Classics Book Club
The Classics Book Club has been meeting at Towne since the mid-2010s and is led by longtime Towne customer Kathy. The club reads just as the name would suggest – the classics! Anything from Austen to Zola is included in the selections and books are voted on by the members of the book club.
Classics Book Club meets on the 4th Tuesday of the month at 7pm.
Upcoming Meetings and Selection
Tuesday, June 27th, 2023: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Tuesday, July 25th, 2023: The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham
Previous Selections
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023: The Chosen by Chaim Potok
Tuesday, April 25th, 2023: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Tuesday, March 28th, 2023: Winter in the Blood by James Welch
Tuesday, February 28th, 2023: Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes
January 2022: Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
November 2022: So Big by Edna Ferber
October 2022: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton
August 2022: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
June 2022: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
May 2022: The Plague by Albert Camus
April 2022: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
March 2022: Lost Horizon by James Hilton
February 2022: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
January 2022: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
November 2021: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
October 2021: Dream of the Red Chamber / The Story of the Stone by Tsao Husen-Chin / Cao Xueqin
September 2021: Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
One of the novels that galvanized W. Somerset Maugham’s reputation as a literary master
A beautifully designed Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition of this haunting American classic: a realistic and emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath.
A coming-of-age classic about two Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, this “profound and universal” (The Wall Street Journal) story of faith, family, tradition, and assimilation remains deeply pertinent today.
“Works of this caliber should be occasion for singing in the streets and shouting from the rooftops.” —Ch
This classic science fiction masterwork by Isaac Asimov weaves stories about robots, humanity, and the deep questions of existence into a novel of shocking intelligence and heart.
“A must-read for science-fiction buffs and literature enjoyers alike.”—The Guardian
A contemporary classic from a major writer of the Native American renaissance — "Brilliant, brutal and, in my opinion, Welch's best work." —Tommy Orange, The Washington Post
(This book cannot be returned.)
A shining star of the Harlem Renaissance movement, Langston Hughes is one of modern literature's most revered African American authors. Although best known for his poetry, Hughes produced in Not Without Laughter a powerful and pioneering classic novel.
Combining a sensational story of a man's physical and moral decline through alcohol, a study of marital breakdown, a disquisition on the care and upbringing of children, and a hard-hitting critique of the position of women in Victorian society, this passionate tale of betrayal is set within a stern moral framework tempered by Anne Bront 's optimistic belief in universal redemption.
(This book cannot be returned.)
One might not expect a woman of Edith Wharton's literary stature to be a believer of ghost stories, much less be frightened by them, but as she admits in her postscript to this spine-tingling collection, "...till I was twenty-seven or -eight, I could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost story." Once her fear was overcome, however, she took to writing tales of the supernatural for p
The Searing Portrayal Of War That Has Stunned And Galvanized Generations Of Readers
From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime—"a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless" (The New York Times Book Review).
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“Its relevance lashes you across the face.” —Stephen Metcalf, The Los Angeles Times • “A redemptive book, one that wills the reader to believe, even in a time of despair.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Washington Post
“A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force.” — San Francisco Examiner
The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon's highly original classic satire of modern America, about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in what would appear to be an international conspiracy.
“The most artful kind of suspense. . . ingenuity I have rarely seen equaled.” — The New Yorker
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader.
First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds.
MI6’s man in Havana is Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true…
The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known by the title of The Dream of the Red Chamber, is the great novel of manners in Chinese literature.
New York Times bestseller and winner of the Costa Book Award.