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Channel: Book Club Notes – What Smart Women Read
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Making Sense of Julian Barnes’ Ending

The New York Times critic Liesl Schillinger writes, “In The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes reveals crystalline truths that have taken a lifetime to harden. He has honed their edges, and polished them...

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Book Club Challenges: Part III

The novel is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. –Annie Murphy Paul If reading fiction is the ideal way to “enter fully into other people’s thoughts and...

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Are Women Writers Taken Seriously?

Annie Dillard wrote, “At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain,...

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The Personal Meets The Political: Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun

Violence is the common hell of all who are associated with it.  –The House Gun What happens when an upper-middle class, white South African family becomes the victim of violence? What happens when that...

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Book Club Challenges: Part IV

Reading a wonderful novel can transport you anywhere in the world….and it’s even more enjoyable when the trip is shared with friends. This is one of the main reasons book clubs thrive, despite the...

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Summer Slog: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall

Last summer one of our reading groups decided to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which we abandoned after much fretting and conversation. It was just too heavy for the lighter fare most...

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It’s Hard to Blog About Hate

Hate: A Romance is our third international novel on this year’s reading list. So far we have worked our way through David Grossman (To the End of the Land) and Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot), and...

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Lean in to Literature

In her highly-publicized bestseller Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg seeks to understand why working women still struggle to achieve parity in positions of leadership. As the chief operating officer of...

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Can The Circle Be Unbroken?

If you have qualms about the pervasive effects of social media, then Dave Eggers’ The Circle will heighten your suspicions. In this fast paced, disturbing look at the inevitable intrusion of all things...

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A Young Author to Watchand Her Must-Read Novel

Over the last six months we have enjoyed some wonderful novels that are ideal for your reading groups. We have specifically explored writers under the age of forty, including Gary Shteyngart, Claire...

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How To Be Both: Neither Here Nor There

When was the last time you read a book and felt like you couldn’t penetrate the text? With all the press commemorating the twenty-year anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, those of us...

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Exploring the Depths of Depravity: A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is the equivalent of literary waterboarding: Be prepared for an onslaught of descriptions that will leave you in a state of perpetual despair. Although critically...

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