January Book Club Meetings

Happy New Year! We are starting the year with some great reads! The Seniors Book Club will be meeting January 14, 2009 at 2:00p.m. in the Training Room to discuss the Giller award-winning novel Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay.

About the book.....

Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined.
Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly lovable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land.
Written in gorgeous prose, laced with dark humour, Late Nights on Air is Hay’s most seductive and accomplished novel yet.

Review Quotes:
“Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx.”
— Washington Post

"Dazzling....A flawlessly crafted and timeless story, masterfully told.” — Jury citation, the Scotiabank Giller Prize

“Exquisite….Hay creates enormous spaces with few words, and makes the reader party to the journey, listening, marvelling….” — Globe and Mail
(Source: www.mcclelland.com)




The Monday Evening Book Club will be meeting Monday , January 12th at 7:00 p.m. in the Library Program Room to discuss the novel The Outlander by Gil Adamson. This book is a"Canada Reads" selection for 2009.

More about this Canadian historical novel:

In 1903 a mysterious, desperate young woman flees alone across the west, one quick step ahead of the law. She has just become a widow by her own hand.

Gil Adamson's extraordinary novel opens in heart-pounding mid-flight and propels the reader through a gripping road trip with a twist -- the steely outlaw in this story is a grief-struck nineteen-year-old woman. As the young widow encounters characters of all stripes -- unsavoury, wheedling, greedy, lascivious, self-reliant, and occasionally generous and trustworthy -- Adamson weds her brilliant literary style to the gripping, moving, picaresque tale of one woman's deliberate journey into the wild.

Reviews:

"The Outlander deserves to be read twice, first for the plot and the complex characters which make this a page-turner of the highest order, and then a second time, slowly, to savor the marvel of Gil Adamson's writing. This novel is a true wonder."
- Ann Patchett

"Gil Adamson's first novel bolts off the opening page. . . An absorbing adventure from a Canadian poet and short story writer who knows how to keep us enthralled. . . . The Girl Being Chased is one of the most enduring figures of chivalric and chauvinistic literature. . . a strikingly pensive novel, anchored by the stark beauty of its setting and the harsh wisdom of its narrator. . . . Adamson is as captivating with descriptions of vast mountain ranges as she is with the smaller calamities. . . her story will unsettle your dreams just the same."
- Washington Post
(Source: www.anansi.ca)

December Book Club Meetings

The Monday Evening Book Club will meet on December 8th in the Program Room on the 1st floor of the library. We will discuss Digging to America by Anne Tyler.

Two families arrive at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport in August 1997 to claim the Korean infants they have adopted. Strangers until that evening, they are destined to begin a friendship that will span their adoptive daughters' childhoods. Bitsy and Brad Donaldson are the quintessential middle-class, white American couple. Sami and Ziba Yazdan are Iranian Americans. From the beginning, the differences in the ways they will raise their daughters are obvious: Bitsy's well-meaning but overzealous efforts to retain her child's Korean heritage are evident in the chosen name–Jin-Ho–and in the Korean costumes that she dresses the girl in every year as they mark the anniversary of the adoption date. The Yazdans are comfortable with their daughter Susan's assimilation into their own Iranian-American culture. When Bitsy's widowed father begins to show romantic interest in Susan's grandmother, cultural differences are brought to a head. Tyler weaves a story that speaks to how we come to terms with our identity in multicultural America, and how we form friendships that move beyond the unease of differences. She does not dwell on the September 11 attacks, but subtly portrays the distrust that the Yazdans have to endure in the following months. Tyler's gift, as in her other novels, is her ability to infuse the commonplace with meaning and grace. (Source: School Library Journal)


The Seniors Book Club will hold its annual Christmas Party on December 10th in the Library's Training Room on the second floor. Please come prepared to tell us a bit about a favourite book you read (other than our book club choices) and don't forget to bring a wrapped book (it need not be new, can be gently used) for our "secret" gift exchange. We'll provide coffee/tea and Christmas baking - a fine time will be had by all!

November Book Club Meetings

November's selection for both the Monday Evening Book Club and the Seniors Book Club is A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.

The Monday Evening Book Club will meet 7:00 pm, Monday, November 10th in the Library Program Room.

The Senior's Book Club will meet 2:00 pm on Wednesday, November 12th in the Library Training Room.

More about this acclaimed book by the author of "The Kite Runner":

A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
(Source: Penguin.com)

October Book Club Meetings

The Seniors Book Club will meet on October 15th (in the 2nd floor Training Room) to discuss Digging to America by Anne Tyler.

Two families arrive at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport in August 1997 to claim the Korean infants they have adopted. Strangers until that evening, they are destined to begin a friendship that will span their adoptive daughters' childhoods. Bitsy and Brad Donaldson are the quintessential middle-class, white American couple. Sami and Ziba Yazdan are Iranian Americans. From the beginning, the differences in the ways they will raise their daughters are obvious: Bitsy's well-meaning but overzealous efforts to retain her child's Korean heritage are evident in the chosen name–Jin-Ho–and in the Korean costumes that she dresses the girl in every year as they mark the anniversary of the adoption date. The Yazdans are comfortable with their daughter Susan's assimilation into their own Iranian-American culture. When Bitsy's widowed father begins to show romantic interest in Susan's grandmother, cultural differences are brought to a head. Tyler weaves a story that speaks to how we come to terms with our identity in multicultural America, and how we form friendships that move beyond the unease of differences. She does not dwell on the September 11 attacks, but subtly portrays the distrust that the Yazdans have to endure in the following months. Tyler's gift, as in her other novels, is her ability to infuse the commonplace with meaning and grace. (Source: School Library Journal)



The Monday Evening Book Club will meet on October 20th in the Program Room. We will be discussing the Governor General's Award winner of 2006:

The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens.

Here are some reviews:

From Booklist
Inspired by his own family history, Behrens has fashioned a paean to the strength of the human spirit that illuminates a piece of history. Fergus O'Brien is still in his teens in 1846 when blight strikes his potatoes and typhus his family, whose cabin is set aflame with his younger sisters dead and his parents lying ill inside. Famine, fever, and deprivation are his constant companions, from the workhouse to which he is sent, through his time with an outlaw band, an attack on the farm on which his father was a tenant, respite in a Liverpool bordello, and work in Wales, where he takes a fancy to his shanty-owner's "railroad wife," red-haired Molly, with whom he sets sail for the New World. The law of dreams is to keep moving, and that's what Fergus does, taking advantage of opportunities even as he is haunted by dreams and hurt by betrayal. Behrens tells this story in spare prose that distills ideas to their essence, making this absorbing historical fiction. Michele Leber

Newsday
". . . Behrens has fashioned a beautiful idiom for his book, studded with slippery archaisms and mournful, musical refrains . . . the language and the things it describes seem to be spun out of a single material. And we move through it as willingly, or compulsively, as the protagonist, the wind of love and hate at our backs."

New York Times Review of Books, Dec 10, 2006
The habit among too many contemporary American writers of historical fiction is to throw all sorts of magical nonsense into their stories because they feel the past is only a literary device anyway; an unreal place, where any old notion can be indulged. What Behrens knows, what he teaches us again in this masterly novel, is that the past was indeed wondrous, and terrible and strange, but that it was a very real place, lived by real men and women, and that it sits over us still.

For more information, visit the author's website.

September Book Club Selections

The Seniors Book Club will be meeting in the Library Program Room 2:00 pm. Wednesday, September 17th, to discuss
The Outlander by Gil Adamson.

More about this Canadian historical novel:
In 1903 a mysterious, desperate young woman flees alone across the west, one quick step ahead of the law. She has just become a widow by her own hand.

Gil Adamson's extraordinary novel opens in heart-pounding mid-flight and propels the reader through a gripping road trip with a twist -- the steely outlaw in this story is a grief-struck nineteen-year-old woman. As the young widow encounters characters of all stripes -- unsavoury, wheedling, greedy, lascivious, self-reliant, and occasionally generous and trustworthy -- Adamson weds her brilliant literary style to the gripping, moving, picaresque tale of one woman's deliberate journey into the wild.

Reviews:

"The Outlander deserves to be read twice, first for the plot and the complex characters which make this a page-turner of the highest order, and then a second time, slowly, to savor the marvel of Gil Adamson's writing. This novel is a true wonder."
- Ann Patchett


"Gil Adamson's first novel bolts off the opening page. . . An absorbing adventure from a Canadian poet and short story writer who knows how to keep us enthralled. . . . The Girl Being Chased is one of the most enduring figures of chivalric and chauvinistic literature. . . a strikingly pensive novel, anchored by the stark beauty of its setting and the harsh wisdom of its narrator. . . . Adamson is as captivating with descriptions of vast mountain ranges as she is with the smaller calamities. . . her story will unsettle your dreams just the same."
- Washington Post

(Source: www.anansi.ca)




The Monday Evening Book Club selection for September is Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. The Book Club will meet at 7:00 pm Monday, September 15th, in the Library Training Room. New members are welcome!

More information about this book may be found on our May Book Club post

Seniors August Book Club

The Seniors Book Club will meet on August 13th at 2 pm in the Training Room on the second floor of the library. Our choice this month is the hilarious memoir

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson.

The Life and Times is an account of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s, and it’s fascinating how Bryson revivifies, and makes fresh again, all the standard generalisations of adolescence and of that decade, with its leaps of prosperity (“the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or a waffle iron”) and its famously soul-deadening conformity. As he portrays it lovingly but with a cosmopolitan distance, Iowa was quite grotesque in its normalcy, possibly the whitest place in all of pre-multicultural America. It’s fairly easy to be sardonic like Vidal; it’s fiendishly difficult to be so likeable at the same time, the way Bryson is.
Beneath all his sweet nostalgia for his typical, long-ago childhood (Bryson is fifty-five), he paints the 1950s, the time of fallout shelters and drive-ins and the rise of fast food and television, as a manic-depressive period in history, “a curious blend of undiluted optimism and a kind of eager despair.” (Adapted from Books in Canada review).

Seniors Book Club Summer Selections

The Seniors Book Club will continue to meet over the summer months. Our selection for July 9th is Peony in Love by Lisa See. Our summer meetings will be held in the Library's Training Room on the second floor at 2:00 pm. See you there!

More about Peony in Love...

“I finally understand what the poets have written. In spring, moved to passion; in autumn only regret.”
For young Peony, betrothed to a suitor she has never met, these lyrics from The Peony Pavilion mirror her own longings. In the garden of the Chen Family Villa, amid the scent of ginger, green tea, and jasmine, a small theatrical troupe is performing scenes from this epic opera, a live spectacle few females have ever seen. Like the heroine in the drama, Peony is the cloistered daughter of a wealthy family, trapped like a good-luck cricket in a bamboo-and-lacquer cage. Though raised to be obedient, Peony has dreams of her own.

So begins Peony’s unforgettable journey of love and destiny, desire and sorrow–as Lisa See’s haunting new novel, based on actual historical events, takes readers back to seventeenth-century China.
(Source: www.randomhouse.com)

More information about Lisa See and her novel "Peony in Love" can be found on the author's website: http://www.lisasee.com/

Book Club Selections for June to December

Click on these links to see our book selections for the rest of the year:

Monday Evening Book Club, June-December 2008

Seniors Book Club, June-December 2008

Any comments or suggestions for future choices are always welcome!

June Book Club Selections

The Monday Evening Book Club will meet on June 9th at 7 pm in the Library Training Room on the second floor. This month's selection is

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

To give you an idea of the flavour of the book:

From Booklist
Gilbert, author of The Last American Man (2002) and a well-traveled I'll-try-anything-once journalist, chronicles her intrepid quest for spiritual healing. Driven to despair by a punishing divorce and an anguished love affair, Gilbert flees New York for sojourns in the three Is. She goes to Italy to learn the language and revel in the cuisine, India to meditate in an ashram, and Indonesia to reconnect with a healer in Bali. This itinerary may sound self-indulgent or fey, but there is never a whiny or pious or dull moment because Gilbert is irreverent, hilarious, zestful, courageous, intelligent, and in masterful command of her sparkling prose. A captivating storyteller with a gift for enlivening metaphors, Gilbert is Anne Lamott's hip, yoga-practicing, footloose younger sister, and readers will laugh and cry as she recounts her nervy and outlandish experiences and profiles the extraordinary people she meets. As Gilbert switches from gelato to kundalini Shakti to herbal cures Balinese-style, she ponders the many paths to divinity, the true nature of happiness, and the boon of good-hearted, sexy love. Gilbert's sensuous and audacious spiritual odyssey is as deeply pleasurable as it is enlightening. Donna Seaman

For more information about the book and Elizabeth Gilbert, visit the author's website.
You can also watch interviews with the author on YouTube.





The Seniors Book Club will meet on Wednesday, June 11 at 2 pm in the Library Training Room on the second floor. We will be discussing the Governor General's Award winner of 2006:

The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens.

Here are some reviews:

From Booklist
Inspired by his own family history, Behrens has fashioned a paean to the strength of the human spirit that illuminates a piece of history. Fergus O'Brien is still in his teens in 1846 when blight strikes his potatoes and typhus his family, whose cabin is set aflame with his younger sisters dead and his parents lying ill inside. Famine, fever, and deprivation are his constant companions, from the workhouse to which he is sent, through his time with an outlaw band, an attack on the farm on which his father was a tenant, respite in a Liverpool bordello, and work in Wales, where he takes a fancy to his shanty-owner's "railroad wife," red-haired Molly, with whom he sets sail for the New World. The law of dreams is to keep moving, and that's what Fergus does, taking advantage of opportunities even as he is haunted by dreams and hurt by betrayal. Behrens tells this story in spare prose that distills ideas to their essence, making this absorbing historical fiction. Michele Leber

Newsday
". . . Behrens has fashioned a beautiful idiom for his book, studded with slippery archaisms and mournful, musical refrains . . . the language and the things it describes seem to be spun out of a single material. And we move through it as willingly, or compulsively, as the protagonist, the wind of love and hate at our backs."

New York Times Review of Books, Dec 10, 2006
The habit among too many contemporary American writers of historical fiction is to throw all sorts of magical nonsense into their stories because they feel the past is only a literary device anyway; an unreal place, where any old notion can be indulged. What Behrens knows, what he teaches us again in this masterly novel, is that the past was indeed wondrous, and terrible and strange, but that it was a very real place, lived by real men and women, and that it sits over us still.

For more information, visit the author's website.

May Book Club Selections

The Seniors' Book Club selection for May is Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. The May Book Club meeting will be held at 2:00 pm Wednesday May 14th in the Library Training Room on the second floor.

About this book...

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.

So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.

Advance praise for Loving Frank:

“It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright’s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.”
——Jane Hamilton

“I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she’ll ever leave.”
–Elizabeth Berg

(Source: www.randomhouse.com)




The May selection for the Monday Evening Book Club is Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami.
The meeting will be held Monday May 12th at 7:00 pm in the Library Training Room on the second floor of the Library. New members are welcome!
For more information about our book for May, click here:

April Book Club Selections

The Seniors Book Club will be discussing Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill. We will meet in the 1st floor program room on April 9 at 2 pm. New members are always welcome.

For more information about "Lullabies for Little Criminals", please click here.







The Monday Evening Book Club's selection for this month is The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson. We will meet in the 1st floor program room on April 14 at 7 pm. New members are always welcome.

For more information about "The Other Side of the Bridge", please click here.

March Book Club Selections

The Seniors' Book Club will meet on Wednesday, March 12th in the Library Program Room to discuss "Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?" by Anita Rau Badami.

Set against the tumultuous backdrop of a fragmenting Punjab and moving between Canada and India, Can you Hear the Nightbird Call? charts the interweaving stories of three Indian women – Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo – each in search of a resting place amid rapidly changing personal and political landscapes.



Review Quotes:

"As Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? shows, the enduring state of ‘in-between’ that is part of both immigrant life in Canada and Sikh life in post-partition India is equally rich in the complex joy of struggle and the possibility for tension, misunderstanding, and, sometimes, violence."
–Calgary Herald

"Nightbird brilliantly tells the timeless story of immigrants who face hardship as they try to build new lives, straddling two worlds and never really fitting into either."
–The Vancouver Sun
Source: www.randomhouse.ca




The Monday Evening Book Club selection for March is "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" by Kim Edwards. The Book Club will meet Monday, March 10th in the Library Program Room at 7:00 pm. New members are welcome!

For a summary, and more information about "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" please click here

Book Club Kits now available at SAPL

This year we are offering a new service to all you book club enthusiasts out there. We have assembled 10 Book Club Kits to help your discussion group have a successful meeting with minimal preparation required on your part.

Each kit contains 8 copies of the book, a resource guide with information about the book and the author, tips on how to lead a discussion, questions to discuss, and suggestions for your next pick.

The loan period for a kit is 6 weeks (no renewals). The person who checks out the kit is financially responsible for any lost or damaged items. Please reserve Book Club Kits at the Adult Information Desk on the 2nd floor of the library (459-1682).

Here are the titles we have so far:

February Seniors Book Club Selection

The Seniors Book Club will meet on Wednesday, February 13th, at 2pm. We will discuss

The Other Side of the Bridge
by Mary Lawson

In this follow-up to her acclaimed Crow Lake, Lawson again explores the moral quandaries of life in the Canadian North. At the story's poles are Arthur Dunn, a stolid, salt-of-the-earth farmer, and his brother, Jake, a handsome, smooth-talking snake in the grass, whose lifelong mutual resentments and betrayals culminate in a battle over the beautiful Laura, with Arthur, it seems, the unlikely winner. Observing, and eventually intervening in their saga, is Ian, a teenager who goes to work on Arthur's farm to get close to Laura, seeing in her the antithesis of the mother who abandoned his father and him. It's a standard romantic dilemma—who to choose: the goodhearted but dull provider or the seductive but unreliable rogue?—but it gains depth by being set in Lawson's epic narrative of the Northern Ontario town of Struan as it weathers Depression, war and the coming of television. It's a world of pristine landscapes and brutal winters, where beauty and harshness are inextricably intertwined, as when Ian brings home a puppy that gambols adorably about—and then playfully kills Ian's even cuter pet bunny. Lawson's evocative writing untangles her characters' confused impulses toward city and country, love and hate, good and evil. (From Publisher's Weekly)

February Evening Book Club Selection

On Monday, February 11th, the Monday Evening Book Club will meet in the program room at 7 pm. New members are always welcome! We will discuss the Canada Reads 2007 winning title:

Lullabies for Little Criminals
by Heather O'Neill


In her debut novel, This American Life contributor O'Neill offers a narrator, Baby, coming of age in Montreal just before her 12th birthday. Her mother is long dead. Her father, Jules, is a junkie who shuttles her from crumbling hotels to rotting apartments, his short-term work or moneymaking schemes always undermined by his rage and paranoia. Baby tries to screen out the bad parts by hanging out at the community center and in other kids' apartments, by focusing on school when she can and by taking mushrooms and the like. (She finds sex mostly painful.) Stints in foster care, family services and juvenile detention ("nostalgia could kill you there") usually end in Jules's return and his increasingly erratic behavior. Baby's intelligence and self-awareness can't protect her from parental and kid-on-kid violence, or from the seductive power of being desired by Alphonse, a charismatic predator, on the one hand, and by Xavier, an idealistic classmate, on the other. When her lives collide, Baby faces choices she is not equipped to make. (From Publisher's Weekly)