Book Club
The Book Club, as one of the Literary Interest Society’s committees, convenes periodically to discuss the current literary undertaking. In the past, members have read and discussed The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards, Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. Book Club meetings are typically held in the lower level of Holman Library in the Study Group Room, however the Book Club is not meeting regularly on campus this semester. We are attempting to hold our Book Club sessions in a new format described below. Texts for the Book Club are generally selected through a voting process administered using McKendree email. A list of suggestions are distributed to all members and potential Book Club participants are advised to respond with the books they would most like to read by a selected date. After receiving and tallying all the votes, the selected work is announced to all members and participants are instructed to obtain their personal copies via the internet, bookstores, or the library. Once the text has been selected, a completion date is established and a Book Club meeting is scheduled to discuss the work at hand.
For the Spring 2011 Semester:
After the success of the dual Book Clubs featuring children's literature and contemporary fiction last semester, we decided to continue this venture into the Spring Semester. Also, in the Spring Semester we will be trying a new format for Book Club.
The way it works is that we are going to be reading one children's literature book each month as well as one work of contemporary fiction each semester. Instead of limiting our discussion to meetings, everyone is invited to share their thoughts via the new Book Club Online Forum located at the bottom of this page. This is a new feature for the LIS Book Club and we encourage everyone to use it! Please keep comments centered on the topic at hand and feel free to respond to each other's posts.
In person discussions are still encouraged! We will be meeting in April in 1828 to share our thoughts in person, ask questions, and gain new insights. Please feel free to bring your kids or friends to the meetings. We want as much input and as many perspectives as we can. Hope to see you all there!
Children's Literature Selections
The selection of books that we will be reading for the Spring 2012 Children Literature section will include the following texts:
January: Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel
February: Roses are Red, Your Feet Really Stink by Diane De Groat
March: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault
April: Click Clack, Moo: Cows that Type by Doreen Cronin
These stories include some popular and not so popular children's books. We hope that everyone will enjoy and comment on within the forums.
Contemprorary Fiction Selection
Our newest selection for our Contemporary fiction forum is to be Stephen King's newest novel 11/22/63. Again, we hope that everyone will enjoy reading this novel and participate in the online forum. The following is a book description provided by amazon:
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.
Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history.
Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.
Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.
A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.
We hope to have a full discussion over both Stephen King as a novelist and his take on the JFK assassination through online discussions and at our meeting in April.
The way it works is that we are going to be reading one children's literature book each month as well as one work of contemporary fiction each semester. Instead of limiting our discussion to meetings, everyone is invited to share their thoughts via the new Book Club Online Forum located at the bottom of this page. This is a new feature for the LIS Book Club and we encourage everyone to use it! Please keep comments centered on the topic at hand and feel free to respond to each other's posts.
In person discussions are still encouraged! We will be meeting in April in 1828 to share our thoughts in person, ask questions, and gain new insights. Please feel free to bring your kids or friends to the meetings. We want as much input and as many perspectives as we can. Hope to see you all there!
Children's Literature Selections
The selection of books that we will be reading for the Spring 2012 Children Literature section will include the following texts:
January: Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel
February: Roses are Red, Your Feet Really Stink by Diane De Groat
March: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault
April: Click Clack, Moo: Cows that Type by Doreen Cronin
These stories include some popular and not so popular children's books. We hope that everyone will enjoy and comment on within the forums.
Contemprorary Fiction Selection
Our newest selection for our Contemporary fiction forum is to be Stephen King's newest novel 11/22/63. Again, we hope that everyone will enjoy reading this novel and participate in the online forum. The following is a book description provided by amazon:
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.
Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history.
Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.
Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.
A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.
We hope to have a full discussion over both Stephen King as a novelist and his take on the JFK assassination through online discussions and at our meeting in April.