JANUARY BOOK

 And so another new year will soon be upon us, and we'll ring it in with our January selection of After the Quake (link), a collection of short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami.  Join the post-holiday frivolity on Tuesday evening of January 14 at our regular Zawa Restaurant location (at Commercial & Venables; Zawa).  It's a 7pm start time and all are welcome as always.  In the meantime, Ritual Solstice Greetings to everyone and best wishes this festive season.

The six stories in Haruki Murakami's mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami's characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.  As haunting as dreams, as potent as oracles, the stories in" After the Quake are further proof that Murakami is one of the most visionary writers at work today.

DECEMBER BOOK

Our book for December is The Yiddish Policemen's Union (link) by American author Michael Chabon.  This complex alternate history novel won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.  The second Tuesday of the month lands on December 10th this time around. The status remains quo for our location, Zawa Restaurant at Commercial & Venables (Zawa), as well as our start time (7pm).  As usual, all are welcome to join in for some pre-holiday book banter accompanied by feasting and libations.

For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

NOVEMBER BOOK

November's selection is the extraordinary memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup (link).  The second Tuesday of the month falls on November 12th and we hope to see one and all at our usual Zawa's location (Zawa) at the regular 7pm start time.  Plus ones welcome.

Twelve Years a Slave is a landmark work, not just for its historical significance but for its enduring relevance. Northup's eloquent prose and vivid descriptions offer a stark portrayal of a dark chapter in American history, challenging readers to confront the painful truths of the past while inspiring a commitment to justice and equality. This memoir stands as a poignant and unforgettable exploration of the resilience of the human spirit in the pursuit of freedom.

OCTOBER BOOK

Our book for October is The Lover by French author Marguerite Duras (link).  We're back to our regular second Tuesday of the month schedule, which means we'll be meeting at 7pm on the evening of October 8th at our usual Zawa's home (Zawa) but it looks like patio season is over.  All carbon-based bipeds welcome.

A sensational international bestseller, and winner of France's coveted Prix Goncourt, 'The Lover' is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart. Saigon,1930s: a poor young French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society. A sensational international bestseller, 'The Lover' is disturbing, erotic, masterly. Here is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between the lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart.

SEPTEMBER BOOK

Our September selection is The Children of Men (link) by noted English mystery writer P.D. James.  This dystopian vision of the near future is a departure from her regular oeuvre and in 2006 was adapted brilliantly for the screen by noted Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron.  We're back to our regular second Tuesday of the month schedule, so come and join the jocular japing on Tuesday, September 10 at our usual haunt, Zawa restaurant on Commercial Drive off Venables (link).  Festivities commence at 7pm and everyone is welcome.  Check the patio first if the late summer weather is co-operating.

Civilization itself is crumbling as suicide and despair become commonplace. Oxford historian Theodore Faron, apathetic toward a future without a future, spends most of his time reminiscing. Then he is approached by Julian, a bright, attractive woman who wants him to help get her an audience with his cousin, the powerful Warden of England. She and her band of unlikely revolutionaries may just awaken his desire to live . . . and they may also hold the key to survival for the human race.

AUGUST BOOK

Our book for August is the short story collection Little Black Book of Stories by the English Booker Prize winning author A.S. Byatt (link).  Please note:  due to scheduling conflicts we have moved the date to the second Thursday of the month, August 15th.  We should be back to our second Tuesday schedule in September.  Join the literary festivities at our usual Zawa location (Zawa) on Commercial Drive, beginning at 7pm.  We'll be on the patio if the glorious summer weather continues.  Everyone welcome as always.

Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood:two middle-aged women, childhood friends reunited by chance, venture into a dark forest where once, many years before, they saw–or thought they saw–something unspeakable. Another woman, recently bereaved, finds herself slowly but surely turning into stone. A coolly rational ob-gyn has his world pushed off-axis by a waiflike art student with her own ideas about the uses of the body. Spellbinding, witty, lovely, terrifying, the Little Black Book of Stories is Byatt at the height of her craft.

 

JULY BOOK

It's back to fiction for July as we have selected The Bad Girl by Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa (link).  The second Tuesday of the month falls on July 9, so join the garrulous gang at Zawa's on Commercial Drive (link) at our usual start time of 7pm, probably outside on the patio.  Everyone welcome.

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship her. Charting Ricardo's expatriate life through his romances with this shape-shifting woman, Vargas Llosa has created a beguiling, epic romance about the life-altering power of obsession.

JUNE BOOK

Our book for June is very topical, Reset:  Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (link), a CBC Massey Lectures offering by Ronald J. Diebert, founder of Citizen Lab, the world-renowned digital tech and security group.  Join the gang at our usual Zawa's location (link) on Tuesday, June 11 as we delve into the pros and cons of our brave new digital world.  It's the regular 7pm kickoff and all are welcome.  With a modicum of luck we'll have a sun drenched evening on the patio.

Drawing from the cutting-edge research of the Citizen Lab, the world-renowned digital security research group which he founded and directs, Ronald J. Deibert exposes the impacts of this communications ecosystem on civil society. He tracks a mostly unregulated surveillance industry, innovations in technologies of remote control, superpower policing practices, dark PR firms, and highly profitable hack-for-hire services feeding off rivers of poorly secured personal data. Deibert also unearths how dependence on social media and its expanding universe of consumer electronics creates immense pressure on the natural environment. In order to combat authoritarian practices, environmental degradation, and rampant electronic consumerism, he urges restraints on tech platforms and governments to reclaim the internet for civil society.

MAY BOOK

We're back to fiction for May.  Our selection is Brideshead Revisited (link) by English author Evelyn Waugh.  The book was adapted for television as an 11 part BBC miniseries in 1981 and later filmed in 2008.  Join the usual suspects on Tuesday, May 14 at our Zawa's haunt (link) at 7pm.  All welcome all the time.

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the years before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes to finally recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

APRIL POEMS (!)

Since April is Poetry Month, we thought we'd celebrate the occasion by trying something different.  We've selected a variety of poems to mull over and discuss (see list below).  Most can be found at the excellent Poetry Foundation site (link), a treasure trove of versification well worth a deep dive.  So join the poetry party this Tuesday (April 9) at our usual 7pm start time at Zawa's (link) on Commercial Drive, just off Venables.  All are welcome regardless of their taste in poetry.

Here's a haiku appetizer for starters:

I kill an ant

and realize my three children

have been watching

Shuson Kato

And the current main course (check the Comments for any late additions):

P.K. Page

My Chosen Landscape

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=49471

Robert Frost

Acquainted with the night

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47548/acquainted-with-the-night

Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47651/after-great-pain-a-formal-feeling-comes-372

My Last Duchess

Robert Browning

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43768/my-last-duchess

E.E. Cummings

All nearness pauses, while a star

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=25957

Thomas Hardy

The Darkling Thrush

 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44325/the-darkling-thrush

W.B. Yeats

The Second Coming

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

Osip Mandelstam

'Your thin shoulders whips will redden'

https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Russian/Mandelstam.php

W.H. Auden

Twelve Songs: IX (Stop all the clocks)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159365/twelve-songs-ix

Percy Shelley:

• Ozymandias
• Ode to the West Wind
• The Flower that Smiles today
• Music when Soft Voices Die
• Mont Blanc

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/percy-bysshe-shelley

MARCH BOOK

Our selection for the Ides of March is The Talented Mr. Ripley (link) by American novelist and short story writer Patricia Highsmith.  The book was the basis for the popular 1999 film of the same name.  We're back at our usual Zawa's location on Commercial Drive (link) on Tuesday, March 12 at the normal 7pm start time.  All bibliophiles of any stripe welcome.

It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring" (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving―and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche―as ever.

FEBRUARY BOOK

Our book for February is the latest novel from contemporary English author Zadie Smith, The Fraud (link).  We'll meet on Tuesday, February 13 at our usual Zawa's location on Commercial Drive (link) with the usual 7pm start time.  All lifeforms welcome.

  

     It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

     Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

     Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

 

JANUARY BOOK

Happy New Year to one and all!  We'll start off the new year with a collection of Kurt Vonnegut short stories Welcome to the Monkey House (link).  We're sticking with our second Tuesday of the month schedule, so that means Tuesday, January 9 this time around.  And we're back at Zawa's on the Drive (link) at our usual 7pm start time.  Come and join the gang for some literary chatter and chow.  All residents of the Milky Way welcome.

A MASTERFUL COLLECTION OF TWENTY-FIVE SHORT STORIES FROM THE INIMITABLE AUTHOR OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, KURT VONNEGUT

'Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer...a zany but moral mad scientist' Time

A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms. A scientist discovers the secret to unlocking instant happiness, with unexpected consequences. In an America where everyone is equal every which way, a teenage boy plans to overthrow the system.

Welcome to the Monkey House gathers together twenty-five of Kurt Vonnegut's short stories from the 1950s and 1960s. Shot through with Vonnegut's singular humor, wit and bewilderment at humanity, this is a collection that celebrates a true master of short-form fiction.