Christ Church

Christ Church Book Club!
2012-2013

7:00pm. Third Tuesday of the Month. An eclectic choice of various books, one main book or excerpt per evening, along with reference to other books, for discussion and debate. Open to all and everyone! One hour. Where? Coronation Room, Christ Church Parish Hall, 7 Wentworth Street, Windsor, Nova Scotia. Contact: David Curry 798-2454.

Dates: September 18th, October 16th, November 20th, 2012;
January 15th, April 16th, & May 21st, 2013

Tuesday, September 18th, 2012. The Book of Common Prayer: Past, Present and Future. Published in commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother-book, as it were, of the Anglican family of Books of Common Prayer internationally, it is a collection of essays, scholarly but accessible, from which one may pick and choose, and read as one pleases. Among the contributors is the celebrated English detective fiction writer, Dame P.D. James. It is available from www.amazon.ca for $ 15.88. I have a number of copies as well. This year, 2012, marks as well the 50th anniversary of the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, the only post-World War II prayer book that stands intentionally within the principles of the Anglican Common Prayer tradition.

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012. Cutting for Stone (www.amazon.ca - $ 15.88) by Abraham Verghese, an Ethiopian writer and doctor, who now teaches at Stanford University, California. An epic first novel, it ranges in its scope from India to Ethiopia, from Africa to America while exploring the many complexities and confusions of cultures and communities, of love and healing.

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012. Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, (www.amazon.ca – $ 14.43) examines the remarkable history and cultural and intellectual interchange between Jews, Christians and Muslims in Medieval Spain, bringing to life a world which has touched the cultures of western Europe and their heirs in many and intriguing ways.

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013. Adam Gopnik’s 2011 CBC Massey Lecture Series, Winter: Five Windows on the Season (www.amazon.ca – $ 16.57) provides a thoughtful and kaleidoscopic view of the season of winter as reflected mostly through art and literature. While it may not exactly “drive the cold winter away” (in Loreena McKennit’s words and song), it may help us with the winter blues to see how others have seen and dealt with winter before us.

Tuesday, April 16th, 2013. Amin Maalouf’s novel, Balthasar’s Odyssey (www.amazon.ca – $ 19.95), along with his non-fiction book, Disordered World (www.amazon.ca – $ 20.48) offer a way to think about the religious and cultural challenges that are before us between Jews, Christians and Muslims. The novel is set in the 17th century, while Disordered World reflects on our present confusions. Together they challenge the assumptions and outlook of the European and western cultures as well as those of the world of the Middle East.

Tuesday, May 21st, 2013. Louise Penny’s novel, Still Life  (www.amazon.ca – $ 10.82), and Tom Gallant’s The Lord God Bird (www.amazon.ca – $ 15.64) are two very different works which nonetheless captivate and challenge us about life in small communities, about our relation to nature and to one another. The one is set in a (fictional) little rural village, Three Pines, in Quebec; the other in the actual bayous of Big Woods, Arkansas. Both are works by Canadian writers, the one from Quebec, the other lives near Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Though tinged with a wee bit more than a modicum of a romance for rural places, both works are full of wonderful grace-notes that illumine the soul and warm the heart.