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")

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!