Everything Is Illuminated - by Jonathan Safran Foer

This one is such a blend of feelings, an opening compliment and counterpoint to our last read (Fight Club). Instead of FC's trauma of breaking the banal into reality, here we go questing to resolve an inherited but personally unexperienced trauma. Beautiful, brilliant, funny, moving.

Plenty to discuss with relevant timing, as most of the story is set in Ukraine and exploring the aftermath of that former pogrom. Might be hard, if interesting, to reconcile that cultural schadenfreude while a few more are currently underway.

There are no end of glowy reviews out there for you to find, so I'll share instead a fun critical bit from the Guardian:
"Foer has taken from everyone from Lawrence Sterne to (oh mercy) Dave Eggers: there's Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism; there's a plotline plundered from William Styron; there are repeated borrowings from the Tin Drum (right down to having a character hide under someone's skirts). There's gimmicky referencing of his own name just like every achingly postmodern male US writer who began his career after the millennium."

***The cafe has not been opening on Sundays, so BYO snacks and drinks!