Wilton Library - Senior Center Book Discussions

All adult Wilton residents are welcome to join this free book discussion group which meets at the Comstock Community Center from September through May. An optional lunch following the discussion is $3. Extra copies of each title will be available at the Wilton Library in the month the book is to be discussed. Please call the Senior Center at 834-6240 to reserve a place for lunch.

Click Here for Past Senior Center Selections

September 23 at 11 am THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY by Billy Collins		Discussion Leader: Judson Scruton. Playful, elegant, and witty are words used to describe the poetry of America’s two-term Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Through his poetry Collins takes the ordinary and makes it unusual. In the poem “Theme” he pays tribute to Cole Porter and his wry and clever style—this is also Collins’ style. Collins mastery of words shows that good poetry doesn’t have to be obscure or incomprehensible. According to The New York Review of Books, “It is difficult not to be charmed by Collins, and that in itself is a remarkable literary accomplishment.” And, The Boston Globe describes him as “A sort of poet not seen since Robert Frost.”
October 28 at 11 am SUMMER AT TIFFANY by Marjorie Hart		Discussion Leader: Maureen Canary. In this delightful book, Marjorie Hart, at age eighty-three reminisces about a summer spent in New York City in 1945. Never having been east of the Mississippi and “remembering the last stifling Iowa City summer that only a row of corn could love…” she and her best friend from the Kappa house at the University of Iowa, both with meager savings, boarded a train for Manhattan certain they would find fabulous high-fashion jobs. This proved much more difficult than anticipated but, serendipitously, they became the first two women ever to work the sales floor at Tiffany & Co. In this book the author shares her memories of that remarkable summer which she says “…continue always to embrace me, and bring a smile to my face.”
November 25 11 am TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES by Thomas Hardy		Discussion Leader: Karen Tatarka. In this novel, an indictment of society’s double standard in the Victorian era, Thomas Hardy created a character who faced an agonizing moral choice. Young Tess Durbeyfield tries to restore her family’s fortunes by claiming connection to the aristocratic d’Urbervilles. These d’Urbervilles were not true aristocrats, an ancestor had simply taken the name when he came across a list of half-extinct, ruined families in the British Museum. Her seduction by Alec d’Urberville ultimately leads to tragedy as Tess struggles with conflicting passions. This story, one of the most poignant in English literature, was considered by Thomas Hardy to be his finest novel.
January 27 11 am THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY by Henry James		Discussion Leader: William Ziegler. This masterpiece by Henry James was begun in Florence, Italy, in the spring of 1879. First appearing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1880, a revised edition appeared in 1908. The story of a young American woman who journeys to Europe to, as Henry James writes, “affront her destiny,” Isabel Archer is a young woman of great promise who wants to establish and protect her independence. She rejects suitors of wealth and position only to eventually lose her freedom to the captivating but essentially cruel Gilbert Osmond. As James stated, in this work he wanted to show “…”what an ‘exciting’ inward life may do for the person leading it even while it remains perfectly normal.” Through the author’s richly imaged portrait of her, Isabel Archer has become one of the great heroines of American literature.
February 24 at 11 am TEAM OF RIVALS by Doris Kearns Goodwin		Discussion Leader: David Ostergren. This work by Doris Kearns Goodwin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a multiple biography of the team of personal and political competitors that Lincoln put together to lead the country through one of its darkest periods.. Five of the key players—Edwin M. Stanton, Salmon P. Chase, William H. Seward, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln—are portrayed. Four of these men had been candidates for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination; all four disdained Lincoln for his background and lack of experience. Goodwin illustrates in this book how Lincoln, in spite of this, used his leadership style, political genius, and deep understanding of human nature to put together this “team of rivals.”
March 24 at 11 am A GESTURE LIFE by Chang-rae Lee		Discussion Leader: Miwako Ogasawara. This novel, the story of a man born of Korean parents and raised in Japan who leads a very proper life in a New York suburb slowly unfolds as his careful life begins to come apart. Gradually, the reader through a series of small events discovers the mystery of his life; his forbidden love for a young Korean comfort woman he met while serving as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II. The dilemma of being an outsider is vividly portrayed. The New York Times Book Review describes it as “A tender meditation on love, loss and family…a rapturous evocation of a past life, viewed across a great gap of time and culture.”
April 28 at 11 am LEAP OF FAITH: MEMOIRS OF AN UNEXPECTED LIFE by Queen Noor		Discussion Leader: Barbara Jones. This autobiography is the remarkable story of a young American woman who becomes the wife of an Arab monarch. It is also an introduction to the modern Middle East. The subtitle of the book is “Memoirs of an Unexpected Life” and this is what Lisa Halaby, a member of the first freshman class at Princeton to accept women, found when she became Noor Al Hussein, Queen of Jordan. Queen Noor eloquently describes her challenges and joys as she struggles to fulfill the role expected of her as queen. In USA Today the book is described as “A compelling memoir….If Queen Noor’s object was to make the Arab world more human and understandable, she has succeeded.”
May 26 at 11 am LIFE OF PI by Yann Martel		Discussion Leader: Kathy Leeds. This novel is described by Publishers Weekly as “a fabulous romp through an imagination by turns ecstatic, cunning, despairing and resilient.” The story is that of a young Indian boy named Pi who, as the son of a zookeeper, has developed an extraordinary knowledge of wild beasts. While sailing with his family and some of their menagerie to begin life in Canada, their ship sinks and Pi is left to survive on a 26-foot-long raft with a 450-pound Bengal tiger. What follows is an engaging tale in which, to quote The Seattle Times, “Each chapter is a well-polished pearl…an exhilarating story of gut survival….” The New York Times Book Review compares this book, which won a prestigious Canadian prize for fiction, to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.