Welcome to the Boston Area Swarthmore Alumni Book Group. Our group has been around since 1998 and serves Boston-area alumni of Swarthmore College, as well as parents, friends, spouses, and other assorted folks. As those in the class of 1983 can tell you, you need not have graduated in the Amphitheater in order to attend our meetings.
Our books this year (with one exception) come from a list of “Short Perfect Novels” in Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence. As the main character says, these are “books that knock you sideways in around 200 pages. Between the covers there exists a complete world. The story is unforgettably peopled and nothing is extraneous. Reading one of these books takes only an hour or two but leaves a lifetime imprint…”
Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabel, Hrabal Review in NYT, 1990
Train Dreams, Denis Johnson
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, 1970 NYTimes review of The Bluest Eye, The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison, NYTimes, April, 2015
The Shadow-Line, Joseph Conrad
The All of It, Jeannette Haien (Read for December 13th)
Winter in the Blood, James Welch
Swimmer in the Secret Sea, William Kotzwinkle
The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald
First Love, Ivan Turgenev
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee
Fire on the Mountain, Anita Desai
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka