Tomorrow by Graham Swift

Friends of the High Library Book Club meets Wednesday, November 28th in the High Library Conference Room at 7pm.

Come join the discussion of this recent book.

"From Amazon: Graham Swift wants to keep us awake with Tomorrow, a monologue in which a mother lies next to her husband, worrying about a revelation that will soon alter their lives."

Graham Swift is a previous Booker Prize award winning author. This novel is written from a woman's point of view and is primarily an interior monologue. Does this writing style work or is it just tedious?

Join the discussion either in person or on the blog. Let us know what you think.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, subtitled "How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" could be sub-subtitled, "a paradigm-changing experience." I'm having my first-year seminar read large selections from this book for several reasons. One, as Deirdre Donahue says in USA Today, "it reaffirms that human beings are profoundly social beings influenced by and influencing other human beings, no matter how much technology we introduce into our lives." Two, while Gladwell posits that ideas are viral, I also believe that information is viral in how it gets spread. There's no better way to understand the global information environment and the Internet than via Gladwell's metaphors. Third, Gladwell is able to synthesize phenomena from epidemiology, psychology, sociology and group dynamics, bringing, as Paula Geyh says in the Chicago Tribune, "insights gleaned from these disparate fields together and applying them to an impressive array of contemporary social behaviors and cultural trends. Such knowledge, properly applied, could have enormous potential." I hope that all readers of Gladwell's work will be able to make further connections after they read this book.