The Upper Moreland Free Public Library holds monthly book discussion meetings for anyone who wants thoughtful discussion and great company. Our Daytime Book Discussion Group meets on the first Thursday of every month from 2:30-3:45pm.
We also have an Evening Book Discussion Group that meets the last Wednesday of every month from 7:00-8:15pm.
New attendees are always welcome at these groups, and no registration is needed. Stop by the reference desk for help in getting a copy, or put a hold in the catalog on the titles below!
Daytime Book Discussion Group Schedule
February 2 ~ Jacob’s Roomby Virginia Woolf ~ 144 pages, © 1922The story is about the life of Jacob Flanders, who is evoked purely by other characters’ perceptions and memories of him. Jacob remains an absence throughout. Elegiac in tone, the work beautifully memorializes the longing and pain of a generation that lost so many of its most promising young men to World War I.
March 1 ~ Martin Edenby Jack London ~ 480 pages, © 1909The semiautobiographical “Martin Eden” is the most vital and original character Jack London ever created. Set in San Francisco, this is the story of Martin Eden, an impoverished seaman who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame.
April 5 ~ The Bone Peopleby Keri Hulme ~ 450 pages, © 1985Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, the novel chronicles the relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a loner, convinced that “to care for anything is to invite disaster.” She’s disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Simon is adopted by a Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy.
May 3 ~ The Johnstown Floodby David McCullough ~ 302 pages, © 1968At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation’s burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, and a terrible tragedy unfolded.
June 7 ~ The Custom of the Countryby Edith Wharton ~ 380 pages, © 1913The beautiful and ruthless Undine Spragg, a spoiled heiress who looks to her next materialistic triumph as her latest conquest throws himself at her feet, moves from America’s heartland to Manhattan, and then to Paris. Wharton’s critical eye leaves no social class unscathed.
July 5 ~ To a God Unknownby John Steinbeck ~ 188 pages, © 1933While fulfilling his dead father’s dream of creating a prosperous farm, Joseph Wayne comes to believe that a magnificent tree embodies his father’s spirit. His brothers share in Joseph’s prosperity and the farm flourishes—until one brother, scared by Joseph’s pagan belief, kills the tree and brings famine on the farm.
August 2 ~ The New Lifeby Orhan Pamuk ~ 304 pages, © 1998Osman is an ordinary engineering student in Istanbul until he comes across a book that changes his life. A sort of quasimystical tract, it provides a guide to a new life that is so irresistible Osman becomes obsessed by it. Meeting more devotees of the book, Osman soon finds himself on a magical trek across the Turkish countryside, in search of a missing friend and hounded by groups tracking the book’s followers.
September 6 ~ The Great Fireby Shirley Hazzard ~ 326 pages, © 2004In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. A brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. A young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother falls in love. In the shadow of world enmities, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness.
October 4 ~ Too Much Happinessby Alice Munro ~ 303 pages, © 2009A collection of short stories from one of our masters. In one story, a young wife mourning the loss of her three children receives release from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. In the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey through Europe.
November 1 ~ Marchby Geraldine Brooks ~ 280 pages, © 2005As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the Civil War, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. From Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, Mr. March, who has gone off to war leaving his wife and daughters to make do in mean times.
December 6 ~ In the Garden of Beastsby Erik Larson ~ 464 pages, © 2011This book documents the efforts of the first American ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, William E. Dodd, to acclimate to a residence in an increasingly violent city where he is forced to associate with the Nazis while his daughter pursues a relationship with Gestapochief Rudolf Diels.
Previous 2012 Titles-
January 5 ~ The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoetby David Mitchell ~ 479 pages, © 2010
This story, set in 1799 in Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, centers on Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk, who encounters Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then broken—with terrible consequences.
