[NFBV-Potomac-Announce] March 5 Book Club Meeting and Call for Additional Books.

Wed Feb 26 16:20:51 UTC 2025

The Potomac Chapter book club will meet on Wednesday March 5, 7:00 PM on Zoom.

As a reminder, the book to  be discussed is the Great Divide by Cristina Henriquez

We need to meet to discuss April, May, and June books. Let me know if you have additional book candidates.

I suggest a meeting at 4:00 PM March 2 if I can get our Zoom.

Some recommendations below.

John

Bonnie O'Day made two recommendations below.

Butcher's Crossing, by John Williams
1870s. After hearing Ralph Waldo Emerson speak, Will Andrews drops out of Harvard and heads west to "find himself." He funds a hunt that spirals into the slaughter of thousands of buffalo. Andrews returns from the expedition questioning both his actions and the value of his experience.
Comment: I would never have picked this book but someone in our book club wanted to read it. The subject was tough for me to get behind and I had to skip the "buffalo slaughter" parts, but the book was fast paced and pretty interesting. The myths about the west were dispelled in this book.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride
The book takes place in Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
Comment: I love all of James McBride's books. This one was particularly compelling to me because it describes the situation of a deaf child who is institutionalized against everyone in the community's will. It also depicts the lives of several members of the Chicken Hill community, the down and out as well as the prosperous. Lots of humor as well as pathos.

More recommendations from Leroy.

The first recommendation, the Kite Runner, was  discussed several years ago.

David Copperfield

Author: Charles Dickens<https://www.audiobooksnow.com/author/Charles%20Dickens/>

Narrator: Ralph Cosham<https://www.audiobooksnow.com/narrator/Ralph%20Cosham/>

Unabridged: 33 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.<https://www.audiobooksnow.com/publisher/Blackstone%20Audio,%20Inc./>

Published: 04/19/2012

Categories: Fiction<https://www.audiobooksnow.com/discover/fiction/>, Classic<https://www.audiobooksnow.com/browse/classic/>

________________________________
Synopsis
David Copperfieldis the timeless tale of a thoughtful orphan discovering how to live and love in a cutthroat, indifferent adult world. It firmly embraces all the eternal freshness, the comic delights, the tender warmth, and the ghastly horrors of childhood. Of all Charles Dickens novels, this is perhaps the most revealing, both of Dickens himself and of the society of his time. Certainly Copperfields experienceshis early rejection, child labor in a warehouse, experience as a journalist, and final success as a novelistare strikingly similar to Dickens own. It is little wonder that Dickens said of it, Of all my books I like this the bestLike many fond parents I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield.
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Author Bio
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England, where his father was a naval pay clerk. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, another port town. He received some education at a small private school but this was curtailed when his father's fortunes declined.

When Dickens was ten, the family moved to Camden Town, and this proved the beginning of a long, difficult period. When he had just turned twelve, Dickens was sent to work for a manufacturer of boot blacking, where for the better part of a year he labored for ten hours a day, an unhappy experience that instilled him with a sense of having been abandoned by his family. Around the same time Dickens's father was jailed for debt in the Marshalsea Prison, where he remained for fourteen weeks. After some additional schooling, Dickens worked as a clerk in a law office and taught himself shorthand; this qualified him to begin working in 1831 as a reporter in the House of Commons, where he became known for the speed with which he took down speeches.

By 1833 Dickens was publishing humorous sketches of London life in the Monthly Magazine, which were collected in book form as Sketches by "Boz". These were followed by the publication in installments of the comic adventures that became The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, whose unprecedented popularity made the twenty-five-year-old author a national figure. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who would bear him ten children over a period of fifteen years. Dickens's energies enabled him to lead an active family and social life, including an indulgence in elaborate amateur theatricals, while maintaining a literary productiveness of astonishing proportions. He characteristically wrote his novels for serial publication and was himself the editor of many of the periodicals in which they appeared, including Bentley's Miscellany, the Daily News, Household Words, and All the Year Round. Among his close associates were his future biographer John Forster and the younger Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on fictional and dramatic works. In rapid succession he published Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge, sometimes working on several novels simultaneously.

Dickens's celebrity led to a tour of the United States in 1842. There he met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and other literary figures, and was received with an enthusiasm that was dimmed somewhat by the criticisms Dickens expressed in his American Notes and in the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit. The appearance of A Christmas Carol in 1843 sealed his position as the most widely popular writer of his time; it became an annual tradition for him to write a story for the season, of which the most memorable were The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth. He continued to produce novels at only a slightly diminished rate, publishing Dombey and Son in 1848 and David Copperfield in 1850.

>From this point on, his novels tended to be more elaborately constructed and harsher and less buoyant in tone than his earlier works. These late novels include Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865, was his last completed novel and perhaps the most somber and savage of them all. Dickens had separated from his wife in 1858-he had become involved a year earlier with a young actress named Ellen Ternan-and the ensuing scandal had alienated him from many of his former associates and admirers. He was weakened by years of overwork and by a near-fatal railroad disaster during the writing of Our Mutual Friend. Nevertheless, he embarked on a series of public readings, including a return visit to America in 1867, which further eroded his health. A final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a crime novel much influenced by Wilkie Collins, was left unfinished upon his death on June 9,1870, at the age of 58.
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Reviews
[https://static.audiobooksnow.com/images/rating-five-star.png]
Goodreads<http://www.goodreads.com/> review by Lisa of Troy<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3630114081?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget> on August 21, 2024

Money can't buy you love (but it can keep you out of debtor's prison) David Copperfield is a fictional biography of the life of David Copperfield starting with his birth. David has a very unhappy childhood, subject to much torment. How will this shape and mold David? On whom can he rely? How will Mr. ..more<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3630114081?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget>
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Goodreads<http://www.goodreads.com/> review by mark<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/411868259?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget> on March 22, 2015

DAVID COPPERFIELD: MASTER VILLAIN oh you architect of doom! your devious passivity and willful naivete know no boundaries! your crimes are many! your poor doting mother - hustled off to an early grave, and you do nothing! you repay the Murdstones' attempts at improvement with intransigence and a savage b ..more<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/411868259?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget>
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Goodreads<http://www.goodreads.com/> review by [ J o ]<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1307723881?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget> on July 10, 2023

Read as part of The Infinite Variety Reading Challenge, based on the BBC's Big Read Poll of 2003. Charles Dickens can do no wrong, except perhaps keep around 100 pages of rather irrelevant tangents in this book. It was such a powerhouse of characterisation and world-building that I barely know where t ..more<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1307723881?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget>
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Goodreads<http://www.goodreads.com/> review by Emma<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5385429917?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget> on April 29, 2023

2.75 :( ..more<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5385429917?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget>
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Goodreads<http://www.goodreads.com/> review by Vit<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/588658789?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget> on February 13, 2022

David Copperfield is a convolutedly grotesque and darkly satirical Bildungsroman. First of all, David Copperfield is a colourful collection of inimitable characters. And we pass through this flowery assembly as through the gallery of images taken from Hieronymus Bosch's canvases... The gloomy taint that ..more<https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/588658789?utm_campaign=reviews&utm_medium=widget>
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Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution.

n a stunning work of insight and hope, New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb once again reveals his unmatched talent for finding humanity in the lost and lonely and celebrates the transforming power of the written word.

For several years, Lamb has taught writing to a group of women prisoners at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. In this unforgettable collection, the women of York describe in their own words how they were imprisoned by abuse, rejection, and their own self-destructive impulses long before they entered the criminal justice system. Yet these are powerful stories of hope and healing, told by writers who have left victimhood behind.
In his moving introduction, Lamb describes the incredible journey of expression and self-awareness the women took through their writing and shares how they challenged him as a teacher and as a fellow author. Couldn't Keep It to Myself is a true testament to the process of finding oneself and working toward a better day.
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