Book Discussion Group
About the Group
Founded in 1988, the Bucks County Community College Book Discussion Group meets from 7:30 to 9 p.m. on the second Thursday of the month during the academic year. Titles range from fiction to nonfiction, classics to recent publications, and are selected by group participants twice a year: in June for the fall semester and December for the spring semester. Discussions are moderated by Language & Literature Professor Michael Hennessey. The meetings are free and open to the public.
Discussions now take place live online using the Zoom web-conferencing tool. A limited number of spaces are available each month. If you are interested in joining a discussion, please contact Prof. Hennessey at michael.hennessey@bucks.edu at least a week in advance of the date.
Fall 2024 Selections
Jul 11 – Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (208 pages).1998 Booker Prize Winner
On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is editor of the newspaper "The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister.
In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life. A sharp contemporary morality tale, cleverly disguised as a comic novel, Amsterdam is "as sheerly enjoyable a book as one is likely to pick up this year."
Aug 8 – Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (354 pages). Description from Amazon.com:
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years. Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world. "Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstances and personality, and reveling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs." —The New Yorker.
Sep 12 – James by Percival Everett (302 pages)
"When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
*Oct 10 – Psychedelic Outlaws: The Movement Revolutionizing Modern Medicine by Joanna Kempner * The author will join the discussion. (384 pages).
An award-winning sociologist unearths how a group of ordinary people debilitated by excruciating pain developed their own medicine from home-grown psilocybin mushrooms—crafting near-clinical grade dosing protocols--and fought for recognition in a broken medical system. Cluster headache, a diagnosis sometimes referred to as a 'suicide headache,' is widely considered the most severe pain disorder that humans experience. There is no cure, and little funding available for research into developing treatments. When Joanna Kempner met Bob Wold in 2012, she was introduced to a world beyond most people's comprehension—a clandestine network determined to find relief using magic mushrooms. These 'Clusterbusters,' a group united only by the internet and a desire to survive, decided to do the research that medicine left unfinished. They produced their own psychedelic treatment protocols and managed to get academics at Harvard and Yale to test their results. Along the way, Kempner explores not only the fascinating history and exploding popularity of psychedelic science, but also a regulatory system so repressive that the sick are forced to find their own homegrown remedies, and corporate America and university professors stand to profit from their transgressions. She's a tenured prof of clinical sociology at Rutgers Main campus. Her first book, "Not Tonight" (Chicago Press), won many awards. Amgen bought 500 copies and distributed them to their marketing dept. Adds for migraine medicine have changed a lot, since.
Nov 14 – Mink River by Brian Doyle (319 pages).
Like Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood" and Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio, " Brian Doyle's stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.
In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking. . . It's the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.
Dec 12 – Wild Houses by Colin Barrett (272 pages).
The riotous, raucous and deeply resonant debut novel from "one of the best story writers in the English language today" (Financial Times). Wild Houses follows two outsiders caught in the crosshairs of a small-town revenge kidnapping gone awry. With his acclaimed and award-winning collections Young Skins and Homesickness Colin Barrett cemented his reputation as one of contemporary Irish literature's most daring stylists. Praised by the Oprah Daily as "a doyen of the sentence," and by the Los Angeles Times as a writer of "unique genius," Barrett now expands his canvas with a debut novel that contains as much grit, plot, and linguistic energy as any of his celebrated short stories. As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, introspective loner Dev answers his door on Friday night to find Doll English— younger brother of small-time local dealer Cillian English—bruised and in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, County Mayo's fraternal enforcers and Dev's cousins. Dev's quiet homelife is upturned as he is quickly and unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' frenetic revenge plot against Cillian. Meanwhile, Doll's girlfriend, seventeen-year-old Nicky, reeling from a fractious Friday and plagued by ghosts and tragedy of her own, sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina. Set against Barrett's trademark depictions of small town Irish life, Wild Houses is thrillingly-told story of two outsiders striving to find themselves as their worlds collapse in chaos and violence.