Before your first visit, please read our Parking requirements. Also check our WORKSHOPS (for writers) for even more events! Unless noted, no RSVP required. ALL ARE WELCOME!
WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 2-4, BOOK GROUP
The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States and is now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the women and men in its population.
The story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate, and wry, she reveals to us the dark corners behind the establishment’s calm façade, as certain tendencies now in existence are carried to their logical conclusions. The Handmaid’s Tale is funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and a tour de force. It is Margaret Atwood at her best.
The Sitting Room Book Group meets the third Wednesday of every month from 2 to 4 pm. Email jpage@sonic.net if you wish to receive reminders of he meetings and readings. All are welcome. No fee.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 10-2: ARCHIVES WORKSHOP Lite Lunch Provided
Archivist and historian Lynn Downey will join us for a special look at the world of archives and how the treasures of the Sitting Room’s Women Writers Archive fit into this larger world. What exactly IS an archive? And how can we share the rich treasures in the Sitting Room with readers? Attendance is limited to do justice to the material, so please rsvp kpetaluma@gmail.com if you are interested in attending.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2-4, BOOK GROUP
When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous Mirabelle Dartigen--the woman they still hold responsible for a terrible tragedy that, look place during the German occupation decades before. Althrough Framboise hopes for a new beginning. She quickly discovers that past and present are inextricably intertwined. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the scrap book of recipes she has inherited from her dead mother.
With this book, Framboise recreates her mother's dishes, which she serves in her small creperie. And yet as she studies the scrapbook -- searching for clues to unlock the contradiction between her mother's sensuous love of food and often cruel demeanor -- she begins to recognize a deeper meaning behind Mirabelle's cryptic scribbles. Within the journal's tattered pages lies the key to what actually transpired the summer Framboise was nine years old.
Rich and dark. Fire Quarters of the Orange is a novel of mothers and daughters of the past and the present, of resisting, and succumbing, and an extraordinary work by a masterful writer.
The Sitting Room Book Group meets the third Wednesday of every month from 2 to 4 pm. Email jpage@sonic.net if you wish to receive reminders of he meetings and readings. All are welcome. No fee.
When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous Mirabelle Dartigen--the woman they still hold responsible for a terrible tragedy that, look place during the German occupation decades before. Althrough Framboise hopes for a new beginning. She quickly discovers that past and present are inextricably intertwined. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the scrap book of recipes she has inherited from her dead mother.
With this book, Framboise recreates her mother's dishes, which she serves in her small creperie. And yet as she studies the scrapbook -- searching for clues to unlock the contradiction between her mother's sensuous love of food and often cruel demeanor -- she begins to recognize a deeper meaning behind Mirabelle's cryptic scribbles. Within the journal's tattered pages lies the key to what actually transpired the summer Framboise was nine years old.
Rich and dark. Fire Quarters of the Orange is a novel of mothers and daughters of the past and the present, of resisting, and succumbing, and an extraordinary work by a masterful writer.
The Sitting Room Book Group meets the third Wednesday of every month from 2 to 4 pm. Email jpage@sonic.net if you wish to receive reminders of he meetings and readings. All are welcome. No fee.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2-4, BOOK GROUP
As part of the fall focus on women writing science, we discuss two examples. Read one or both.
Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also a celebration of the lifelong curiosity, humility, and passion that drive every scientist. She introduces us to Bill, her brilliant, eccentric lab manager. And she extends the mantle of scientist to each one of her readers, inviting us to join her in observing and protecting our environment. Warm, luminous, compulsively readable, Lab Girl vividly demonstrates the mountains that we can move when love and work come together.
As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans as "the younger brothers of creation." She describes her book as a gift of braided stories “meant to heal our relationship with the world” by weaving together the three strands of “indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge.
The Sitting Room Book Group meets the third Wednesday of every month from 2 to 4 pm. Email jpage@sonic.net if you wish to receive reminders of he meetings and readings. All are welcome. No fee.
The Sitting Room Book Group meets the third Wednesday of every month from 2 to 4 pm. Email jpage@sonic.net if you wish to receive reminders of he meetings and readings. All are welcome. No fee.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2-4, BOOK GROUP
For millions of Americans and foreign visitors who have navigated America’s great rivers by raft or boat – and for those who wish they could – this book explores rivers and their impact on the human emotional landscape. Rebecca Lawton offers such seekers not only the thrill rides and vacation destinations of our rivers but also their rich ecosystems and spiritual wellsprings: “To those who come to know them well, rivers are home . . . It was the river that taught me instinctive responses, in an unparalleled mentorship that led me throughout the American West every day for more than a decade. Being on the river every day taught me to read water – to psyche out where rocks hid in riffles, find safe passage in inscrutable rapids, and keep moving in flatwater sections.” Now, years later, she offers many of the lessons she learned from interpreting rivers and currents, living in the river community, and being steeped in boating subculture.
The Sitting Room Book Group meets the third Wednesday of every month from 2 to 4 pm. Email jpage@sonic.net if you wish to receive reminders of he meetings and readings. All are welcome. No fee.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2-4, BOOK GROUP
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His novels and plays have won, among other awards, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Costa Book of the Year award, the Irish Book Awards Best Novel, the Independent Booksellers Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He also had two consecutive novels, A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. He lives in Wicklow with his wife and three children.
One of this author's novels will be selected for reading and discussion in November. Watch this space for the chosen book.
The Sitting Room Book Group meets the third Wednesday of every month from 2 to 4 pm. Email jpage@sonic.net if you wish to receive reminders of he meetings and readings. All are welcome. No fee.
