Welcome!

The Senior Book Club meets the 3rd Monday of every month at the Joe C. Montoya Community and Senior Center, located at 245 N Thorpe Rd, Flagstaff, AZ 86001.

All books provided are large print books for easier reading.

If you need to check out the current book, call 928-213-2380 or email libraryprograms@flagstaffpubliclibrary.org. You can also stop by the library and get your book there.

Next meeting books will be available at the Joe C. Montoya Community Center to check out after the meeting. You can also return the previous book then.

This month we are reading:

Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

Goodreads Choice Award

Nominee for Best Mystery & Thriller (2021)

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.

“Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…” To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either.

Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa—the “Waldorf of Harlem”—and volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. The heist doesn’t go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes.

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

But mostly, it’s a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.

This is part of our Summer Reading Challenge (SRC) Programming, attending this event will give you a code to get points torwards your reaching your point goal. Remember you can use those points to get tickets for the many raffle prizes available! You don't have to finish to get tickets.

Not part of our SRC program? Join here!

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