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Ok, folks, enjoy the summer break and keep reading. We will meet again very soon!! And in the meantime... Stay hungry, stay foolish!

BURGOS E.O.I. Reading Club

Hosted by Ana Mercado

Reinvent Yourself:
Discover the Rewards of Reading in English
2019-2020 programme

01

Men Explain Things to Me
By Rebecca Solnit

6 November 2019

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Men Explain Things to Me is Rebecca Solnit’s 19th book. First published in 2014, it is comprised of a collection of essays primarily concerned with gender politics. The first essay explores men silencing women. It begins with Solnit recounting a conversation with “Mr. Very Important” in which he asks her about her writing, only to talk over her and lecture her about a book that, it turns out, she actually wrote. She uses this to explore the way traditional gender roles inculcate men to believe that they are automatically better informed than women and have a right to speak over them. Examining how this works to silence women and drown out their voices, Solnit links this to wider patterns of repression, violence, and abuse.

 

02

Olive Kitteridge
By Elizabeth Strout

27 November 2019

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The story follows the main character, Olive Kitteridge, as she deals with the daily life of living in a small town in Crosby, Maine. As a high school math teacher, Olive Kitteridge is responsible for teach many of the children that live in the town, once they are old enough to attend high school age. This type of interaction, plus the fact that everyone knows everyone in this small town, leads Olive Kitteridge to form her own opinions and judgments on the various people that live in the town.

Olive's opinions and judgments are not just reserved for the other people that live in Crosby. Olive also has strong opinions and judgments when it comes to her pharmacist husband, Henry Kitteridge, and her only child, son Christopher Kitteridge. The author introduces a series of characters in the novel and then weaves together how these people fit into the life of Olive Kitteridge.

 

03

The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
By Bobby Henderson

18 December 2019

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Behold the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), today's fastest-growing carbohydrate-based religion! According to its founder, Bobby Henderson, the universe and all life within it were created by a mystical and divine being: The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Intelligent Design has finally met its match -and it has nothing to do with apes or the Olive Garden of Eden.What drives the FSM's devout followers, the Pastafarians? 

04

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
By Yuval Noah Harari

22 January 2020

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Having dealt with the distant past in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) and with the distant future in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), Harari turns in 21 Lessons his attention to the present. In a loose collection of essays, many based on articles previously published, he attempts to untangle the technological, political, social, and existential quandaries that humankind faces.

05

Plainsong
By Kent Haruf

19 February 2020

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Plainsong tells the story of multiple characters living in or near a small town in rural Colorado. Tom Guthrie and his two young sons, Ike and Bobby, try to cope with abandonment by their wife and mother. Victoria Roubideaux is a seventeen-year-old woman from an impoverished background who discovers she is pregnant. Harold and Raymond McPheron are two elderly bachelors who find themselves helping Victoria. These characters and others interact in an effort to live and find happiness in a small town.

07

A Visit from the Goon Squad
By Jennifer Egan

29 April 2020

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Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging 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.

06

The Children Act
By Ian McEwan

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Fiona Maye is a respected High Court Judge specialising in Family Law and living in Gray's Inn Square. While reviewing a case, she is approached by her husband, Jack, who tells her that because of their lack of physical intimacy he would like to embark on a sexual affair, with her permission, with a 28 year old statistician. Fiona is horrified and refuses to agree to the terms. She had developed a horror of the body after presiding over a case in which she ruled that conjoined twins should be separated despite the fact that one twin would immediately die due to her verdict. Though her peers lauded her elegant solution to the case, Fiona is privately troubled by it but nevertheless refuses to share this detail with Jack. In the middle of their fight Fiona receives a call about an emergency case of a young teen with leukemia who refuses a blood transfusion as a member of Jehovah's Witnesses. Jack leaves the apartment.

08

The Only Story
By Julian Barnes

20 May 2020

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First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn’t know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he’s proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention. As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen.
Tender and profound, The Only Story is an achingly beautiful novel by one of fiction’s greatest mappers of the human heart.

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