Mercer Island, WA 98040 Open Book Club
Island Book's open book club meets the last Thursday of the month at 7:30pm. Our staff facilitator chooses both fiction and nonfiction titles. All are welcome to attend.
See Open Book Club's previous picks over the last 10+ years.
Thursday, February 25th, 7:30 pm
The Man in the Wooden Hat, by Jane Gardam
The New York Times called Sir Edward Feathers one of the most memorable characters in modern literature; he first appeared in a lyrical novel called Old Filth, acclaimed as Jane Gardam's masterpiece, a book where life and art merge. And now that beautiful, haunting novel has been joined by a companion that also bursts with humor and wisdom: The Man in the Wooden Hat. Old Filth was Eddie's story ("Failed In London, Try Hong Kong"), but this is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself. They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s. As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the 50-year union of two remarkable people, the novel is a triumph. The Man in the Wooden Hat is fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power. It will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor so compelling and so thoroughly satisfying.
Thursday, March 25th, 7:30 pm
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford
In the opening pages of Jamie Ford's stunning debut novel, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle's Japantown. Boarded up for decades, it contains the belongings of Japanese families left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, he goes back in memory to the 1940s, at the height of the war, and his meeting with Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship and innocent love that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. After Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept. Forty years later in the hotel's dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope.
Thursday, April 29th, 7:30 pm
The Lost City of Z, by David Grann
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed "New Yorker" writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century": What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z? In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world's largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization existed. Then he and his expedition vanished. Fawcett's fate—and the tantalizing clues he left behind about Z—became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. Grann’s quest for the truth and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett's fate and Z form the heart of this complex, enthralling narrative.
Thursday, May 27th, 7:30 pm
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
In the dawning light of an August morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in McCann's intricate portrait of a city and its people. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. An artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. And Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann's powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city's people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the "artistic crime of the century.