all about book clubs
Welcome to All About Book Clubs! What better way is there to promote reading than to act as a forum for people who love books and enjoy sharing their ideas about what they've read? With this webpage, FOL hopes to launch a community-wide conversation about our favorite pastime - READING!
We will feature book reviews, interviews with authors, book club reading lists, etc. We hope your club will join in the conversation! To submit articles or ideas for this page, contact the FOL office at 215-8775 or info@friendsoftheknoxcolib.org.
information exchange
WEST KNOX BRANCH BOOK CLUB
A Book Group has formed at West Knox Library--we meet once a month at the library, 100 Golf Club Road. Meetings are on the fourth Monday of each month, from 10:30 a.m. to 11:45a.m. All are welcome. The book we will discuss on Monday, February 25, 2008 is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Wells.
REVIEW: Triangle by Katharine Weber
It's arrival night to begin a week at Edisto Island, South Carolina. I unpack my clothes, make up the bed, and then line up the books, the annual vacation ritual. Day One, and I choose Triangle, a novel lent by a good reader friend.
Based on the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in Manhattan, the author, Katharine Weber, blends fact and fiction to draw the reader into the life of Esther Gottesfeld, the last living survivor of the tragic fire.
Esther's grand daughter, Rebecca, has heard her grandmother's story of her personal experience countless times. When a historian, Ruth Zion, pursues several discrepancies of Esther's story, Rebecca and her partner, a well-known composer George Botkin, begin an investigation of their own to get at the truth of the events that resulted in Esther's survival, even as hundreds, including her sister Pauline died.
One of the most fascinating parts of the story is George's music. Inspired by patterns in nature and human events, he ultimately composes a piece based on the Triangle fire and the fate of Esther, Pauline, and Sam, her sister's fiancé, a triangle of their own.
Triangle is at once a love story, or several; a tale of survival, sacrifice, and heroism; a detective story; and a fascinating glimpse of how music and stories are created. Finally, it is the perfect way to begin a week of reading, relaxation, and rejuvenation.
Ginna Mashburn
ADULT READING CHALLENGE
The Knox County Public Library is proud to partner with the YWCA's Committee on Social Justice to bring a special reading program to you. This summer, you are invited to join the "Passport Program" as part of the KCPL Adult Reading Challenge. The YWCA has designed discussion groups around THE KITE RUNNER and THE NAMESAKE to encourage each of us to view the world from a different perspective. Please see the KCPL calendar for a list of times and dates for these discussions.
Middlemarch: A Book Review
The Breakfast Book Club had an ambitious goal for its March 13th meeting: to read the lengthy but impressive 19th century novel, Middlemarch, by George Eliot. The discussion was lively and members seemed gratified that they had met the challenge. Some of the group pointed out that they would forever measure other novels they read by the high standard set by George Eliot. Not only is her writing so perfect for the subject matter, it is full of impressive quotations by the omniscient narrator, a persona impossible to separate from the author herself.
As Eliot explores relationships of all sorts: parent-child, husband-wife, sibling, friend, uncle or aunt, she shows that the people who are successful in life are those who can live outside themselves and show love to other people. In fact, Eliot has Dorothea, the main character, express her view of what constitutes a life well lived: "That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."
At once a love story, or several; a look at the marriages that do not work as well as those that do; a satire of the gossip and eavesdropping that characterize middle-class social life; and a picture of the ways that good, but imperfect, people affect those around them, Middlemarch is abundantly worthy of its selection as an outstanding book in English literature. Ina Hughs, writing in a Sunday, March 18th News Sentinel review, noted that The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books (W. W. Norton, $14.95), edited by J. Pedar Zane, chose Middlemarch as one of its ten greatest works of literature of all times. Others listed in this assessment were Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), Lolita (Nabokov) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), Hamlet (Shakespeare), The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), In Search of Lost Time (Proust), and The Stories of Anton (Chechov).
Ginna Mashburn
Writer Recommendations
I've just read a little book that some of you might enjoy, Nora Ephron's hilarious I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts On Being A Woman. While those of us women over fifty might identify with it more, I think men and women of all ages will find it funny, sad, and thoughtful. One chapter is entitled "On Rapture," and it's about her love affair with fiction. She writes, "And finally, one day, I read a novel that is probably the most rapture-inducing book of my adult life. On a chaise lounge at the beach on a beautiful summer day, I open Wilkie Collin's masterpiece, The Woman In White, probably the first great work of mystery fiction ever written . . . , and I am instantly lost to the world."
Her reference to Collins echoes a recommendation by Elizabeth Kostova, author of
The Historian, when she was here in November. She was asked what author aspiring writers should read, and she cited Collins' The Moonstone as well as The Woman in White. Collins is a 19th century British novelist, contemporary of Charles Dickens, and I'm looking forward to reading these two novels over the holidays. After all, two fine writers' recommendations deserve our attention.
-- Ginna Mashburn