The G.L.O.B.E. Book Club

Welcome to our book club's inaugural meeting! It's my hope that this is the beginning of a long and fulfilling biblio-journey for you with our group. Oh, and Happy New Year--may 2026 be exciting and prosperous for you!

As such, we'll get things started with a lighter read set in Central Europe whose apropos themes include: new beginnings, hospitality, community, and fellowship.

This novel's charm and light-heartedness doesn't take away from it being historical fiction worthy of literary accolades, including praise from Elizabeth Strout and Anuradha Roy, Publishers Weekly and Le Monde, and nominations for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award. It also became a massive best-seller in Germany and Austria.

Publishing Date: 2023
Number of Pages: 191, Europa Editions
Author Nationality: Austrian
Translation: from German, by Katy Derbyshire

Remember, please pick only one of today's two sessions. Thank you! Your Zoom invitation will be emailed to you closer to the meeting date.

From Goodreads:

From one of Austria’s most beloved and best-selling authors, comes this vibrant tale of love, loss, and renewal set against the transformations of 1960s Vienna.

Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a to open a café. Raised in a home for war orphans run by the Sisters of Charity, Robert is warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined. When the corner café in the Carmelite market square closes, Robert realizes that his chance has come.

The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal. In the newspapers with which fishmongers wrap the char and trout from the Danube, one can read about great things to come, a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Enlivened by these promises, Robert refurbishes the café, painting the walls, varnishing the furniture, and polishing the stove plates.

Rewarding Robert’s efforts and in search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love, or just a place where they can feel understood. As the city is transformed, Robert's cafe becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe and rejoice.

Combining the enchantment of warm prose with tender humor, Robert Seethaler has written a charming parable of human existence animated by unforgettable characters and a kaleidoscope of human stories.

Welcome to our book club's inaugural meeting! It's my hope that this is the beginning of a long and fulfilling biblio-journey for you with our group. Oh, and Happy New Year--may 2026 be exciting and prosperous for you!

As such, we'll get things started with a lighter read set in Central Europe whose apropos themes include: new beginnings, hospitality, community, and fellowship.

This novel's charm and light-heartedness doesn't take away from it being historical fiction worthy of literary accolades, including praise from Elizabeth Strout and Anuradha Roy, Publishers Weekly and Le Monde, and nominations for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award. It also became a massive best-seller in Germany and Austria.

Publishing Date: 2023
Number of Pages: 191, Europa Editions
Author Nationality: Austrian
Translation: from German, by Katy Derbyshire

Remember, please pick only one of today's two sessions. Thank you! Your Zoom invitation will be emailed to you closer to the meeting date.

From Goodreads:

From one of Austria’s most beloved and best-selling authors, comes this vibrant tale of love, loss, and renewal set against the transformations of 1960s Vienna.

Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a to open a café. Raised in a home for war orphans run by the Sisters of Charity, Robert is warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined. When the corner café in the Carmelite market square closes, Robert realizes that his chance has come.

The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal. In the newspapers with which fishmongers wrap the char and trout from the Danube, one can read about great things to come, a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Enlivened by these promises, Robert refurbishes the café, painting the walls, varnishing the furniture, and polishing the stove plates.

Rewarding Robert’s efforts and in search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love, or just a place where they can feel understood. As the city is transformed, Robert's cafe becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe and rejoice.

Combining the enchantment of warm prose with tender humor, Robert Seethaler has written a charming parable of human existence animated by unforgettable characters and a kaleidoscope of human stories.

Our book club's second meeting transports us to 1930s Japan. Kawabata is regarded as one of Japan's greatest authors--so much so that he was the country's first Nobel Prize in Literature winner, in 1968--and Snow Country is widely considered the laureate's masterpiece. For the month of love, we'll be following the evolution of a passionate affair, albeit a doomed romance. Will we also consider this a work of master craftsmanship, as have so many before us across the decades?

Publishing Date: 1948
Number of Pages: 175, Vintage International Edition
Author Nationality: Japanese
Translation: from Japanese, by Edward G. Seidensticker

Remember, please pick only one of today's two sessions. Thank you! Your Zoom invitation will be emailed to you closer to the meeting date.

From Goodreads:

Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.

Our book club's second meeting transports us to 1930s Japan. Kawabata is regarded as one of Japan's greatest authors--so much so that he was the country's first Nobel Prize in Literature winner, in 1968--and Snow Country is widely considered the laureate's masterpiece. For the month of love, we'll be following the evolution of a passionate affair, albeit a doomed romance. Will we also consider this a work of master craftsmanship, as have so many before us across the decades?

Publishing Date: 1948
Number of Pages: 175, Vintage International Edition
Author Nationality: Japanese
Translation: from Japanese, by Edward G. Seidensticker

Remember, please pick only one of today's two sessions. Thank you! Your Zoom invitation will be emailed to you closer to the meeting date.

From Goodreads:

Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.