Category: EnCore Authors

Notes from the December 2014 EnCore Book Club: The Home of THE Many-Gables

It’s that time of month. Tonight, EnCore-sters met to discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The House of THE Seven Gables. One of the club attendees, the lovely Kim Santo, took great issue with one nefarious, print-on-demand copy of the novel present at the meeting that clearly lacked the necessary article on the volume title (I’ll let […]

Notes from the November 2014 EnCore Book Club: Angela Carter

Hard-Core alums gathered on Guy Fawkes Day (November 5th) to discuss Angela Carter’s award-winning novel, Nights at the Circus. Over delicious El Pelon Mexican fare and several bottles of wine and beer, we bantered about Cockney accents, multiple voice narratives, and fin-de-siecle Europe’s fascination with the freaky, the sleazy, and the revolutionary. Is Fevvers (supposed […]

Notes from the October 2014 EnCore Book Club: Edgar Allan Poe

Pumpkin beer, pumpkin “blondies,” pumpkin whiskey (that’s right), pumpkin ice cream, Halloween-themed Jo-Jos, OTTO pizza, wine and cider and hot tea and more; this was the fall spread that the EnCore book club attendees tucked into as they pulled out their copies of Edgar A. Poe’s short stories. One could title this meeting “From Victorians […]

Notes from the February 2014 EnCore Book Club: What is Life?

This month, EnCore book club attendees struggled with Erwin Schrodinger’s slim volume, What is Life?, a book that, as quoted in Goodreads, was “written for the layman, but proved to be one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of DNA.” Erwin Schrodinger is an inescapable figure in Core’s […]

Notes from the November 2013 EnCore Book Club: Frankenstein

Big turn-out this month: EnCore book club members met to discuss the much-beloved Gothic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, written by Mary Shelley. The discussion began with the novel’s framing device. The story begins with an exchange of letters between Captain Robert Walton and his sister. The captain, on an expedition to the North […]

Notes from the August 2013 EnCore Book Club: Shame

EnCore book club members met this month to discuss Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame (click on the link to read the Goodreads summary). The discussion got off to a slow start, considering many members attending had either not read the book, or had not finished it. Such a situation has never deterred book club attendees, and […]

Notes from the July 2013 EnCore Book Club: Things Fall Apart

This month, EnCore’s book club delved into Things Fall Apart, by the renowned and recently deceased Nigerian scholar Chinua Achebe. As described on the back of the paperback 50th Anniversary Edition from Anchor Books, the novel “tells two intertwining stories, both centered on Okonkwo, a ‘strong man’ of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, […]

Notes from the February EnCore Book Club: Persepolis

The EnCore book club met this month to discuss the popular graphic novel Persepolis, by Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi. It was an unusual choice for the group for a variety of reasons: the book is a memoir of a young girl growing up in revolutionary Iran, it was originally written in French, and it was published as a […]

Notes from the June EnCore Book Club

The EnCore Book Club met on June 6th to discuss the last book on its Ancient Greco-Roman cycle, Augustus, by John Williams. Thoughtfully munching on Chinese food while sipping beer and wine, attendees first pondered about the structure of the book. Augustus is a novel made up of the fictional letters and journal entries of […]

Notes from the May EnCore Book Club

An emphatic discussion was held last week Wednesday the 9th at the EnCore Book Club meeting. Professor Loren J. Samons kindly attended our discussion of his book What’s Wrong With Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship (University of California Press, 2004). We discussed ancient and contemporary politics, the business of government, and the interconnectedness of social, economic, and other issues. To learn more, read on!