Katonah Village Library Book Discussion Group

2010 Schedule

The Katonah Village Library Book Discussion Group is led by Virginia.

The Library's Book Discussion Group has been meeting every three weeks (with occasional one-week lapses due to holidays) since 1983. The group meets on Wednesday evenings at 8 PM and talks informally about plot, character, motivation, language, and anything else that comes to mind for about an hour before checking out the author's biographical facts and what critics have had to say about the book under discussion.

Anyone interested is cordially invited to pick up a copy of the upcoming book (lists for future dates and copies of the current book are always available) and join the fun! The books are almost always fiction, with a fair distribution between male and female authors; and a range of publication dates from the nineteenth century up to a few months ago.

Click here for books discussed in 2009

Current selections listed below (all summaries obtained from WLS database Novelist)

July 28 - Song Yet Sung by James McBride

 A tale set against a backdrop of slave rights conflicts in the nineteenth-century Chesapeake Bay region finds young runaway Liz Spocott inadvertently inspiring a slave breakout from the attic prison of a notorious slave thief.

August 18 - The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker

Orphaned sisters Leeann and Mary Beth live in a small town with Leeann attending high school and Mary Beth working two jobs, until Mary Beth's special gift for helping people with their problems uncovers their family's dark secret.

September 1 - A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Ralph Truitt, a wealthy businessman with a troubled past who lives in a remote nineteenth-century Wisconsin town, has advertised for a reliable wife and his ad is answered by Catherine Land, a woman who makes every effort to hide her own dark secrets.

September 22 - To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

An English family's complex lives are followed and picked up again after a 10 year hiatus in order to explore the effects of time.

October 13 - Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Benji, one of the only black kids at an elite prep school in Manhattan, tries desperately to fit in, but every summer, he and his brother, Reggie, escape to the East End of Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals has built aworld of is own.

November 3 - Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

On the sixtieth anniversary of the 1942 roundup of Jews by the French police in the Vel d'Hiv section of Paris, American journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article on this dark episode during World War II and embarks on investigation that leads her to long-hidden family secrets and to the ordeal of Sarah, a young girl caught up in the raid.

November 24 - The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

Kitty Fane's affair with Assistant Colonial Secretary Townsend, a married man, is interrupted when she is taken from Hong Kong by her vengeful bacteriologist husband to accompany him to his new post amid a raging cholera epidemic.

December 15 - Spooner by Pete Dexter

Losing his father shortly after birth, Warren Spooner endures a troubled childhood and even more troubled young adulthood that is marked by his dishonorably discharged stepfather, whose inexhaustible patience is tested by the difficult Warren.