For Readers

Monday Night Book Group

Join Barb H. on Monday, March 1 at 6:30 pm to discuss Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan.

Set in contemporary San Francisco and in a Chinese village where Peking Man is unearthed, The Bonesetter's Daughter is an excavation of the human spirit: the past, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes. This is the story of LuLing Young, who searches for the name of her mother, the daughter of the famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain. The story conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of myths, and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory what we have lost in grief. Tan has a master's degree in linguistics from San Jose State University and worked as a language specialist to programs serving children with developmental disabilities.

Stop in the library to get your copy. For more info, call Barb at 440.255.8811 x 210. Here is a list of upcoming selections.

Book and Brush Club

Join Lynn and Barb on Thursday, March 25 at 7:00 pm in the Garfield Room to discuss The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean. The author, Debra Dean, will also be joining the discussion via telephone conference.

Debra Dean worked as an actor in the New York theater for nearly a decade before opting for the life of a writer and teacher. The Madonnas of Leningrad is her first novel.

Russian emigré Marina Buriakov, 82, is preparing for her granddaughter's wedding near Seattle while fighting a losing battle against Alzheimer's. Struggling to remember whom Katie is marrying (and indeed that there is to be a marriage at all), Marina does remember her youth as a Hermitage Museum docent as the siege of Leningrad began; it is into these memories that she disappears. After frantic packing, the Hermitage's collection is transported to a safe hiding place until the end of the war. The museum staff and their families remain, wintering (all 2,000 of them) in the Hermitage basement to avoid bombs and marauding soldiers. Marina, using the technique of a fellow docent, memorizes favorite Hermitage works; these memories, beautifully interspersed, are especially vibrant.

Stop in the library to get your copy. For more info, call Barb at 440.255.8811 x 210. Here is a list of the Book and Brush Club's 2010 selections.

Book Club for Men

The next meeting will be on Monday,March 15 at 6:30 pm to discuss Blindness by Joe Saramago.

"Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.

And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human."
--Alix Wilber

Free dinner provided! For a copy of the book, please go to the Information Services desk, or for more information contact Steve Haas at 255-8811, ext 216, steve.haas@mentorpl.org. Book Club for Men is free and open to the public.

Profilers Crime Time- Crime Book Discussion Group

The next meeting will be on Thursday,March 25 at 7:00 pm March's selection is The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam by Chris Ewan.

"This impressive debut, a comic whodunit from British entertainment lawyer Ewan, owes much of its charm and success to its compelling antihero, Charles Howard. An established author of mysteries featuring a burglar-detective, Howard himself is a successful burglar. While finishing his latest novel in Amsterdam, Howard receives a cryptic invitation via his Web site and follows his curiosity to a meeting with a mysterious American who somehow knows of the author's secret profession. Howard initially declines the commission to steal two small plaster monkeys, but when he succeeds in his assignment, he finds his client has been brutally bludgeoned. After becoming a suspect, Howard scrambles to understand the link between the monkeys and a diamond heist over a decade earlier. The ease with which Ewan creates a memorable protagonist and pits him against a plausible and tricky killer will be the envy of many more established authors. The detection is first-rate, and Howard is a fresh, irreverent creation who will make readers eager for his next exploit." — Publishers Weekly

Refreshments will be served. For more information, and to get a copy of the book, contact Sarah Osinsky or Grace Peterson at 440-255-8811, or email sarah.osinksy@mentorpl.org and grace.peterson@mentorpl.org.

Profilers received mention in Great Britain by the John Buchan Society.

Join Profilers Crime Time on goodreads

Twenty Something Readers

The next meeting will be on Monday, March 29 at 6:30 pm at Panera - 9587 Mentor Ave. Mentor OH.

March's selection will be The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

 

"If a virulent virus—or even the Rapture—depopulated Earth overnight, how long before all trace of humankind vanished? That's the provocative, and occasionally puckish, question posed by Weisman (An Echo in My Blood) in this imaginative hybrid of solid science reporting and morbid speculation. Days after our disappearance, pumps keeping Manhattan's subways dry would fail, tunnels would flood, soil under streets would sluice away and the foundations of towering skyscrapers built to last for centuries would start to crumble. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, anything made of bronze might survive in recognizable form for millions of years—along with one billion pounds of degraded but almost indestructible plastics manufactured since the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, land freed from mankind's environmentally poisonous footprint would quickly reconstitute itself, as in Chernobyl, where animal life has returned after 1986's deadly radiation leak, and in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a refuge since 1953 for the almost-extinct goral mountain goat and Amur leopard. From a patch of primeval forest in Poland to monumental underground villages in Turkey, Weisman's enthralling tour of the world of tomorrow explores what little will remain of ancient times while anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like. " –Publishers Weekly

 

Refreshments will be served. For more information, and to get a copy of the book, contact Steve Haas at 440-255-8811, or email steve.haas@mentorpl.org.

Books with Breakfast

Librarian Sarah O. is back at the Main Library with stories and breakfast! On Tuesday, March 16, look for her at the Lake Branch at 9:45 am, and at the Main Library at 11:00 am.

Book Discussion for Seniors

Our monthly book group for seniors meets at the Mentor Senior Center. The next meeting will be on Wednesday, March 10 at 1:30 pm to discuss The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan. Call Barb Hauer at 440.255.8811 x 210 for details.

Refreshments for our Book Discussions are provided through the generousity of the Friends of Mentor Public Library