Do you enjoy reading? Then join the members of The Resurrection Readers each month (either virtually or outside) on the first Tuesday @ 1 pm to discuss the previous month’s reading selection. You don’t need to be a member – just a bookworm looking for fun, fellowship and, when we’re lucky – some great food! Periodically, we’re honored to host a guest author as well. Membership has doubled over the last year, and we’re excited to start up again after a temporary shutdown due to Coronavirus. We look forward to hooking up with friends old and new! Contact Bonnie Lou Binnig for more information: stretchrfb@yahoo.com
Below, please find the current reading selections.
May 3– The Four Winds by Kristen Hannah – It is Texas, 1921. WWI is over and optimism and abundance fills the land, except for unmarried Elsa Wolcott whose future looks bleak until she meets Rafe Martinelli. Her reputation is shot, so she marries this man she barely knows.
By 1934, the world has changed with millions out of work and drought devastating the Martinelli farms in the great dust bowl. Everything is dying including Elsa’s tenuous marriage and like many neighbors, Elsa decides to go west to California to search for a better place for her children to survive and have a better life.
This sweeping novel brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it—the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity, The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.
June 7 – The Dutch House by Ann Patchett – Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. At the end of the Second World War Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, it becomes the undoing of everyone.
Cyril’s son Danny relates the story of how he and his sister Maeve are exiled from the house they grew up in by their stepmother. They are thrown back into poverty. Set over five decades and despite the appearance of success, the siblings are only comfortable with each other, looking back on their loss with humor and rage. When at last they have to confront the people who left them behind, the indulged brother and over-protective sister have to dig into their paradise lost.
This novel explores questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are.
July 5 – The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult – Dawn Edelstein is on a flight when the flight attendant tells everyone to prepare for a crash landing. As she has her last thoughts instead of her husband she thinks of a man, Wyatt Armstrong, whom she last saw 15 years ago. He is an archaeologist she worked with and loved in Egypt, studying burial rituals.
Dawn survives the crash and when asked where she would like to continue her flight, instead of returning to Boston, her husband Brian and their daughter, and her work as a death doula – helping people transition between life and death, she questions whether she made the right choice. She goes to Egypt, wondering if what she thought was a good life could be a great one. What does a well-lived life look like? Do we make choices, or do our choices make us instead? Who would you be if you weren’t the person you are right now?
As the story unfolds Dawn’s two possible futures play out along with secrets, doubts, and questions she has never asked or answered. It seems that life is offering her a second chance, and she is not sure if the choice she made was the right one. If she chooses Egypt she may reconnect with Wyatt, and also complete her research on The Book of Two Ways – the first known map of the afterlife. Is it possible to return to the past and go another way?
August 2. How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn – International-bestselling winner of the National Book Award and the basis for the Academy Award–winning film directed by John Ford.
Huw Morgan remembers the days when his home valley was prosperous, verdant, and beautiful—before the mines came to town. The youngest son of a respectable mining family in South Wales, he is now the only one left in the valley, and his reminiscences tell the story of a family and a town both defined and ruined by the mines. His story is both joyful and heartrending—a portrait of a place and a people existing now only in memory.
Full of memorable characters, richly crafted language, and surprising humor, How Green Was My Valley is the first of four books chronicling Huw’s life, including the sequels Up into the Singing Mountain, Down Where the Moon is Small, and Green, Green My Valley Now.