Book Groups |
March 2012
ELLIOTT BAY BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, March 6th 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 Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. England is in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter. Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon, where she rents a room in boarding house run by Mrs. Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and seeks to relieve her solitude by going out drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelmann, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That's when Miss Roach's troubles really begin.
Recounting an epic battle of wills in the claustrophobic confines of the boarding house, Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude, with a delightfully improbable heroine, is one of the finest and funniest books ever written about the trials of a lonely heart.
GLOBAL ISSUES & ETHICS BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, March 13th 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 title selection for March is Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America by Eugene Robinson. The African American population in the United States has always been seen as a single entity: a "Black America" with unified interests and needs. In his groundbreaking book Disintegration, longtime Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson argues that, through decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and immigration, the concept of "Black America" has shattered. Now, instead of one, there are four distinct groups: a Mainstream middle-class majority with a solid stake in society; a large Abandoned minority with less hope than ever of escaping poverty; a small Transcendent elite, whose enormous wealth and power makes even whites genuflect; and newly Emergent groups of mixed-race individuals and recent black immigrants who question what "black" even means. Cornel West wrote, "Gene Robinson's Disintegration is the first popular salvo in the Age of Obama regarding the delicate issues of class division, generation gap and elite obsession in Black America. The painful conversation must continue—and we have Gene Robinson as a useful guide."
SPECULATIONS-SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, March 20th at 6:30 p.m.
(third Tuesday of each month)
As the literature of ideas and imagination, Science Fiction and Fantasy simply demands discussion. Our March selection is Margaret Atwoods's unforgettable love story and compelling vision of the future, Oryx and Crake. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey—with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake—through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.
STAGES - ELLIOTT BAY DRAMA BOOK CLUB
Tuesday, March 27th 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 March selection is Homebody/Kabul by Tony Kushner. Written before 9/11, with Homebody/Kabul, Kushner has turned his penetrating gaze to the arena of global politics to create this suspenseful portrait of a dangerous collision between cultures. "Kushner's first big work on a great big canvas since his Pulitzer Prize–winning Angels in America. This eerily timely work about Afghanistan is comparably mesmerizing and mournful, vast and intimate, emotionally generous and stylistically fabulist, wildly verbal, politically progressive and scarily well informed." — Newsday Please join us for a fascinating discussion of this complex play.
