Book Club at Resurrection Lutheran Church
Do you love reading books? Do you love reading books with a group of people? Are you looking for people to discuss literature with? Many love to read books, but it can be hard to find someone to discuss the book with after you’re done reading it. If you are interested in meeting other people to discuss the books you read, you should consider joining the book club at Resurrection. Here you will find great opportunities to meet new people and make new friends.
Membership
Membership is open to all who love reading books and making time to share their understanding with others. The book club at Resurrection Lutheran Church consists of a number of great minds who read and talk about books based on a topic or an agreed-upon reading list. We choose a specific book to read and discuss each month. The club is focused on reading books that enrich the hearts and lives of its members.
If you feel like being part of a book club with an atmosphere of love and mutual influence is something of interest to you, please join us. You can contact Ruth Wolter at 618-433-1469 for information as to how to become a member.
Meeting Time and Venue
Our next meeting will be April 10th at 6:30 pm at church.
Past Books
Elyse Tillman will be the discussion leader on April 10th. Her book choice is Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. The book is available through the library.
Summary: Set in the ethnic neighborhoods of Seattle during World War II and Japanese American internment camps of the era, this debut novel tells the heartwarming story of widower Henry Lee, his father, and his first love Keiko Okabe. When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during the war are uncovered during renovations at a Seattle hotel, a man embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti-Japanese sentiment.
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Summary: A a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.
But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.
A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
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