Upcoming programs:
-Yoga with Marie Blair every Tuesday 10:30-11:30am
-Tuesday April 17th at 6:30pm, Documentaries After Dark
presents the film, “Harry and Snowman”
Dutch immigrant Harry DeLeyer journeyed to the United States
after World War II and developed a transformative relationship with a broken
down Amish plow horse he rescued off a slaughter truck that was bound for the
glue factory. Harry paid eighty dollars for the horse and named him Snowman. In
less than two years, Harry & Snowman went on to win the triple crown of
show jumping, beating the nation's top pedigree horses and wealthiest
socialites. They became famous and traveled around the world together. Their
chance meeting at a Pennsylvania horse auction saved them both and crafted a
friendship that lasted a lifetime. Eighty-six year old Harry tells their
Cinderella love story firsthand, as he continues to train on today's show
jumping circuit.
-Thursday April 19th at 6:30pm, UAB Neuroscience Café
presents the latest research on stroke and aphasia
-Monday April 23rd at 6:30pm, Money Smart Week presents the film, “The Big Short”
Based on the true story of four outsiders who saw what the
big banks, media, and government refused to: the global collapse of the
economy. A bold investment leads them into the dark underbelly of banking,
where everyone and everything is in question.
-Tuesday April 24th at 6:30pm, GRG returns with a discussion
of books on TV & film
-Thursday April 26th at 6:30pm, Community Conversation on
Aging presents eldercare financial planning
___________________________
This week, the Genre Reading Group met to discuss debut
novels. I love debut novels, an author’s
first opportunity to make an impact and a statement, a chance to explore new
stories, methods, and worlds! This is a
great group, with lots of variety from which to choose!
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST
NBCC JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FINALIST
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017
ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST’S MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017
ONE OF NPR’S ‘GREAT READS’ OF 2017
A USA TODAY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
AN AMAZON.COM BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A BUSINESS INSIDER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Impossible to put down." —NPR
"A novel that readers will gulp down, gasping.” —The Washington Post
"The word 'masterpiece' has been cheapened by too many blurbs, but My Absolute Darling absolutely is one." —Stephen King
A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.
Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of her mother, in the thrall of her tortured and charismatic father, Martin. Her social existence is confined to the middle school (where she fends off the interest of anyone, student or teacher, who might penetrate her shell) and to her life with her father.
Then Turtle meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes, lives in a big clean house, and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first time, the larger world begins to come into focus: her life with Martin is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape, using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching her. What follows is a harrowing story of bravery and redemption. With Turtle's escalating acts of physical and emotional courage, the reader watches, heart in throat, as this teenage girl struggles to become her own hero—and in the process, becomes ours as well.
Shot through with striking language in a fierce natural setting, My Absolute Darling is an urgently told, profoundly moving read that marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer.
LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST
NBCC JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FINALIST
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017
ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST’S MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017
ONE OF NPR’S ‘GREAT READS’ OF 2017
A USA TODAY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
AN AMAZON.COM BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A BUSINESS INSIDER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Impossible to put down." —NPR
"A novel that readers will gulp down, gasping.” —The Washington Post
"The word 'masterpiece' has been cheapened by too many blurbs, but My Absolute Darling absolutely is one." —Stephen King
A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.
Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of her mother, in the thrall of her tortured and charismatic father, Martin. Her social existence is confined to the middle school (where she fends off the interest of anyone, student or teacher, who might penetrate her shell) and to her life with her father.
Then Turtle meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes, lives in a big clean house, and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first time, the larger world begins to come into focus: her life with Martin is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape, using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching her. What follows is a harrowing story of bravery and redemption. With Turtle's escalating acts of physical and emotional courage, the reader watches, heart in throat, as this teenage girl struggles to become her own hero—and in the process, becomes ours as well.
Shot through with striking language in a fierce natural setting, My Absolute Darling is an urgently told, profoundly moving read that marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer.
Motherest by Kristen Iskandrian
A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF 2017
Marrying the sharp insights of Jenny Offill with the dark
humor of Maria Semple, MOTHEREST is an inventive and moving coming-of-age novel
that captures the pain of fractured family life, the heat of new love, and the
particular magic of the female friendship -- all through the lens of a fraying
daughter-mother bond.
It's the early 1990s, and Agnes is running out of people she
can count on. A new college student, she is caught between the broken home she
leaves behind and the wilderness of campus life. What she needs most is her
mother, who has seemingly disappeared, and her brother, who left the family
tragically a few years prior.
As Agnes falls into new romance, mines female friendships for intimacy, and struggles to find her footing, she writes letters to her mother, both to conjure a closeness they never had and to try to translate her experiences to herself. When she finds out she is pregnant, Agnes begins to contend with what it means to be a mother and, in some ways, what it means to be your own mother.
As Agnes falls into new romance, mines female friendships for intimacy, and struggles to find her footing, she writes letters to her mother, both to conjure a closeness they never had and to try to translate her experiences to herself. When she finds out she is pregnant, Agnes begins to contend with what it means to be a mother and, in some ways, what it means to be your own mother.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
One of English literature's classic masterpieces—a gripping
novel of love, propriety, and tragedy.
Emily Brontë's only novel endures as a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence. Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, situated on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before. What unfolds is the tale of the intense love between the gypsy foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine, forced to choose between passionate, tortured Heathcliff and gentle, well-bred Edgar Linton, surrendered to the expectations of her class. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance at his betrayal is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.
And now, a musical interlude...
Emily Brontë's only novel endures as a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence. Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, situated on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before. What unfolds is the tale of the intense love between the gypsy foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine, forced to choose between passionate, tortured Heathcliff and gentle, well-bred Edgar Linton, surrendered to the expectations of her class. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance at his betrayal is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.
And now, a musical interlude...
Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations
and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible
creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and
inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. Considering the novel's
enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord
Byron's.
"We will each write a story," Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley. The friends were summering on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland in 1816, Shelley still unknown as a poet and Byron writing the third canto of Childe Harold. When continued rains kept them confined indoors, all agreed to Byron's proposal.
The illustrious poets failed to complete their ghost stories, but Mary Shelley rose supremely to the challenge. With Frankenstein, she succeeded admirably in the task she set for herself: to create a story that, in her own words, "would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror -- one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart."
"We will each write a story," Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley. The friends were summering on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland in 1816, Shelley still unknown as a poet and Byron writing the third canto of Childe Harold. When continued rains kept them confined indoors, all agreed to Byron's proposal.
The illustrious poets failed to complete their ghost stories, but Mary Shelley rose supremely to the challenge. With Frankenstein, she succeeded admirably in the task she set for herself: to create a story that, in her own words, "would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror -- one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart."
“At once a scholar’s homage to The Iliad and
startlingly original work of art by an incredibly talented new novelist….A book
I could not put down.”
—Ann Patchett
—Ann Patchett
“Mary Renault lives again!” declares Emma Donoghue, author of Room, referring to The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s
thrilling, profoundly moving, and utterly unique retelling of the legend of
Achilles and the Trojan War. A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the
human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that
brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed
adventure, an epic love story, a marvelously conceived and executed
page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel has already earned resounding
acclaim from some of contemporary fiction’s brightest lights—and fans of Mary Renault, Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Colleen McCullough’s Masters
of Rome series will delight in this unforgettable journey back to ancient
Greece in the Age of Heroes.
Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Or did she?
In this riveting debut novel, See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt recasts one of the most fascinating murder cases of all time into an intimate story of a volatile household and a family devoid of love.
On the morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden calls out to her maid: Someone’s killed Father. The brutal ax-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, leaves little evidence and many unanswered questions. While neighbors struggle to understand why anyone would want to harm the respected Bordens, those close to the family have a different tale to tell―of a father with an explosive temper; a spiteful stepmother; and two spinster sisters, with a bond even stronger than blood, desperate for their independence.
As the police search for clues, Emma comforts an increasingly distraught Lizzie whose memories of that morning flash in scattered fragments. Had she been in the barn or the pear arbor to escape the stifling heat of the house? When did she last speak to her stepmother? Were they really gone and would everything be better now? Shifting among the perspectives of the unreliable Lizzie, her older sister Emma, the housemaid Bridget, and the enigmatic stranger Benjamin, the events of that fateful day are slowly revealed through a high-wire feat of storytelling.
And gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Or did she?
In this riveting debut novel, See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt recasts one of the most fascinating murder cases of all time into an intimate story of a volatile household and a family devoid of love.
On the morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden calls out to her maid: Someone’s killed Father. The brutal ax-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, leaves little evidence and many unanswered questions. While neighbors struggle to understand why anyone would want to harm the respected Bordens, those close to the family have a different tale to tell―of a father with an explosive temper; a spiteful stepmother; and two spinster sisters, with a bond even stronger than blood, desperate for their independence.
As the police search for clues, Emma comforts an increasingly distraught Lizzie whose memories of that morning flash in scattered fragments. Had she been in the barn or the pear arbor to escape the stifling heat of the house? When did she last speak to her stepmother? Were they really gone and would everything be better now? Shifting among the perspectives of the unreliable Lizzie, her older sister Emma, the housemaid Bridget, and the enigmatic stranger Benjamin, the events of that fateful day are slowly revealed through a high-wire feat of storytelling.
Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of
Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at
their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a
cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the
Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: Her mother is stolen
away―by a figure who claims to come from the Hinterland, the cruel supernatural
world where her grandmother's stories are set. Alice's only lead is the message
her mother left behind: “Stay away from the Hazel Wood.”
Alice has long steered clear of her grandmother’s cultish
fans. But now she has no choice but to ally with classmate Ellery Finch, a
Hinterland superfan who may have his own reasons for wanting to help her. To
retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the
world where her grandmother's tales began―and where she might find out how her
own story went so wrong.
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther
Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but
slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws
the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity
becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an
experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and
harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has
made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
This is the story of Oskar Matzerath, a dwarfish hunchback
detained in a mental hospital, convicted of a murder he did not commit. From
his third birthday when he received a tin drum, it has become the means of his
expression, allowing him to draw forth memories from his past as well as from
the Nazi era. Oskar’s imaginative distortion and exaggeration of history
reveals a startlingly true portrayal of the human situation.
WINNER OF THE JEWISH QUARTERLY WINGATE PRIZE
10 WOMEN TO WATCH IN 2017--BookPage
10 WOMEN TO WATCH IN 2017--BookPage
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
After one night's deadly mistake, a man will go to any lengths to save his family and his reputation.
Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has the perfect life--married to a beautiful police officer and father of two young boys. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road after an exhausting hospital shift, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene.
When the victim's widow knocks at Eitan's door the next day, holding his wallet and divulging that she knows what happened, Eitan discovers that her price for silence is not money. It is something else entirely, something that will shatter Eitan's safe existence and take him into a world of secrets and lies he could never have anticipated.
WAKING LIONS is a gripping, suspenseful, and morally devastating drama of guilt and survival, shame and desire from a remarkable young author on the rise.
After one night's deadly mistake, a man will go to any lengths to save his family and his reputation.
Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has the perfect life--married to a beautiful police officer and father of two young boys. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road after an exhausting hospital shift, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene.
When the victim's widow knocks at Eitan's door the next day, holding his wallet and divulging that she knows what happened, Eitan discovers that her price for silence is not money. It is something else entirely, something that will shatter Eitan's safe existence and take him into a world of secrets and lies he could never have anticipated.
WAKING LIONS is a gripping, suspenseful, and morally devastating drama of guilt and survival, shame and desire from a remarkable young author on the rise.
Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking,
and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing
force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and
resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. It is a novel only
Anne Rice could write.
Praise for Interview with the Vampire
“A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller . . . Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth–the education of the vampire.”—Chicago Tribune
“Unrelentingly erotic . . . sometimes beautiful, and always unforgettable.”—Washington Post
“If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—Boston Globe
“A chilling, thought-provoking tale, beautifully frightening, sensuous, and utterly unnerving.”—Hartford Courant
Praise for Interview with the Vampire
“A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller . . . Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth–the education of the vampire.”—Chicago Tribune
“Unrelentingly erotic . . . sometimes beautiful, and always unforgettable.”—Washington Post
“If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—Boston Globe
“A chilling, thought-provoking tale, beautifully frightening, sensuous, and utterly unnerving.”—Hartford Courant
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