Home

Book Groups
Four times monthly you will hear a lively book group discussion pouring down from our travel loft at Elliott Bay. We invite you to pick up the book of the month and join us. Below you'll find this month's listings for our Fiction, Global Issues & Ethics, Science Fiction & Fantasy and Drama book groups which meet regularly. Don't forget, all featured book group titles purchased at Elliott Bay during the month prior receive a 20% discount!

March 2010

ELLIOTT BAY BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, March 2nd at 6:30 p.m.
(First Tuesday of each month)

Each month, the Elliott Bay Book Club reads and discusses the best in contemporary fiction with the occasional classic thrown in for good measure. Our March selection is The Journey of Little Gandhi by Elias Khoury. A many-layered story of Little Gandhi, or Abd al-Karim, a shoe shine in a city fractured by war. Shot down in the street, Gandhi's story is recounted by an aging and garrulous prostitute named Alice. Ingeniously embedding stories within stories, Little Gandhi becomes the story of a city, Beirut, in the grip of civil war. Laila Lalami in the Los Angeles Times says, "Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury."



GLOBAL ISSUES & ETHICS BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, March 9th at 6:30 p.m.
(second Tuesday of each month)

Our Global Issues & Ethics Book Group is devoted to discussing books that cover the most relevant topics of our everyday lives. Our selection for March is Israel vs. Utopia by Joel Schalit. Israel is a synonym for many things: the ancestral home of the Jewish people, the antagonist of the Palestinians, the realization of a centuries-old dream of freedom, the heart of the War on Terror. No country inspires as much debate about its rights and wrongs, its legitimacy and illegitimacies, as Israel. In this new volume, Israel vs. Utopia Israeli American journalist Joel Schalit distinguishes between the Israel he knows and the image of it that exists in the imagination of Americans and Europeans. Israel is a state of mind, Schalit argues, as much as it is a sovereign state. Exploring this tension—in America, in Israel, in Europe—through a combination of personal observations, political analysis, and cultural commentary, Schalit defines the instability of Israel, as a metaphor, and America's troubled love for it, as only an Israeli American could. Doug Henwood said of the book, "Fresh thinking about the Middle East is rare, but that's Joel Schalit's specialty. Regardless of your politics, you probably won't see Israel in the same way again after reading this admirable and engaging book—and that's something we all need. And you'll probably develop an irresistible appetite for good hummus along the way."



SPECULATIONS-SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, March 16th at 6:30 p.m.
(third Tuesday of each month)

As the literature of ideas and imagination, Science Fiction and Fantasy simply demands discussion. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest is March's selection. In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomer to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska's ice. Thus was Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.
But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.
Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue's widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenage boy to support, but she and Ezekial are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.
His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive. Kelly Link calls it, " A marvelous book crammed with readerly pleasures—zombies, pirates, cracking adventures, historical conceits, and characters that make you wish you could linger inside it long after turning the final page. Cherie Priest is one of my favorite fantasists."



STAGES - ELLIOTT BAY DRAMA BOOK CLUB
Tuesday, March 23rd at 6:30 p.m.
(fourth Tuesday of each month)

Elliott Bay's Drama Book Group, Stages, meets once a month to read, enjoy and discuss great plays and dramatic works, contemporary and classic, from the U.S. and around the world. Our selection for March is the controversial modern British play Closer by Patrick Marber. This is a brilliant exploration into the brutal anatomy of modern romance, where a quartet of strangers meet, fall in love, and become caught up in a web of sexual desire and betrayal. Closer has been hailed as one of the best plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done." Please join us for this lively discussion of this brutally thought-provoking drama.