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EVENING BOOK CLUB

The WLS Evening Book Club is a very simple affair, open to all. Here’s how to join: 

  • Sign up for our newsletter. 

  • Borrow one of our library copies free of charge. 

  • Hop online from 7-8 p.m. each First Wednesday for some great conversation! 

 

New to book clubs? Come join us! There’s nothing quite like the pleasure of talking about something you just read with some nice folks who’ve read it, too. 

We hold our meetings on Zoom, so you can join us right from your favourite reading chair. New to Zoom? It’s easy—we’ll help you connect. 

Library copies are first come, first served (you can also buy your own at one from our friends at the Wairarapa’s many great local bookstores.

Any questions, contact dan@wls.org.nz. Readers of the Wairarapa, you are never alone! 



Wednesday 6 July: Something New Under the Sun

 

For July, we’ll follow our recent speculative mood into what the wags like call cli-fi with a discussion of Something New Under the Sun, by Alexandra Kleeman. 

The Blurb: “Novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Los Angeles to oversee the film adaptation of one of his books and try to impress his wife and daughter back home with this last-ditch attempt at professional success. But California is not as he imagined. Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are everywhere, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick finds an unlikely partner in Cassidy Carter—the cynical starlet of his film—and the two investigate the sun-scorched city, where they discover the darker side of all that glitters in Hollywood.” 


Some links!

  • A profile of Kleeman in the New York Times: “I have a funny relationship to the idea of realism.” 

  • A review in the Guardian noting Kleeman’s interest in the book’s nonhuman elements, including “the plastic taste of soft furnishings in a carpet beetle’s mouth.” 

  • An interview where Kleeman talks about how the book grapples with the intertwining myths of Hollywood and the American West. 

  • The novel shares its title with a groundbreaking 2001 textbook offering “an environmental history of the 20th Century World.” Both, of course, are riffing on Ecclesiastes


 

COMING UP:
 

The Bookseller at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw.

PAST TITLES:

Here are the books we’ve read and enjoyed! Want to read them in your own book club? Contact dan@wls.org.nz about checking out a free book club set of any title. 

 

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May 2022 

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
“‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness. I’m glad you watch everything so carefully, Klara.’” 

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June 2022 

Strange Beasts of China, by Yan Ge.
“‘My mother used to tell me, ‘You can’t be sure that beasts aren’t people, or that people aren’t just another type of beast.’” 

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THIS MONTH

April 2022 

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly 
"There comes a time of night when it becomes okay to sit on the ground, even away from parks and boulders and other natural sitting spots."

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March 2022 

Lea YpiFree: Coming of Age at the End of History
“When you see a system change once, it’s not that difficult to believe that it can change again."

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February 2022 

Sue Orr, Loop Tracks 
"The first time I got on an aeroplane, I was sixteen years old and pregnant."

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December 2021                                                                                         

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat 

“This is a female text, written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little.” 

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November 2021 

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You 

“Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way the nicest reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine?” 

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