Book Club
The book club is an opportunity to engage in learning and professional development by reading a book, getting together with your colleagues to explore new ideas, network, discuss the content of the book, and create an action plan to apply your learning at work and in life.
Format
The book club follows this format:
- Participants will meet three times per book as a group.
- Each person receives a personal copy of the book (yours to keep), along with guided questions to consider for discussion with the larger group.
- Participants, please read the book.
- Sessions focus on a discussion about the contents and themes of the book, sharing thoughts about how the ideas presented in the book may be applied within the university community.
Session information
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Fall Offering - Pachinko
Pachinko
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.Join us to discuss:
Time: 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Dates:Thursday, October 3, 2024
Thursday, November 7, 2024
Thursday, December 5, 2024 -
Winter Offering - When Women Were Dragons
When Women Were Dragons
GOODREADS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - A fiery feminist fantasy tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman's place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are."Ferociously imagined...and as exhilarating as a ride on dragonback." --Lev Grossman, bestselling author of The Magicians Trilogy
"Completely fierce, unmistakably feminist, and subversively funny." --Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
In the first adult novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Ogress and The Orphans, Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex's beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn't know. It's taboo to speak of.
Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and
watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations. When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small--their lives and their prospects--and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.
Join us to discuss:
Time: 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Dates:
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Tuesday, March 4, 2025 -
Spring Offering - The Framed Women of Ardemore House
The Framed Women of Ardemore House
In recognition of National Accessibility Awareness Week, the Spring Offering of Book Club will be The Framed Women of Ardemore House.
Schillace makes her fiction debut with her cozy mystery book that follows an autistic and hyperlexic book editor named Jo Jones in New York who inherits an estate in the English countryside. The town groundskeeper is found shot to death on her newly acquired property; Jo finds herself in possible danger while also being a potential suspect. Schillace, a neurodivergent medical historian, infuses her own lived experience into Jo’s unique way of interpreting the world around her. This nuanced portrayal of neurodiversity adds depth to the character, which, on its own makes the book worth the read, even though some might agree the story is less of a thriller and more police procedural in its telling.
Join us to discuss:
Date: Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Time: 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Location: Virtual
Note: Please read the book in its entirety prior to this session.
