UHMC Book Club 2022 Book List
The UHMC Book club brings UHMC faculty, staff, students, and community members together for discussion and sharing ideas based on books selected on topics relating to diversity, education, equity and the human condition. Dorothy Tolliver, Retired UHMC Librarian, leads rich discussion that develops members’ expression and knowledge, while making connections with colleagues and community members.
Copies of the books are available in HSPLS.
Join the UHMC Book Club on the last Friday of the month, 09:30 am, virtually led by Professor Tolliver.
Dates and books are subject to change.
Check our calendar for updates. For information on the UHMC Book Club, contact Joyce Yamada (yamadajo@hawaii.edu; 984-3663). Sponsored by: The UHMC Faculty & Staff Development & the UHMC Library
January 28, 2022
THE BOOK COLLECTORS OF DARAYA: A BAND OF SYRIAN REBELS AND THE STORIES THAT CARRIED THEM THROUGH THE WAR by Delphine Minoui Author and Lara Vergnaud translator
Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. A group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books. A sanctuary was born: a library to escape the blockage, offering Arabic poetry, American self-help, Shakespearean plays and more. Over text messages, Minoui came to know the young men who gathered in the library, exchanged ideas, learned English, and imagined how to shape the future, even as bombs kept falling from above.
February 25, 2022
THE STOCKHOLM OCTAVO by Karen Engelmann
Life is close to perfect for Emil Larsson, a self-satisfied bureaucrat in the Office of Customs and Excise in 1791 Stockholm. He is a true man of the town – a drinker, card player, and contended bachelor – until Mrs. Sofia Sparrow, fortune-teller and proprietor of an exclusive gaming parlor, shares with him a vision she had: a golden path that will lead him to lvoe and connection. She lays an Octavo for him, a spread of eight cards that augur the eight individuals who can help him realize this vision – if he can find them.
March 25, 2022
THE VANISHING HALF by Brit Bennett
A story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined.
April 29, 2022
THE ALCHEMIST by Paulo Coelho
An Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom point Santiago in the director of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles alone the way. But what starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treasures found within.
May 27, 2022
BRAIDING SWEETGRASS: INDIGENOUS WISDOM, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE, AND THE TEACHING OF PLANTS by Robin Wall Kimmerer
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.”
June 24, 2022
THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE by V. E. Schwab
To escape a forced marriage, Addie LaRue makes a bargain with the devil in 1714. She gets to live forever, but the catch is she will be forgotten by everyone she meets. After 300 years, Addie has become resigned to her fate until she meets a young man who remembers her name.
July 29, 2022
THE SELLOUT by Paul Beatty
Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, his childhood was spent as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father’s pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family’s financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realized there never was a memoir. All that’s left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Enlisting the help of the town’s most famous resident – the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins – he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
August 31, 2022, Wednesday
DEACON KING KONG by James McBride
A wise and witty novel about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting. In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles in to the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .45 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of this funny, moving novel. As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters – caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York – overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.
September 30, 2022
KONA WINDS by Scott Kikkawa
A hard-boiled noir murder mystery set in Honolulu in 1953, when Hawaiʻi was changing from a racially stratified, near-feudal plantation colony to the multi-ethnic 50th State. This debut novel by Japanese American author Scott Kikkawa was written with the firm belief that Hawaiʻi is more than just a pretty backdrop for the mischief tourists. It can be, and was, a terrifying, sodden place whose social realities were ugly not so long ago and continue in some respect to go unresolved. In addition, the novel provides a glimpse into the police work of postwar Honolulu, which has been rarely written in this way before.
October 28, 2022
THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by Matt Haig
Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived, to see how things would be if you had made other choices. Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? Up until now Nora Seed’s life has been full of misery. When she finds herself in the Midnight Library, she can now undo every decision she regrets. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be.
November 30, 2022
THE GUEST LIST by Lucy Foley
On a remote island, the perfect wedding turns deadly in this thrilling mystery. The high profile wedding between a television star and a magazine publisher is supposed to be the perfect event. Set off the coast of Ireland, all the stops have been pulled out. Yet once the guests arrive, past conflicts come into play and someone turns up dead. Was it the bride? The best man? The wedding planner? Foley keeps you guessing until the end, giving each suspect a firm motive to want to commit murder.
December 30, 2022
KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, is designed to be a playmate for real children. From her place in the store she watches the behavior of those who come in to browse, and those who pass on the street outside. In conversations with the other AI and the Manager, she remains hopeful she will be chosen. When a possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.
