Book Club 2007-2008
7:00-9:00 pm Lewis Lounge
September 19 - The Bell by Iris Murdoch
The story of a lay community of mixed-up people encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns, including Dora Greenfield, an erring wife who returns to her husband, and Michael Meade, who is confronted by his homosexual former lover.
October 24 - A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
A tragic wartime romance set against the brutal and chaotic backdrop of World War I is the classic story of a volunteer ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front and the English nurse he loves and leaves behind.
November 14 - Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
A poignant portrayal of the thoughts and events that comprise one day in a woman's life.
December 12 - Short Stories
Friend of My Youth: Stories by Alice Munro
A collection of ten short stories deals with such subjects as a woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother; an adulterous couple; and a widow discovering unpleasant truths about her husband's past.
Tell Me A Riddle by Tillie Olsen
Four short stories set in the United States are concerned with the suffering and tragedy of human experience.
January 23 - Middlemarch by George Eliot
At the story's center stands the intellectual and idealistic Dorothea Brooke-a character who in many ways resembles Eliot herself. But the very qualities that set Dorothea apart from the materialistic, mean-spirited society around her also lead her into a disastrous marriage with a man she mistakes for her soul mate.
February 20 -- Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates
A compelling study of the hidden life of America's suburbs presents the journal of eighteen-year old Richard Elwood, an unhappy, overweight teen who looks back at his childhood in a succession of wealthy suburbs and roams the neighborhood at night armed with a German sniper rifle. March 19 The Fall of a Sparrow by Robert Hellenga Tells the story of a midwestern professor who, his career ruined by an affair with a student, travels to Bologna to attend a trial of terrorists who had killed his eldest daughter
April 23 - The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - Giorgio Bassani
The young, middle-class Jewish narrator recounts his relationship with the Finzi-Continis, an insular, upper-class Jewish family, in Ferrara on the eve of World War II and the family's blindness to impending destruction.
May 21 - Suite française - Irène Némirovsky ; translated by Sandra Smith
A story of life in France under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"Storm in June," set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied village rife with resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
June 18 - Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
A forensic pathologist returns to Sri Lanka--after 15 years abroad--to assist in identifying victims of the country's civil war
July 16 - Waiting for the Barbarians by James Coetzee
A magistrate in a country village protests the army's treatment of members of the barbarian tribes taken prisoner during a civil war and finds himself arrested as a traitor.
Please contact Mary Pat Fallon, 708-524-6602 or mpfallon@dom.edu if you have any questions.