All avid readers and wannabe book critics are welcome to participate in this wonderful opportunity to gather and explore the sometimes challenging written works.
The Book Club meets on Tuesday, May 15th at 7:00 pm. The book is Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen.
Patty
and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the
gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods
generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you
where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to
actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife
of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter
cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a
better world.But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street’s attentive eyes?
In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom’s characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
Awards:
Winner of the John Gardner Fiction Award
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Book Club Selections, October 2011 to May 2012
Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel (October, 2011)The Help, by Kathryn Stockett (November, 2011)
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon (December, 2011)
The Best Laid Plans, by Terry Fallis (January, 2012)
Origin of Species, by Nino Ricci (February, 2012)
Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan (March, 2012)
The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway (April, 2012)
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen (May, 2012)
Current and past Book Club titles are available in the Trinity library.