Come Discuss One of Last Year’s Best Books

One of the member benefits of joining ARRT, is that you get to attend our quarterly book discussions for free.  These are a fabulous opportunity for those of us who normally only lead book discussions to get to be just a regular  participant.

Our next discussion is on July 9th.

Here is the official announcement:

Join us for a discussion of A Constellation of Vital Penomena  at the summer meeting of the ARRT Quarterly Book Discussion.
Wednesday, July 9, 2:00 PM  RAILS Burr Ridge, Conference Room B 125 Tower Drive, Burr Ridge 

A Constellation of Vital Penomena  by Anthony Marra In rural Checnya, a young girl watches as her father is taken in the night by Russian soldiers. At a nearby hospital, a world-class surgeon tends to soldiers and rebels injured by landmines. In A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, readers slip in and out of their lives and back and forth in time as author Anthony Marra explores what it means to survive in a time of war.  

To register, please email rebecca.malinowski@railslibraries.info

But here is why I am making it a priority to be there:

1. Rebecca was one of my co-presenters at the hugely successful ARRT Reboot Your Book Club program in May.  Click here for details and access to slides.  Rebecca is an excellent and experienced book discussion leader.  I am excited to see her in action and learn some new leader tricks.
2. Speaking of new tricks, I cannot even remember the last time I was a participant in a book club. I cannot stress enough how important it is for book club leaders to take time to see things from the other side of the discussion.
3. The book: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. I have been meaning to read this book since last October at the ARRT Unconference when our speaker and the owner of my favorite Independent book store, Jason Smith [The Book Table] talked at length about this novel.  On their site he has this quote: "This is an incredibly impressive debut novel which takes place during the Chechen conflict of the 1990s. Both beautiful and harrowing, it is by far the best novel I have read this year.” At the Unconference he talked about how this book is hard to hand sell, as you can probably see from his quote and the book description I included above, but, Jason told us, if you can convince someone to read the book they will thank you. So, when Rebecca picked this novel for her discussion, I took it as a sign that I need to read it.

So what are you waiting for?  Time to sign up.  If you aren’t an ARRT member, no worries.  You can join when you come to the discussion. It’s only $10!

I hope to see you there.