Reading Leaders Book Club
As lifelong readers and leaders, we all know the importance of reading and literacy…well beyond the pre-k12 classroom where it is often assigned. AESA Executive Director Dr. Joan Wade and Janelle Bailey, State Director of the Wisconsin Academic Decathlon first met at the United States Academic Decathlon (USAD) National Competition in Frisco, Texas, in 2018. They reconnected a year ago at the USAD National Competition in Bloomington, Minnesota, and escaped at the end of dinner to explore a Barnes and Noble bookstore together. Their friendship was sealed among the rows of books as they talked about their favorite books and suggested new ones to take home. Out of this friendship, the AESA/CESA 7 Reading Leaders Book Club was created! Joan and Janelle invite you to join this brand new virtual book club.
Next Book Club Date: February 18, 2021 @ 7:00 pm Eastern (6:00 pm Central; 5:00 pm Mountain; 4:00 pm Pacific)
February Book Choice: Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
 A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one -- least of all himself -- in the process.
 It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn't ask for more out of life—her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open. As her studies take her all over the city, she is drawn to Greenwich Village's new bohemia, where she discovers the Heterodoxy Club—a radical, all-female group in which women are encouraged to loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women's rights. Soon, Laura finds herself questioning her traditional role as wife and mother. But when valuable books are stolen back at the library, threatening the home and institution she loves, she's forced to confront her shifting priorities head on . . . and may just lose everything in the process.
Eighty years later, in 1993, Sadie Donovan struggles with the legacy of her grandmother, the famous essayist Laura Lyons, especially after she's wrangled her dream job as a curator at the New York Public Library. But the job quickly becomes a nightmare when rare manuscripts, notes, and books for the exhibit Sadie's running begin disappearing from the library's famous Berg Collection. Determined to save both the exhibit and her career, the typically risk-averse Sadie teams up with a private security expert to uncover the culprit. However, things unexpectedly become personal when the investigation leads Sadie to some unwelcome truths about her own family heritage—truths that shed new light on the biggest tragedy in the library's history.
If you haven't participated in the book club before, CLICK HERE to join the group.
Previous Book Club Titles:
- January 21, 2021: The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Dare
- December 17, 2020: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
- November 19, 2020: Anxious People by Fredrick Backman
- October 15, 2020: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
- September 17, 2020: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
- August 20, 2020: All Adults Here by Emma Straub
- July 16, 2020: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
- June 18, 2020: American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
Janelle instituted a program at her ESA in Wisconsin called “CESA 7 READS” to bring people who love to read together to get ideas for what to read next and/or to share their ideas about books. Visit the CESA 7 Reads website for more information.
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