The PKSCA Book Club has been an incredibly enriching ride for me (Alan Ellis) personally. How else would I have found the time and motivation to read, and analyze in depth, masterpiece classics like Fathers and Sons, The Nose, A Hero of Our Time, Oblomov, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, We, Master and Margarita, Twelve Chairs, Doctor Zhivago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Quiet Flows the Don/The Don Flows into the Sea, and A Gentleman in Moscow?! In preparation to lead discussions, I read most of the novels both in English and Russian, researched the authors, and composed the discussion questions—amassing enough material to spend several sessions on each novel. After all, how can you do justice to Crime and Punishment or Master and Margarita or any of the others in a 90-minute Zoom session? (That said, we did allot two sessions to War and Peace, reading it over a four-month period.)
But an organization is only as effective as the sum of its parts—i.e., its participants—and participation in the PKSCA Book Club has gradually dwindled over the past several months. So I’ve made the decision to take a break, postponing our May meeting to the end of July, thus providing time to determine how many on the PKSCA e-mail list have the interest and availability to keep our book club afloat. Regardless of the results of that survey, we’ll hold the meeting via Zoom on July 31st to discuss Anne Blankman’s compelling best-seller, The Blackbird Girls. For information about the author and the novel, go to the website Book Club page.