Our book group choice for April 2006 is In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant. Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice, the shimmering city born out of water to become a miracle of east-west trade: rich […]
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Our book group for March 2006 is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. First published in 1841, the book chronicles a wide range of popular delusions and fads throughout history, from tulip mania to the South Sea Bubble. Mackay’s central thesis is that crowd psychology is a powerful force that can lead to irrational and
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Our book group choice for February 2006 Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Is Sophie Fevvers the toast of Europe’s capitals? Part swan? Or all fake?
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Our book group choice for January 2006 is Neuromancer by William Gibson. The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus-hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace.
Our book group choice for December 2005 is The Enchantment of Lily Dahl by Siri Hustvedt. The protagonist of Hustvedt’s second novel is a heroine of the old style: tough, beautiful, and brave.
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Our book choice for November 2005 is Ways Of Hearing: A User’s Guide To The Pop Psyche from Elvis to Eminem by Ben Thompson. Someone once said that “pop music is an argument anyone can join in on.”
Our book group choice for September 2005 is Small Island by Andrea Levy. Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. The novel tells the story of four characters who are affected by the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants who came to the United Kingdom in the
Our book for August 2005 is A Room with a View by EM Foster. The story follows Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman who is on a tour of Italy with her chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett. Lucy is a conventional young woman who has been raised in a strict Victorian household. She is engaged to be married to Cecil Vyse, a wealthy
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Our book choice for July 2005 is Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self. What if there is only a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because somebody has to?
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Our book group choice for May 2005 is City of Glass by Paul Auster. Nominated for an Edgar award for best mystery of the year, City of Glass inaugurates an intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as “post-existentialist private eye.”
