Diamond in the Basalt

For our next read, the coordinators and book club members have decided to create a new list of potential reads! If you would like to nominate some new books, please add a comment to this post or email one of us.

A few new nominations include:

“The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex” by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

“A $1.3 trillion industry, the US nonprofit sector is the world’s seventh largest economy. From art museums and university hospitals to think tanks and church charities, over 1.5 million organizations of staggering diversity share the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) designation, if little else. Many social justice organizations have joined this world, often blunting political goals to satisfy government and foundation mandates. But even as funding shrinks and government surveillance rises, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the nonprofit model.

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers original essays by radical activists from around the globe who are critically rethinking the long-term consequences of this investment. Together with educators and nonprofit staff they finally name the “nonprofit industrial complex” and ask hard questions: How did politics shape the birth of the nonprofit model? How does 501(c)(3) status allow the state to co-opt politi-cal movements? Activists or -careerists? How do we fund the movement outside this complex? Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is an unbeholden exposé of the “nonprofit industrial complex” and its quietly devastating role in managing dissent.”

“Cure for Death By Lightning” by Gail Anderson Dargatz

“The year is 1941. For the Weeks family on their frontier farm in Western Canada, life is brutally hard, with moments of joy few and far between. Fifteen-year-old Beth Weeks narrates this coming-of-age story, which is sprinkled with recipes, home remedies and useful homesteading advice (e.g., how to kill and clean a chicken: keep it calm, since “there’s nothing as frustrating as trying to kill a panicked chicken”). Though the inventory of authentic period detail is evocative, make no mistake: this is no warmhearted tale of pioneer life. Forget square dances and barn raisings; think bestiality and incest. Beth’s tortured, demanding father, mentally ill following a traumatic bear attack and the lingering effects of a head injury he received in WWI, goes on one rampage after another. Beth, meanwhile, does her best to fight off various sexual predators, finding solace of sorts in a tentative love affair with Nora, a troubled half-Indian girl. But Coyote, a sinister shape-changing spirit, stalks them and others, infusing the plot with a weird mystical aura at odds with the hardscrabble realism of the descriptions of day-to-day life. A dysfunctional Little House on the Prairie, this bleak, violent saga is a disturbing mixture of period minutiae and grim supernatural phenomena.”

“People of the Book” by Geraldine Brooks

“In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair she begins to unlock the book s mysteries. The listener is ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past as the book s journey is traced from its salvation back to its creation. Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is an ambitious, electrifying novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity.”

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If you have not received the new survey, please email Melissa at missmae187@gmail.com and she will send it to you promptly. Please fill out the survey by Sunday so we can make a decision before our next book club meeting on:

Sunday, April 5th at 1 pm
Little Garden Cafe
2901 W Northwest Blvd.
Spokane, WA 99205

Please be prepared to discuss Middlesex in its entirety (or come if you are okay with spoilers). Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you soon!

Questions? Feel free to email the book group coordinators:

• Becky – beckyhuss [at] gmail [dot] com

• Melissa – missmae187 [at] gmail [dot] com

• Hilary – hilwhitt [at] hotmail [dot] com