Hi everyone, our June gathering will be via Zoom, on Friday, June 11, 2021 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

If you’ve previously signed up for a book club meeting, and thus I have your email address; you don’t need to sign up again. I will send you the Zoom link the first week in June.

If you’re new to the Southeast Steuben Count Library Adult Book Club – welcome! You can sign up on the library’s website by clicking the following link:

https://ssclibrary.org/activities/adult-book-club-before-coffee-cold/

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Our June read is Before The Coffee Gets Cold (208 pages) written by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

The book is available in print form through StarCat; and for instant checkout as an eBook or digital audiobook through the Hoopla Catalog found online at

https://www.hoopladigital.com/browse/ebook

You can also download the Hoopla app to your mobile device to read the eBook or listen to the digital audiobook version.

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Here is the publisher overview of the plot of Before The Coffee Gets Cold:

What would you change if you could travel back in time?

Down a small alleyway in the heart of Tokyo, there’s an underground café that’s been serving carefully brewed coffee for over a hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers its customers something else besides coffee-the chance to travel back in time.

The rules, however, are far from simple: you must sit in one particular seat, and you can’t venture outside the café, nor can you change the present. And, most important, you only have the time it takes to drink a hot cup of coffee-or risk getting stuck forever.

Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of traveling to another time: a heartbroken lover looking for closure, a nurse with a mysterious letter from her husband, a waitress hoping to say one last goodbye and a mother whose child she may never get the chance to know.

Heartwarming, wistful and delightfully quirky, Before the Coffee Gets Cold explores the intersecting lives of four women who come together in one extraordinary café, where the service may not be quick, but the opportunities are endless.

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May Book Club Notes:

The Adult Book Club meeting for May was held via Zoom from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. on Friday, May 14, 2021.

Our May Read was The Boy In The Field by Margot Livesey

The cliff notes overview of the book The Boy In The Field by Margot Livesey is:

Despite the title, the book really chronicles the experience of the three teenage Lang siblings: outgoing Zoe (age 16), studious Matthew (age 17) and artistic Duncan (age 13), who live in a tranquil, small village outside of the town where they attend school, with their father Hal, a blacksmith, and their mother Betsy a solicitor.

One day in September 1999, the sibling’s father promises to pick them up at school and forgets to do so.

So, the trio start walking home. As they walk by a field, bordered by a fence and bushes, Zoe sees something red in the field. Upon investigation, the siblings discover “The Boy” of the title, a youth they later learn is named Karel Lustig, lying beneath a tree in the field. Karel has been attacked by an unknown assailant and is unconscious.

The siblings realize that Karel needs help; so, the elder siblings, Zoe and Matthew, send the youngest Duncan to flag down a car for assistance. Once Duncan has finished his task he returns to his siblings and Karel, still lying unconscious in the field. The emergency crew arrive and take Karel to the hospital. The siblings go home, where later that evening they are visited by Police Inspector Price, who takes their statements regarding the incident and asks them not to discuss finding the boy in the field with anyone outside their household.

The story unfolds from there; the author paints a pleasing portrait of a family whose members genuinely care for each other and do their best to support each other through times easy and hard. The narrative starts out chronicling the experience of the siblings finding Karel in the field, together, and subsequent chapters follow each of the three siblings, in turn, in the aftermath of the event of finding the boy in the field. The story is indeed a Bildungsroman, as the impact of finding Karel in the field has the siblings in a contemplative mood in the months that follow, realizing there is evil in the world and sometimes people are treated abysmally for no good reason; while also, as teenagers do, trying to find where they fit in, in the world.

Readers also learn a bit more about “The Boy In The Field” himself, Karel Lustig by the end of the book; but as mentioned the book really isn’t his story; it is the story of three siblings who might live next door to any of us, and who they are impacted by a dark an unexpected event.

About The Writing: The author has something that is great for an author to have, the proverbial “way with words.” Her writing is descriptive and articulate without being packed with fluffy extraneous details; this is something the reader perceives from the first page of the book when she describes the sibling trio finding the Karel in the field  in this way: “Here is what happened one Monday in the month of September, in the last year of the last century;” “Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang were on their way home from school,” when they came upon the boy in the field.

The consensus of book club members is that the book The Boy In The Field is definitely worth reading, and several book club members were also interested in checking out additional titles by the author.

Margot Livesey’s current reading list:

Homework (1990)

Criminals (1996)

The Missing World (2000)

Eva Moves the Furniture (2001)

Banishing Verona (2004)

The House on Fortune Street (2008)

The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012)

Mercury (2016)

The Boy in the Field (2020)

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Other Items Discussed At The May Book Club Gathering Via Zoom:

In discussing how one event, like finding an unconscious youth in a field, can impact, or even transform, one’s life; we discussed the Ben Franklin attributed proverb For Want of a Nail.

For Want of a Nail
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
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Other Books Recommended By Book Club Members:

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah: Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she barely knows.

By 1934, the world has changed; millions are out of work and drought has devastated the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as crops fail and water dries up and the earth cracks open. Dust storms roll relentlessly across the plains. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa’s tenuous marriage; each day is a desperate battle against nature and a fight to keep her children alive.

In this uncertain and perilous time, Elsa- like so many of her neighbors – must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or leave it behind and go west, to California, in search of a better life for her family.

The Four Winds is a rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it – the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity, The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation. – Description from the publisher
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Sold on a Monday: A Novel by Kristina McMorris:  2 CHILDREN FOR SALE The sign is a last resort. It sits on a farmhouse porch in 1931, but could be found anywhere in an era of breadlines, bank runs and broken dreams. It could have been written by any mother facing impossible choices.

For struggling reporter Ellis Reed, the gut-wrenching scene evokes memories of his family’s dark past. He snaps a photograph of the children, not meant for publication. But when it leads to his big break, the consequences are more devastating than he ever imagined.

Inspired by an actual newspaper photograph that stunned the nation, Sold on a Monday is a powerful novel of love, redemption, and the unexpected paths that bring us home. – Description from the publisher
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Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr.: A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, by the bestselling author of The Black Church.

The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked “a new birth of freedom” in Lincoln’s America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the “nadir” of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.

Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a “New Negro” to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age.

The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored “home rule” to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation.

An essential tour through one of America’s fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion’s mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.

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Recommended Viewing:

One Lane Bridge, Season 1 (Available on DVD and through Acorn TV):

More a character study than a mystery; set in New Zealand – and the scenery is great!

And here is the IMDB overview of the series:
During a murder investigation at Queenstown’s infamous One Lane Bridge, ambitious young Maori Detective, Ariki Davis, inadvertently reawakens a spiritual gift that endangers the case, his career and his life.

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References

Margot Livesey. (n.d.). Fantastic Fiction. Retrieved May 21, 2021, from https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/margot-livesey/

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Margot Livesey Professor Fiction. (n.d.). Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Retrieved April 21, 2021, from https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/people/margot-livesey

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Walsh, S. (2020, August 11). “Life is about change—whether we like it or not”: An Interview with Margot Livesey. Ploughshares. https://blog.pshares.org/life-is-about-change-whether-we-like-it-or-not-an-interview-with-margot-livesey/

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/margot-livesey/

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If you have questions about the book club, feel free to call the library at 607-936-3713 or send me an email to me at reimerl@stls.org

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL