Adult Book Clubs

The Holmes library offers two book discussion groups for adult readers. We continue to offer our monthly evening group, and have added an afternoon book club more convenient for our Senior readers. Please feel free to try either group!

Copies of the books are available at the Circulation Desk, or can be reserved through our iBistro catalog. For more information or to sign up, contact Jean for the evening group and Susan for the afternoon group.

Traditional Evening Group

      Books we have read

Afternoon Readers

      Books we have read

Evening Group

Afternoon Readers

Sudden Sea
by R. A. Scotti
Tuesday, March 23, 6:30pm

From Publishers Weekly

Former journalist and mystery novelist Scotti successfully applies her skills in both genres to this detailed retelling of the 1938 hurricane that ripped across seven Northeastern states and killed 682 people, "the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history-worse than the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire, or any Mississippi flood." Although the enormity of the destruction has been written about before, Scotti focuses on "a few experiences that seem representative of many more" through interviews with hurricane survivors, their families and friends, as well as previously published recollections by survivors, including the late Katharine Hepburn. Scotti's detailed look at the general extent of the hurricane's destruction adds poignancy to individual stories, such as those of Joseph Matoes, who sees his children swept away from their school bus as they are battered by huge waves; Lillian Tetlow and Jack Kinney, two sweethearts who survive a storm that destroys Napatree, R.I., and who later marry; and Charles Pierce, a "green and unsure" junior forecaster for a woefully underprepared U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) who stands against his experienced superiors as the only forecaster to recognize the danger of the hurricane. Scotti also skillfully presents the details of a hurricane, although she reminds us that "after decades of study and with all the technological tools of the trade... we still cannot predict a hurricane more than twenty-four hours in advance."

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Books We Have Read

February	Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
January '10	The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser	~
December	In a Gilded Cage by Rhys Bowen
November	Never Tell a Lie by Hallie Ephron (author visit)
October	The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
September	The Widow's War by Sally Gunning
August	The Eleventh Man by Ivan Doig
June	First Light by Philip R. Craig and William Tapply	~
May	Black Mass by Dick Lehr
April	Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland
March	Limitations by Scott Turow
February	Harriet and Isabella by Patricia O'Brien
January	How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life by Mameve Medwed
December	The Childrens Blizzard by David Laskin	~
November	Deafening by Frances Itani
October	Blessings by Anna Quindlen
September	North River by Pete Hamill
	Death in Belmont by Sebastion Junger
	Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Afternoon Readers' Book Club

For more information or to sign up, please contact Susan at (781)293-2271 or by email. This month's selection...

Reading Lolita in Tehran
by Azar Nafisi
Tuesday, April 6, 1 pm

From Publishers Weekly

This book transcends categorization as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is superb as all three. Literature professor Nafisi returned to her native Iran after a long education abroad, remained there for some 18 years, and left in 1997 for the United States, where she now teaches at Johns Hopkins. Woven through her story are the books she has taught along the way, among them works by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James and Austen. She casts each author in a new light, showing, for instance, how to interpret The Great Gatsby against the turbulence of the Iranian revolution and how her students see Daisy Miller as Iraqi bombs fall on Tehran Daisy is evil and deserves to die, one student blurts out. Lolita becomes a brilliant metaphor for life in the Islamic republic. The desperate truth of Lolita's story is... the confiscation of one individual's life by another, Nafisi writes. The parallel to women's lives is clear: we had become the figment of someone else's dreams. A stern ayatollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king, had come to rule our land.... And he now wanted to re-create us. Nafisi's Iran, with its omnipresent slogans, morality squads and one central character struggling to stay sane, recalls literary totalitarian worlds from George Orwell's 1984 to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Nafisi has produced an original work on the relationship between life and literature.



Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Books We Have Read

March	Watchers of Time by Charles Todd
February	The Seduction of Water by Carol Goodman
January	A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve
December	The Cat Who Came For Christmas by Cleveland Amory
November	Lily of the Valley by Suzanne Strempek Shea