Monday Books
Monday Books has long been a unique way for Waynflete parents and guardians to gather in a casual atmosphere and discuss a book chosen by a member of the school’s staff, faculty, or parent community. Any adult can attend at any time; there is no requirement to have come before or to have read all of the featured books. Monday Books is open to the entire Waynflete adult community and we hope you will join us!
Monday Books will meet in Thaxter Library (Emery Building) from 6:00-7:30 pm on the dates below.
Titles may be purchased online or in-store at Print: A Bookstore. One copy of each book is also available to borrow from Thaxter Library. Please stop by Thaxter Library in the Emery Building or contact Emily Graham ().
You can also reserve books through your local public libraries. To check availability and reserve, login and request your books on MaineCat http://mainecat.maine.edu/ (Portland residents) or Minerva https://minerva.maine.edu/ (other area towns). Consider reading any of the selections ahead to beat the rush!
2022-2023 Book Selections
Monday, October 3, 2022
How to do Nothing — Jenny Odell
Discussion Leader: Susan Conley, P’19, ’21
In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives.
Monday, November 7, 2022
Between Two Kingdoms — Suleika Jaouad
Discussion Leader: Sonya Tomlinson, P’33
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
Monday, December 12, 2022
How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question — Michael Schur
Discussion Leader: Olivia Pardi, Communications Coordinator
Most people think of themselves as “good,” but it’s not always easy to determine what’s “good” or “bad”—especially in a world filled with complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice. Fortunately, many smart philosophers have been pondering this conundrum for millennia and they have guidance for us. With bright wit and deep insight, How to Be Perfect explains concepts like deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, and more so we can sound cool at parties and become better people.
Monday, February 13, 2023
Be Holding — Ross Gay
Discussion Leader: Cassie Pruyn, 6–12 English Faculty
Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.
Monday, March 6, 2023
“What the Constitution Means to Me” — Heidi Schreck
Discussion Leader: Tiki Fuhro, Grades 6-12 Theater Faculty and Director
When she was fifteen years old, Heidi Schreck started traveling the country, taking part in constitutional debates to earn money for her college tuition. Decades later, in What the Constitution Means to Me, she traces the effect that the Constitution has had on four generations of women in her family, deftly examining how the United States’ founding principles are inextricably linked with our personal lives.
Monday, April 3, 2022
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
Discussion Leader: Sarah Getchell, Grades 9-12 English Faculty, P’37
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
