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")

Seniors' Favourites

Better late than never - here are some of the favourite reads our Seniors group members presented at December's Christmas Party. It was quite a mix of old and new classics, fiction and biographies. We all discovered something we can't wait to get our hands on to read.

Five smooth stones by Ann Fairbairn
The cloister and the hearth by Charles Reade (being re-ordered)
The Thornbirds by Colleen Mccullough (being re-ordered)
My left foot by Christie Brown (being re-ordered)
Mercy by Alissa York
A fine balance by Rohinton Mistry
Small island by Andrea Levy
The far pavillions (out of print, library only has DVD)
The Mitford years series by Jan Karon
The pillars of the earth by Ken Follet
Those who save us by Jenna Blum
The Shack by William P. Young
The year of wonders by Geraldine Brooks
The frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys
Stolen innocence by Elissa Wall (biography)
Three cups of tea by Greg Mortenson (biography)

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.