December Book Club

The Wednesday Letters by Jason F. Wright

Get ready for a super easy read, entertaining, pulling at your heart strings kind of book. We will be meeting on December 8th at Maghin Abernathy's house. We will be doing a used book exchange for our Christmas meeting. Please bring a wrapped used book that you may have laying around the house. We will do a greedy santa to exchange books. Directions to Maghin's will be sent via e-mail.

In the wake of his bestselling Christmas Jars comes a sweetly crafted story from Wright, a Virginia businessman. Jack and Laurel Cooper are two hardworking, loving Christian pillars of the community who die in each other's arms one night in the bed-and-breakfast that they own and operate. The event calls their three grown children home for the funeral, including their youngest son, a fugitive from the law who must face an outstanding warrant for his arrest and confront his one true love, now engaged to another man. As events unfold around the funeral, the three children discover a treasure trove of family history in the form of Wednesday letters-notes that Jack wrote to his wife every single week of their married lives. As they read, the children brush across the fabric of a devoted marriage that survived a devastating event kept secret all these years. It's a lovely story: heartening, wholesome, humorous, suspenseful and redemptive. It resonates with the true meaning of family and the life-healing power of forgiveness all wrapped up in a satisfying ending.

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

September Book Club

We are very excited for our September book club meeting. It's been too long since our last meeting. We will miss those 3rd year SAA members dearly that added so much entertainment and great conversation, but we hope that you will read the book and definitely add comments on the blog or any other way that we can reach out and disccuss our opinions.

This month we've decided to read Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell.

Julie & Julia, the bestselling memoir that's "irresistible....A kind of Bridget Jones meets The French Chef" (Philadelphia Inquirer), is now a major motion picture. Julie Powell, nearing thirty and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, resolves to reclaim her life by cooking in the span of a single year, every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her unexpected reward: not just a newfound respect for calves' livers and aspic, but a new life-lived with gusto. Since this book has been turned into a movie we aer going to try and do a movie night at Middlesboro Theater once it comes out to theaters.

This book can be found at the Tazewell Walmart and on Amazon for $5.00(used). Book Club is set for Thursday, September 17th at 7:00 at Amanda Toti's House- 447 Bristol Rd., Harrogate. Bring your favorite appetizer or dessert and we're looking forward to some great conversation. Here are directions to Amanda's house from DCOM. We hope to see you there!

447 Bristol Road, Harrogate

Turn Right onto 25 E from DCOM
Turn Left onto Forge Ridge Road
Turn Left once you see the Shawanee Baptist Church sign onto Brunswick Dr.
At the stop sign turn left onto Shawnee Rd. and then make an immediate Right onto Bristol Road.
About 1 mile down turn left onto Ramsey. Amanda's house is the first house on the left. You can park on the lot on the left by the second house on the left, it's a 2nd years house that lets use the lot.

Summer Book

We will sadly miss all of the book club members that moved off to their new cities for their significant other's rotations. We will have another summer book club meeting and we will try to see if we can't do a skype book club or something to keep those that have moved still involved. We know that it won't be the same though. For our July book club we will be reading The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. The meeting date and place is to be announced. We hope that people enjoy this book turned to movie starring Kate Winslet.

The Reader

Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable.... Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?" The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. What does it mean to love those people--parents, grandparents, even lovers--who committed the worst atrocities the world has ever known? And is any atonement possible through literature? Schlink's prose is clean and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue, and excess in any form. What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the attempt to breach the gap between Germany's pre- and postwar generations, between the guilty and the innocent, and between words and silence.

--R. Ellis --This text refers to the Paperback edition. www.brightonplacelibrary.org/Portals/0/the%20...

June Book Club

We are sad to see some of the second years head off to their rotation sites, they will all be missed dearly. We had a great May meeting at Megan Sumrell's and we are planning to do a book for June. The June book is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. We will be having book club at Amanda Toti's new house in Harrogate on June 9 at 7:00. Directions will be e-mailed out at a later date. The book can be found on Amazon and someone had said they have it at Walmart and the book store in the Middlesboro mall. We hope to see you there for a nice summer read.

The 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 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.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

May Book Club

The May Book Club will be next Tuesday, May 19th at Megan Sumrell's house at 7:00. We will be discussing The Great Gatsby and The Last Lecture. Directions will be e-mailed later this week.

Two Short Reads- You Pick

We are doing two very short reads for May, you may choose to read both and come and discuss both or pick one. The first is a classic by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Great Gatsby. In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings.
The Last Lecture. By Randy Pausch: "We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."--Randy Pausch
A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?
When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

The time and date will be posted shortly. Happy Reading!

Reviews copyright of amazon.com review

Book Club This Tuesday!

Book club will be this Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. The book for discussion is American Wife. Book club will be hosted by Angela Goins, check your email for directions!