Adult Book Discussions will Resume in September

Our popular book discussions meet once a month during the school year in the programming room downstairs. Books can be borrowed from the library so check our catalog for availability. Our fall programs begin with two recent titles: The Glass Room by Simon Mawer and Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. Please make plans to join us.

"Evenings with Elise Barack" returns on Thursday, September 2 at 7:15 pm when this popular presenter will lead a discussion on The Glass Room by Simon Mawer.

The Glass Room was short listed for The Booker Prize. For more information read what The Washington Post's Ron Charles says about this deeply moving novel:

" During the pause between world wars, a Jewish businessman and his new wife commissioned a startlingly modern house for themselves in Czechoslovakia. They hired the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and gave him free rein to design an avant-garde structure that looks like a Mondrian painting in three dimensions: a long, low building of dramatic straight lines, marked by a large room with floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Unbelievably, this elegant house survived the dismemberment of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia, German bombing, Soviet invasion and the natural forces that conspire against a neglected building. The Villa Tugendhat, which has been a public museum since the mid-1990s, remains a masterpiece of minimalist architecture, and now it's the evocative setting for a stirring new novel that almost won this year's Booker Prize. The author, Simon Mawer, moves through six decades of European history, much of it unspeakably tragic, using the glass house as a window on the hopes and fears of its various inhabitants and the conflicts that rip Europe apart. Pianists and Nazis, doctors and servants, everyone is drawn to the living room's extraordinary vista and feels aroused by the promise of such clarity."

The first meeting of "Afternoons with Judy Levin" is scheduled for Thursday, September 16 at 12:30 pm. We will discuss Zeitoun by local author Dave Eggers.

Don't know the book ... check out these reviews:

"Through the story of one man’s experience after Hurricane Katrina, Eggers draws an indelible picture of Bush-era crisis management. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a successful Syrian-born painting contractor, decides to stay in New Orleans and protect his property while his family flees. After the levees break, he uses a small canoe to rescue people, before being arrested by an armed squad and swept powerlessly into a vortex of bureaucratic brutality. When a guard accuses him of being a member of Al Qaeda, he sees that race and culture may explain his predicament. Eggers, compiling his account from interviews, sensibly resists rhetorical grandstanding, letting injustices speak for themselves." The New Yorker

"Zeitoun offers a transformative experience to anyone open to it, for the simple reasons that it is not heavy-handed propaganda, not eat-your-peas social analysis, but an adventure story, a tale of suffering and redemption, almost biblical in its simplicity, the trials of a good man who believes in God and happens to have a canoe. Anyone who cares about America, where it is going and where it almost went, before it caught itself, will want to read this thrilling, heartbreaking, wonderful book.” Neil Steiberg, Chicago Sun-Times

"Zeitoun is a riveting, intimate, wide-scanning, disturbing, inspiring nonfiction account of a New Orleans married couple named Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun who were dragged through their own special branch of Kafkaesque (for once the adjective is unavoidable) hell after Hurricane Katrina." James Wolcott, Vanity Fair

Look for information on book recommendations, programming notes and new additions to the collection in future postings on the Lake Forest Library Blogspot.