Albany Ladies Book Club

Special note: Since we are nearing the holiday season, I would like to suggest two ways we can celebrate together:

1. Cookie swap! Bring 1-2 dozen of your favorite cookie (or other baked good) to share. Please also bring your own baggie or to-go container so participants can take home 1-2 cookies from everyone. (for anyone anxious about rules: I checked with Prof Java's that outside food is okay in this instance).
2. Literary grab bag. Bring a wrapped, small, literary/bookish gift you think other readers would enjoy. I would ask that everyone keeps this to $12 or less. This could be cute bookmarks, a notebook, a dish towel with a bookish saying on it, a tiny reading light, etc.

Participation in both of these events is 100% optional. We will do the holiday grab bag and cookie swap at 6:15, a little earlier than normal, so we can still get down to discussing the book by 6:45ish.

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We're reading Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus on Thursday, December 12th at Professor Java's in Albany.

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.

Upper Hudson Library System Access:
audiobook via Libby
ebook via Libby
physical copies (regular and large print)

Future meetings will generally be on the second Thursday of the month at Professor Java's in Albany. Drop book suggestions here: https://forms.gle/pEQ8rBtNUnLM58ov8

We're reading The Fetishist by Katherine Min on Thursday, January 9th at Professor Java's in Albany.

In this hilariously savage, poignant novel by acclaimed author Katherine Min, a grieving daughter’s revenge on the man who caused her mother’s death sets off a series of unexpected reckonings.

On a cold, gloomy night, twenty-three-year-old Kyoko stands in the rain with a knife in her hoodie’s pocket. Her target is Daniel, who seduced Kyoko’s mother then callously dropped her, leading to her death. But tonight, there will be repercussions. Following the unsuspecting Daniel home, Kyoko manages to get a rash kidnapping plot off the ground . . . and then nothing goes as planned.

The Fetishist is the story of three people—Kyoko, a Japanese American punk-rock singer full of rage and grief; Daniel, a philandering violinist forced to confront the wreckage of his past; and Alma, the love of Daniel’s life, a Korean American cello prodigy long adored for her beauty, passion, and talent, but who spends her final days examining if she was ever, truly, loved.

An exuberant, provocative story that confronts race, complicity, visibility, and ideals of femininity, The Fetishist was written before the celebrated author’s untimely death in 2019. Startlingly prescient, as wise and powerful as it is utterly delightful, this novel cements Katherine Min’s legacy as a writer with a singular voice for our times.

Upper Hudson Library System Access:
ebook via Libby
audiobook via Libby
physical copies (regular print)

Future meetings will generally be on the second Thursday of the month at Professor Java's in Albany. Drop book suggestions here: https://forms.gle/pEQ8rBtNUnLM58ov8

We're reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney on Thursday, February 13th at Professor Java's in Albany.

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family―but especially love―from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties―successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women―his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude―a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Upper Hudson Library System Access:
Audiobook via Libby
ebook via Libby
physical copies (regular & large print)

Future meetings will generally be on the second Thursday of the month at Professor Java's in Albany. Drop book suggestions here: https://forms.gle/pEQ8rBtNUnLM58ov8