Book Club Announces New Selections, Full Schedule
November’s book-club meeting was a great success. With seven in attendance (five prior members and two newcomers), Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees was discussed. All enjoyed the nuances of this incredibly captivating novel.
On Sunday, December 17, the book-club discussion will center around Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. We hope this meeting will be just as well-attended because this, too, is a very engaging novel. Set in an unnamed South American country, terrorists attack at a birthday party for a Japanese industrialist in the vice president’s home. Captors and their prisoners settle into a strange domesticity, and romantic liaisons soon develop.
On Sunday, January 14, Fall on Your Knees by Canadian playwright and actor Ann-Marie MacDonald will be discussed. Set in the coal-mining communities of Nova Scotia in the early part of this century, the novel centers on four sisters and their relationships with each other and with their father.
The OPALGA book club also decided on their selections through April, 2007:
February Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
The son of a poet with a “wild mental imbalance” and a professor with a “pitch-black dark side,” Burroughs is sent to live with Dr. Finch (his mother’s therapist) when his parents separate and his mother comes out as a lesbian.
March Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
From her childhood in Harlem to her young adulthood, Lorde writes in detail of her cultural heritage from the Caribbean island of Grenada and recalls what it was like to be a young, black lesbian in the 1950s.
April The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Esperanza Cordero, a girl coming of age in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, uses poems and stories to express thoughts and emotions about her oppressive environment.
Note: January’s meeting has been changed to Sunday, January 14, because the holiday brunch has been scheduled for Sunday, January 21.
The book club meetings take place on Sundays from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at The OPALGA Center, 947 Garfield, Oak Park. All books are available through amazon.com. In addition, copies will be made available at the Oak Park Public Library as well as at The Book Table. Remember, OPALGA receives a charitable donation from The Book Table for each book purchased there. Please let them know that you are purchasing your book as part of the OPALGA book club.
Other books being considered (join us and voice your preferences) include the following:
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. A womanizing Czech surgeon is forced to flee Russian invasion and takes on menial roles.
• The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. A young woman and a married mother fall in love.
• Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw. An Olympic swimmer is seduced and edged out for the gold medal by a rival.
• When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago. A memoir recounts childhood in rural Puerto Rico and teenage years in New York City.
• The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. An interracial affair in pre-AIDS London.
• Sula by Toni Morrison. Two women—friends since childhood—are reunited as grown women.
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Story of a young, black woman on a journey of self-discovery.
• Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan. A tale of two doomed Osage Indian families in the 1950s.
