Programs & Crafts

September 28, 2023: Still Life With Breadcrumbs, Anna Quindlen, 2014 [fiction]. Rebecca Winter is a prize-wining art photographer about whom everyone in the art world of New York was talking. Until she reached middle age, and then they weren't. Strapped for funds and looking for new inspiration, she rents out her expensive New York City apartment and rents sight unseen a small cabin/hunting lodge in the woods (the setting is most likely Arkansas). There she discovers new everyday skills, a new kind of people, new subjects for her art and new ways of looking at the world and relationships. [M.E.L.]

October 26, 2023: The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, A Novel, Eve Jurczyk, 2022 [fiction]. This novel is a mystery that involves not murder, but theft. Leisl is the assistant to the director of the rare books library at a major university, and she has temporarily taken over his position after he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to communicate. Shortly after she assumes that role, a set of extremely rare and expensive books disappears from the safe in her office, just before it is scheduled to be displayed at a special event for the library's donors. In the process of searching for the book, she is forced to reexamine her professional and personal life, including her relationships with her husband, her daughter, and a past lover. [M.E.L.]

November 30, 2023: The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan, 2022 [fiction]. Frida, a single mother working from home leaves her baby alone for a few minutes to make an emergency run to her office across town to pick up materials she needs for a project. But she is distracted by her work e-mails and messages, and a few minutes stretches to two hours. She returns home to find the police have entered her home and taken the baby into custody. She is charged with child abandonment and instead of being sent to prison, she is taken to an experimental "school" where bad mothers must show their worthiness before they can apply to regain custody of their children. [M.E.L.]

December 21, 2023: Comfort and Joy: A Fable, Kristin Hannah, 2005 [fiction]. A California woman running from a failed marriage and the worst betrayal she can imagine survives a plane crash but is not found by rescue crews. Injured and stunned, she stumbles upon a remote former fishing lodge in the Washington rain forest and meets a bereaved child and his father, who give her friendship and temporary shelter during the Christmas season. When she finds herself waking from a coma in her hometown hospital, she wonders, did such a place actually exist, and was anything that happened to her real? [M.E.L.]

January 25, 2024: Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game. [Fiction] In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew"Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut-young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister. Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives. (Amazon).

February 29, 2024: Marie Benedict, The Other Einstein. [Fiction] In the tradition of Beatriz Williams and Paula McClain, Marie Benedict's The Other Einstein offers us a window into a brilliant, fascinating woman whose light was lost in Einstein's enormous shadow. This novel resurrects Einstein's wife, a brilliant physicist in her own right, whose contribution to the special theory of relativity is hotly debated. Was she simply Einstein's sounding board, an assistant performing complex mathematical equations? Or did she contribute something more? Mitza Maric has always been a little different from other girls. Most twenty-year-olds are wives by now, not studying physics at an elite Zurich university with only male students trying to outdo her clever calculations. But Mitza is smart enough to know that, for her, math is an easier path than marriage. Then fellow student Albert Einsten takes an interest in her, and the world turns sideways. Theirs becomes a partnership of the mind and of the heart, but there might not be room for more than one genius in a marriage. (Amazon).

March 28, 2024:  Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. [Fiction] Now more than ever: Aldous Huxley's enduring "masterpiece . . . one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the 20th century" (Wall Street Journal) must be read and understood by anyone concerned with preserving the human spirit in the face of our "brave new world". Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order--all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. "A genius [who] spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine" (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history's keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Writing in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites. (Forward written by Christopher Hitchings).

April 25, 2024: Kathleen Cambor, In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden. [Fiction] The story of a bittersweet romance set against the backdrop of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Flood-a tragedy that cost some 2,200 lives when the South Fork Dam burst on Memorial Day weekend, 1889. The dam was the site of a gentlemen's club that attracted some of the wealthiest industrialists of the day-Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, and Andrew Carnegie-and served as a summertime idyll for the families of the rich. In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden imagines the lives that were lived, lost, and irreparably changed by a tragedy that could have been averted. (Amazon).

May 30, 2024: Betsy Carter, We Were Strangers Once. [Fiction] On the eve of World War II Egon Schneider-a gallant and successful Jewish doctor, son of two world-famous naturalists-escapes Germany to an uncertain future across the sea. Settling into the unfamiliar rhythms of upper Manhattan, he finds solace among a tight-knit group of fellow immigrants, tenacious men and women drawn together as much by their differences as by their memories of the world they left behind. They each suffer degradations and triumphs large and small: Egon's terminally acerbic lifelong friend, bestselling author Meyer Leavitt, now wears a sandwich board on a New York street corner; Catrina Harty, the headstrong daughter of a dirt-poor Irish trolley driver, survives heartbreak and loss to forge an unlikely alliance; and Egon himself is forced to abandon his thriving medical practice to become the "Cheese Man" at a Washington Heights grocery. But their spirits remain unbroken, and when their littl ecommunity is faced with an existential threat, these strangers rise up together in hopes of creating a permanent home. With her uncanny ability to create indelible characters in unforgettable circumstances, bestsellting author Betsy Carter has crafter a gorgeous novel that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt adrift and longed for home.  (Amazon).

June 27, 2024: Paul Acamporo, I Kill the Mockingbird. [Fiction] When Lucy, Elena, and Michael receive their summer reading list, they are excited to see To Kill a Mockingbird included. But not everyone in their class shares the same enthusiasm. So they hatch a plot to get the entire town talking about the well-known Harper Lee classic. They plan controversial ways to get people to read the book, including re-shelving copies of the book in bookstores so that people think they are missing and starting a website committed to "destroying the mockingbird." Their efforts are successful when all of the hullabaloo starts to direct more people to the book. But soon, their exploits start to spin out of control and they unwittingly start a mini revolution in the name of books. (Amazon).