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  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run.

    In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That’s how this extraordinary autobiography began. Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humour and originality found in his songs.

    Born to Run will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen, but this book is much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll. Rarely has a performer told his own story with such force and sweep. Like many of his songs (‘Thunder Road’, ‘Badlands’, ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’, ‘The River’, ‘Born in the U.S.A.’, ‘The Rising’, and ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’, to name just a few), Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography is written with the lyricism of a singular songwriter and the wisdom of a man who has thought deeply about his experiences.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

    This acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from an award-winning author “pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale” and includes a foreword by N. K. Jemisin (John Green, New York Times).

    When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions.

    Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 



    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown.

    Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that’s what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.

    Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 



    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

    Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an ageing former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

    A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. GET MORE INFORMATION ON HOW TO USE ZOOM

  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars.

    San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man’s guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries—memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo’s wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched. Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric, Snow Falling on Cedars is a masterpiece of suspense— one that leaves us shaken and changed.

    “Haunting…. A whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper.”—Los Angeles Times

    “Compelling…heartstopping. Finely wrought, flawlessly written.”—The New York Times Book Review

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. GET MORE INFORMATION ON HOW TO USE ZOOM

  • Tuesday Night Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico

    It’s just like book club but with albums! With new advances in technology, the way we consume music through our devices, apps and on demand streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and iTunes is making the idea of the “album” as an art form extinct. Get together with other music enthusiasts on Tuesday nights to discuss some of the greatest records of all-time! Listen to the album beforehand and then come prepared to discuss. This event will feature Velvet Underground & Nico.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Record Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 

    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Record Club: Paul McCartney & Wings, Band on the Run

    It’s just like book club but with albums! With new advances in technology, the way we consume music through our devices, apps and on demand streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and iTunes is making the idea of the “album” as an art form extinct. Get together with other music enthusiasts on Tuesday nights to discuss some of the greatest records of all-time! Listen to the album beforehand and then come prepared to discuss. This event will feature Paul McCartney & Wings, Band on the Run.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Record Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 

    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Record Club: Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge over Troubled Water

    It’s just like book club but with albums! With new advances in technology, the way we consume music through our devices, apps and on demand streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and iTunes is making the idea of the “album” as an art form extinct. Get together with other music enthusiasts on Tuesday nights to discuss some of the greatest records of all-time! Listen to the album beforehand and then come prepared to discuss. This event will feature Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge over Troubled Water.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Record Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 

    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Record Club: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live, 1975-85

    It’s just like book club but with albums! With new advances in technology, the way we consume music through our devices, apps and on demand streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and iTunes is making the idea of the “album” as an art form extinct. Get together with other music enthusiasts on Tuesday nights to discuss some of the greatest records of all-time! Listen to the album beforehand and then come prepared to discuss. This event will feature Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live, 1975-85

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Record Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 

    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Record Club: Joe Jackson, Look Sharp!

    It’s just like book club but with albums! With new advances in technology, the way we consume music through our devices, apps and on demand streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and iTunes is making the idea of the “album” as an art form extinct. Get together with other music enthusiasts on Tuesday nights to discuss some of the greatest records of all-time! Listen to the album beforehand and then come prepared to discuss. This event will feature Joe Jackson, Look Sharp!

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in-person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Record Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available.