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If you've ever thought of joining a book club, Do visit us. We meet on the first Friday of each month at 10:30am in the main room of the Mid-County Senior Center.

"The earth lay rich and dark and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes. Sometimes they turned up a bit of brick, a splinter of wood. It was nothing. Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. They worked on, moving together --- together --- producing the fruit of this earth --- speechless in their movement together."

The simple raw imagery of THE GOOD EARTH won Pearl S. Buck the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1932. Its poignant portrayal of a poor farmer's life and his bond with the land is as relevant to our own ancestral roots as it is to rural China. Wang Lung, the central figure around which the entire narrative revolves, is a man of many complexities depicted by his relationships with his wife, his father, his children and his village. His land is precious, its value equating to his own self-worth. Although steeped in the ancient traditions, he reflects certain enlightened thinking at times that may be more for the author's emphasis of injustices than a true depiction of the average Chinese peasant in the early 1900s.

Wang Lung's story begins as a young man seeking a wife to cook, clean and bear his children. O-lan, a slave's slave from a wealthy household, comes to live and share his life in the subservient fashion that traditions dictate. Initially their marriage brings satisfaction to both, although for vastly different reasons. Wang Lung has a sense of fulfillment in having such a wise and competent woman to raise his children and maintain his home. And even though women are still considered "slaves" by their men, O-lan has found a better life than she's ever known; she is well-cared for and Wang Lung is kind. Together they bring five children into the world and work their thriving farm.

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Join the Book Club!
Join in Books Appreciation and Discussions.
First Friday of each Month
10:30am to 12:00 noon.
Please call: 831.476.4711

If you've ever thought of joining a book club, Do visit us. We meet on the first Friday of each month at 10:30am in the main room of the Mid-County Senior Center.

A novel set in the aftermath of World War II. It moves back and forth about Japan, China, Hong Kong and Britain and contains an unlikely romance.

"Shirley Hazzard has written a hypnotic novel that unfolds like a dream: Japan, Southeast Asia, the end of one war and the beginnings of another, the colonial order gone, and, at the center of it all, a love story." --Joan Didion

Ms. Hazzard's previous novels are The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), and The Transit of Venus (1981). She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Her nonfiction works include Defeat of an Ideal (1973), Countenance of Truth (1990), and the memoir Greene on Capri (2000). She lives in New York, with sojourns in Italy.

The award for fiction went to Irish writer Colm Toibin for his novel about Henry James, "The Master," ... The Times citation described the novel as 'an illumination of the very process of writing itself - a compelling, richly rewarding and utterly original work of fiction about family and friendship and art in the Modern Age.'

Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955. She grew up "in the middle of an alfalfa field," in the part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields.

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

The story of a lovable Irish-American from Queens who as a young man had lost his first real love. He died an alcoholic, and the book explores his deep and fierce loyalty to the dream his early love represented. The chairman of the judging panel, of "The National Book Award" said the novel had a voice like nothing we could recall. Alice McDermott is the author of three other novels. She teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University.

"Child of My Heart", a deceptively simple story about one fifteen-year-old girl's summer on the east end of Long Island. McDermott is something of a specialist in the literature of wry sorrow - she's Irish, after all, Ron Charles noted in The Christian Science Monitor. Her previous novel, "Charming Billy", described a lovable alcoholic who could never marry the woman he loved. She's not far from that theme in Child of My Heart, but this time she's wound sorrow tightly around a spine of resilience to produce a story that's more profound and unsettling.

The Handmaid's Tale is set in the futuristic Republic of Gilead. Sometime in the future, conservative Christians take control of the United States and establish a dictatorship. Most women in Gilead are infertile after repeated exposure to pesticides, nuclear waste, or leakages from chemical weapons. The few fertile women are taken to camps and trained to be handmaidens, birth-mothers for the upper-class. Infertile lower-class women are sent either to clean up toxic waste or to become "Marthas," house servants.

Sue Monk Kidd was born and raised in the tiny town of Sylvester, Georgia, which is tucked among the pinelands and red fields of Southwest Georgia, a place she has lovingly referred to it as "an enduring somewhere." Her writing has been deeply influenced by place, and she mined her experiences of growing up in Sylvester as she wrote "The Secret Life of Bees", her first novel.

The 'Margaret Atwood Society' Web Pages

The website of the Margaret Atwood Society, an international association of scholars, teachers and students who share an interest in Atwood's work. The main goal of the Society is to promote scholarly exchange of the writer's work by providing opportunities for scholars to exchange information.

One of the world's most celebrated authors, Margaret Atwood has penned a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays, in the genre of her popular books Good Bones and Murder in the Dark, punctuated with wonderful illustrations by the author. Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, these highly imaginative, vintage Atwoodian mini-fictions speak on a broad range of subjects, reflecting the times we live in with deadly accuracy and knife-edge precision.

In pieces ranging in length from a mere paragraph to several pages, Atwood gives a sly pep talk to the ambitious young; writes about the disconcerting experience of looking at old photos of ourselves; gives us Horatio's real views on Hamlet; and examines the boons and banes of orphanhood. "Bring Back Mom: An Invocation" explores what life was really like for the "perfect" homemakers of days gone by, and in "The Animals Reject Their Names," she runs history backward, with surprising results.

Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, The Tent is vintage Atwood. Enhanced by the author's delightful drawings.

Margaret E. Atwood, a celebrated and prolific author and poet, is largely hailed as Canada's foremost contemporary writer. She received her B.A. from Victoria College, University of Toronto, and her A.M. from Radcliffe. Atwood's work is well-known for skillfully broaching subjects ranging from power, gender politics, feminism, the nature of mass society and the fate of Canada and its literature. Her most famous novel is The Handmaid's Tale, which is set in a futuristic American dystopia controlled by religious zealots.

Margaret Atwood has earned an international reputation for creating fiction that is at once arresting, convincing, and tremendously imaginative. With Oryx and Crake, she has surpassed even her own prodigious standards. Crafting a world that is provocative and all-too-plausible - like the chilling and oddly prophetic dystopia of the The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood spins a fascinating what-if story that will change the way we look at everything from genetic modification to climate change.