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, September 30th, 7:30 pm
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother's death and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.
Thursday, October 28th, 7:30 pm
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
The true story of one family, caught between America's two biggest policy disasters: the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days following the storm he travels the city by canoe, feeding abandoned animals and helping elderly neighbors. Then, on September 6th, police officers armed with M-16s arrest Zeitoun in his home. Told with eloquence and compassion, Zeitoun is a riveting account of one family's unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water.
Thursday, November 18th, 7:30 pm
Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger
The author of the phenomenally successful novel The Time Traveler's Wife returns with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second book set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London. Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old twin sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt.
Note special third Thursday meeting date!