"Books Sandwiched In" provides readers with a regular opportunity to participate
in informal, facilitated discussion of noteworthy works of fiction and nonfiction. All
are welcome to join us on the first Wednesday of the month, at 11:30 am in the conference
room on the lower level of the Library. Participants are encouraged to bring a lunch and
share their thoughts on the current reading selection, copies of which are available on a
first-come first-served basis at the circulation desk.
The group has established two annual traditions. In August, the group will discuss the
book that has been selected for the Carolina Summer Reading Program. And in September, in
recognition of Banned Books Week, the group will discuss a book that has been challenged
or banned. Celebrated annually during the last week of September, Banned Books Week is
sponsored by the American Library Association and the American Booksellers Association
and endorsed by the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.
Upcoming Discussions
- August 4th, 2010
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- Student Choice – Picking Cotton - Jennifer Thompson-Cannino
This is the story of an improbable friendship between the author Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton, the man she had mistakenly identified as her rapist eleven years earlier, in 1984. Thompson-Cannino was a 22-year-old white North Carolina college student who, though traumatized, later married and had children in the decade after her rape. Cotton, a young black man, spent the decade seeking freedom and was finally exonerated by DNA evidence. He was able to forgive the people who had put him in prison including Thompson-Cannino. The two victims forged a friendship, collaborated in writing the book, and now together advocate for judicial reform.
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- September 1st, 2010
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- Banned/Challenged – The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
This novel was originally published in 1951 for adults but became popular with adolescent readers for the themes of teenage confusion and rebellion. Holden Caulfield has become an icon for teenagers who are seeking identity, belonging and connection and who, like him, are dealing with alienation. The story follows Holden’s experiences in New York City following his expulsion from a prep school in Pennsylvania. The book has been translated throughout the world. It frequently has been challenged in the United States for its use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and teenage angst. One reviewer says the reason for the book’s enduring popularity is the utter, innocent sincerity with which it was written; it is perhaps manipulative but never phony. J. D. Salinger died in 2010.
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- October 6th, 2010
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- Zeitoun - Dave Eggers
This is the revelation of one man’s experience after Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a successful Syrian-born painting contractor, decides to stay in New Orleans and protect his property while his family flees. After the levees break, he uses a small canoe to rescue people, before being arrested by an armed squad. When a guard accuses him of being a member of Al Qaeda, he begins to understand his predicament may be based on race and culture. He is thrown into one of the wire cages, and after several days is moved to a correctional center outside New Orleans. For six days his wife Kathy and relatives in Syria and Spain seek word of him, fearing he has perished. After almost a month of legal proceedings, Kathy raises bail and Zeitoun is released. Dave Eggers has used interviews with the couple in New Orleans and with relatives in Syria and Spain to approach the subject intimately. He lets the injustices speak for themselves. One reviewer called the story an American tragedy.
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- November 3rd, 2010
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- A Lesson Before Dying - Earnest Gaines
The narrator of this exploration of race and identity set in a small Cajun community in Louisiana is Grant Wiggins, a teacher in a small church school. His young student, Jefferson, has been convicted of murder in a robbery gone bad even though he had not been armed and did not pull the trigger. When Jefferson’s attorney claims that executing him would be tantamount to killing a hog, his incensed grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant to help. Grant is unhappy with his own status and longs to leave the South. Eventually Grant overcomes his reluctance and the two men, both equally degraded by racism, achieve a relationship that transforms them both. Grant struggles to impart a sense of pride to Jefferson before he must face his death. Though the conclusion is inevitable, Gaines gives a story with emotional power and universal resonance that has endured since its publication in 1957.
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- December 1st, 2010
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- Teacher Man - Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt’s final memoir in the trilogy that started with Angela’s Ashes and continued with ‘Tis, focuses on his 30-year teaching career in New York high schools. McCourt finds humor in nearly everything. He writes about his own misfires, the frustrations with bureaucrats, and the unorthodox methods he used to motivate and teach. He finds encouragement from his own dismal upbringing in the slums of Limerick. This account describes the dignity and difficulties of a largely thankless profession with self-deprecating wit and uncommon perception. It is obvious that McCourt liked his job, especially as he found how to be his own man. It is about educating, forming intellects, and about getting people to think. McCourt fans and teachers will love it.
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- February 2nd, 2011
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- The Piano Teacher - Janice Y K Lee
This novel is about the rigors of love and survival during a time of war and the consequences of choices made under duress. Claire Pendleton, newly married and arrived in Hong Kong in 1952, finds work as a piano teacher. Her student is the daughter of Melody and Victor Chen, a wealthy couple. The girl is not very interested in music, but the Chens’ British expat driver, Will Truesdale, is interested in Claire, and vice versa. As the affair becomes known, specifics of Will’s murky past and details of Victor’s role in past events lend intrigue and a few unexpected twists. The author covers this time in Chinese history and tells without judgment the choices people must make under torturous circumstances. She describes a world in which horrors are painfully real but obscured and seldom told.
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- March 2nd, 2011
11:30am - 4:00pm
- Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China - Jung Chang
This unsettling family portrait by Jung Chang is about three generations of women during the political upheavals in China in the 20th century. Her grandmother was a warlord’s concubine. In the early days of Mao’s revolution, her mother was married to a Communist Party official. They struggled with hardships before being denounced in the Cultural Revolution in the vicious cycle of Mao’s purges. Chang, born in 1952, saw her mother put into a detention camp, then later rehabilitated; her father was denounced and died a broken man in 1975. Chang herself worked and marched for Mao until doubt turned her away from his excess policies and purges. She left China in 1978 and is now director of Chinese studies at London University. Her memoir radiates her inner strength.
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- April 6th, 2011
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout
In this novel presented in stories, some previously published, Strout introduces the reader to the appalling Olive Kitteredge, sometimes portrayed as deeply human and often sympathetic. Olive is a seventh-grade math teacher in Crosby, Maine who is married to Henry, the town pharmacist, and is mother to Christopher. She is described as an emotional storm trooper and anyone in her way had better watch out. The book presents a portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection. Strout also supplies gentle humor and hope. People are sustained by ordinary life and the natural wonders of coastal Maine. The collection has been described as easy to read and impossible to forget.
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- May 4th, 2011
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- Strength in What Remains - Tracy Kidder
This is the remarkable story of Deogratias, a young former medical student from the central African nation of Burundi. In 1993, through no fault of his own, Deo was forced into a terrifying journey. For six months, on foot, he escaped civil war and ethnic violence in Burundi and from genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Then, with a French friend’s help, he was transported to New York where he encountered a new set of travails. He had little money, almost no English and barely survived by sleeping in Central Park and delivering groceries. Deo credits his friends in Burundi and a few kind New Yorkers, and especially Columbia University for his survival. He is now an American citizen and runs a clinic he founded in his beloved homeland, Burundi. Tracy Kidder makes this account personal, relating his friendship with Deo and their trip together to Burundi where they traced the steps of his horrific escape and visited the pile of ruins which later became the clinic Deo had long dreamed about. The reader will be inspired by this one man’s courage and pluck.
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- June 1st, 2011
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Schaeffer and Annie Barrows
The letters comprising this small charming novel begin in 1946, when Juliet Ashton writes to her publisher to say she is tired of covering the sunny side of war and its aftermath. Guernsey farmer Dawsey Adams finds Juliet’s name as the author of a used book and asks his neighbors to write Juliet with their stories. This puts her back in the path of war stories. From the letters the story emerges of the Guernsey inhabitants under the long, tragic German occupation. The unique characters write about the origin of the Literary Society and the booklovers’ clever efforts to outwit the Germans. Judith decides to visit and finds inspiration for her next work and for her life. One critic credited the book for affirming the power of books to nourish people during hard times.
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- July 6th, 2011
11:30am - 4:00pm Meeting Room
- The Help - Kathryn Stockett
This first novel of Kathryn Stockett is an optimistic story of Southern whites and the black women who were trusted to raise their children. The story is set in Jackson, Mississippi during the nascent civil rights movement. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan has returned to her parents’ cotton farm after graduating from Ole Miss in 1962 and is anxious to become a writer. She has been encouraged to write what disturbs her. A budding social activist, she begins to collect stories of the black women while enlisting the help of Aibileen, a maid who has raised 17 children, and her friend Minny who has been unemployed off and on for mouthing off to her white employers. Skeeter puts together a book of stories both scathing and shocking which brings pride to the black community. Doing this gives Skeeter the courage to confront her personal boundaries and pursue her dreams.
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Past Discussions
Click here to view past discussions.
For more information about “Books Sandwiched In” contact
Nancy Dixon.