October Book Club Selections

The Seniors Book Club will be meeting Wednesday. October 14th at 2:00 pm in the Library Training Room. Our October selection is Good to a Fault by Alberta author Marina Endicott. New members are welcome!

More about this award-winning book.....

In a moment of self-absorption, Clara Purdy’s life takes a sharp left turn when she crashes into a beat-up car carrying an itinerant family of six. The Gage family had been travelling to a new life in Fort McMurray, but bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer rather than remnants of the accident. Recognizing their need as her responsibility, Clara tries to do the right thing and moves the children, husband and horrible grandmother into her own house—then has to cope with the consequences of practical goodness.

What, exactly, does it mean to be good? When is sacrifice merely selfishness? What do we owe in this life and what do we deserve? Marina Endicott looks at life and death through the compassionate lens of a born novelist: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.

Praise for Good to a Fault

“Marina Endicott is really funny, a sweet-natured but sharp-eyed and quick-tongued social observer in the Jane Austen-Barbara Pym-Anne Tyler tradition, who can wring love, revulsion and hilarity from readers in a single page.”
–T.F. Rigelhof, The Globe and Mail

“Endicott manages to create utterly realistic characters with believable dialogue and thoughts, whether adult or child. And she makes them sympathetic even when they are doing something wrong…Like Endicott’s first book, Open Arms, and reminiscent of the work of Carol Shields, Good to a Fault is a profoundly humane novel.”
–Candace Fertile, The Vancouver Sun

(Source: www.free-handbooks.com)

The Monday Evening Book Club will be meeting in October on the third Monday of the month: Monday, October 19th at 7:00 pm in the Program Room. The book for discussion will be the well-known classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

More about this American classic:

"A profoundly moving novel, and an honest and true one. It cuts right to the heart of life...If you miss A Tree Grows in Brooklyn you will deny yourself a rich experience...It is a poignant and deeply understanding story of childhood and family relationships. The Nolans lived in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn from 1902 until 1919...Their daughter Francie and their son Neely knew more than their fair share of the privations and sufferings that are the lot of a great city's poor. Primarily this is Francie's book. She is a superb feat of characterization, an imaginative, alert, resourceful child. And Francie's growing up and beginnings of wisdom are the substance of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."
New York Times

"One of the books of the century."--New York Public Library

(Source: www.harpercollins.com)

September Book Club Selections

The Seniors Book Club is taking a summer break and will meet again on Wednesday, September 9th, at 2 pm in the second floor Training Room. We will discuss Reading by Lightning, the exciting first novel by Manitoba writer Joan Thomas. The book just won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean) and was the winner of an online poll in The Winnipeg Foundation's On the Same Page Literacy program (which means the novel will be promoted in Manitoba schools and to the public in general as THE book to read this year).

Here is a glowing review from Quill & Quire:

Most first-time novelists strain for the gold ring; Joan Thomas grabs it effortlessly in this wonderful book. Undoubtedly, her years editing, reviewing, and writing about other writers’ work in The Globe and Mail and elsewhere – winning a National Magazine Award in the process – have helped hone her skills.

Reading by Lightning begins in Lancashire and rural Manitoba in the early years of the 20th century. William Piper has reluctantly emigrated to Canada as part of a shady scheme that lines its Christian leaders’ pockets. Since then, he has hung on by dint of endless, soul-winnowing labour, yet he manages to send his 16-year-old daughter Lily to England, ostensibly to assist her widowed grandmother but in actuality as a way of removing her from the clutches of her evangelical mother.

Lily blossoms in England, finding warmth and easy affection. George, her autodidact cousin (“a brain on a stick,” his father growls), opens the world to her, and the two become “great pals.” But Lily is compelled to make them more – an impulse fuelled by hormones but doomed by history. The Second World War revs up, and George, desperate for experience, submits himself to the machine.

As George is drawn into the war, Lily is recalled to the farm in Canada to care for her ailing mother. Grieving and resentful, she finds herself back in a domestic trap of emotional and sensory deprivation. There is a risk that the novel could get stuck there too, but fortunately Thomas provides a surprising plot twist to keep the narrative moving. Although the war is far from over, Thomas’s final extraordinary scene leaves the reader with a sense of possibility and a faith in the future.

Thomas’s finely nuanced sensibility variously evokes Austen, Alice Munro, and Richard B. Wright. She captures verbal intonations as if she has overheard them, and conjures characters so vividly that we can almost reach out and touch them. A remarkable debut.

Reviewed by Maureen Garvie (from the December 2008 issue)

... and an interview with Joan Thomas.

The Monday Evening Book Club 's next meeting will take place on September 14 in the main floor Program Room. We will discuss the novel Spanish Fly by award-winning Canadian writer Will Ferguson. This novel is somewhat of a departure from his previous humour and travel writing - here is a synopsis:

Jack McGreary is a young man with a troubled soul and a gift for scams. Raised by his father in the dying town of Paradise Flats amid the dust storms of the 1930s, Jack has learned to live by his wits. And when a pair of fast-talking swindlers named Virgil Ray and Miss Rose blow through town, Jack joins forces with them.

Together they go on a crime spree across the Southwest, pulling a series of elaborate and often hilarious cons. Young Jack is swept along into a world of hot jazz and cold calculating crimes of the heart, as the sexual tension between him and Miss Rose grows. Someone is being set up. (Source: www.willferguson.ca)

For a wealth of background information on this novel, go to the author's website.

June Book Club Selections

The Seniors Book Club will meet Wednesday, June 10th at 2 pm in the Training Room to discuss Spanish Fly by Will Ferguson.

Raised by his father in the dying town of Paradise Flats, Jack McGreary has learned to live by his wits. The year is 1939. Drought has turned America's heartland into a dust bowl, and the world is on the brink of war. Jack's father wants him to head north to Canada to sign up in the fight against Fascism. But when a pair of fast-talking swindlers named Virgil and Miss Rose blow through town, Jack falls in with them instead. Together, they go on a crime spree across the Southwest, staging a series of inventive and often hilarious cons, while sexual tension between Jack and Miss Rose grows ... Someone is being set up. (Source: amazon.ca)

For more information, visit Will Ferguson's website.




The Monday Evening Book Club will meet June 8th in the Training Room to discuss the memoir Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

For more information about the book and some interesting links, click here.

May Book Club Selections

The Monday Evening Book Club will meet Monday, May 11th at 7:00 pm in the Program Room to discuss People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.


Find more information about this Book Club selection...

For more about Geraldine Brooks and her works, visit the author's website.




The Seniors Book Club will meet Wednesday, May 13th at 2:00 pm in the Training Room to discuss the classic novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

More information about this American classic:

"A profoundly moving novel, and an honest and true one. It cuts right to the heart of life...If you miss A Tree Grows in Brooklyn you will deny yourself a rich experience...It is a poignant and deeply understanding story of childhood and family relationships. The Nolans lived in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn from 1902 until 1919...Their daughter Francie and their son Neely knew more than their fair share of the privations and sufferings that are the lot of a great city's poor. Primarily this is Francie's book. She is a superb feat of characterization, an imaginative, alert, resourceful child. And Francie's growing up and beginnings of wisdom are the substance of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."
New York Times

"One of the books of the century."--New York Public Library

(Source: www.harpercollins.com)

April Book Club Selections

The Seniors Book Club will meet in the 2nd floor Training Room on April 15th to discuss Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography Infidel.

Readers with an eye on European politics will recognize Ali as the Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament who faced death threats after collaborating on a film about domestic violence against Muslim women with controversial director Theo van Gogh (who was himself assassinated). Even before then, her attacks on Islamic culture as "brutal, bigoted, [and] fixated on controlling women" had generated much controversy. In this suspenseful account of her life and her internal struggle with her Muslim faith, she discusses how these views were shaped by her experiences amid the political chaos of Somalia and other African nations, where she was subjected to genital mutilation and later forced into an unwanted marriage. While in transit to her husband in Canada, she decided to seek asylum in the Netherlands, where she marveled at the polite policemen and government bureaucrats. Ali is up-front about having lied about her background in order to obtain her citizenship, which led to further controversy in early 2006, when an immigration official sought to deport her and triggered the collapse of the Dutch coalition government. Apart from feelings of guilt over van Gogh's death, her voice is forceful and unbowed—like Irshad Manji, she delivers a powerful feminist critique of Islam informed by a genuine understanding of the religion. (Source: Publishers Weekly)

Follow these links for further information, including interviews with the author:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's biography on the AHA Foundation's website (established by Hirsi Ali and her supporters)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Anderson Cooper 360
Ayaan Hirsi Ali interviewed on Swedish Television
Fareed Zakaria interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Articles written by Hirsi Ali for the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research:

"My view of Islam."
"Islam's silent moderates."
"Muslim women are the key to change."

And for balance, a critical review of the book published in The Economist.





The Monday Evening Book Club will meet in the Program Room on April 20th at 7 pm. This month we will discuss the 2009 Canada Reads winner The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill.

More information about this book ...

March Book Club Selections

The Monday Evening Book Club will meet at 7:00 pm Monday, March 9th in the Library Program Room to discuss the Giller-award winning book Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay.

For more about the book...

For a video interview with Elizabeth Hay, and more reviews of "Late Nights on Air" visit the author's homepage


The Seniors Book Club will meet at 2:00 pm Wednesday, March 11th in the Training Room to discuss People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

More information about this intriguing book:

Inspired by the true story of a mysterious codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, People of the Book is a sweeping adventure through five centuries of history. From its creation in Muslim-ruled, medieval Spain, the illuminated manuscript makes a series of perilous journeys: through Inquisition-era Venice, fin-de-siecle Vienna, and the Nazi sacking of Sarajevo.

In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed manuscript, which has been rescued once again from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with figurative paintings. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—she becomes determined to unlock the book’s mysteries. As she seeks the counsel of scientists and specialists, the reader is ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past, tracing the book’s journey from its creation to its salvation.

In Bosnia during World War II, a Muslim risks his life to protect it from the Nazis. In the hedonistic salons of Vienna in 1894, the book becomes a pawn in an emerging contest between the city’s cultured cosmopolitanism and its rising anti-Semitism. In Venice in 1609, a Catholic priest saves it from Inquisition book burnings. In Tarragona in 1492, the scribe who wrote the text has his family destroyed amid the agonies of enforced exile. And in Seville in 1480, the reason for the Haggadah’s extraordinary illuminations is finally disclosed.

(Source: www.geraldinebrooks.com)

February Book Club Meetings

On February 9th, 2009 the Monday Evening Book Club will discuss Bill Bryson's hilarious autobiography The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. We will meet in the Program Room at 7 pm.

More about this book ...

For more information about the author, go to Bill Bryson's website.

You can also watch an interview with Bill Bryson about his autobiography.

... and don't miss this priceless glimpse of 50's government propaganda entitled "Duck and Cover".







On February 11, 2009 the Seniors Book Club will meet in the 2nd floor Training Room to discuss The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. Published under the title Someone knows my name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, the book won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book and the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Most recently it was nominated as a 2009 Canada Reads selection. This synopsis of the novel is quoted from the contest website:

Over the course of this epic novel, Aminata is transformed into a storyteller extraordinaire. She spins the astonishing tale of her remarkable travels from Africa to America and back again. Along the way, a sojourn in Nova Scotia illuminates a long-neglected chapter in Canadian history.

Aminata’s autobiography — or, in her words, “ghost story” — begins with her idyllic childhood in West Africa. Happy times are cut short when she is abducted at age 11, placed in chains, taken across the sea and forced into slavery at an indigo plantation in South Carolina.

But Aminata is a survivor and this is just one chapter in her remarkable life story. In a fitting twist for a book featured on Canada Reads, Aminata discovers that literacy just might be her ticket to a new life.

There is a wealth of background information available on this topic. Here are some interesting links for you to peruse:

Lawrence Hill's Website

A video interview with Lawrence Hill

Black History Videos

An online exhibit of Daniel G. Hill's life and work (created by his son, Lawrence Hill)

Black Loyalist documents (including a transcription of "The Book of Negroes")