
January 2016
HYP Book Club – “All the Light We Cannot See”
January’s book is “All the Light We Cannot See,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Anthony Doerr. It’s about a blind French girl who’s learned her city (the historic walled city Saint-Malo) by sense of touch, and a German boy interested in radio and working for the Nazis. Their stories collide against the backdrop of WWII.…
Find out more »February 2016
HYP Book Club – “The Martian”
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…
Find out more »March 2016
HYP Book Club – “The Handmaid’s Tale”
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…
Find out more »May 2016
HYP Book Club: “The Alienist”
“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…
Find out more »June 2016
HYP Book Club – “Dead Wake – The Crossing of the Lusitania”
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…
Find out more »July 2016
HYP Book Club – “Founding Brothers”
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…
Find out more »August 2016
HYP Book Club – “The Nightingale”
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…
Find out more »December 2016
HYP Book Club – “Children of the new world: stories”
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.…
Find out more »January 2017
HYP Book Club – “The Watchmen”
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,…
Find out more »March 2017
HYP Book Club – “Modern Romance”
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;…
Find out more »July 2017
HYP Book Club – “Station Eleven”
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…
Find out more »August 2017
HYP Book Club – “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI”
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…
Find out more »September 2017
HYP Book Club – “The Lost City of Z”
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…
Find out more »October 2017
HYP Book Club – “The Haunting of Hill House” and assorted Edgar Allan Poe stories
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…
Find out more »November 2017
HYP Book Club – “Lincoln in the Bardo”
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…
Find out more »December 2017
HYP Book Club – “The Great Divorce”
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…
Find out more »January 2018
HYP Book Club – “And Then There Were None”
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…
Find out more »May 2018
HYP Book Club – “Bunk”
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…
Find out more »June 2018
HYP Book Club – “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”
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…
Find out more »July 2018
HYP Book Club – “Heart of Darkness”
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…
Find out more »HYP Book Club Challenge Read – “Infinite Jest”
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…
Find out more »August 2018
HYP Book Club – “The Plot Against America”
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…
Find out more »September 2018
HYP Book Club – “Kindred”
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…
Find out more »October 2018
HYP Book Club – “The Outsider”
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…
Find out more »December 2018
HYP Book Club – “At Home”
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…
Find out more »January 2019
HYP Book Club – “The Book Thief”
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…
Find out more »February 2019
HYP Book Club – “Ender’s Game”
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…
Find out more »March 2019
HYP Book Club – “If Beale Street Could Talk”
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…
Find out more »April 2019
HYP Book Club – “Everything I Never Told You”
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…
Find out more »May 2019
HYP Book Club – “Master of the Game”
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,…
Find out more »June 2019
HYP Book Club – “Range” Author Event
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…
Find out more »HYP Book Club – “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”
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,…
Find out more »July 2019
HYP Book Club Challenge Read – “1Q84”
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…
Find out more »August 2019
HYP Book Club – “Born a Crime”
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…
Find out more »September 2019
HYP Book Club – “Normal People”
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…
Find out more »October 2019
HYP Book Club – “The Library Book”
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…
Find out more »November 2019
HYP Book Club – “The Children of Men”
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”…
Find out more »January 2020
Arts/International & Social Committee Meetings
The Arts Committee strives to enrich the lives of HYP members by illuminating the cultural diversity of Harrisburg. We offer access to the wide array of arts and cultural events that exist in the city while showcasing events involving and illustrating the arts. We also partner with educational institutions and local organizations to promote the…
Find out more »February 2020
HYP Book Club Book: “Between the World and Me”
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’…
Find out more »March 2020
HYP Book Club Book: “Brooklyn”
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…
Find out more »Arts/International & Social Committee Meetings
The Arts Committee strives to enrich the lives of HYP members by illuminating the cultural diversity of Harrisburg. We offer access to the wide array of arts and cultural events that exist in the city while showcasing events involving and illustrating the arts. We also partner with educational institutions and local organizations to promote the…
Find out more »May 2020
Arts/International & Social Committee Meetings
The Arts Committee strives to enrich the lives of HYP members by illuminating the cultural diversity of Harrisburg. We offer access to the wide array of arts and cultural events that exist in the city while showcasing events involving and illustrating the arts. We also partner with educational institutions and local organizations to promote the…
Find out more »June 2020
Arts/International & Social Committee Meetings
The Arts Committee strives to enrich the lives of HYP members by illuminating the cultural diversity of Harrisburg. We offer access to the wide array of arts and cultural events that exist in the city while showcasing events involving and illustrating the arts. We also partner with educational institutions and local organizations to promote the…
Find out more »July 2020
Arts/International & Social Committee Meetings
The Arts Committee strives to enrich the lives of HYP members by illuminating the cultural diversity of Harrisburg. We offer access to the wide array of arts and cultural events that exist in the city while showcasing events involving and illustrating the arts. We also partner with educational institutions and local organizations to promote the…
Find out more »August 2020
Arts/International & Social Committee Meetings
The Arts Committee strives to enrich the lives of HYP members by illuminating the cultural diversity of Harrisburg. We offer access to the wide array of arts and cultural events that exist in the city while showcasing events involving and illustrating the arts. We also partner with educational institutions and local organizations to promote the…
Find out more »September 2020
Arts/International & Social Committee Meetings
The Arts Committee strives to enrich the lives of HYP members by illuminating the cultural diversity of Harrisburg. We offer access to the wide array of arts and cultural events that exist in the city while showcasing events involving and illustrating the arts. We also partner with educational institutions and local organizations to promote the…
Find out more »October 2020
Arts/International & Social Committee Meetings
The Arts Committee strives to enrich the lives of HYP members by illuminating the cultural diversity of Harrisburg. We offer access to the wide array of arts and cultural events that exist in the city while showcasing events involving and illustrating the arts. We also partner with educational institutions and local organizations to promote the…
Find out more »November 2020
Arts/International & Social Committee Meetings
The Arts Committee strives to enrich the lives of HYP members by illuminating the cultural diversity of Harrisburg. We offer access to the wide array of arts and cultural events that exist in the city while showcasing events involving and illustrating the arts. We also partner with educational institutions and local organizations to promote the…
Find out more »November 2021
HYP Book Club: Challenge Read – “Dune” Book 1
So the ol’ book club is at it again, with a longer than usual book for a longer than usual time period. Enter the challenge read, where we’ll have approximately 3 months to read a sci-fi classic, “Dune” by Frank Herbert. Dune is set on the planet Arrakis, the story of a boy heir to…
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