In honor of Oscar month, February's book is "The Martian," by Andrew Weir.  It's about an astronaut/biologist/engineer who gets separated from his mission team and is stranded on Mars. By himself. He has to survive several hundred days until the next mission launch, meaning he needs to figure out all kinds of basic things like…

March’s book is “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. It’s set in a dystopian future where women are no longer allowed to read, and because of declining births, are only valued for their ability to give birth. It’s the story of an individual handmaid, who remembers the time before, and is trying to survive but…

“The Alienist” (by Caleb Carr) takes place in turn-of-the-century (1890's) New York, told from the point of view of a newspaper man, who's in on something that's never been tried before....using psychology to develop a profile in an attempt to catch a serial killer. It's historical fiction, so thoroughly detailed and brilliantly realized that you'll…

June's book is Dead Wake: The Crossing of the Lusitania,” written by Erik Larson, acclaimed author of “The Devil in the White City.” It 's an enthralling and dramatic non-fiction  account of the tracking of the world's fastest luxury liner by German U-Boats in 1915.  Below is a goodreads link to the book. We meet…

In celebration of Independence Day, we're going thematic for July, with “Founding Brothers” by Joseph Ellis, acclaimed author of books on Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.  It's about the intertwined lives of the founders of our country and how that affected the decisions they made at critical junctions during the formation of the country.  Want…

It’s the dog days of summer, so there’s nothing like a good book to beat the heat! August’s book is “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah. We go back in time to WWII, with two sisters in France in different stages of life and different perspectives of the war. One is married, and her husband is…

Join us for a discussion of December's book, “Children of the new world” by Alexander Weinstein.  We'll look towards the new year with this set of stories that imagines a near-future replete with possibilities, and characters who are coming to grips with technology and its effects on them and humanity, for better or for worse.…

Book Club is starting the new year with something new – a graphic novel. Join us as we read “The Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, the epic story of humanity, truth, justice, and an exploration of heroism and superheroism. It’s also the award-winning, list-making, highly-regarded genre-defining must-read for anyone into graphic novels, comics,…

HYP Book Club is keeping it thematic for February, with “Modern Romance” by Aziz Ansari.  It’s exactly what the title implies, a discussion of the ups and downs of looking for love in the modern age, by a very thoughtful and comedic mind.  We'll meet at the Midtown Scholar at 2:00 in the upstairs lounge;…

July’s book is Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. The description from Goodreads.com is so great we’ll use that one (edited for brevity): “One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back…

August brings us a true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history. From the author of “The Lost City of Z,” David Grann, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is about the systematic murders of Osage Indians for money and oil rights in the 1920s. It’s also the story of the…

September's book is “The Lost City of Z,” non-fiction by David Grann, a story that at once seems familiar and fantastic. We've all heard or seen stories about the the search for the unknown or lost civilization in the depths of the jungle. This one actually happened. It's about Percy Fawcett, a British explorer and…

It's October and that can mean only one thing...Halloween! And for HYP Book Club, that means some scary, creepy stories. This month's reading is the classic Shirley Jackson book, “The Haunting of Hill House.” And for added spookiness, we're also reading five stories from Edgar Allan Poe: “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The…

November's book is “Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders.  A National Book Award Finalist and NY Times bestseller, it's a look at Lincoln like no other; mourning the death of his beloved son Willie, and spending a night visiting with old ghosts both recently and long ago departed.  All of these ghosts have unique…

As a bookend to last month’s book (a discussion of ghosts and the hereafter in “Lincoln in the Bardo”), this month we’re reading “The Great Divorce” by C.S. Lewis. You may have heard of him as the author of the beloved “Narnia” series, but Lewis’ bread and butter was theological writing and storytelling. “The Great…

The winter is a great time for armchair mysteries, so we’re starting the new year out right with a classic by Agatha Christie, “And Then There Were None.” It’s considered by the author herself to be her most difficult book to write, and it’s one of the all-time best-selling books, with over 100 million copies…

There’s been a lot of news about “fake news” recently, for lack of a better term.  In May, HYP Book Club will get to the bottom of it with “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News” by Kevin Young.  It’s at once a review of the history of American hoaxes…

Savannah, May 2, 1981. Shots ring out in one of its grandest mansions. Murder or self -defense? For years after, it still gets debated. In “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” John Berendt takes us on a tour of the facts (as much as we can find out), and in doing so, we…

On its surface, “Heart of Darkness” is a tale about a river journey to hunt down the chief of an inner station of a trading company deep in the jungle. But the novella that inspired the movie “Apocalypse Now” is much deeper, a foray into a meditation on the good and evil of mankind, with…

Another HYP Book Club first: The Challenge Read! We pick a super-lengthy book with an interesting premise and take 6 months to read it. Then we meet at the end of the six months and talk not just about the book, but the experience. The honor of being the first-ever challenge read goes to... “Infinite…

In honor of the recent passing of Philip Roth, we’re reading one of his lesser-known works, “The Plot Against America.” Imagine an America where famed aviator Charles Lindbergh becomes president and America stays out of WWII, and a cordial “understanding” is negotiated with Nazi Germany. But Roth goes beyond typical dystopia in playing out the…

One thing we can say for sure at the HYP Book Club is that we’ve never read an African-American female sci-fi author. Since we like to take the road less traveled, we’re going to remedy that this month, with “Kindred” by the renowned Octavia Butler. It’s about a young African-American writer, who somehow travels back…

October means Halloween, so we’re reading the latest from the spook-master himself, Stephen King. In the “Outsider,” a young boy’s corpse is found in a town park. The suspect is a popular little league coach and father of two girls. The case seems ironclad, but the suspect has an alibi. What’s going on here? As…

Bill Bryson has done everything from philosophizing about life to discussing the history of the universe to travel shows on PBS.  In his recent-ish modern-day classic, “At Home,” he sets his endlessly curious mind and meticulous, sidetrack-filled storytelling methods to an examination of how world events have contributed to the everyday mundane things and rooms…

It’s a new year, so book club is doing something new – reading off a list on Goodreads (well, for at least our first two books). The topic is adult fiction with young protagonists/point of view, and the book is “The Book Thief,” Markus Zusak’s beloved story about a girl in 1939 Nazi Germany who…

Continuing with the theme of young protagonists, February’s book is Ender’s Game, the celebrated sci-fi story by Orson Scott Card. In a future where parents are typically allowed two children, and the world is constantly in peril from the threat of an alien force, a new type of military mind is needed. Enter “Ender” (real…

For anyone who’s read his work or seen his interviews (most recently in the stellar documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro”), you know what an important and inspiring writer (and human being) James Baldwin was and is. So now we get to read his book, “If Beale Street Could Talk.” It’s about a young African-American…

The time is the 1970s; the place, small-town Ohio. Two Chinese American parents are determined that their favorite daughter fulfill the dreams they couldn’t pursue.  But she’s found dead in the local lake, and the bonds that were keeping the family together are suddenly frayed. “Everything I Never Told You,” by Celeste Ng, is a…

Maine is usually the setting for a somewhat-famous horror writer with a regal name; this time it’s the setting for a powerful family that made its fortune in diamonds. “Master of the Game,” by renowned bestseller Sidney Sheldon, tells the journey of the Blackwell dynasty over a hundred years in the making. South Africa, Paris,…

What's the most effective path to success in any domain? It's not what you think. In conjunction with the Midtown Scholar Bookstore and Harrisburg Regional Chamber & CREDC, the Harrisburg Young Professionals is pleased to welcome New York Times bestselling author David Epstein to Harrisburg as he presents his new book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph…

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by acclaimed writer Arundhati Roy, is at once personal journeys and historical backdrop; an immersion in years of India’s religious, political, and cultural changes told through individual stories, with both suffering and love. It is about sides of the same coin, war becoming peace and vice versa, acceptance and hate,…

Every so often, we at the ol’ book club like to dig into something a little bit bigger than a monthly book. Okay, a lot bigger. So we came up with the challenge read, whereby we read a much longer work over the course of six months. Although we’ll be checking in from time-to-time at…

You might know Trevor Noah as the guy who succeeded Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. Or as a stand-up comedian. With “Born a Crime,” we meet Trevor Noah the author, and the mixed-race kid growing up in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. It’s rare we read an autobiography for book club, but we were…

Sally Rooney has been heralded as one of the next great young writers and the ‘first great millennial novelist’ (The New Yorker). She’s also considered to be great at writing about younger people (read: students at university). In her latest, “Normal People,” she writes about a boy and a girl with a history and power…

More than 30 years ago, a fire damaged hundreds of thousands of books at the Los Angeles Public Library; it’s still a mystery today who did it and why. In “The Library Book,” author Susan Orlean goes over the fire and broadens the discussion into a look at how big and how important of a…

England, 2021. The birth rate has dropped to zero, society has gone to pieces, a despot has abolished democracy, and mankind faces an uncertain future.  But a group of dissidents isn’t giving in to despair and depression. Will hope win the day? Join us as we discuss P.D. James’ dystopian meditation “The Children of Men”…

February is Black History Month, and Book Club is reading “Between the World and Me” by the supremely gifted and creative Ta-Nehisi Coates (“Black Panther,” “We Were Eight Years in Power,” among others). It’s a long letter to his son about being Black in the United States. It’s also a history lesson combined with Coates’…

Book Club is continuing its thematic journey in honor of St. Patrick’s Day with “Brooklyn,” by Colm Toibin. It’s about a girl coming of age in post-WWII Ireland, where the economy is rough and it’s hard to find work.  With the help of an Irish priest from Brooklyn, she makes her way to America where…