Register here for 2025 Book Study Group sessions.
After registering, Zoom will send you a confirmation email with your personal link for joining the meetings. Please do not share that link; it is yours alone.
Share the fun of the Book Study Group by encouraging others to register with the link above.
Currently reading:
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (August 2023)
A New York Times Notable Book • A New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Winner of the 2024 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction
From one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR/Fresh Air, Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Time Magazine
James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store opens with the discovery of a skeleton in a well in a small town. Chicken Hill is a vibrant community of immigrants, Jewish and black people, resulting in a mix of characters with intertwined lives and shared histories. It’s a story about people who are struggling and their ambitions, successes and disappointments. As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
Schedule:
January 6 through March 3, 2025
Every other Monday for 90 minutes
9:00 am PT / 10:00 am MT / 11:00 am CT / 12:00 pm ET
Book Study Group guidelines are simple:
- Read the chapters and bring your thoughts to the next meeting.
- Register for the meetings via Zoom (using the REGISTER button below). After registering, Zoom will send you a unique link to join the series of meetings. Do not share the link, it is unique to you.
- Contact Peter Nelson with any questions
About the Book Study Group
Since 2018, between 20 and 30 avid readers meet every two weeks via Zoom to discuss. We choose books with depth and relevance to issues of the day.
List of previous books read by the Book Study Group.
Vision for the Book Study Group
- We participate in in-depth discussions and share ideas on books that speak to our ecological integrity, social and economic justice, and peaceful coexistence.
- We educate ourselves about ecological, social, economic concerns so that we have better and more effective ideas about how to co-create change, and act from knowledge and insight gained through our reading and our dialogue.
- We attract diversity.
- We have facilitators trained in helping diverse groups of individuals with different approaches and ideas to have discussions where all can be heard.
- We can act as a possible educational resource for other action groups within EAN
- We continue to select books by having members offer suggestions, and then choose by majority vote/agreement
- We encourage the formation of smaller groups from within the book group who want to chat, discuss, and just enjoy each other’s company
- We hold an annual BIG READ for all members of EAN
- We conclude each meeting with an action step to reduce GHG in the atmosphere.