Thomaston Library
Directions
Book Discussion Group
July - December 2008
The book
discussion group meets
the second Wednesday of every month
at 7:00 pm in the Community Room.
Copies of the book to be discussed are available at the library
three weeks prior to the discussion.
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Wednesday - October 8, 2008 American Pastoral by Philip Roth 
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, American
Pastoral charts the downfall of an all-American golden
boy betrayed by his daughter. In the late 1960s, the sixteen-year-old
Merry plants a bomb in the local post office in a protest against
the Vietnam war. Her bomb kills a man instantly. Merry – fat,
silly and spoiled – is now a murderer. |
Wednesday - August 13, 2008 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf  (Dr.
Mark Schenker will lead the discussion)
A book in three parts, the story centers on the Ramsay family
and their visits to the Isle of Skye. The novel’s structure
is that of two days separated by a passage of ten years. From
the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse,
the author examines the complex tensions and allegiances of family
life. |
Wednesday - November 12, 2008 Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky 
(Dr. Mark Schenker will lead the discussion)
Suite Francaise
consists of two novellas: “Storm in June” follows a
number of Parisians fleeing before the German arrival in 1940; “Dolce”
shows life in a French village in the first, strangely peaceful,
months of the German occupation. Irene Nemirovsky, a French writer
of Ukrainian Jewish origin, was arrested and died of typhus at Auschwitz.
Her notebook, containing the two novels, was preserved by her daughters
and published in 2004 as Suite
Francaise. |
Wednesday - September 10, 2008 Catch 22 by Joseph Heller 
A satire on the madness of war, Catch
22 is the story of Captain Joseph Yossarian, a member
of a U.S. bomber crew stationed on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa
during World War II. Unmoved by patriotic ideals or abstract notions
of duty, Yossarian interprets the entire war as a personal attack
and becomes convinced that the military is deliberately trying to
send him to an untimely death. |
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