February Selection: H is for Hawk

What??  A memoir?  Does this mark the first time PBR Book Club has tackled this venerable genre?  Well, that depends on how you define our pal McClanahan's Crapalachia, which ended with a meta-admission that the author had manufactured much of its memoir-ness.

At any rate, February's read is Helen Macdonald's much-praised "H is for Hawk."   The New Yorker review says the book is "one part grief memoir, one part guide to raptors, and one part biography of T. H. White, who chronicled his maiden effort at falconry in “The Goshawk,” written just before he began work on 'The Once and Future King.'"


Perhaps we can get one of Kansas' 50 licensed falconers to come and chat with us?  Or at least get the film club back together for a screening of Ladyhawke.

See you at the Tap for H is for Hawk (and remember that PBR, as always, is for Pabst Blue Ribbon).

2016 PBR Book Club Update and January Selection: Panic in a Suitcase

Readers, we're in our fourth year of PBR Book Club and we remain more-or-less functional.  We still meet on the last Tuesday of each month at the Taproom.  We still Skype with authors sometimes.  We still have no clear rules on how to choose the monthly selections and usually just yell until others give in.  But we DO have swanky new press photos (see below) that will almost certainly NOT help us in our never-ending quest to get a Wiki page (why do they hate us??).

The January selection is Yelena Akhtiorskaya's Panic in a Suitcase.  What's the plot?  Let's turn to the Guardian review:

"In fact, there barely is a plot in Panic in a Suitcase. That's not a criticism: what we get instead of a sweeping story are a multitude of exuberant set pieces about modern émigré life, animated by Akhtiorskaya's insider knowledge and her offbeat way with words."

Good enough!  See you at the Tap.

[Your humble admin also dares you to join him in reading Garth Risk Hallberg's 900 page "Proustian epic" City on Fire, which is about 1977 New York and intertwines its sprawling plot with handwritten letters and excerpts of zines written by characters....this may take most of the year to finish].