Book Club

The Jewish Center’s Book Club reads and discusses books of Jewish interest.

Our Book Club usually meets on the third Tuesday of the month.   Relax with a good book — and then join us for a lively and engaging discussion.  Everyone is welcome to participate, whether you enjoyed the book or not, and even if you haven’t finished it.

Multiple copies of our selections are usually available at the Princeton Public Library on the “Book Club” shelves.  Or you can purchase the book from Amazon. Every time you visit Amazon from our website, The Jewish Center earns up to 15% of each sale. 

To request more information, please click here.

Best wishes to all for wonderful Thanksgiving gatherings—such a great American holiday!

We have the following Book Club meetings planned:

Get ready for the upcoming titles:

August 20, via Zoom
The Collector by Daniel Silva

Johannes Vermeer’s 1664 masterpiece “The Concert” was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. That real – still unsolved – case is at the heart of Daniel Silva’s new thriller, The Collector. Despite his initial reluctance, art restorer and former Israeli intelligence officer Gabriel Allon is enlisted to hunt down the painting, along with an unexpected collaborator. (NPR)

The missing masterpiece is the lynchpin of a conspiracy that if successful, could plunge the world into a conflict of apocalyptic proportions. To foil the plot, Gabriel must carry out a daring heist of his own, with millions of lives hanging in the balance.

Elegant, meticulously plotted, and filled with a cast of unforgettable characters, The Collector moves swiftly from the graceful canals of Venice to the windswept coast of northern Denmark to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia—and, finally, to a heart-pounding climax in Russia as current as tomorrow’s headlines. – danielsilvabooks.com

September 17, via Zoom
This Magnificent Dappled Sea by David Biro

In a small Italian village, nine-year-old Luca Taviano catches a stubborn cold and is subsequently diagnosed with leukemia. After an exhaustive search, a match turns up 3000 miles away in the form of an unlikely donor: Joseph Neiman, a rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, who is suffering from a debilitating crisis of faith. As Luca’s young nurse, Nina Vocelli, risks her career and races against time to help save the spirited redheaded boy, she uncovers terrible secrets from World War II — secrets that reveal how a Catholic boy could have Jewish genes.  – (Jewish Book Council)
Can inheritance be transcended by accidents of love? That is the question at the heart of This Magnificent Dappled Sea, a novel that challenges the idea of identity and celebrates the ties that bind us together.

Two strangers—generations and oceans apart—have a chance to save each other in this moving and suspenseful novel about family secrets and the ineffable connections that lead us to one another.

October 15 – The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day’s breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother’s death. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage’s grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can’t, and they become companions.

Everything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret—one that nobody else in town would ever suspect—and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. With her own identity suddenly challenged, and the integrity of the closest friend she’s ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she’s made about her life and her family. When does a moral choice become a moral imperative? And where does one draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy?

In this searingly honest novel, Jodi Picoult gracefully explores the lengths we will go in order to protect our families and to keep the past from dictating the future

As usual, all of our books can be ordered online and you can click on the Amazon Smile link to choose us as your charity, and earn a commission for the Synagogue: www.smile.amazon.com

If you’d like your name removed from our email list, please let me know, but please remember that all other Book Club business should be sent to Louise.

Be safe! Stay well! 

Regards,
– Donna