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All book groups meet in the Board Room on the 4th floor
For more information, please contact Sharon Miller at 415-393-0113
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MYSTERY
READERS' BOOK CLUB
Meetings on SECOND MONDAY of each month, at
12:00 noon
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Monday, February 8
Stieg Larsson
The Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo |
Monday, March 8
Stuart Kaminsky
The Man Who Walked
Like a Bear |
Monday, April 12
Agatha Christie
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd |
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THE PROUST
SOCIETY OF AMERICA
San Francisco Chapter at the Mechanics'
Institute Library
Meets on second and fourth Wednesday of every
month, at 6:30 pm. Registration required.
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The Mechanics' Institute Library proudly
sponsors the Proust Reading Group, presented in
affiliation with The Proust Society of America.
The Proust Society of America was established in
1997 by the Mercantile Library of New York and its
Center for World Literature.
After six years and two iterations
of reading "À la recherche du temps perdu"
(known in English as "In Search of Lost
Time" or "Remembrance of Things
Past"), in September 2009 the Proust
Reading Group begins reading a series of "post-Proustian"
novels, that is, works that have been influenced,
directly or indirectly, by Proust's redefinition
of the genre of the novel, and by Proust's
examination of Memory, Time, and the Self.
View
a list of those novels.
The group meets on the second and fourth Wednesday
of each month from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm. The
group is facilitated by Dr. Mark Calkins,
who holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature
and is currently a lecturer at San Francisco
State University, as well as webmaster and
editor-in-chief of TempsPerdu.com.
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The group is open to members of the Mechanics' Institute
and to the public. Fees for the book group are $65
for members and $90 for the public per semester
(@ ten meetings). Participants in the group are
also eligible to attend meetings and events held
at the New York and Boston chapters of the Proust
Society of America.
If you have any questions, you may contact
Dr. Calkins by email.
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SHARING
LIFE STORIES
To register, please contact
Sharon Miller at 415-393-0113 or by email |
Thursday,
February 18 at 6:00 pm
The Diary
of Frida Kahlo,
by Frida Kahlo
The discussion will be led by Julia Bergman.
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Mexican painter Frida Kahlo
(1919-1954) kept this haunting journal which, like
her art, is painted in vivid colors. It covers her
tumultuous last decade and encompasses love letters
that mirror her obsessive devotion to her husband,
painter Diego Rivera, political musings on Communism,
sketches, doodles, and resplendent paintings that
fuse surrealism, pre-Columbian gods and myths, and
animal-human hybrids. During this time, she was preoccupied
with her declining health and death, isolation and
repeated surgical operations resulting from a bus
accident when she was eighteen that severely damaged
her spine, pelvic bones and leg. This work, sprinkled
with irony and black humor, is a testament to Kahlo's
resilience and courage. |
Thursday,
March 18 at 6:00 pm
An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard
The discussion will be led by Moira Johnston.
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"Ms. Dillard has written an autobiography in semimystical prose
about the growth of her own mind, and it's an exceptionally interesting account. She is
one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly
wide-awake than human beings generally get to be. (Thoreau once said he had never met a
man who was fully awake - but he was forgetting about women, and he hadn't met Ms.
Dillard.) She is a stunning observer. There is a passage in this book, a rather long
one, in which she talks about adult skin as perceived by a child. She begins with an
event: herself as a little girl, pinching up the skin over one of her mother's knuckles,
and watching in fascination as it stays ridged up instead of instantly returning to
smooth shapeliness as a child's hand does. The passage grows into a meditation on how
parents (in her case, very young and very good-looking ones, though she didn't know it
then) physically appear to a child. It seemed to me, reading it, that skin had never been
adequately described before." - Noel Perrin,
NYTimes Book Review |
Thursday,
April 15 at 6:00 pm
A Moveable Feast & A Moveable Feast: the Restored Edition, by Ernest Hemingway
The discussion will be led by Richard Reinhardt.
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"What is it exactly that explains the continued fascination of
this rather slight book? Obviously, it is an ur-text of the American enthrallment with
Paris. To be more precise, it is also a skeleton key to the American literary fascination
with Paris (and contains some excellent tips for start-up writers, such as the advice to
stop working while you still have something left to write the next day). There are the
'wouldn’t be without, even if you don’t quite trust' glimpses of the magnetic Joyce
and the personable Pound and the apparently wickedly malodorous Ford Madox Ford.
Then there are the moments of amusingly uncynical honesty, as when Stein and
Toklas met Ernest and Hadley and 'forgave us for being in love and being married—time
would fix that.' The continued currency of that useless expression the lost generation
becomes even more inexplicable when it is traced to a stupid remark made by Gertrude
Stein’s garage manager, and such quotable fatuity, however often consecrated by repeated
usage, is always worth following to its source. Most of all, though, I believe that
A Moveable Feast serves the purpose of a double nostalgia: our own as we contemplate a
Left Bank that has since become a banal tourist enclave in a Paris where the tough and
plebeian districts are gone, to be replaced by seething Muslim banlieues all around the
periphery; and Hemingway’s at the end of his distraught days, as he saw again the
'City of Light' with his remaining life still ahead of him rather than so far behind."
- Christopher Hitchens,
The Atlantic |
Thursday,
May 20 at 6:00 pm
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, by Mary McCarthy
The discussion will be led by Theodora Rossi.
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"[Mary McCarthy] never spares herself at all. The
vanities and ambitions, the resentments and misunderstandings, the small triumphs
and the scarring disasters that marked her early years are set forth with remarkable
candor, so that her book is the most incisive contribution to the story of her
development as an artist that we shall ever have. Talk about a Lost Generation sounds
glib and becomes vague when you read this book about a writer who was harshly given
every opportunity to become one of the lost, and yet went on to create in modern idioms
a style based on classic Latin satire. " - Charles Poore,
NYTimes Book Review |
Thursday,
June 17 at 6:00 pm
One Writer's Beginnings
, by Eudora Welty
The discussion will be led by Sarah Ballard.
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"Beguiling as autobiography and . . . profound and priceless
as guidance for anyone who aspires to write serious fiction . . .. It may, at that,
not be possible to convey to someone else that mysterious transfiguring gift by which
dream, memory and experience become art. Yet, in these few pages, Eudora Welty seems
to have followed the trail . . . to the richness of her maturity with a gracious and warming
clarity.." - Los Angeles Times Book Review |
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FICTION
YOU WISH YOU HAD READ
Meets third Tuesday of the
month @ 12:00 NOON |
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Tuesday, February
16
Waiting for the Barbarians,
J. M. Coetzee |
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The story is set in a small
frontier town of a nameless empire, a melancholy tale
of an aging colonial magistrate’s struggle against
the stupidity, brutality, and racism of a government
which he has served complacently all his life. The
unnamed magistrate is reluctant to take any action
which would disrupt the secure course of his life.
However, his peaceful existence ends with the arrival
of some special forces of the Empire, led by a sinister
Colonel Joll. There are rumours that the barbarians
are preparing an attack on the Empire. Colonel Joll
conducts an expedition into the land beyond the frontier,
capture some "barbarians", tortures and
kills some of them, and leaves for the capital to
prepare a larger campaign against the barbarians.
Meanwhile, the Magistrate becomes involved with a
"barbarian girl" who was left behind crippled
and blinded by the torturers. Eventually, he decides
to take her back to her people. After a life-threatening
trip, he returns to his village. The Empire's forces
then return and the Magistrate's own plight begins.
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Tuesday, March 16
Nathanael West
Miss Lonelyhearts: A Novel |
Tuesday, April 20
Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea |
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FORGOTTEN
CLASSICS
Meets quarterly on THURSDAYS @ 6:00 PM |
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Thursday, February 4
The Heart of Midlothian, Sir Walter Scott
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This novel was originally published in
four volumes in 1818. On first publication, author
Scott was praised for his ability to recreate the
past vividly and to illustrate the Scottish character.
At the center of this work is Edinburgh's forbidding
Tolbooth prison, known by all as the Heart of Midlothian.
The first volume is dominated by the Porteous Riots
that broke out in 1736 over the execution of two
smugglers. A condemned criminal Andrew Wilson has
helped his accomplice 'Robertson' (the assumed identity
of the reckless young nobleman George Staunton)
to escape. Captain John Porteous ordered soldiers
to fire into the crowd, killing several people.
Porteous was later killed by a mob led by Staunton.
Staunton hoped to liberate his lover Effie Deans
who is awaiting trial for child-murder, but she
refuses to escape.
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The second volume is concerned
with Effie's trial and condemnation. Having been seduced
and made pregnant by Staunton, Effie has hidden her
condition. Since she cannot produce the child in court,
and has informed nobody of her condition, it is presumed
that she has murdered her child to conceal her guilt.
Effie is charged with infanticide. Effie's sister
Jeanie faces a moral dilemma in court when asked whether
Effie told her of her condition. A white lie would
save Effie's life, but Jeanie's convictions forbid
her to tell a lie. Effie is sentenced to death. The
third volume covers Jeanie's journey to London hoping
to receive a royal pardon for her sister. The final
volume describes Jeanie's marriage to a Presbyterian
minister and their newfound prosperity. Meanwhile,
Effie marries Staunton. Years later, Staunton, while
searching for his lost child, is killed by an outlaw
who turns out to be his own son. |
Thursday, May 6
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain |
Thursday, August 19
Alan Paton
Cry, the Beloved Country |
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Revised: February 01, 2010 |
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