This year the Slow Reading Discussion Group will be continuing its close study of works that explore, from a variety of perspectives, the rich theme of displacement.
This year the Slow Reading Discussion Group will be continuing its close study of works that explore, from a variety of perspectives, the rich theme of displacement. Leading the group is Ellen Lambert, who has a Ph.D. from Yale and taught high school English at The Dalton School for over 25 years. Texts include Javier Zamora's memoir Solito, Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake, Christy Lefteri's novel The Beekeeper of Aleppo, and Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things.
Whereas Solito, our first reading of the 2025-26 year, provides a finely detailed account of one nine-year-old boy's arduous physical journey from his native El Salvadorian village to La USA, Jhumpa Lahiri's celebrated 2003 novel The Namesake spans a period of some thirty years and treats in more leisurely fashion the classic American theme of assimilation. This is a family story, but (as the title implies) the focus is on the growth of the son, Gogol Ganguli, the namesake whose birth (to a mother uprooted from her native Calcutta and cut loose from the traditions of the Bengali culture in which she was reared) is the subject of the novel's opening chapter.
Specific readings are as follows:
For Nov. 3: pp. 1 - 93.
For Nov. 17: pp. 93 - 158.
For Dec. 1: pp. 159 - 245.
For Dec. 15: pp. 246 - 291.
AGE GROUP: | Adults about 55 and over | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Books and Authors |
