The Next Meeting - January

Disgrace by Coetzee proved to be a controversial and stimulating novel. Thanks to all of you who came to the book group and expressed your opinions.

Many book group attendees were disappointed that we were going to skip over January and meet again in February. Therefore, I have reserved the 22nd of January, a Thursday evening, for an additional meeting. We will be discussing Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, a story of racial injustice in a small Southern town.

If you are unable to attend this meeting, I will be discussing To Kill a Mockingbird at another time as well; I will let you know the date as soon as possible.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a core 8th grade novel, and I encourage you to attend.

Our Next Novel

The first Heschel Book Group met on Wednesday, November 11. It was a lovely gathering of parents, grandparents, and alumni. The group decided that the next book we would tackle would be Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. This novel, set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape, is a heartbreaking novel about Professor David Lurie and his daughter. An affair with one of his students leaves David jobless and friendless. His attempts to relate to his daughter, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen.

From The New Yorker, "Disgrace has just made literary history by winning Coetzee an unprecedented second Booker, and what seems striking about it, right from the start, is its almost unnatural sense of poise, the way it takes you by the hand and leads you through unrecognizable terrain only to pull the ground out from under you with such accumulated force that by the time you come to the last sentence you feel as if you'd lost your bearings, and you aren't sure how useful they'd be now, anyway. Disgrace is not a hard or obscure book-it is, among other things, compulsively readable-but what it may well be is an authentically spiritual document, a lament for the soul of a disgraced century."

This novel deals explicitly with the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the aftermath of centuries of racial oppression. Although this is a bleak and emotionally wrenching novel, I encourage you to read this Nobel Prize winning author's work. We will meet on Tuesday, December 9, in the Lainer Library at 7:00. Come and share your insights or just listen to the discussion. This group is open to faculty and staff, parents and grandparents, alumni, and friends of Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School.

Book Club's First Meeting

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is set in Nazi Germany and follows the story of Liesel Meminger, a young girl left in the care of foster parents. This powerfully poetic story is about the ability of books to feed the soul.

The Horn Book Review states that The Book Thief "is exquisitely written and memorably populated, Zusak's poignant tribute to words, survival, and their curiously inevitable entwinement is a tour de force to be not just read but inhabited."

The New York Times states, "“Brilliant and hugely ambitious…Some will argue that a book so difficult and sad may not be appropriate for teenage readers…Adults will probably like it (this one did), but it’s a great young-adult novel…It’s the kind of book that can be life-changing."

Pick up a copy of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, and start reading!

Please join us in the Lainer Library from 7:00 - 9:00 pm on Tuesday, November 11th as we discuss this touching novel. Come and share your insights or just listen to the discussion. This group is open to faculty and staff, parents, alumni, and friends of Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School.

Welcome

Welcome to the Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School Book Group Blog. Here you will be able to get information about upcoming books or post questions or comments. The following dates are reserved for the book group:

November 11, December 9, February 17, March 31, April 28, May 26

We will meet in Lainer Library from 7:00 - 9:00 pm. Come and share your insights or just listen to the discussion. This group is open to faculty and staff, parents, alumni, or friends of Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School.