North Kohala book group gets together Tuesday
North Kohala Public Library’s book group meets at 11 a.m. on Tuesday in Kapaau.
This month’s, the club will be discussing “Pilgrim at the Tinker Creek,” by Annie Dillard.
“Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of “beauty tangled in a rapture with violence.”
Her personal narrative highlights one year’s exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays king of the Meadow with a field of grasshoppers. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.
Info: 889-6655.
Fiction book club to meet
Kona Stories hosts a fiction book club discussing “Bark” by Loorie Moore on Tuesday.
Moore has received honors for her work, among them the Irish Times International Prize for Literature and a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. Her novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,” was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
In her book, Bark, are eight masterful stories. Lorrie Moore in a perfect blend of craft and bewitched spirit, explores the passage of time, and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite, singular wisdom.
In the first story, “Debarking,” a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the United States prepares to invade Iraq, and against this ominous moment, we see-in all its irresistible hilarity and darkness-the perils of divorce and what can follow in its wake. In “Foes,” a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest at a fund-raising dinner in Georgetown. In “The Juniper Tree,” a teacher, visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend, is forced to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a kind of nightmare reunion. And in “Wings,” we watch the unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians who neither held fast to their dreams nor struck out along other paths as Moore deftly depicts the intricacies of dead ends and the workings of regret.
The group meets at 6:30 p.m. at the store. Book groups are free if books are purchased at Kona Stories, or a $5 donation is requested.
Info: 324-0350.
Honokaa Public Library book club to meet
The Honokaa Public Library hosts a book club from 5-6 p.m. on Thursday.
This month, the club is reading “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival” by John Vaillan.
The book tells the gripping story of man pitted against nature’s most fearsome and efficient predator. Outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s murdering them, almost as if it has a vendetta. A team of trackers is dispatched to hunt down the tiger before it strikes again. They know the creature is cunning, injured, and starving, making it even more dangerous. As Vaillant recreates these extraordinary events, he gives readers an unforgettable and masterful work of narrative nonfiction that combines a riveting portrait of a stark and mysterious region of the world and its people, with the natural history of nature’s most deadly predator.
Info: 775-8881. ■