Hi everyone, first the info. on our upcoming April 2024 Book Club for Adult Gathering! 

The Southeast Steuben County Library Book Club for Adults will hold our next meeting at the library on Friday, April 12, 2024, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. in the Conference Room at the library.  

Our April Read is: The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant 

Looking forward a month, our May 2024 gathering will be held at the library on Friday, May 10, 2024. Our May Read is The Heaven & Earth Book Store by James McBride.  

Copies of both the April & May Reads may be picked up at the Circulation Desk at any time! 

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And here are the notes on our March 2024 Gathering & Read:  

The March 2024 Book Club for Adults gathering was held at the library on Friday, March 8, 2024. 

Our March Read was The Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane 

The Half Moon is the story of a long-married couple Malcolm & Jess Gephardt, during a time of crisis.   

Martin, a bar manager, has an outgoing personality and loves to interact with people, making him the perfect bartender. He has been the head bartender of the local Half Moon bar for years, and he has recently achieved his long-held dream of owning the Half Moon bar, by naively making an oral deal with the bar’s previous owner Hugh.   

In contrast, Jess is a more reserved person, a lawyer who works at a local law firm and who has worked hard for years to climb the corporate ladder, but has lost rungs along the way due to her struggles with I.V.F. Jess’s two main life goals have been to make partner at her law firm and to have a baby.   

During the book readers discover that Malcolm and Jess, originally married in their twenties because they were unexpectedly expecting a baby, that they subsequently lost that baby, and have more recently tried multiple times to conceive via I.V.F. without success. The couple recently came to a crossroads on the baby making front, with Jess wanting to continue to try and conceive and Malcolm having concluded that they are never going to conceive and deciding he prefers to stop trying, thus eliminating the related struggle and stress from his life. 

In a sense, you could say both Malcolm and Jess are having a mid-life crisis. Malcolm was so determined to buy The Half Moon that he didn’t thoroughly vet the sale with Hugh and so he got a bad deal; and despite Malcolm’s best efforts to turn a profit the Half Moon is losing money, and Martin knows the business isn’t sustainable.  And Jess has become aware that having to take time off from work, for I.V.F. treatments has cost her the opportunity to become a partner at her law firm, and now it seems her other big dream, to have a baby will not be coming to fruition either, so to put it succinctly, she feels as if all the dedication and hard work she has put in towards her goals has been wasted and gained her nothing. 

During the book, a distraught Jess leaves Malcolm and temporarily takes up with another man, a man without a wife but with three young children, and Malcolm struggles to live without Jess, taking care of the bar while trying to figure out what to do about his failing business.  

Toward the end of the book, the couple, in what might be bending believability a bit, reconcile. Jess users her sharp lawyer skills to get Malcolm out his bad deal with Hugh and as part of the new deal, Malcolm sells the land the Half Moon building is set on, which he discovers his mother actually owns and gives to him; in doing so Malcolm discharges all his debts and is able to start over with a clean slate.  

Malcolm then accepts an offer from a friend to manage a bar on St. John’s Island, in the Caribbean, with Jess seeing him off and expecting to join him on the island shortly.  

The consensus of book club members is to give the book two thumbs down as a “don’t read it!” title.  

Some book club members didn’t find the story believable; others thought the characters weren’t well drawn and several book club members just generally didn’t like the book and didn’t finish it. There were one or two book club members who thought the book was okay; but suffice to say the book club will not be reading another title by Mary Beth Keane! 

In contrast, I have spoken to several book club members about our April Read, The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant, and they have all said they either have and/or are enjoying reading the book. So, I have high hopes that the majority of book club members will enjoy reading our next read! 

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Book Club Members Recommended Reads: March 2024 

Elderhood by Louise Aronson  

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction 

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction 

Winner of the WSU AOS Bonner Book Award 

The New York Times bestseller from physician and award-winning writer Louise Aronson–an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life, as revelatory as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. 

For more than 5,000 years, “old” has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. 

Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that’s neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy–a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. 

Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author’s own words, “an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being.” 

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Erasure by Percival Everett 

Percival Everett’s blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross 

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been “critically acclaimed.” He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.” Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies―his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father’s suicide seven years before. 

In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestseller. He doesn’t intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is―under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh―and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel. 

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Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Thich Nhat Hanh 

Stress. It can sap our energy, undermine our health if we let it, even shorten our lives. It makes us more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, disconnection and disease. Based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction program, this classic, groundbreaking work—which gave rise to a whole new field in medicine and psychology—shows you how to use medically proven mind-body approaches derived from meditation and yoga to counteract stress, establish greater balance of body and mind, and stimulate well-being and healing. By engaging in these mindfulness practices and integrating them into your life from moment to moment and from day to day, you can learn to manage chronic pain, promote optimal healing, reduce anxiety and feelings of panic, and improve the overall quality of your life, relationships, and social networks. This second edition features results from recent studies on the science of mindfulness, a new Introduction, up-to-date statistics, and an extensive updated reading list. Full Catastrophe Living is a book for the young and the old, the well and the ill, and anyone trying to live a healthier and saner life in our fast-paced world. 

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If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother by Julia Sweeney 

“I took so long to assemble my lovely family. If only they would disappear.”  

While Julia Sweeney is known as a talented comedienne and writer and performer of her one-woman shows, she is also a talented essayist. Happily for us, the past few years have provided her with some rich material. Julia adopted a Chinese girl named Mulan (“After the movie?”) and then, a few years later, married and moved from Los Angeles to Chicago. She writes about deciding to adopt her child, strollers, nannies (including the Chinese Pat), knitting, being adopted by a dog, The Food Network, and meeting Mr. Right through an email from a complete stranger who wrote, “Desperately Seeking Sweeney-in-Law.” She recounts how she explained the facts of life to nine-year-old Mulan, a story that became a wildly popular TED talk and YouTube video.  

Some of the essays reveal Julia’s ability to find that essential thread of human connection, whether it’s with her mother-in-law, who candidly reveals a story that most people would keep a secret, or with an anonymous customer service rep during a late-night phone call. But no matter what the topic, Julia always writes with elegant precision, pinning her jokes with razor-sharp observations while articulating feelings that we all share.  

Poignant, provocative, and wise, this is a funny, and at times powerful, memoir by a woman living her life with originality and intelligence. 

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Meditation by Marcus Arelius  

 Written in Greek by an intellectual Roman emperor without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a wide range of fascinating spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the leader struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. Spanning from doubt and despair to conviction and exaltation, they cover such diverse topics as the question of virtue, human rationality, the nature of the gods and the values of leadership. But while the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation, in developing his beliefs Marcus also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a series of wise and practical aphorisms that have been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and ordinary readers for almost two thousand years. 

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Recipe for a Perfect Wife: A Novel by Karma Brown  

In this intriguing dual narrative novel, a modern-day woman finds inspiration in hidden notes left by her home’s previous owner, a quintessential 1950s housewife. As she discovers remarkable parallels between this woman’s life and her own, it causes her to question the foundation of her own relationship with her husband—and what it means to be a wife fighting for her place in a patriarchal society. 

When Alice Hale leaves a career in publicity to become a writer and follows her husband to the New York suburbs, she is unaccustomed to filling her days alone in a big, empty house. But when she finds a vintage cookbook buried in a box in the old home’s basement, she becomes captivated by the cookbook’s previous owner—1950s housewife Nellie Murdoch. As Alice cooks her way through the past, she realizes that within the cookbook’s pages Nellie left clues about her life—including a mysterious series of unsent letters penned to her mother. 

Soon Alice learns that while baked Alaska and meatloaf five ways may seem harmless, Nellie’s secrets may have been anything but. When Alice uncovers a more sinister—even dangerous—side to Nellie’s marriage, and has become increasingly dissatisfied with the mounting pressures in her own relationship, she begins to take control of her life and protect herself with a few secrets of her own. 

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West Heart Kill: A novel by Dann McDorman 

LOOKING FOR AN ANYTHING-BUT-ORDINARY WHODUNIT? • Welcome to the West Heart Club. Where the drinks are neat but behind closed doors . . . things can get messy. Where upright citizens are deemed downright boring. Where the only missing piece of the puzzle is you, dear reader. 
 
A unique and irresistible murder mystery set at a remote hunting lodge where everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective on the scene—a remarkable debut that gleefully upends the rules of the genre. 
 
“A thoroughly original suspense novel that hops across elements of the genre—a diabolical locked-room mystery interspersed with a fascinating primer on the form—while always being tremendous fun to read.”—Chris Pavone, best-selling author of Two Nights in Lisbon 
 
An isolated hunt club. A raging storm. Three corpses, discovered within four days. A cast of monied, scheming, unfaithful characters. 
 
When private detective Adam McAnnis joins an old college friend for the Bicentennial weekend at the exclusive West Heart club in upstate New York, he finds himself among a set of not-entirely-friendly strangers. Then the body of one of the members is found at the lake’s edge; hours later, a major storm hits. By the time power is restored on Sunday, two more people will be dead . . . 

Have a great day!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Tel: 607-936-3713 x212

Email: reimerl@stls.org