The Brazos Book Club
Brazos Bookstore store employee Mark Haber leads a freestyle conversation about a wide variety of books, fiction and non-. Attending group members choose the book for the next month at the end of each meeting. No need to worry if you haven't read this month's book. All are welcome!
Click below to purchase or hold a copy of this month's book to pick up at the bookstore.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16 -- 7 PM
Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host's lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 21 -- 7 PM
A missing laptop, a petulant critic, a sojourn in communal living--Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a bracingly intelligent examination of grief, autonomy, aging, desire, information overload, and the condition of being a thinking and feeling inhabitant of an often unthinkable, numbing world. Anna Moschovakis's debut novel bristles with honesty, humor, and the hungers that propel us to revise and again revise our lives.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17 -- 7 PM
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 -- 7 PM
Eric Chevillard's visionary play of word and thought has been compared to the work of Beckett, Michaux, and Pinget, yet the universe he spins is utterly his own. Palafox (Editions de Minuit, 1990), Chevillard's third novel of eleven, explores the ecosystem of an unclassifiable yet enchanting protean creature, Palafox. A team of experts armed with degrees of higher learning is determined to label, train, baptize, and realize the elusive creature, while Palafox effortlessly and wordlessly defies them all.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, JULY 18, AND AUGUST 8 -- 7 PM
Over a century and a half after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature.
We will be working through the book in sections: for our first meeting in June, read pp 1-214 (ch. 1-43). For July, please read 215-439 (ch. 44-90). And for August, read 440-end (ch. 91-135).
WEDNESDAY, MAY 16 -- 7 PM
Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18 -- 7 PM
In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man. He is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast.
Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.
Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21 -- 7 PM
In a dive bar in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, takes the stage for his final show. Over the course of a single evening, Dov's patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood. And in the dance between comic and audience, a deeper story begins to take shape as Dov confronts the decision that has shaped the course of his life--a story that will alter the lives of several of those in attendance. A poignant exploration of how people confront life's capricious battering, A Horse Walks into a Bar is a searing story of loss and survival.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21 -- 7 PM
Go Tell It on the Mountain, originally published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery one Saturday in March of 1935 of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17 -- 7 PM
A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.
