Why Book Club?
On our website you can see a list of books going back to 2015, but in my emails, I find a trail of non-fiction by women going back at least to 2007. In those days, Vertigo Books was still located in College Park, and one of their employees was the volunteer coordinator for the book club. Since we have read at least ten books every year, we’ve read at least one hundred and twenty diverse books by women on many different topics. I love Book Club because the non-fiction books are about real people and the real things they have accomplished. Book Club gives me a great feeling: that after every book my scope of knowledge is a little wider.
The books are always suggested by book club members and then selected by voting. We have six great books lined up through February! They represent a great sample of the kinds of things we read.
For September, Book Club will meet on Tuesday at the Community Library, to discuss Harriet Tubman: the road to freedom, by Catherine Clinton. At the moment of this writing, my kindle app says I am 24% into the book (with five days to go!). We welcome you to come and join us if you have read the book or even if you are just interested in the topic of Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad, or that period in history. Our book club emphasizes showing up to discuss the book and the topics it has raised, but we are not too hard on anyone who hasn’t managed to finish the book. This biography of Harriet Tubman is very well written and engrossing, putting the well known figure into her historical context, and revealing little known facets of her life, while educating the reader about the times she lived in. For those who have visited the wonderful Harriet Tubman museum on the Eastern Shore, this book will help put everything together.
We try to include different genres as well as women of different backgrounds. Upcoming books include a memoir with economic overtones (Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, by Sarah Smarsh, October); a book about the one person’s experience with the Jehovah’s Witnesses (Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life, by Amber Scorah, November), and an experimental memoir by a Native American writer (Heart Berries: A Memoir, by Terese M. Mailhot, December). For January, we’ll be reading about an Asian woman who was adopted and explores her origins (All you Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung), and a history (The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, by Kate Clifford Larson, February).
A new initiative this year is to begin a Kids’ Multicultural Book Club. One young winner of last year’s “If I were Mayor” essay contest actually suggested this idea: that every young person should read books about people from a variety of different backgrounds. If you or your child would like to be part of putting this club together, please contact us at info@cpae.org. A book club needs members! and the books are best selected by those members. Perhaps someone reading this blog is the next volunteer coordinator!
