Tuesday, January 13: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Tuesday, February 10: Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann
Tuesday, March 10: An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
Anna DiMartino
Tuesdays, 4–5:30 PM
January 13, February 10, March 10
Joan & Irwin Jacobs Music Room
$10/15 for each session
Are you an avid reader, or would you simply like to read more? Would you like to read more thoughtfully? Are you intellectually curious and longing to be with a group of like-minded folks?
Join us for lively and thought-provoking discussion on award-winning (or nominated) literature, primarily fiction.
Wine and snacks provided.
Tuesday, January 13: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon
Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year
"A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."—The Washington Post
The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book.
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
Tuesday, February 10: Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann
This National Book Award finalist is a revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann.
In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her.
Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder."
In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.
Tuesday, March 10: An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day
In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II.
Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.
Immediately after you register, look for a confirmation email and receipt. In the week preceding the class start date, you will receive another email with more details.