The Page Turners Book Club

NOTE: This In-person event is open only to members of the Page Turners Book Club. The exact location will be sent to members who RSVP. The meeting will start at 10:15 AM.

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley (2023; 240 pages; memoir)

From Amazon.com:

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew. In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers

The Indigo Girl by Natasha Boyd (2018; 334 pages)
Please join on Zoom for our discussion. And, feel free to join us for socializing anytime between 9:30 and 10:00. The meeting begins promptly at 10:00.

From Amazon.com:
Boyd, Natasha The Indigo Girl 2018 334 pages Dianna Renfrow
The year is 1739. Eliza Lucas is sixteen years old when her father leaves her in charge of their family's three plantations in rural South Carolina and then proceeds to bleed the estates dry in pursuit of his military ambitions....Based on historical documents, including Eliza's letters, this is a historical fiction account of how a teenage girl produced indigo dye, which became one of the largest exports out of South Carolina, an export that laid the foundation for the incredible wealth of several Southern families who still live on today. Although largely overlooked by historians, the accomplishments of Eliza Lucas influenced the course of US history. When she passed away in 1793, President George Washington served as a pallbearer at her funeral. This book is set between 1739 and 1744, with romance, intrigue, forbidden friendships, and political and financial threats weaving together to form the story of a remarkable young woman whose actions were before their time: the story of the indigo girl.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (2016; 208 pages; memoir)
Please join on Zoom for our discussion. And, feel free to join us for socializing anytime between 9:30 and 10:00. The meeting begins promptly at 10:00.

Host: Rhyena H.

From Amazon.com:
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he
was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

This is Happiness by Niall William (2021, 400 pages, fiction)
Please join on Zoom for our discussion. And, feel free to join us for socializing anytime between 9:30 and 10:00. The meeting begins promptly at 10:00.

From Amazon.com:
A profound and enchanting bestselling novel from the Booker Prize-longlisted author, Niall Williams, about the loves of our lives and the joys of reminiscing. An intricately observed portrait of a community in County Clare Ireland during the “coming of electricity" and the return of one significant character who hopes to redeem a love story. Seventeen-year-old Noel is living with his grandparents and observes the town’s idiosyncrasies and its traditions, its paradoxes and its inanities, its failures and its triumphs. Luminous and otherworldly, and yet anchored with deep-running roots into the earthy and the everyday.