October Book Clubs at Kona Stories

Kona Stories Book Store offers a variety of book clubs that meet monthly to discuss books of fiction, travel and non-fiction.

The fiction group meets the second Tuesday of the month at 6:30 p.m., the travel group meets the third Tuesday of the month at 6:30 p.m., and the non-fiction group meets the fourth Tuesday of the month at 6 p.m.

The book groups are free if the books purchased are from Kona Stories or if a $5 donation is made.

You can choose to attend any of all of the groups.

Bring pupus or a beverage and come prepared to discuss the following books:

Fiction Group discussing: “Some Luck” by Jane Smiley on Oct. 11, 2016

National Book Award Nominee “Some Luck” is set in 1920 in Denby, Iowa.

Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just welcomed their firstborn son, Frank, into their family farm. He will be the oldest of five.

“Some Luck” by Jane Smiley will be discussed with the fiction group club on Oct. 11, 2016 at Kona Stories.

Each chapter in this novel covers a single year, encompassing the sweep of history as the Langdons abide by time-honored values and pass them on to their children.

With the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change through the early 1950s, we watch as the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis.

Later still, a girl we’d seen growing up now has a little girl of her own.

The first volume of an epic trilogy from a beloved writer at the height of her powers, “Some Luck” starts on a literary adventure through cycles of birth and death, passion and betrayal that will span a century in America.

A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, The Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and BookPage.

This group meets at 6:30 p.m. at Kona Stories Book Store.

Travel Group is discussing: “A Passion for Paris: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light” by David Downie on Oct. 18, 2016

This book is a top-notch walking tour of Paris.

The author’s knowledge of the city and its artists grants him a mystical gift of access: doors left ajar and carriage gates left open foster his search for the city’s magical story.

“Passion for Paris” by David Downie will be discussed with the travel group club on Oct. 18, 2016 at Kona Stories.

Anyone who loves Paris will adore this book. Readers visiting the city are advised to take it with them to discover countless new experiences.

Kirkus Reviews – “A unique combination of memoir, history, and travelogue, this is author David Downie’s irreverent quest to uncover why Paris is the world’s most romantic city and has been for over 150 years”.

Abounding in secluded, atmospheric parks, artists’ studios, cafés, restaurants and streets little changed since the 1800s, Paris exudes romance.

The art and architecture, the cityscape, riverbanks, and the unparalleled quality of daily life are part of the equation.

But the city’s allure derives equally from hidden sources: querulous inhabitants, a bizarre culture of heroic negativity, and a rich historical past supplying enigmas, pleasures and challenges. Rarely do visitors suspect the glamor and chic and the carefree atmosphere of the City of Light grew from and still feed off the dark fountainheads of riot, rebellion, mayhem and melancholy and the subversive literature, art and music of the Romantic Age.

Weaving together his own with the lives and loves of Victor Hugo, Georges Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Balzac, Nadar and other great Romantics Downie delights in the city’s secular romantic pilgrimage sites asking, Why Paris, not Venice or Rome the tap root of “romance” or Berlin, Vienna and London where the earliest Romantics built castles-in-the-air and sang odes to nightingales?

Read “A Passion for Paris: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light” and find out.

This group meets at 6:30 p.m. at Kona Stories Book Store.

Non-Fiction Group is discussing: “Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble” by Marilyn Johnson on Oct. 25, 2016

Marilyn Johnson, the author of two acclaimed books about quirky subcultures “The Dead Beat” (about obituary writers) and “This Book Is Overdue” (about librarians) brings her irrepressible wit and curiosity to bear on yet another strange world, that of archaeologists.

Who chooses to work in ruins? What’s the allure of sifting through layers of dirt under a hot sun? Why do archaeologists care so passionately about what’s dead and buried and why should we?

“Live in Ruins” by Marilyn Johnson will be discussed with the non-fiction group club on Oct. 25, 2016 at Kona Stories.

Johnson tracks archaeologists around the globe from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, from Newport, R.I., to Machu Picchu.

She digs alongside experts on an eighteenth-century sugar plantation and in a first-century temple to Apollo.

She hunts for bodies with forensic archaeologists in the vast and creepy Pine Barrens of New Jersey, drinks beer with an archaeologist of ancient beverages, and makes stone tools like a caveman.

By turns amusing and profound, “Lives in Ruins,” with its wild cast of characters, finds new ways to consider what is worth salvaging from our past.

This group meets at 6 p.m. at Kona Stories Book Store.

Kona Stories is located in the Keauhou Shopping Center in the courtyard shops on the KTA side.

If you need more information call Brenda or Joy at 808-324-0350 or check it out online at here.