Loganberry Books Events

Welcome to the Classics Club! Our book group leader Christine, a former young adult librarian, is your guide to those timeless books that almost certainly showed up on your high school and college reading lists. Be reunited with an old friend (or an old foe!), or finally get yourself acquainted with one of those titles that it seems as if everyone in the world has read but you. We guarantee a spirited discussion!

UPCOMING DISCUSSIONS

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Thursday, October 27, 2011, 7:30 pm
**Please note time change from 7 pm**

Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence, and a few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in his imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps." --Goodreads.com

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest
Thursday, November 17, 2011, 7 pm
We will read the first third of Infinite Jest for this discussion. Discussion will continue in December and January.

Somewhere in the not-so-distant future, the screwed-up residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the Enfield Tennis Academy search for the master copy of a movie so dangerously entertaining that its viewers die in a state of catatonic bliss. Explores essential questions about what entertainment is, why we need it, and what it says about who we are. "Wallace is a superb comedian of culture." James Wood, Guardian

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	Classics Club Welcome to the Classics Club! Our book group leader Christine, a former young adult librarian, is your guide to those timeless books that almost certainly showed up on your high school and college reading lists. Be reunited with an old friend (or an old foe!), or finally get yourself acquainted with one of those titles that it seems as if everyone in the world has read but you. We guarantee a spirited discussion! UPCOMING DISCUSSIONS Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray Thursday, October 27, 2011, 7:30 pm Please note time change from 7 pm Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence, and a few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in his imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps." --Goodreads.com David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest Thursday, November 17, 2011, 7 pm We will read the first third of Infinite Jest for this discussion. Discussion will continue in December and January. Somewhere in the not-so-distant future, the screwed-up residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the Enfield Tennis Academy search for the master copy of a movie so dangerously entertaining that its viewers die in a state of catatonic bliss. Explores essential questions about what entertainment is, why we need it, and what it says about who we are. "Wallace is a superb comedian of culture." James Wood, Guardian
	PAST DISCUSSIONS Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions Thursday, September 22, 2011, 7 pm Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth. --Goodreads.com
	Sinclair Lewis: Elmer Gantry Thursday, August 25, 2011, 7 pm Universally recognized as a landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry scandalized readers when it was first published, causing Sinclair Lewis to be "invited" to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia. His portrait of a golden-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church--a saver of souls who lives a life of duplicity, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence--is also the record of a period, a reign of grotesque vulgarity, which but for Lewis would have left no trace of itself. Elmer Gantry has been called the greatest ,most vital, and most penetrating study of hypocrisy that has been written since the works of Voltaire. --Goodreads.com
	Willa Cather: My Antonia Thursday, July 28, 2011, 7 pm First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. --Goodreads.com
	Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Thursday, June 23, 2011, 7 pm Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Intended at first as a simple story of a boy's adventures in the Mississippi Valley, the book grew and matured under Twain's hand into a work of immeasurable richness and complexity. More than a century after its publication, the critical debate over the symbolic significance of Huck's and Jim's voyage is still fresh, and it remains a major work that can be enjoyed at many levels. —Goodreads.com
	Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio Thursday, May 26, 2011, 7 pm ... there is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped. Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small Ohio town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the center is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's "grotesques" - solitary figures unable to communicate with others. --Goodreads.com
	Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Thursday, April 28, 2011, 7 pm When she was only 23, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. -Goodreads.com
	Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man Thursday, March 24, 2011, 7 pm From the flap: First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist ushers readers into a paralell universe that throws our own into harsh and even hilarious relief.
	Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary Thursday, February 24, 2011, 7 pm Madame Bovary follows the saga of a well-meaning country doctor and his beautiful and well-bred wife, Emma, whose unrealistic expectations of love and marriage lead to her tragic undoing. Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece has often been described as a “perfect work of fiction.” Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth Thursday, January 27, 2011, 7 pm "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth," warns Ecclesiastes 7:4, and so does the novel by Edith Wharton that takes its title from this call to heed. New York at the turn of the century was a time of opulence and frivolity for those who could afford it. But for those who couldn't and yet wanted desperately to keep up with the whirlwind, like Wharton's charming Lily Bart, it was something else altogether: a gilded cage rather than the Gilded Age. --Amazon.com
	Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights Thursday, December 16, 2010, 7 pm Please note this is the third Thursday of December, rather than the usual 4th Thursday! Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's only novel, is one of the pinnacles of 19th-century English literature. It's the story of Heathcliff, an orphan who falls in love with a girl above his class, loses her, and devotes the rest of his life to wreaking revenge on her family.-Goodreads.com
	Raymond Carver: Collected Stories Thursday, November 18, 2010, 7 pm From the jacket flap: Raymond Carver's spare dramas of loneliness, despair, and troubled relationships breathed new life into the American short story of the 1970s and '80s. In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver's stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or "dirty realism," a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver's stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. Our discussion will focus on three of Carver's most acclaimed stories: "Cathedral," "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," and "A Small, Good Thing."
	Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Thursday, October 28, 2010, 7 pm The epic battle between man and monster reaches its greatest pitch in the famous story of Frankenstein. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor himself to the very brink. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship …and horror. –GoodReads.com
	Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale Thursday, September 23, 2010, 7 pm In a startling departure from her previous novel, respected Canadian poet and novelist Atwood presents here a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives. The tale is told by Offred (read: "of Fred"), a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be. --Library Journal
	John Steinbeck: Cannery Row Thursday, August 26, 2010, 7 pm Steinbeck's enduring novel explores life near the sardine fisheries of Monterey, California during the Great Depression. The stories of Doc, a marine biologist; Mack, the leader of a group of hobos; Dora, the proprietor of the local whorehouse; and others interweave to paint a convincing portrait of the lives of those misunderstood, marginalized people who still exist at the fringes of American life today.
	Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities Thursday, July 29, 2010, 7 pm “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” With 200 million copies sold, A Tale of Two Cities is among the most famous works of English fiction. It depicts the plight of the French peasantry under the demoralization of the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the French Revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and a number of unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events, most notably Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a dissipated British barrister who endeavours to redeem his ill-spent life out of love for Darnay's wife, Lucie Manette.
	Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird Thursday, June 24, 2010, 7 pm One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis of an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father -- a crusading local lawyer -- risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
	Frances Burney: Evelina Thursday, May 27, 2010, 7 pm Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions--as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville. Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader.