TOWN OF ESOPUS LIBRARY

TOWN OF ESOPUS LIBRARY
BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP
Reconnect, Relax, Become a Regular...

READER'S CHOICE

BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP


Scintillating Discussions since 1999!

MEETS MONTHLY


The group is casual and the discussions are informal.
The library will provide the books.
The monthly selections are suggested and chosen by the readers.
Reading interests are contemporary fiction, classics, memoirs and popular nonfiction.
New members and new suggestions are always welcome.

For more information, ask at the Library's circulation desk.
See the library's monthly calendar of events for meeting dates.

new block
See our Facebook page!! Town of Esopus Library
A forum for Town of Esopus Library patrons
to share their thoughts about recently read books.

Thank you, and good reading.
***********************************

Hudson Valley Reads
Are you looking for a good book to read or listen to?
Sign up for our e-alerts and get great book suggestions by email.
Hudson Valley Reads: Newsletters on Books


Send us
Book Suggestions



Upcoming Selections

October 8 - Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
From Publishers Weekly
The letters comprising this small charming novel begin in 1946, when single, 30-something author Juliet Ashton (nom de plume Izzy Bickerstaff) writes to her publisher to say she is tired of covering the sunny side of war and its aftermath. When Guernsey farmer Dawsey Adams finds Juliet's name in a used book and invites articulate—and not-so-articulate—neighbors to write Juliet with their stories, the book's epistolary circle widens, putting Juliet back in the path of war stories. The occasionally contrived letters jump from incident to incident—including the formation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society while Guernsey was under German occupation—and person to person in a manner that feels disjointed. But Juliet's quips are so clever, the Guernsey inhabitants so enchanting and the small acts of heroism so vivid and moving that one forgives the authors (Shaffer died earlier this year) for not being able to settle on a single person or plot. Juliet finds in the letters not just inspiration for her next work, but also for her life—as will readers. (Aug.)

November 4 - Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. SignatureReviewed by Marcel TherouxIn her 2002 speculative novel, Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood depicted a dystopic planet tumbling toward apocalypse. The world she envisaged was in the throes of catastrophic climate change, its wealthy inhabitants dwelling in sterile secure compounds, its poor ones in the dangerous pleeblands of decaying inner cities. Mass extinctions had taken place, while genetic experiments had populated the planet with strange new breeds of animal: liobams, Mo'Hairs, rakunks. At the end of the book, we left its central character, Jimmy, in the aftermath of a devastating man-made plague, as he wondered whether to befriend or attack a ragged band of strangers. The novel seemed complete, closing on a moment of suspense, as though Atwood was content simply to hint at the direction life would now take. In her profoundly imagined new book, The Year of the Flood, she revisits that same world and its catastrophe. Like Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood begins just after the catastrophe and then tracks back in time over the corrupt and degenerate world that preceded it. But while the first novel focused on the privileged elite in the compounds and the morally bankrupt corporations, The Year of the Flood depicts more of the world of the pleebs, an edgy no-man's land inhabited by criminals, sex workers, dropouts and the few individuals who are trying to resist the grip of the corporations.The novel centers on the lives of Ren and Toby, female members of a fundamentalist sect of Christian environmentalists, the God's Gardeners. Led by the charismatic Adam One, whose sermons and eco-hymns punctuate the narrative, the God's Gardeners are preparing for life after the prophesied Waterless Flood. Atwood plays some of their religion for laughs: their hymns have a comically bouncing, churchy rhythm, and we learn that both Ren and Toby have been drawn toward the sect for nonreligious reasons. Yet the gentleness and benignity of the Gardeners is a source of hope as well as humor. As absurd as some of their beliefs appear, Atwood seems to be suggesting that they're a better option than the naked materialism of the corporations.This is a gutsy and expansive novel, rich with ideas and conceits, but overall it's more optimistic than Oryx and Crake. Its characters have a compassion and energy lacking in Jimmy, the wounded and floating lothario at the previous novel's center.Each novel can be enjoyed independently of the other, but what's perhaps most impressive is the degree of connection between them. Together, they form halves of a single epic. Characters intersect. Plots overlap. Even the tiniest details tessellate into an intricate whole. In the final pages, we catch up with Jimmy once more, as he waits to encounter the strangers. This time around, Atwood commits herself to a dramatic and hopeful denouement that's in keeping with this novel's spirit of redemption.Marcel Theroux's most recent novel, Far North, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in June.



  • 2010 Selections
    • Little chapel on the River: A Pub, a Town and the Search for What Matters Most by Gwendolyn Bounds
    • Possession by A.S. Byatt
    • The Thirteenth Tale: a Novel by Daine Setterfield
    • The Little Book by Selden Edwards
    • Black & White and Dead All Over by John Darnton
    • The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst
    • The Third angel by Alice Hoffman
    • Body Surfing by Anita Shreve
    • The Summer I Dared by Barbara Delinsky
    • Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
      by Mary Ann Shaffer
    • Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
    • Kissing Christmas Goodbye by MC Beaton
  • 2009 Selections
    • Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
    • Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
    • Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
    • Blindness by Jose' Saramago
    • Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
    • Painted Drum by Louise Erdich
    • Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman
    • Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
    • Footprints of God by Greg Iles
    • The Library Book by John Fiske
    • Night Fall by Nelson DeMille
    • Sweet Revenge by Diane Mott Davidson


  • 2008 Selections
    • Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
    • Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing
    • Quiet Game by Greg Iles
    • Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst
    • Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
    • Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
    • The Society by Michael Palmer
    • Amagansett by Mark Mills
    • The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days
      and the Triumph of Hope by Jonathan Alter
    • Boom!: Voices of the Sixties by Tom Brokaw
    • A different Kind of Christmas by Alex Haley

  • 2007 Selections
    • 1776 - David McCullough
    • Atonement - McEwan
    • American Pastoral - Roth
    • The Laramie Project - Kaufman
    • The Sign of the Book– A Cliff Janeway Bookman Novel – Dunning
      Also: Fierce Attachments - Vivian Gornick
    • The Known World - Edward Jones
    • The Poe Shadow - Matthew Pearl
    • Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver
    • A Stolen Season - Steve Hamilton
    • Lazy B: Growing up on a cattle ranch in the American Southwest - Sandra Day O’Connor & H. Alan Day
    • The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue
    • Santa Cruise by Mary Higgins Clark
      and Carol Higgins Clark



    Top
    Updated 9/03/10 by M
     home button