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  • T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

    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 T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

    Famous for juxtaposing Eastern cultures with Western literary references, The Waste Land has been celebrated for its eloquence, depth of meaning and numerous subtleties. Quickly ascending to the status of literary classic, The Waste Land is widely considered by literary scholars to be Eliot’s finest poem, representing a maturity in his style and a confidence in both expression and in research.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

    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 Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country.

    First published in 1913, Edith Wharton’s The Custom Of The Country is scathing novel of ambition featuring one of the most ruthless heroines in literature. Undine Spragg is as unscrupulous as she is magnetically beautiful. Her rise to the top of New York’s high society from the nouveau riche provides a provocative commentary on the upwardly mobile and the aspirations that eventually cause their ruin. One of Wharton’s most acclaimed works, The Custom Of The Country is a stunning indictment of materialism and misplaced values that is as powerful today for its astute observations about greed and power as when it was written nearly a century ago.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Questlove’s Music Is History

    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 Questlove’s Music Is History.

    Music Is History combines Questlove’s deep musical expertise with his curiosity about history, examining America over the past fifty years.

    Focusing on the years 1971 to the present, Questlove finds the hidden connections in the American tapes- try, whether investigating how the blaxploitation era reshaped Black identity or considering the way disco took an assembly-line approach to Black genius. And these critical inquiries are complemented by his own memories as a music fan, and the way his appetite for pop culture taught him about America.

    A history of the last half-century and an intimate conversation with one of music’s most influential and original voices, Music Is History is a singular look at contemporary America.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

    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 Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer.

    A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.

    The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

    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 NATIONAL BESTSELLER Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

    An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. Now an original series on HBO Max.

    Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Ian McEwan’s Atonement

    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 Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

    This month’s novel is NATIONAL BESTSELLER Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

    A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed Booker Prize–winning, international bestselling author Ian McEwan.

    On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’ s incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

    “A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • John Irving’s The Cider House Rules

    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 John Irving’s The Cider House Rules.

    “The Cider House Rules is filled with people to love and to feel for. . . . The characters in John Irving’s novel break all the rules, and yet they remain noble and free-spirited.”—The Houston Post

    First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch—saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud’s, ether addict and abortionist. This is also the story of Dr. Larch’s favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer

    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 Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer.

    #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK 

    From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates comes a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.

    This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,

    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 Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

    The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library’s top 20 novels of the 20th century. In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book’s heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


  • Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

    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 Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

    Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in Lolita, Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

    “The only convincing love story of our century.” —Vanity Fair

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.