisiting a singular passion in the 21st-century aftermath of #MeToo.
"Few writers can tackle the bedroom--or female libido . . . but Ciment is a master: in exquisitely spare prose, she nails it." -- The New York Times
In this unflinching account of the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was a teenager and he was married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1996 memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility around a May-December romance. In the light of #metoo, with new understanding about the balance of power between an older man and an underage girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband's death at ninety-three.
This riveting book about art, memory, and morality asks many questions along the way: Does a story's ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself? Suffused with the wisdom that comes with time, Consent is an author's brave recasting of her life's settled narrative, and an urgent read for women of all ages.