Lifespan Book Club
BOOK CLUB 2016
LIFESPAN RESOURCES
404.237.7307
Meets at 12:00 noon – Trinity Presbyterian Church
3003 Howell Mill Rd, NW Atlanta, GA 30327
1/25 – (please note that this is our annual pot luck luncheon) Potpourri
Everyone is invited to present a favorite book and will have about 7 minutes to present. This is our annual covered dish luncheon. Please bring something to share.
2/22 – Acts of Faith by Erich Segal
From the author of Love Story (1970), this novel explores the intertwined lives of three young people from two different worlds. Reaching across more than a quarter of a century, from the tough streets of Brooklyn to ultra-modern Brasilia to an Israeli Kibbutz, and radiating the splendor of Rome and Jerusalem, this is the unforgettable story of three remarkable lives and a forbidden love.
Reviewer: Hennie Rodts
3/21 – Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
“It is a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon…” This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920’s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.
Reviewer: Mimi Roberts
4/25 – The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
A middle–aged man owns a failing independent bookstore on Alice Island off the coast of Massachusetts. A widower, Fikry is lonesome, angry and a bit of a literary snob. He doesn’t stock any old book at Island books, where “No Man Is an Island, Every Book is a World.” He is roused from his slough of despondence by a surprise left in his sparsely stocked children’s section. His life is forever changed.
Reviewer: Cele Covatta
5/23 – My Year in Harper by Malcolm L. Wilkinson
My Year in Harper tells the story of a twenty-year-old Charles Chandler and his exile from Memphis to a small town in Southwest Mississippi. His encounter with the three old great-aunts he lives with, as well as the many town characters he meets during the year, changes his life in the most unexpected ways. Malcom L. Wilkinson is a retired Vinings pharmacist and pharmacy owner. He was born and raised in Southwest Mississippi and now lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His book of short stories and poems, Tales of Harper, was published in 2014.
Mr. Wilkinson will be the facilitator this date.
6/27 – The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah Terri
“In love we find out who we are.” France, 1939
In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France….but invade they do,…When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive. Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gaetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can…completely.
Reviewer: Suzy Poole
7/25 – Gutenberg’s Apprentice by Alex Christie
A detailed historical novel takes the readers into Gutenberg’s 15th century Mainz workshop. A sophisticated moving story of the creation of the Gutenberg Bible. A deep immersive recreation of a pivotal moment in history.
Reviewer – Hennie Rodts
8/29-All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
10 years in the writing, and a Pulitzer Prize winner, this beautiful novel follows a blind girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Using the radio’s ability as a device to cross enemy lines, a tense and evocative tale is woven as the adventure unfolds.
Reviewer: Frank Gleason
9/26-The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Genetics professor Don Tillman’s ordered, predictable life is thrown into chaos when love enters the equation in this immensely enjoyable novel. Never good with social cues, Don explains his difficulty empathizing with others, which he forthrightly says is a defining symptom of the autism spectrum, as a result of his brain simply being wired differently. Diagnosis is not the issue here, as the reader is rooting for Don as he searches for ways to fit in. With his fortieth birthday approaching, he designs a questionnaire to find a compatible female life partner using his overriding devotion to logic. But he finds his quest competing with the request of a woman to discover the identity of her biological father. Don is used to causing amusement or consternation in others, but as his self-awareness and understanding grow, so do his efforts to behave more appropriately. Determined and unintentionally sweet, Don embarks on an optimistic and redemptive journey. Funny, touching, and hard to put down, The Rosie Project is certain to entertain even as readers delve into deep themes. For a book about a logic-based quest for love, it has a lot of heart. –Bridget Thoreson.
Reviewer: Meg Taylor
10/31-The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of a Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
It all starts on the one hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson, Sitting quietly in his room in an old folk’s home, he is waiting for the party he never wanted to begin. The Mayor is going to be there, but as it turns out, Allan is not. Slowly but surely, he climbs out of his bedroom window into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his get-away. This is a fun and feel good book for all ages.
Reviewer: Mimi Roberts
11/28- Neverhome by Laird Hunt
She calls herself Ash but that is not her real name. She is a farmer’s faithful wife, but she has left her husband to don the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. This novel tells the harrowing story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed, hysteria and heartbreak she becomes a hero, folk legend, a madwoman and traitor to the American cause.
Reviewer: Renee Rux
There is no meeting in December.