"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
- June 4th, 2008
- The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers’ floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan’s first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.
Through these encounters-by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map’s countless places in between.
[ Show Detail ]
- July 2nd, 2008
- Plainsong by Kent Haruf
Plainsong, according to Kent Haruf’s epigraph, is “any simple and unadorned melody or air.” It’s a perfect description of this lovely, rough-edged book, set on the very edge of the Colorado plains. Tom Guthrie is a high school teacher whose wife can’t—or won’t—get out of bed; the McPherons are two bachelor brothers who know little about the world beyond their farm gate; Victoria Roubideaux is a pregnant 17-year-old with no place to turn. Their lives parallel each other in much the same way any small-town lives would—until Maggie Jones, another teacher, makes them intersect. Even as she tries to draw Guthrie out of his black cloud, she sends Victoria to live with the two elderly McPheron brothers, who know far more about cattle than about teenage girls. Trying to console her when she think she’s hurt her baby, the best lie they can come up with is this: “I knew of a heifer we had one time that was carrying a calf, and she got a length of fencewire down her some way and it never hurt her or the calf.”
Holt, Colorado, is the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone’s business before that business even happens. In a way, that’s true of the book, too. There’s not a lot of suspense here, plotwise; you can see each narrative twist and turn coming several miles down the pike. What Plainsong has instead is note-perfect dialogue, surrounded by prose that’s straightforward yet rich in particulars: “a woman walking a white lapdog on a piece of ribbon,” glimpsed from a car window; the boys’ mother, her face “as pale as schoolhouse chalk”; the smells of hay and manure, the variations of prairie light. Even the novel’s larger questions are sized to a domestic scale. Will Guthrie find love? Will Victoria run away with the father of her baby? Will the McPherons learn to hold a conversation? But in this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and Plainsong manages to capture nothing less than an entire world—fencing pliers, calf-pullers, and all. Kent Haruf has a gorgeous ear, and a knack for rendering the simple complex
[ Show Detail ]
- August 6th, 2008
- The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino
Yoshino, a law professor at Yale and a gay, Asian-American man, masterfully melds autobiography and legal scholarship in this book, marking a move from more traditional pleas for civil equality to a case for individual autonomy in identity politics. In questioning the phenomenon of “covering,” a term used for the coerced hiding of crucial aspects of one’s self, Yoshino thrusts the reader into a battlefield of shifting gray areas. Yet, at every step, he anticipates the reader’s questions and rebuttals, answering them not only with acute reasoning, but with disarming humility. What emerges is an eloquent, poetic protest against the hidden prejudices embedded in American civil rights legislation—legislation that tacitly apologizes for “immutable” human difference from the white, male, straight norm, rather than defending one’s “right to say what one is.” Though Yoshino recognizes the law’s potential to further (and hinder) liberty’s cause, he admits that his “education in law has been an education in its limitations.” Hence, by way of his unsparing accounts of self-realization, he reveals that the struggle against oppression lies not solely in fighting an imagined, monolithic state but as much in intimate discourse with the mother, the father and the colleague who constitute that state.
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- September 3rd, 2008
- The Position by Greg Wolitzer
Paul and Roz Mellow are enthusiastically in love—so much so that in 1975 they write a how-to sex book, Pleasuring, that features illustrations of them in every imaginable position. The book becomes a runaway bestseller. When the children find the book and read it together, they’re forever traumatized, in ways both serious and comedic. Flash forward 30 years: Paul and Roz are long divorced and remarried, and Paul, in particular, remains bitter; the grown children fumble through their lives on the eve of the publisher’s reissue of the sex classic.
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- October 1st, 2008
- Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick
In this remarkable effort, National Book Award–winner Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea) examines the history of Plymouth Colony. Philbrick brings into focus a gruesome period in early American history.
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- December 3rd, 2008
- Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen
Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse’s unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town’s first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.
[ Show Detail ]
- February 4th, 2009
- The Good German by Joseph Kanon
This compelling thriller is both a touching love story and a masterful portrayal of the struggle for geopolitical control of postwar Germany. Network correspondent Jake Geismar, who covered Berlin before the war, has returned to the devastated city, ostensibly to cover the Potsdam Conference but actually to find the woman he loves. Miraculously, Lena Brandt, Jake’s wartime mistress, has survived. However, her mathematician husband is missing, and both the American and Russian intelligence services are hunting him.
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- March 4th, 2009
- My Life in France by Julia Child
With Julia Child’s death in 2004 at age 91, her grandnephew Prud’homme (The Cell Game) completed this playful memoir of the famous chef’s first, formative sojourn in France with her new husband, Paul Child, in 1949. The couple met during WWII in Ceylon, working for the OSS, and soon after moved to Paris, where Paul worked for the U.S. Information Service. Child describes herself as a “rather loud and unserious Californian,” 36, six-foot-two and without a word of French, while Paul was 10 years older, an urbane, well-traveled Bostonian.
[ Show Detail ]
- April 1st, 2009
- Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux
In one of Theroux’s most magnificent novels, the paranoid, brilliant, and self-destructive Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they’ve left.
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- May 6th, 2009
- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents—Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls’ childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices.
[ Show Detail ]
- June 3rd, 2009
- Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
Because of a storm, Dr. David Henry delivers his wife’s babies himself, aided only by a nurse. The fraternal twins are born healthy, but one has Down syndrome. Without telling his wife, he asks the nurse to take the child to a home and tells his wife that the twin died at birth. The nurse secretly absconds with the baby to Pittsburg and this story traces the impact of the Dr.’s decision on the lives of those involved over 25 years.
[ Show Detail ]
- July 1st, 2009
- The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: a Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado
This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family’s gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor, now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Lagnado’s story hinges on her father, “the Captain,” who cut a dashing figure in mid-century Cairo, consorting with British officers and Egyptian royalty at French cafés while his family, neglected, stayed home.
[ Show Detail ]
Past Discussions
Click here to view past discussions.
For more information about “Books Sandwiched In” contact
Chris Page.