Thursday Night Book Group

Our Thursday Night Book Club meets every fourth Thursday of the month and is open to any and all readers. Led by Laura, our discussions are good, varied and – for the most part – stay on point. But we have a lot of laughs, too. Stop in, try us out, meet some new friends and read some great books. It’s a fun night spent in good company.

JANUARY 2012

FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen
Thursday, January 26, 7 p.m.

"We gave ourselves a nice long time to read this book and word is that people either love it or hate it. You know what that means? It will be a fantastic discussion!”

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, comes a darkly comedic novel about family. Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul-the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams.

Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes? In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

FEBRUARY

THE TASTE OF SALT by Martha Southgate
Thursday, February 23, 7 p.m.

“Karen found this gem and noted that it would be an ideal read for the book group. Well, we don’t have to be told twice!”

Award-winning novelist Martha Southgate (who, in the words of Julia Glass, can write fat and hot, then lush and tender, then just plain truthful and burning with heart ) now tells the story of a family pushed to its limits by addiction over the course of two generations.

Josie Henderson loves the water and is fulfilled by her position as the only senior-level black scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family back in landlocked Cleveland. Her adored brother, Tick, was her childhood ally as they watched their drinking father push away all the love that his wife and children were trying to give him. Now Tick himself has been coming apart and demands to be heard. Weaving four voices into a beautiful tapestry, Southgate charts the lives of the Hendersons from the parents first charmed meeting to Josie 's realization that the ways of the human heart are more complex than anything seen under a microscope.