Archives for January 2016

Join us Monday, February 8, and learn to make BOOK ART!

February 8 —12507289_927158233998629_8202519300543911246_n

Book Making, Book Art,
and Literary Trivia

Monday, February 8, 7:00 PM
Michaels Arts & Crafts Store
Park Road Shopping Center

 

Join us to learn h323188487_5b2900ae86ow to create book art!

Use book pages to make:
– Flowers
– Butterflies
– Backgrounds
And put them on canvas!

Simply bring an old book you wouldn’t mind turning into book art, or any crafting paper you have around the house.

 

We’ll see you at the Michaels store at Park Road Shopping Center!

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OK — so maybe we3f9583b797badf71c115f0a7934b8830 won’t get quite this fancy………..   Book-Art-1

 

Come to the next WNBA Great Group Reads Book Club meeting! Tuesday, February 2, 7 PM

We have a terrific book club in our chapter! 

As our reading guide, we take the list of 2015 Great Group Reads titles recommended for book clubs during WNBA’s National Reading Group Month. Starting in November 2015, we’re reading books from the current 2015 Great Group Reads list.  See below!

 

Our book for our February 2 meeting is….

 

Without You 20685373Without You, There Is No Us:
My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite
by Suki Kim
Crown, hardcover

A haunting memoir of teaching English to the sons of North Korea’s ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il’s reign

Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields—except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime.

Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues—evangelical Christian missionaries who don’t know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn’t share their faith. As the weeks pass, she is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. At the same time, they offer Suki tantalizing glimpses of their private selves—their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished. She in turn begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own—at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. But when Kim Jong-il dies, and the boys she has come to love appear devastated, she wonders whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.

Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world’s most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls “soldiers and slaves.”Suki Kim 8581

Suki Kim is the author of the award-winning novel The Interpreter and the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Open Society fellowships. She has been traveling to North Korea as a journalist since 2002, and her essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books. Born and raised in Seoul, she lives in New York.

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Our meetings take place on the first Tuesday of each month, 7 PM, at the Panera on Fairview near SouthPark — see dates below. We have chosen books to take us through to next October when there will be a new Great Group Reads list released. If you have questions about our Book Club, please contact Kristen Knox at whitreidsmama@yahoo.com.

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Here are the books we’ll be reading in 2015-2016!

November 3 — Dietland by Sarai Walker (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

December 1 — All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (McSweeny’s)

January 5 — Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League
by Jonathan Odell 
(Maiden Lane Press)

February 2 — Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim (Crown)

 March 1 — Landfall by Ellen Urbani (Forest Avenue Press)

April 5  — The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton
(Grand Central Publishing)

May 3 — Henna House by Nomi Eve (Scribner)

June 7 — Orphan #8 by Kim van Alkemade (William Morrow)

July 5 — The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora (Grove Press)

August 2 — Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jeannine Capó Crucet
(St. Martin’s Press)

September 6 — Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
(Gallery Books/Scout Press)

October 4 — No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman (Twelve)

WNBA Members — Join us for our Annual Book Swap and Networking Meeting! Monday, January 11, 7 PM

JanuaWinter is the warmest seasonry 11 —
Annual Book Swap
and Networking Meeting

— location details will be sent to members  

Monday, January 11, 7:00 PM
Kristen Knox’s house
(Members, please watch for a WNBA email  for the address or contact Kristen for info)  

MEMBERS ONLY!!  Once_upon_a_wintertime_little_golden_book

Our president Kristen Knox once again is hosting our annual WNBA-Charlotte book swap at her house/personal library! Use this chance to tidy up your bookshelves, or to clutter them again with new reads. Bring books to swap out or just to donate to a good cause.  

This is a members only event!

Check out this webpage and  WNBA-Charlotte’s Facebook page for further updates.

See you soon!

 

Come to the next WNBA Great Group Reads Book Club meeting! Tuesday, January 5, 7 PM

We have a terrific book club in our chapter! 

As our reading guide, we take the list of 2015 Great Group Reads titles recommended for book clubs during WNBA’s National Reading Group Month. Starting in November 2015, we’re reading books from the current 2015 Great Group Reads list.  See below!

Our book for our January 5 meeting is….

Our book for our January 5, 2016,  meeting is….

Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks LeagueMiss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League
by Jonathan Odell

Maiden Lane Press, paperback

Set in pre-Civil Rights Mississippi, Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League is the story of two young mothers, Hazel and Vida one wealthy and white and the other poor and black who have only two things in common: the devastating loss of their children, and a deep and abiding loathing for one another. Embittered and distrusting, Vida is harassed by Delphi s racist sheriff and haunted by the son she lost to the world. Hazel, too, has lost a son and can t keep a grip on her fractured life. After drunkenly crashing her car into a manger scene while gunning for the baby Jesus, Hazel is sedated and bed-ridden. Hazel s husband hires Vida to keep tabs on his unpredictable wife and to care for his sole surviving son. Forced to spend time together with no one else to rely on, the two women find they have more in common than they thought, and together they turn the town on its head. It is the story of a town, a people, and a culture on the verge of a great change that begins with small things, like unexpected friendship.Jonathan Odell

Jonathan Odell tell us more about himself and his writing:
Born in Mississippi, I grew up in the Jim Crow South and became involved in the civil rights movement in college. I hold a master’s degree in counseling psychology and have been active in human resource development for over 30 years, including holding the position of Vice President of Human Resources for a Minneapolis based corporation and later founding my own consulting companies.

I am the author of the acclaimed novel The Viewfrom Delphi, which deals with the struggle for equality in pre-civil rights Mississippi, my home state. My novel The Healing explores the subversive nature story plays in the healing of an oppressed people and was published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday early 2012. In 2015 Maiden Lane released Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League, a reimagining of my first novel.

My short stories and essays have appeared in Stories from the Blue Moon Café (Macadam/Cage 2004), Men Like That (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Letters of the Twentieth Century (Dial Press, 1999), Breaking Silence (Xanthus Press, 1996), Speakeasy Literary Magazine, and the Savannah Literary Journal.

 

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Our meetings take place on the first Tuesday of each month, 7 PM, at the Panera on Fairview near SouthPark — see dates below. We have chosen books to take us through to next October when there will be a new Great Group Reads list released. If you have questions about our Book Club, please contact Kristen Knox at whitreidsmama@yahoo.com.

____________________________________________________________

Here are the books we’ll be reading in 2015-2016!

November 3 — Dietland by Sarai Walker (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

December 1 — All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (McSweeny’s)

January 5 — Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League by Jonathan Odell(Maiden Lane Press)

February 2 — Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim (Crown)

 March 1 — Landfall by Ellen Urbani (Forest Avenue Press)

April 5  — The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton (Grand Central Publishing)

May 3 — Henna House by Nomi Eve (Scribner)

June 7 — Orphan #8 by Kim van Alkemade (William Morrow)

July 5 — The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora (Grove Press)

August 2 — Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jeannine Capó Crucet (St. Martin’s Press)

September 6 — Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg (Gallery Books/Scout Press)

October 4 — No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman (Twelve)