APRIL BOOK

Our April selection is The Reason of Things (link), an interesting potpourri of philosophical essays on everyday life by the noted British philosopher, author and activist A.C. Grayling (wikilink).  Note: We're off our regular schedule in April.  Due to scheduling conflicts, our meeting will be on April 21 (the 3rd Tuesday of the month).  The usual time (7pm) and location (Zawa) still apply.  All are welcome to join our animated gatherings.  (With any weather luck, we may even be back outdoors on the patio.)

"A distinctive voice somewhere between Mark Twain and Michel Montaigne" is how Psychology Today described A.C. Grayling.  A civilized society, says Grayling, is one which never ceases having a discussion with itself about what human life should best be. In this book, Grayling adds to this discussion a series of short informal essays about ethics, ideas, and culture. A recurring theme is religion, of which he writes "there is no greater social evil." He argues, for instance, that liberal education is better than religion for inculcating moral values. "Education in literature, history, and appreciation of the arts," he says, "opens the possibility for us to live more reflectively and knowledgeably, especially about the nature and variety of human experience. That in turn increases our capacity for understanding others better, so that we can treat them with respect and sympathy, however different their outlook on life." Thought provoking rather than definitive, these essays don't tell readers what to think, but only note what has been thought about how it is best to live. A person who does not think about life, the author reminds us, is like a stranger mapless in a foreign land. These brief and suggestive essays offer us the outlines of a map, with avenues of thought that are a pleasure to wander down.

MARCH BOOK

And so we've reached the final installment of our triptych of classics with our March selection from one of the godfathers of magical realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude (link).  The festivities begin at 7pm at our usual hangout, Zawa Restaurant (ZAWA) this coming Tuesday, March 10.  Anyone is welcome to join our small band of bantering, bibulous bibliophiles.

From Wikipedia:

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictitious town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.  The magical realist style and thematic substance of the book established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.  Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, the book has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 50 million copies.  The novel, considered García Márquez's magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon and in world literature.