Book Group
Due to Covid-19, the Sitting Room Book Group continues its meeting via Zoom
All welcome to participate. To get the Zoom invite, write to Joann Borri, joannborri@gmail.com
All welcome to participate. To get the Zoom invite, write to Joann Borri, joannborri@gmail.com
January 19, 2022
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. Discussion Facilitated by Barbara Lesch McCaffry
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Based on the extraordinary life of Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C.
Thomas Wazhashk, who by night keeps watch in a factory while also tending to the affairs of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa as tribal chairman, is drawn from Erdrich’s maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau. In the 1950s, Gourneau juggled both jobs at a time when a mendacious U.S. Senator was trying to “terminate” the tribe and push its members off the last scrap of land reserved for them. |
February 16, 2022
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. Discussion Facilitated by Linda Lampson.
Migrations, the Australian young-adult writer Charlotte McConaghy’s first voyage into the warming waters of literary eco-fiction, is a visceral and haunting novel that opens with the lines “The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here.”
We have a mercurial and restless narrator signing on with a menacing captain who is rarely seen above deck. Ringing any bells? As well as a work of first-rate climate fiction, Migrations is also a clever reimagining of Moby-Dick, that foundational text of humankind vs. nature, of hubris vs. humility, with Franny playing Ishmael, the famously morose seafarer whose damp and drizzly soul has gone full November. Sea yarns that serve as voyages of self-discovery have been the exclusive literary domain of men for far too long, and McConaghy deserves extra credit for sounding the oceanic depths of the female soul.
Migrations is a nervy and well-crafted novel, one that lingers long after its voyage is over. It’s a story about our mingling sorrows, both personal and global, and the survivor’s guilt that will be left in their wake. Michael Christie the New York Times
MARCH 16, 2022 & April 20, 2022
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Discussion Facilitated by Rosemary Manchester.
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
