Afternoon Coffee Book Club

Join the Afternoon Coffee Book Club (formerly the Morning Coffee Book Club) where Scott Biegen, a PSPL Librarian (and English Teacher in a previous life), leads a book club meeting on Zoom. It will be BYOC (Bring Your Own Coffee) this year, but we'll have fun reading and discussing the works of a diverse group of women who bravely explore the concepts of solitude, isolation, disconnection and connection in one way or another.

The group meets the 3rd Wednesday of the month (September-May) on Zoom from 2:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m. (PST). To receive meeting information and join the email list for the Afternoon Coffee Book Club, please email Scott Biegen in advance of the meeting at scott.biegen@palmspringsca.gov

Click here to see other selections for the Afternoon Coffee Book Club.

September 16, 2020

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

—Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Book of 2018

One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years—Entertainment Weekly

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.

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