As you all know, the Contemporary Issues book club started with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for January, and this month we are reading My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. We are meeting to discuss it at Panera’s on Biesterfield Road, on Saturday, February 20, at 9:30 AM.


As we’ve discussed, it is probably a good idea to choose our future books for more than one month at a time, so people can plan. Our detailed current list of suggestions (from various sources) is at http://www.swhi.net/~steveg/StNick/book-list.html. It has just been updated, so take a look!

I am proposing that we plan to continue alternating fiction and nonfiction, and try to alternate “heavy” or serious works with more entertaining ones. To make the process easier, I suggest we choose our next few from the following “short list.”

March

• Candide (Voltaire)
• Good Omens (Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett)
• Letters From the Earth, and The Diaries of Adam & Eve (Mark Twain)

April

• 95 Theses (Martin Luther)
• Existentialism and Human Emotions (J.P. Sartre)
• The Year of Living Biblically (A.J. Jacobs)

May

• The Plague (Albert Camus)
• The Shack (William P. Young)
• A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.)

If you think you will – or even just might – participate, please e-mail Steve Gruenwald with your choices. Please copy and paste the above list into your e-mail and indicate your first, second, and third choices for each month – or, if you like, state other preferences.

–  Steve G