Hi everyone, first up the reminder! Our November Book Club for Adults meeting is next Friday, November 8, 2024 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

We’ll be discussing our November Read, The Great Divide by Cristina Henrquez, which focuses on some of the everyday people impacted by the building of the Panama Canal in 1904. Copies of the book can still be picked up at the library if anyone needs a copy.

And copies of our December Read: Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice For Murders by Jesse Q. Sutanto will be available on November 8.

Hope to see everyone next Friday!

Have a great weekend,

Linda

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Now, on to a review of our last book club gathering and read!

The October SSCL Book Club for Adults gathering was held on Friday, October 11, 2024.  

We discussed our October Read Mrs. Nash’s Ashes by Sarah Adler.  

Despite the title, Mrs. Nash’s Ashes was a lighter read than our September book, Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian which features characters who survived the Armenian Genocide of the early twentieth century.  

The cliff notes version of the plot is that Mrs. Nash’s Ashes follows the story of three main characters; former child actress Millicent “Millie” Watts-Cohen, English teacher and writer Hollis Hollenbeck, and Millie’s friend and neighbor, the late Mrs. Rose Mcintrye Nash. The story of Millie and Hollis is contemporary; the love story of Millie and the love of her life, Elsie Brown is told in flashbacks.  

As a child Millie appeared in a popular TV show and she recently had a spectacular public breakup, outside a restaurant, with her former boyfriend Josh, when she discovered he had been using her fame, by creating a false social media account in her name, to advance his career. Hollis and Josh went to school together, and he too was at the restaurant the night of the breakup and took a very distraught Millie home after her fight with Josh. 

Fast forward a couple of months and Mrs. Nash has recently died, Millie having promised her she would reunite her ashes, which she has stored in her backpack, with Elsie, who she discovered was alive and living in Florida. Millie booked a flight to Florida and was waiting for her flight at the National Airport in Washington D.C., when a male fan unknowingly accosted her, and a curmudgeonly Hollis, who was also waiting to catch a flight to Florida, came to her rescue. 

Longer story short, the airport experienced technical difficulties, Millie and Hollis’s flights are cancelled, and they decide to car pool it to Florida; along the way they encounter a number of humorous and interesting obstacles including a road closure due to an olive oil spill, the angst of Millie’s former boyfriend Josh who sees photos of Millie and Hollis on social media, and Millie being asked to be the Grand Marshall in a parade in a small town they stay in for a few days, while Hollis’s car is being fixed.  

Interspersed with the story of Millie and Hollis, is the story of Rose and Elsie who meet, near an army base in Florida, during World War II; when Rose is a pigeoneer and Elsie an army nurse. The women fall in love and spend a great deal of their off-duty hours together playing games, hanging out on a lovely local beach and just enjoying each other’s company; but both realize in the end, that a future together is impossible due to the social norms of the day. Rose finishes her service as a pigeoneer goes home, marries and has children; and writes occasionally to Elsie for a few years until it seems, due to an inaccurate report, that Esther has been killed while serving in Korea.  

Decades later, Millie discovers that, in fact, Elsie survived the Korean War and is living in a hospice in Florida; and this discovery prompts the road trip. 

Despite some literal and figurative bumps in the road Mille and Hollis make it to Florida and rush to Elsie’s hospice only to discover that Elsie died the day Millie and Hollis met in the National airport. Millie is sad that she wasn’t able to keep her promise to Mrs. Nash and reunite her, the form of her ashes, with Elsie. Instead, Millie decides to bury Mrs. Nash’s ashes on the same nearby beach where the women spent much of their time together during World War II.  

An epilogue of the story, available by signing up to receive the author, Sarah Adler’s, newsletter, indicates that a year after the contemporary road trip Millie and Hollis took, that they have become a couple.  

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What Other Books Book Club Members Have Read Recently:

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum  

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer-prize winning author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them 

“A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism… clear-sighted and fearless… a masterclass in the marriage of dodgy government to international criminality… (both) deeply disturbing.”—John Simpson, The Guardian • “Especially timely.”—The Washington Post 

We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. 

But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. 

International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don’t stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren’t linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan’s essay calling for “containment” of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat. 

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The Impossible Us by Sarah Lotz 

 Nick: Failed writer. Failed husband. Dog owner.

Bee: Serial dater. Dress maker. Pringles enthusiast.

One day, their paths cross over a misdirected email. The connection is instant, electric. They feel like they’ve known each other all their lives. So they decide to meet.

While Nick buys a new suit, and gets his courage up, Bee steps away from her desk, and sets off to meet him at a London train station. With their happily-ever-after nearly in hand, what happens next is incredible and threatens to separate them forever.

As their once in a lifetime connection is tested, Nick and Bee will discover whether being together is an impossible chance worth taking.

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The Life Impossible by Matt Haig 

The remarkable next novel from Matt Haig, the author of #1 New York Times bestseller The Midnight Library, with more than nine million copies sold worldwide 

“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…” 

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. 

Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past. 

Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning. 

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Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger 

“That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.”  

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.  

Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.  

Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God 

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New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton 

New Seeds of Contemplation is one of Thomas Merton’s most widely read and best-loved books. Christians and non-Christians alike have joined in praising it as a notable successor in the meditative tradition of St. John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the medieval mystics, while others have compared Merton’s reflections with those of Thoreau. New Seeds of Contemplation seeks to awaken the dormant inner depths of the spirit so long neglected by Western man, to nurture a deeply contemplative and mystical dimension in our lives. For Merton, “Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the soil of freedom, spontaneity and love.” 

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A Novel Proposal by Denise Hunter 

When western novelist Sadie Goodwin must pen a romance novel to rescue her lackluster sales, there’s only one tiny problem: she’s never been in love. 

Desperate to salvage her career, Sadie accepts an invitation to hole up at her friend’s beach duplex for the summer and devote herself to this confounding genre. After all, where better to witness love than on the beautiful South Carolina shore? 

But Sadie soon finds many ways to procrastinate the dreaded task—like getting to know the beach regulars and installing a Little Free Library on the property. She even attempts conversation with Sam Ford, the frustratingly stubborn neighbor on the other side of the duplex. But things take an unexpected turn when Sadie finds inside her library an abandoned novel with a secret compartment—and a beautiful engage­ment ring tucked inside. 

Suddenly, locating the ring’s owner becomes the perfect way to put off writing that romance. Sadie draws a reluctant Sam into her mission. And as the two close in on an answer to the mysterious proposal, she discovers a tender side to him. She begins to wonder if he just might make the perfect hero for her romance novel—or maybe even her heart. 

From the bestselling author of The Convenient Groom (now a beloved Hallmark Original movie) comes a sweet and sizzling story of a romance writer surprised by her own happily ever after. 

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There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak 

From the Booker Prize finalist, author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two great rivers, all connected by a single drop of water. 

“Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf. Make place for her in your heart too. You won’t regret it.”—Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize 

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. 

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains. 

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time. 

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything. 

A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.” 

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The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman “Not Apt to be Intimidated” by John L. Smith Jr. 

A Wall Street Journal Spring Books 2024 Selection: “What to Read This Spring” 

An Extraordinary Portrait of America’s Beloved Female Founder and First Lady 

Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, was an eyewitness to America’s founding, and helped guide the new nation through her observations and advice to her famously prickly husband, who cherished her. She met many important and significant figures of the period: George Washington and his wife Martha, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Knox, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, John Jay, Marquis de Lafayette, John Paul Jones, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, artist Patience Wright, and even King George III and Queen Charlotte of England, as well as King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette of France. In The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman “Not Apt to Be Intimidated”, writer and researcher John L. Smith, Jr., draws on more than two thousand letters of Abigail’s spanning from the 1760s to her death in 1818, interweaving Abigail’s colorful correspondence—some of which has not appeared in print before—with a contextual narrative. In this priceless documentation of one of the most important periods of world history she comments on the varied personalities she encountered and, while her husband was away from home serving in the Continental Congresses and as a diplomatic envoy in Europe, she wrote him frequently about their home in Massachusetts, their family, national and local politics, and, during the early years of the war, crucial information concerning revolutionary activities around Boston. She was an advocate for education for women, a shrewd businesswoman, and had an unrivaled political acumen. Her strength in the face of disease, loss of children, and other hardships, and her poignant, beautiful, and often philosophical commentary, advice, and predictions allow Abigail to demonstrate her fully modern sensibilities. This major biography of Abigail, the first in over ten years, is a riveting, revealing portrait of a remarkable woman that readers will find very relatable—and one that transforms how she is perceived.   

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And the TV Series:  

Lessons In Chemistry (Apple TV+) 

2024 nominee for 10 Emmy Award, including Outstanding Limited Series. Set in the early sixties; Denied her dream of being a scientist, Elizabeth Zott accepts a job on a TV cooking show and sets out to teach a nation of overlooked housewives way more than recipes. – Apple overview