LPC Book Club

Madeline Island Book Club sets summer schedule

The Madeline Island Book Club has made the selections for the summer and fall schedule based on input received from the members.

The book club has been meeting via zoom throughout the winter and kept in touch with those on the island and afar from Minneapolis to Boston, Florida and Texas.

The group will be meeting during the summer at the Library and also through zoom with a guest professor leading the
discussion in person for one event and an author via zoom for another
event.

All meetings are Tuesday at 7:00 p.m.

The Madeline Island Book Club is open to all who enjoy gathering and discussing both fiction and non fiction with an occasional movie tie in.  Book selections are made each year based on member input and the organizational committee of Susi Saxl, Mark Hier, Robin Russell and Paula Weiss. Those who would like to be added to the email list can contact Susi Saxl 612-916-0956 or Paula Weiss 715-747-2059.  The book club is an affiliate of the La Pointe Center for the Arts which provides funding for guest authors and publicity.

June 20: The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (2014) 480p., a fictional tale of a Kansas slave who unites with John Brown. Henry, the slave, accidentally encounters Brown who mistakes him mistakes him for a girl and gives him a dress to wear. Henry narrates his meetings with Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman and the raid at Harper’s Ferry. Comparisons have been made to Huckleberry Finn and others have said the author is as comic and original as any since Mark Twain.

July  18 : A presentation on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden by Alan Brew, Dean of Faculty and Director of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute at Northland College entitled “Circling Down Wind with Walden”, a pared down approach to reading Walden. Participants are welcome to read all of Walden prior to the presentation or a simpler approach: (a) read the first six paragraphs of the chapter 1 “Economy” (b) about ten pages in from the beginning of “Economy” begin reading after a section break from “Let us consider…”through a number of paragraphs to “How can a man be…..” (c) read the chapter “Where I lived…..”  (d) read “The Bean-Field”, “The Village” and the “Conclusion.” This program is a joint meeting with the Madeline Island Wilderness Preserve.

August 15: Movie night followed by a brief discussion of the book on which the movie was based entitled The Hot Zone: Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus (1999) 368p. by Richard Preston.  This highly infectious virus from Africa suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington D.C.  A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak. 

September 19: Regional author,Jon Hassler’s Days Like Smoke:  A Minnesota Boyhood. (2021) 128p.  This is a beloved Minnesota novelist’s unpublished, until now, memoir of his youth in rural Minnesota.

October 17: A discussion of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2020) 288p.  A crime novel set in a remote Polish village. The main character, Janina, devotes her days to astrology, translating poetry and taking care of summer homes. When there are murders in the neighborhood she inserts herself into the investigation. Nobel Prize winner.

November 21: Author Peter Geye will join us via zoom to discuss his new book, The Ski Jumpers. (2022) 408p. This novel is about a writer and former ski jumper facing a terminal diagnosis who takes one more leap into a past of soaring flights and broken family bonds.

There will be no book club meeting in December.