HOT OFF THE PRESSES: Update on New NCPR Book Club

Since I wrote the entry below, Dale Hobson has created a book club space for us at www.ncpr.org/bookclub where you’ll find the current book discussions, a page for making suggestions for future book club reads, and a page to put your hometown book club or library on the “early notification” email list. We are so excited to see this launch. Can’t wait to hear about what you’re reading…and what you have to say about the books we’re all reading. –Ellen

Many of you may be familiar with our more than decade-old Readers & Writers series–a  call in program featuring a different author each month. Over the years, we’ve worked with area libraries and public schools, and during the past two years, we’ve piggy-backed on the St. Lawrence University Writers Series, bringing authors visiting campus into our studios for these monthly conversations.

We’re changing things.

We will still collaborate with the SLU series on one or two authors each year, and we hope to work with SUNY Canton as they initiate a series of author visits this fall. But we’d like to be more flexible about the books we discuss and we’d like you to help us. We’d like to extend the conversation beyond a single hour, using this space to begin a conversation in the weeks before any on air appearance by an author. We’ll focus on a single book each time–perhaps your hometown book club will decide to read some of the books we choose. Better, perhaps you will suggest titles to us…by living authors.

We’re testing the waters with a first program in this series which will focus on Canadian Jane Urquhart’s Sanctuary Line. (You may know Urquhart from her earlier novel, The Stone Carvers.) Jane has agreed to join us on air Tuesday, April 17 at 7 pm.

So, we’d like to get the ball rolling right now. Betsy Kepes, who you may already know as our regional book reviewer, is joining our book club team. She’ll provide brief reviews of each of the books we select and participate in these online conversations. Plus, we’re hoping the authors will join us for a day or two to respond to some of your online questions.

Let’s get going with this review of Sanctuary Line from Betsy Kepes:

“Don’t expect linear, rising action in Jane Urquhart’s new novel SANCTUARY LINE. The story flutters here and there, past and present and back again, like the monarch butterflies the narrator studies in a wildlife sanctuary on the north shore of Lake Erie.

You’ll have to trust that Urquhart’s prose– elegant, descriptive and thoughtful–is taking you into the deep mystery of this book. What happened at the family orchard that summer evening twenty-five years ago when the narrator was a fifteen-year-old girl?  Urquhart writes: How much of first love — perhaps any love — is developed in isolation and absence. You could completely remove one of the players from the table and nothing much would shift, imagination being what it is.”

Weigh in below and please do keep visiting this blog post. And, yes, we want your ideas for a name for this new NCPR book club. Do suggest titles you’d like us to include in this series, as well. Thanks.

Tags: book club, book reviews, Urquhart