"Book Club Set For Talks"

The Columbus Public Library Discussion Group meets the last Thursday of the month. It is open to the public and we certainly would love to see some new faces.

Fellow book lovers: Please find below the 2004 Columbus Library discussion list. Although we’ve already enjoyed reviewing the first two selections, they were discussed with such enthusiasm I thought it only fair to mention them.

January 29 -- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. Set in a rural Chinese province in the early 1970s, during the horrifying period of Communist "reeducation" known as the Cultural Revolution, Sijie's book tells the story of two privileged friends forced into a life of backbreaking labor for the state. After the boys find a box of contraband Western literature in Chinese translation, they begin discussing the stories with an unschooled seamstress. It's a bold move that becomes the turning point of their lives.

February 26-- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This book was written nearly 80 years ago, but it deals with ageless themes - love, ambition, wealth, social climbing. “The Great Gatsby” is probably the best known of Fitzgerald's novels.

March 25-- The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier This book centers on Vermeer’s prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law

April 29-- Slogum House by Mari Sandoz. Famed Nebraska novelist Mari Sandoz tells of the dark side to frontier life. The story of a sinister family, and the cruel but intensely human woman who ruled them. "Uncompromisingly realistic!"

May 25-- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s they spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever.

June 24th -- Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt. This is the life
Story of Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and his people during the momentous, twilight years of the nineteenth century. Black Elk grew up in a time when white settlers were invading the Lakota’s' homeland, decimating buffalo herds and threatening to extinguish the Lakota’s' way of life. Black Elk and other Lakota’s fought back, a dogged resistance that resulted in a remarkable victory at the Little Bighorn and an unspeakable tragedy at Wounded Knee.

July 29-- Atonement by Ian McEwan. It's 1935, and England is experiencing a heat wave, while chaos rules at the Tallis country estate. Briony Tallis, a precocious 13-year-old with an overactive imagination, witnesses an incident between Cecilia, her older sister, and Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis family's charwoman. The second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie, now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the early days of WWII.

August 26-- Dalva by Jim Harrison. “Dalva” has traveled the world doing a variety of jobs, alternately haunted and driven by men. The reconciliation of the various elements in her life is precipitated by a return to her Midwestern roots, where she acknowledges her family's eccentricities and her own wasted years. In the process a vivid panorama of Nebraska history is revealed.

September 30-- The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers.

October 28-- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit.

NO NOVEMBER MEETING

December 9-- SWEET EYES by Janis Agee. Honey Parrish lives in the small town of Divinity, Iowa. When Honey has an affair with Jasper Johnson, a black man, she provokes anger and resentment masking an unsolved murder that happened years before.