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.

 

DECEMBER BOOK

Ritual winter solstice greetings to one and all!  Our selection for December is Born in Blackness (link) by Howard W. French, a Columbia University Professor of Journalism and long time New York Times foreign correspondent and bureau chief.  Since we've shifted to the second Tuesday of the month, that means it's December 12 this time around.  And we're continuing at Zawa Restaurant on Commercial Drive (link) with the usual 7pm start time.  So take a break from the holiday hoopla and drop by this Tuesday evening for some tasty bites, beer and book banter.  All sentient life forms welcome.

Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the "New World." Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?   In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent.